> and [he] spends a whole lot of time explaining why he is different and we should all put up with his social ineptitude because he didn’t know better
My reading of this in the context of the post is that he self-aware enough to strive to be better, and admits he has failed to do so in the past.
> We the socially inept can and do learn to adapt. He’s a clever man, he can do it too.
Your response touches on something I have been trying to articulate for quite some time. For context: I am a bleeding-heart lefty and I am very often one of the loudmouths who critizes bad behaviour, including RMS's many social faux-pas (to put it politely).
What do we do with people who are trying to adapt, but their process doesn't look like we expect/wished it did?
His apology only barely grazes the actual points he was critized for. But he does admit to failing in the past, and tackles head-on how insufficient his responses were when it comes to women and his defense of Epstein-adjacent topics.
As much as we would like people to grovel and apologize the perfect way... they rarely do.
Is this, however, a good enough response that we can round it up to _redemption_? We want people to listen when we give them feedback on social stuff, we want them to engage us and take our pleas to heart, we want them to deconstruct themselves and do better.
One thing that is missing from these discussions, and this is bigger than the RMS stuff, is a sense of nuance and perspective. The Internet makes it really easy to escalate what should be a complaint into a full-on unforgivable offense... in some cases this is exactly what should be done and I welcome it, but in some others this escalation feels out of whack to me.
It is very hard to constructively argue about the proper intensity of our collective blowback to these offenses, because I haven't found a way to build a constructive defense of lesser-punishment that doesn't feel like a defense of the person or offense itself.
Back to RMS: while I will listen with an open mind to any oposing arguments you have, my subjective position is that this apology (although imperfect) is good-enough for me to believe he is trying.