The autism debate is very interesting, but I can fall to mention that I'm glad to see him so happy again.
Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
461–470 of 943 posts
Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#462Mob justice is not OK just because women do it. If these women have anything substantial they should make formal reports/complaints, not anonymous vogue statements like, "he make me feel uncomfortable". Cannot believe that one even has to say this. Why are women always presumed to be innocent and men always presumed to be guilty? Also, frankly, there is a point at which, certain behaviour might make you feel uncomfor…
Are you saying that jerking off in front of people is OK or borderline? Stallman wasn't removed for "he once hit on me and I had to reject him". He wasn't criminalized at all, he resigned himself after saying stupid stuff.
I think we can see that in hindsight that Epstein was the common denominator in all these controversies and had he not existed Stallman and Minsky will still just be normal nerds with strong opinions on software unrelated to any sex controversy.
They're guilty of association not of doing anything wrong. It doesn't concern me that Stallman said stupid/insensitive things. He has a history of that.
Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#463Mob justice is not OK just because women do it. If these women have anything substantial they should make formal reports/complaints, not anonymous vogue statements like, "he make me feel uncomfortable". Cannot believe that one even has to say this. Why are women always presumed to be innocent and men always presumed to be guilty? Also, frankly, there is a point at which, certain behaviour might make you feel uncomfor…
What you are saying here would get you cancelled 100 times over if you were a public person, sadly.
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Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#464Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there can be a real safe space. Toxic things for some might not be for others, reassuring things for some might be violent for others. It does not mean we should not try to improve how we behave, but it's important to understand it's impossible to have a generic rulebook we can apply everywhere to be safe with everyone. As an example, some swearwords might really violent to hear for some people, but dis…
Do the rich swear more in France, or the poor?
I too wonder. One thing that I found quite interesting when moving to France was how casual everybody, even high school teachers, was with swearwords.
Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#465Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neurodiversity – up to some point anyway, some people take it a tad too far – is great, but that also means that different people are, well, different, and are good at different things. Stallman is good at many different things and he doesn't seem like e bad bloke overall. But he is not good at being a leader. At all. It's just not where his aptitudes lie. As a leader he is not only ineffective, but even counter-prod…
> But he is not good at being a leader Don't 35 years leading the FSF say otherwise? Judging from the reactions in the FSF community to his coming back, people were missing him.
Yes, accomplishments in his 35 years include:
- A major fracture in the movement (arguably two, if you count GPL2/3).
- Actively turning people off (Keith Packard, for example, described why they didn't license X under the GPL: "we had met Richard, and found him a challenging individual"; he later admitted that Stallman was right and that he should have listened).
- Sidetracking of pointless issues ("GNU/Linux", "you should not be using hacker", etc.)
- Alienating of many people who are generally keen on most of the Free Software principles.
- Insisting on absolute freedom to the detriment of more freedom than the status quo.
And so forth.
Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#466Mob justice is not OK just because women do it. If these women have anything substantial they should make formal reports/complaints, not anonymous vogue statements like, "he make me feel uncomfortable". Cannot believe that one even has to say this. Why are women always presumed to be innocent and men always presumed to be guilty? Also, frankly, there is a point at which, certain behaviour might make you feel uncomfor…
Are you saying that jerking off in front of people is OK or borderline? Stallman wasn't removed for "he once hit on me and I had to reject him". He wasn't criminalized at all, he resigned himself after saying stupid stuff.
> Are you saying that jerking off in front of people is OK or borderline?
I have no idea how you went from OP's message to this. Can you explain?
Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#467IMO, Stallman is a good philosophical leader, but a terrible organizational leader. "On the board" is a decent compromise. But he has been a huge contributor to GNU's decent into irrelevance in recent years. As an organization, they're perpetually stuck in the 1990s.
What makes you say this?
Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not. Being unusual does not free you from the burdens of being a decent person, especially while in a public leadership position, especially when your violations are a repeated trend over a very long period. With the right diagnostic criteria just about everybody who is an asshole could be diagnosed with some mental disorder or another and that is more or less the present state of psychology, that kind of reason…
> disqualifies him from being a public figure and leader A lot of people can't do their jobs if they can't be leaders , depending on how you define it. I think that jobs that don't involve interacting with other people are being automated faster on average than jobs that do. So I think it's better not to be quick to disqualify someone from it.
> disqualifies him from being a public figure and leader
Well, to be honest the 'imaleader' bar is pretty low at this moment. New leaders should try to distance themselves from most previous leader's behavior. Expectations about public figures are really far from reality.
Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can have a conversation whether Stallman is the best person to be a leader, but let's keep false accusations and blatant misinterpretations of his words out of that please. Especially if those words are part of perfectly reasonable thought chain that lots of people on the spectrum would easily agree with (at least when being at the same point in the chain). When I read those attacks, it's not about Stallman anymo…
> You can have a conversation whether Stallman is the best person to be a leader, but let's keep false accusations and blatant misinterpretations of his words out of that please Well, yes, but everyone is talking about this, including your comment. Was Stallman treated unfairly? Sure. It is what it is; the world is an unfair place. I can't change that either. It's been a few years: let's move on and talk about effect…
> let's move on and talk about effective leadership for the movement instead.
Let's move on and welcome Stallman back, because we need him more than those that slandered him.
Let's also talk about what should change so it won't happen again, to anybody else.
Not everyone is a gentle giant like Stallman is.
Do you remember what happened to poor Aaron Swarz when he was falsely accused and prosecuted for things he hadn't done?
I, speaking for myself, don't want an FSF were people can get thrown out by an internet mob.
I want an FSF that defends its members and judge facts, not opinions.
I think Stallman is one of those persons, but I very much welcome other candidates.
Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF
#470Mob justice is not OK just because women do it. If these women have anything substantial they should make formal reports/complaints, not anonymous vogue statements like, "he make me feel uncomfortable". Cannot believe that one even has to say this. Why are women always presumed to be innocent and men always presumed to be guilty? Also, frankly, there is a point at which, certain behaviour might make you feel uncomfor…
Were there any allegations of him doing unwanted flirting? This post seems to be conflating rms' cancellation with other people's unwanted behavior.