Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN is pretty divided about Stallman. Bringing up the things he actually at one time said, even if later he said something different, results in a lot of downvoting and toxicity. You can't talk about him without it devolving into binary thinking and binary debates. Same as everything else in 2023 I guess. edit Even this comment, which is just listing a series of objective facts, is getting wildly upvoted/downvoted
HN was deeply divided on RMS when I joined back in 2009. Every thread on him was full of this. :/
EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
141–150 of 376 posts
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bill Gates didn't say much about it, except he didn't know about any of the "bad stuff" and was deceived. Stallman said a bunch of to try to either claim that the victims weren't victims. Or to try to downplay what happened. Those are huge differences.
Bill Gates is connected enough to Epstein to be suspected of participating in it. Of course he isn't talking about it.
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bill Gates didn't say much about it, except he didn't know about any of the "bad stuff" and was deceived. Stallman said a bunch of to try to either claim that the victims weren't victims. Or to try to downplay what happened. Those are huge differences.
Bill Gates is connected enough to Epstein to be suspected of participating in it. Of course he isn't talking about it.
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#144I don’t know or care a whole lot. He isn’t exactly active on issues outside open source.
All I need to hear from him is “I may very well be wrong about this, but I just don’t care enough to argue” and he’s off my mental sh*t list.
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#145 …the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
A paragraph later, the author summarizes Stallman’s view as: …he says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”.
This is the opposite of what Stallman said, but this lie was repeated by the press. An article in the Daily Beast said: Stallman wrote that “the most plausible scenario” for Giuffre’s accusations was that she was, in actuality, “entirely willing.”
An article in Vice spread the same lie: Early in the thread, Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked.
There are two possibilities here. Either the author of the Medium post was not capable of correctly parsing the sentence, or she didn’t care about truth and was leveling as many accusations as possible in the hope that one would stick. In other words: she is either foolish or malicious. The same goes for the writers of the Vice and Daily Beast articles. To describe what they did as journalism would be an insult to journalists.""By satisfying the mob today, we are sacrificing our future. That’s the real risk."
https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/09/30/in-defense-of-richard-stal...
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#146Bill Gates had bonds with Epstein. His multi decade marriage fell after the fact became public. He didn't get 1% the flak that Stallman had for commenting about a word to describe Marvin Minsky.
Bill Gates didn't say much about it, except he didn't know about any of the "bad stuff" and was deceived. Stallman said a bunch of to try to either claim that the victims weren't victims. Or to try to downplay what happened. Those are huge differences.
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#147Yeah I’m just gonna go ahead and suggest that if you’re a parent, you might want to skip reading the comments here.
If you're a parent, read these comments and understand better.
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Is very controversial, even if he backpedalled (only after it resurfaced and created a lot of controversy). He said he didn’t understand the issue and talking to abuse survivors helped him understand it better, and that led to him changing his view. To me, that sounds like a person simply updating their views in response to new evidence-new to them even if much older to many others. Labelling it as “back-pedalling”…
To be clear, I'm not implying that he himself is a pedophile. I also get that he might have changed his mind, but Stallman is also not known to actually change his mind very often. I'm not a mind reader and it's just an impression that I've gotten in the way he apologized. But in any case my point was mostly that he actually made pretty controversial statements at some point, and it's a bit disingenuous to insinuate…
Stallman’s ideas on open source are well thought out, and vigorously defended for decades.
His terrible ideas are neither well thought out, nor extensively defended.
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, his statements regarding pedophilia are enough. It's not exactly a hidden secret. Saying stuff like >I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. Is very controversial, even if he backpedalled (only…
> Is very controversial, even if he backpedalled (only after it resurfaced and created a lot of controversy). He said he didn’t understand the issue and talking to abuse survivors helped him understand it better, and that led to him changing his view. To me, that sounds like a person simply updating their views in response to new evidence-new to them even if much older to many others. Labelling it as “back-pedalling”…
Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona
#150Ignoring the questions of whether Stallman's persona is good, bad, or irrelevant this kind of thing shouldn't still be happening. Stallman's personality is not new, and has not changed since the 80s, and nothing newly controversial has come out in like a decade at this point. It's inexcusable at this point to keep inviting him to give talks and then cancelling them. Either you're ok with hosting him regardless and an…
Believe it or not, a lot of people still don’t know much beyond RMS being the founder of gnu. I have certainly found that plenty of people are not aware of any controversies until they’re pointed out. Whether these organizers had any clue I don’t know. I do think if you’re inviting someone to give a talk, you probably should do some homework to make sure that you’re comfortable with their persona. And if not, don’t i…
Exactly.
> But it’s less common knowledge than you might think.
I don't think it's necessarily "common knowledge" - and there are a bunch of comments in these surrounding threads I wasn't immediately familiar with - but if you're inviting someone to talk you should be doing some basic due diligence which should turn up all of these issues.