881–890 of 943 posts
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>I am comfortable excluding people who Could this be an opportunity for your focused effort? Exclusion is dramatically unkind.
It is unkind, but sometimes one has to be unkind to prevent greater harms from happening. Such is life.
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This is not about a strict monoculture. You can have a robust and diverse culture in which there's broad agreement that a few things are bad - murder, slavery, sex with minors, etc. RMS defended Minsky's sex with a minor and perhaps more relevantly if we read the linked articles, it's part of a longstanding trend with him. And he feels the need to push these views on others in a workplace/academic setting, via mailin…
To be fair, he voiced most of his opinions on his personal blog, and not on the mailing list. His personal blog is presumably a place which you would peruse, if you wanted to know what his personal views on things are, and it was so obscure that seemingly no one knew of it until someone really went digging. Not only that, but he didn't even make these views with any particular frequency. One was made in 2006. Another…
Even given this generous interpretation, RMS' poorly chosen words are still rather egregious.
Specifically he misses the forest for the trees. A fundamental duty of adults is to make sure that our sex partners are (a) of legal age (b) truly freely consenting without coercion.
One can think of various circumstances in which one might reasonably make such a mistake in good faith. However, somebody's private... child sex island is not one of those places.
Even more importantly, RMS neglects even some sort of token recognition of the actual victims of Epstein's trafficking. Hint: Minsky is not one of them!
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You're even more confused. Please reread: "I'll generally excuse people who are trying to do the right thing. Richard is trying to do the right thing." I understand within your cultural frame and value system, ethical behavior is defined with regards to other people's comfort. That's not true for Richard (not for the culture I was born in, for that matter; I don't much care if people around me feel comfortable, nor i…
> I don't much care if people around me feel...make me feel comfortable This doesn't seem consistent with the commonly accepted meaning of "comfortable." By their very nature things that make someone uncomfortable are things they care about. If they truly didn't care they would not experience discomfort. Are there really cultures where inflicting suffering on others is not "within their cultural frame and value syste…
Yes!
* Consider treatment of children in Korea, where kids are forced, by their parents, to study 16 hours per day.
* Consider tactics used in many resistance movements against oppressive governments in Slavic cultures (and similar tactics recently adopted by oppressed African American communities in the US), which are explicitly about making people feel uncomfortable about wrongs.
* Consider Spartan culture (or any other macho culture). Even in the US, why would Marines do the things they do?
* Consider historical Catholic culture of denial and self-sacrifice.
* Consider "drink from the firehose" culture at elite tech schools like MIT.
* Heck, consider the way many cultures temper kids to be resiliant to discomfort (e.g. dipping in cold water in parts of Eastern Europe)
... and so on. Contemporary progressive Western culture is almost uniquely focused on concepts like fun and personal comfort.
The way your comment conflates "comfort" with "things they care about" is an example of that.
Broadly speaking, Western culture is also (both currently and historically) more focused than most other cultures on surface politeness. "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all" is an middle/upper-class WASP concept. In China, if you're fat, you'll get called fat. That's not uniquely US (Japan is even further in that direction), but it is a place a lot of people have to code switch in the US, since the US (with a few other countries, like England, Germany, and Japan) are outliers there. I can't raise my voice in a professional middle-class US workplace. I can do a lot of things on international conference calls (to the relief of both sides!) which would get me instantly fired in the US.
It's a signalling and oppression mechanism too; if a construction worker learned to code but didn't learn to code switch US cultures too, they'd likely never achieve socioeconomic mobility. Google would say they're an aggressive, sexist, white male (or if not white, at the very least, not a "culture fit"). It's how I let you know I'm part of your in-crowd.
Fortunately, I can code switch now!
> By their very nature things that make someone uncomfortable are things they care about. If they truly didn't care they would not experience discomfort.
You're conflating two different things (which are deeply conflated in US culture, so this isn't a comment about you). I'll give a couple of examples:
* I care about personal growth. Personal growth requires discomfort. Whether that's grinding through a complex math text, learning to code switch through immersion in a different culture, being told I'm wrong, or otherwise.
* My girlfriend has a mental health issue. She cares about resolving it. US culture has conditioned her to "manage" it by seeking ways which avoid "triggering" situations. As far as I can tell, that's leading to a spiral where it's getting worse. In my culture, you'd do the opposite; you'd seek out those situations to habituate to them (which is exceptionally uncomfortable).
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Stallman routinely misjudging what other people are thinking and why they are acting is not a matter of debate. Everyone agrees that he is bad at that. Terrible, even.
Mocking anyone who opposes something goes beyond skepticism. So does saying people oppose something "only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness".
Furthermore Stallman isn't mocking them. He is making a claim about why people are acting the way they are and is probably serious in his claim. He's also probably wrong, but being wrong and mocking someone are different things.
The full quote you're referencing is about a long list of things including "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia". Most of that is disgusting, but not anyone's business. I vehemently disagree with the idea that prostitution should be illegal, especially if my money is being wasted prosecuting it. Talk about bailing out a sinking ship trying to stop prostitution. Stallman was also probably wrong on pedophilia - even then depending on what he meant, he didn't flesh that one out very much.
It isn't exactly a damning case against the man when there is one questionable (and vague) addition in an otherwise non-notable list midway down a very long page of random political opinions. Stuff like that being a major line of attack is why he is back on the board of the FSF - the attacks are over trivialities, especially compared to the remarkable success and prescience of his life's work.
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But after someone read it they spoke to him about it and he realized he was wrong and published a correction right along side it and that was many years ago. You should have mentioned that. If he hadn't said it publicly, and only said it in private to people, that wouldn't have happened. Is that better? I don't think so. Free speech creates counter speech and changes people's minds.
He didn't retract anything until just before he resigned as far as I know.[1] The retraction wasn't right along side his earlier comments.[2][3] 6 years isn't many at his age. And he fixed a link without changing anything else just 1 year before. Defend him if you want. But let's be accurate. [1] https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September... [2] https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20J…
(Sorry, you're on your own looking for it -- it was on the first page at the time I saw it.)
I think it is strange that, on the one hand, the tech world has been advocating for the rights of neurodivergent people – society should accept that people on the autism spectrum are different and that’s OK. But at the same time RMS has been attacked for some statements very probably stemming from his autism that, while they may seem a bit shocking and at odds with the mainstream, were not illegal or intentionally of…
If someone is consistently failing to do the necessary part of a job, then it doesn't matter why they are consistently failing; they must be asked to step down and not do that job. One of the responsibilities of anyone in power is to avoid emboldening sexual predators and silencing victims. Anyone in power who does that should be called out; and anyone who continues to do it after being called out should be asked to…
Yes, exactly.
Pointing out extenuating circumstances of someone's (alleged) bad behavior is necessary and useful. But it should always come second to determining what the person should have done instead, and holding them accountable to push society towards a place where everybody has the responsible behavior by default.
The attitude of "if there's any plausible reason person X might have thought they weren't doing anything wrong, we shouldn't punish them" gives the exact wrong incentives.
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This is an extremely dangerous and absolutely insane line of reasoning that is causing incredible harm to young people. You don’t have gender dysphoria because you hung out with girls as an 11 year old.
This is an awful way to talk to people about their own experiences.
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This is an awful way to talk to people about their own experiences.
It comes from a reasonable place: It shouldn't be generalised. You may have issues with specific things that were said (or how they were said), but that isn't clear from your response. Perhaps you could add that, so the author can learn.
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Again, are we talking about the ideas or Stallman? None of that even moves the needle on how high value the ideas are for me. What we are basically talking about here is solidarity on software freedom. Acting in solidarity means priorities. This is why I am focused on ideas. Liking people is not as high of a priority as the software freedom is. To put it bluntly: even my enemies, "those other people" benefit from gre…
I'll be honest, I'm a bit annoyed you think I care less about software freedom, because I don't like Stallman. I'd like to separate two things out. I believe it severely hurts the cause of software freedom to have Stallman at the helm. I think software freedom is bigger than any one person, and Stallman has been, for many years, damaging to the cause. Do you think "the ideas or Stallman" are more important?
It is my intent to understand.
Edit: and let us be clear we are just two good people having a tough discussion. I just want to understand you and your position better.
I agree software freedom is more than a given person.
So far, I have not really seen the ideas put into question here, right?
One of the originators of those ideas is in question.
And that person has done things others don't like, right? (I think so)
From what I can tell, those things are not about the ideas.
In my original comment, I had expressed my sincere desire for there to be focus among the people involved to keep it all about the ideas.
Not doing that does hurt the cause, because people may find themselves unwilling or unable to be a part of things.
You are expressing that, yes?
Either that focus happens, or it does not, and we shall see.
Re: gcc
Stallman would say, fork it and do one better.
He is not wrong about that, FWIW.
That's the freedom part in play. Does not mean we get what we want. It does mean we can do what we want.
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The only thing ASD gives me is a measure of clarity - because all of the hidden rules of society are not hidden to me, they're things I need to learn with intent, it gives me a measure of clarity into which rules are required, and which ones are not, when they can be broken and when they can't be. I'm not gonna say I'd like to be normal, because I have no real construct of what normal would be like - but ASD also giv…
"all humans are some measure of weird, its just a question of how much, and in what way" This is true. However, from a similar (mild form, partially dealt with) ASD observer point of view, I also noticed that the said peculiarities in one's character are like food ingredients. It's about the way one manages to blend them in a recipe and to cook them into something tasteful (for others) that makes or breaks the social…