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EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona

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Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona

#141

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. :/

He convinces many people that some business models are unethical. People who benefit from those business models feel like he's taking money out of their pockets.

Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona

#142

Earlier 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.

I haven't seen a single credible claim that Gates participated in anything inappropriate. The biggest red flag IMO is that his wife divorced him over it.

Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona

#143

Earlier 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.

At this point it seems like everyone is suspected of participating in it. It doesn’t seem like a high bar to cross anymore.

Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona

#144
What I gather is he has some very unpleasant opinions, but is very open to discussion and correction.

I 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 original Remove Richard Stallman post contained leaked communications from a private mailing list. In it, the author quotes an email from Stallman where he explains that Marvin Minsky likely wouldn’t have known that the woman on Jeffrey Epstein’s island was coerced:

    …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

#146

Bill 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.

I doubt anyone who spent a lot of time with Epstein didn’t know. I’m sure many didn’t participate, but everything I’ve read suggests Epstein was practically radiating his obsession with young girls.

Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona

#147

Yeah I’m just gonna go ahead and suggest that if you’re a parent, you might want to skip reading the comments here.

Much Like Stallman keeps finding out, not knowing enough about something is going to get you into trouble.

If you're a parent, read these comments and understand better.

Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona

#148

Earlier 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…

I think part of the controversy is that Stallman is known for being an uncompromising absolutist on open-source. So people assume he has the same attitude towards his terrible ideas.

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

#149

Earlier 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”…

He doesn't have to be a worse person. He just has to be a worse public figure.

Re: EPFL cancels Stallman's lecture citing “the situation regarding” his persona

#150
post #111
post #96

Ignoring 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…

> 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

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.

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