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Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

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Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#501

Post by lanevorockz »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #497
mustafa_pasi wrote: post #427

Mob 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…

I don't see how this is relevant _at all_ to the linked article. You seem to be taking existing arguments that aren't even related to RMS's case and arguing against a strawman of an extreme version of them. No "mob justice" happened here. No women came forward and said RMS "hit on them" or whatever. RMS faced criticism for comments which justified rape and were close to victim blaming, and willingly resigned from his…

Don't rewrite history, main reason Richard was pushed out was a MeToo/racism witch hunt against him. He was not the only one attacked on it, most heads of open source projects were also a target at the same time.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#502

Post by fsflover »

CJefferson wrote: post #376
ddingus wrote: post #235

I am here to say I am pleased to see RMS active in software issues again. I am a fan of his ideas related to software, and his gift to us has paid me and most of my peers off over and over. Tons of others have added to all that and here we are today. Personally, I will consider what he says about software, data, IP. The man is not often wrong. Has a lot to say, and he should be heard. There are other issues, and that…

Genuine question, is there anything useful he has said in the last 10 years he has said you can point to? He seems helplessly lost in the past, before the web, the explosion in javascript, etc. etc.

Is there anything different today concerning software that makes his old words obsolete?

> before the web, the explosion in javascript

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#503

Post by krapp »

SilverRed wrote: post #46
JohnHaugeland wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop. He argued that pedophilia was okay.

Thats a serious misrepresentation of his words. He once had a page on his site saying that he did not think it was harmful if voluntary (eg, consent between people of similar ages but one being over age) He has since removed the post and stated that its more complex than he initially thought.

No. He made multiple statements on his website supporting sexual relationships between adults and minors. There was not simply the one statement he made, then retracted.

Here is a comment I made two years ago pointing them all out as well as the context by which any reasonable person would consider them to be in support of pedophilia.

And while it is true that he made a single comment after the controversy retracting his beliefs, almost as if he were forced to do so to try to put out the PR trashfire that he started, that does not mean OP's comment misrepresents RMS's views. It is correct that RMS was a stalwart, passionate advocate for pedophilia for decades.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#504

Post by fsflover »

dang wrote: post #283
hYKdTfpa wrote: post #3

The attacks on him were dubious at best.

Unrelated to the topic, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be…

Technically, such guideline prohibits anonymous speech, because how you speak can reveal your identity after a certain threshold...

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#505

Post by dataduck »

inglor_cz wrote: post #353
higerordermap wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason wokeism is fastest growing religion in the world.

If they keep eating one another so publicly and randomly, they won't achieve the necessary internal stability. Successful authoritarian movements have a clear set of rules that make you safe as a member, and only turn to internal purges once they destroyed any external opposition.

Are you saying that they haven't destroyed all (effective) external opposition?

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#506

Post by CRConrad »

yread wrote: post #453
mustafa_pasi wrote: post #427

Mob 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.

Neither; GP is clearly saying that such "reason for cancellation" was NOT what Stallman did. And no,

> he resigned himself after saying stupid stuff

only goes to show that you were bamboozled by the BS spread about him. He was pressured to resign after gross distortions of some in and of themselves quite reasonable(1) things he said were spread like gospel of what he actually said, and almost nobody listened to the corrections from people who were not as easily lead.

You can still defect from the former to the latter camp.

___ 1: But admittedly somewhat irrelevant at the time -- and too-obviously prone to easy distortion.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#507

Post by cmeacham98 »

lanevorockz wrote: post #501
cmeacham98 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this is relevant _at all_ to the linked article. You seem to be taking existing arguments that aren't even related to RMS's case and arguing against a strawman of an extreme version of them. No "mob justice" happened here. No women came forward and said RMS "hit on them" or whatever. RMS faced criticism for comments which justified rape and were close to victim blaming, and willingly resigned from his…

Don't rewrite history, main reason Richard was pushed out was a MeToo/racism witch hunt against him. He was not the only one attacked on it, most heads of open source projects were also a target at the same time.

Every[1] reputable[2] source[3] I[4] can[5] find[6] (literally just the top search results for "stallman resigns" that have any info about the reason) says that Stallman resigned over his comments defending a fellow computer scientist over his participation in the Epstein scandal. Do you have a reason to believe otherwise?

1: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/17/20870050/richard-stallman...

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/09/17/richa...

3: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/computer-scientist-richard...

4: https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbm74x/computer-scientist-ri...

5: https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/17/computer...

6: https://www.cnet.com/news/computer-scientist-richard-stallma...

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#508

Post by hutzlibu »

lanevorockz wrote: post #501
cmeacham98 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how this is relevant _at all_ to the linked article. You seem to be taking existing arguments that aren't even related to RMS's case and arguing against a strawman of an extreme version of them. No "mob justice" happened here. No women came forward and said RMS "hit on them" or whatever. RMS faced criticism for comments which justified rape and were close to victim blaming, and willingly resigned from his…

Don't rewrite history, main reason Richard was pushed out was a MeToo/racism witch hunt against him. He was not the only one attacked on it, most heads of open source projects were also a target at the same time.

But it was no vague anonymous - he once hit on me - lynch mob, but very concrete criticism of RMS. Things he said and did in the past - and in the present.

(only thing would be, that his "voluntary resign" was obviously done with a lot of pressure)

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#509

Post by Siira »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #497
mustafa_pasi wrote: post #427

Mob 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…

I don't see how this is relevant _at all_ to the linked article. You seem to be taking existing arguments that aren't even related to RMS's case and arguing against a strawman of an extreme version of them. No "mob justice" happened here. No women came forward and said RMS "hit on them" or whatever. RMS faced criticism for comments which justified rape and were close to victim blaming, and willingly resigned from his…

> willingly resigned

Voluntary suicides are in your pipeline as well, no? Dictatorship sure doesn’t innovate.

Re: Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF

#510

Post by varajelle »

stephenr wrote: post #266
spurgu wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it refreshing to see someone willing to talk and think about these taboo kind of subjects. Myself I think it (sexual interaction) boils down to mutual consent, but there's obviously an age where a person cannot grasp the scope of what they're consenting to. And necrophilia fails this definition since consent is impossible (unless written in a will). And now having looked into what he was actually accused of, o…

The law literally is about age of consent. As a society we deem young people too immature to make important decisions for themselves. Nothing about calling him on his ridiculous views is related to "wokeness". One guy saying "hey maybe fucking kids isn't bad" is not in any way related to social injustice - society in general says that fucking kids is bad. Edit: unless you agree with his claims - then I guess you migh…

Not only young people but also adult who would want to take some kind of drugs, or who would like to get into, god forbid, homosexual acts.

Now, homosexuality has been allowed everywhere in the US for a decade or so. It wouldn't have been if it was not appropriate to talk about it.

Richard Stallman was, for my understanding, just daring to ask questions, and debating over a sensitive topic, and he got blamed for it.

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