Statement of FSF board on election of Richard Stallman

He portrays himself as willing to learn. People who worked with him have different stories.[1]

[1] http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html

Imagine though you're asking "okay, I see you're a lawyer, but you're a black lawyer and I'm afraid that your public credibility in this part of the country may (alas!) be compromised"?

We DO choose how to act, like engaging in public speaking or not, showing up to court/convention poorly dressed or barefoot, or being rude to people and so on.

With choice comes accountability.

With public presence comes public accountability. Very simple.

I'm still not sure why people consider it appropriate to exclude someone like Stallman from serving on the Board of the FSF while continuing to allow Mr. Rafael Reif, for example, to remain president of MIT after sending a personally signed "thank-you note" to one of the most notorious alleged sex-traffickers and convicted child-rapists in US history:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2020/01/12/after-epstei...

Nor would it be any more appropriate to allow Mr. Seth Lloyd back onto the MIT campus with just a slap on the wrist:

https://thetech.com/2021/02/25/mit-administration-epstein-op...

Or Mr. Martin Nowak for that matter either:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/03/26/metro/harvard-sanctio...

On the subject of Nowak's role in aiding and abetting a child rapist, this hacker news thread is worth reading again:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25442060

So why has nobody drafted petitions to cancel Rafael "Thank You So Much Mr. Epstein -- And Don't Forget to Show My Letter to Federal Prosecutors" Reif, Benedict "Epstein is an Ideal Donor for Harvard" Gross, Alan "Dershbag" Dershowitz, Martin "Punishment Serves No Noble Purpose" Nowak, Steven "Using the Internet to Entice a Minor into Prostitution is A-Okay" Pinker, Seth "So What If I Make Female Undergraduates at MIT Feel Uncomfortable" Lloyd, Neri "Epstein was Always a Reliable Supporter of Israel" Oxman, Frank "I Never Saw any Girls that were Underage" Wilczek, and all of the other pedophilia-tolerating two-faced phonies that attended EDGE Foundation dinners hosted by the convicted child rapist and/or visited him on "Pedophile Isle," where FBI reportedly found instruction manuals that Mr. Epstein had ordered on Amazon that describe how to create a so-called "sex slave," in addition to video tapes containing child pornography that he allegedly recorded using secret cameras that were installed throughout his various residences?

Mr. Stallman blaming his "being on the spectrum" for all of the troubling statements cataloged on the website cited below may not entirely excuse him for making them since there is no evidence that someone on the spectrum is more likely than the general population to hold similar views on child rape:

https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

But the most important question today that Mr. Stallman still needs to address directly, because many of his critics on this issue continue to hold him in the highest regard for his role in advancing the free software movement, is a very frank one:

Were his remarks in support of pedophilia designed to persuade Mr. Epstein to donate part of his $500 million estate to the Free Software Foundation, much like he observed role-models such as MIT president Rafael Reif do for Mr. Epstein when Dr. Reif sent Mr. Epstein a personally signed thank-you note for his donation to the Media Lab, or colleagues like Martin Nowak do for Mr. Epstein when Dr. Nowak created a web page on a university website and an office in his department for a convicted child-rapist in exchange for tens of millions of dollars in donations that were promised to his academic program at Harvard and hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, often laundered through Epstein's fellow billionaire pedophile friends like Les Wexner, Glenn Dubin, and Leon Black, to Harvard University, where Mr. Nowak is a professor?

I'm not entirely convinced by the naysayers on this one yet, but Stallman is most deserving of the benefit of doubt thus far, and not because of his autism, but rather because of all of his contributions to free software in spite of it.

On the other hand, many of the other Epstein co-conspirators cited above who directly accepted money from the convicted child-rapist as a form of reputation laundering for an individual who they knew, or should have known, was about to face racketeering charges in federal court for the sex-trafficking of hundreds of underage girls over the past 30 years deserve to spend some serious time in the same jail cell where Mr. Epstein (allegedly) killed himself because he was too much of a coward to stand trial for all of the crimes that he knew he had committed.