141–150 of 280 posts
> Sarah Mei then went through the board members involved one by one, digging into each of their histories, and tweeting what she viewed as fire-worthy infractions. The crimes included: “being super involved with Wikipedia,” retweeting a “hideous” New York Times editorial, and being friendly with famed democracy activist and law professor Lawrence Lessig. Publicly calling out each board member in turn with a clear imp…
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And how laughable, given wikipedia's heavy progressive bias. These people seek out and peddle victimhood as currency. Truly McArthy-esque, to see villains (in our times "oppressors") behind every shadow... Even manufactured self righteousness must be addictive.
> given wikipedia's heavy progressive bias. Do you have a robust academic citation for this? None of the sources here ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideological_bias_on_Wikipedi... ) suggest a heavy bias, and overall it seems that bias is attenuated with stronger participation. I haven't been able to find sources other than those linked.
Personally, I see it in articles on any topic that is controversial, particularly along the axis of the left-right divide in America. Wikipedia is a theater for activism/ideology just like every other space (like our work places) has been opted into the same war in the last 5 years or so. It is most apparent to me when I read an article about influential or popular figures who are moderate or right wing.
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This Sarah Mel character is the one who should be "cancelled".
Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave.
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This Sarah Mel character is the one who should be "cancelled".
Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave.
Wasn't part of the issue with Stallman that his behavior, not just his ideas, were problematic. Like telling a college freshman that he'd kill himself if she didn't go out with him: https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrac...
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Here is a nice document about their approach to “evangelism” http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf And some nice documentation on patent trolling to make the commons financially unviable, this destroyed lives: http://techrights.org/2007/10/22/lasuit-evolution-linux/ And examples of when they paid folks to go spread a bunch of misinformation about the commons: http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/AstroTurfing
I know there was a concerted FUD effort and much dirty playing, including all the stuff you are pointing out. What I specifically didn't see is usage of mental illness as a weapon against OSS.
I’ll update my comment to read “mental deficiency” instead of mental illness for accuracy. I overstated.
(Update: I’ve lost my edit button on the original post)
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Nope, she is the character that needs to be ignored. That's the proper way to deal with trolls - not feeding them, not fighting them but starving them of attention they so desperately crave.
Pedro Domingos has published an article about how to combat cancel culture. > Beating Back Cancel Culture: A Case Study from the Field of Artificial Intelligence https://quillette.com/2021/01/27/beating-back-cancel-culture... TL;DR: Find your friends, Know what to expect, Don’t back down, Don’t let them make it about you, Hold the moral high ground, Mock them mercilessly, Don’t let their narrative outrun yours, Goad…
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The part where it mentions that he isn’t defending sexual predators.
He is, and I'll quote the relevant part from Stallman's statement that is included in the article: "The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X... The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspeci…
Some of the quotes, I suppose you could be charitable and read them as more of a discussion of the logical flaws in language, but it many cases, as is the one above, the quote is so obviously, hilariously heinous, and the mentality behind it so obvious, it's hard to understand why people defend it.
"It's not sexual assault if I thought she was game and didn't use physical force" is such a pedantic defense.
A different take: Microsoft, Oracle, et. al. waged a war against OSS in the 90s. They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness). It’s not a coincidence the class of human that weathered the storm looks like Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al. That’s what it took. The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was l…
Source document: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
I’ve lost my edit button on the original post so putting the correction here.
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> People in the OSS community can, at times, glorify toxic behavior. I wouldn't go so far as to glorify toxic behaviour, but some of what is seen as toxic by some is IMO just frankness or a tactic to bring the conversation back into a realm of technical discussion.
In my experience, people who have technical discussions are often blind to their own emotions and the effect that their words have on the people around them. In good this can be solved. In bad cases, people talk about "discussing technical issues" and "directness" as a shield for their poor behavior. An example from real life: A student, Y, was having a problem with her CS lab assignment, and talked to her professor,…