151–160 of 1001 posts
I've seen some online cheering Stallman's resignation from MIT. I suspect they'll also be cheering about this resignation as well. But this is nothing to cheer about. Regardless of what low regard the man might be held as a person, he's being persecuted for having expressing ideas, demanding proof of claims, advocating for objective standards, and asking questions. These are all hallmarks of scientific inquiry. It se…
> Washington had slaves, that doesn't mean we should hate him. Counterpoint: yes it does. Judging Washington by the standards of his time and his peers , slavery was abhorrent. Take the case of Quock Walker, who sued for his freedom in 1781, for instance. The chief justice of Massachusetts (and later Washington's own nominee for chief justice of the US) wrote: > As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christia…
I'm not saying that Washington thought he was right to have slaves. He was wrong to have slaves and it reflects poorly on him that he did. Rather, I'm saying the amount of good he did for this country far outweighs his wrongs.
One view you can take, which seems defensible, is that he grew to agree with the anti-slavery view late in life, yet as a calculated measure to hold the country together when half the economy was dependent on slavery, did nothing about it, and also was too weak to give up his own station in life which was similarly dependent on slavery. Yet he freed his slaves in his will, both for their own sake and in the (ultimately vain) hope that he would inspire others to do the same.
The other view is that he never actually believed it, or he would have made freeing human beings a political priority. He was embarrassed into freeing his slaves after Martha's death, but he fundamentally thought that it was more important for himself and Martha to live their last years in comfort than for his slaves to live in freedom, and that the negative peace of the new country holding together was preferable to the positive peace of meaningful liberty. And that therefore the "good" he did for this country was to set us up for the Civil War and for many more decades of viewing certain people as not fully deserving of human rights.
And relevantly to RMS and the free software movement - if Washington hadn't been there, if instead William Cushing or Gouverneur Morris had been in a similar role, what would they have done? Or even if Washington were still there but he did not use his leadership position to say, "I don't like slavery, but we have to keep it for now," what could Cushing or Morris have accomplished? Washington presided over the convention where Morris made his ultimately ineffective argument.
Washington wasn't the only founding father, nor the only skilled military leader among the revolutionary forces. In a world without him, would the US still have won and would it have been better set up to fight slavery? (Would the revolutionary forces have allowed black soldiers in earlier, and moreover had more morale among the black soldiers, thereby leading to an earlier victory?) If such a scenario is plausible, then the good he did didn't outweigh his wrongs.
I've seen some online cheering Stallman's resignation from MIT. I suspect they'll also be cheering about this resignation as well. But this is nothing to cheer about. Regardless of what low regard the man might be held as a person, he's being persecuted for having expressing ideas, demanding proof of claims, advocating for objective standards, and asking questions. These are all hallmarks of scientific inquiry. It se…
RMS was defending Minsky, awkwardly. As someone who has a history of social awkwardness, he should be forgiven for this. He's been a good steward of the FSF, which has doing important work in the service of free (read: non-backdoored) hardware lately. I know there are good people still at the FSF, but I can only hope they are as incorruptible and dogged as RMS. The way this attack came suddenly out of the depths make…
Minsky was a child molester. There's no way to defend that.
RMS was defending Minsky, awkwardly. As someone who has a history of social awkwardness, he should be forgiven for this. He's been a good steward of the FSF, which has doing important work in the service of free (read: non-backdoored) hardware lately. I know there are good people still at the FSF, but I can only hope they are as incorruptible and dogged as RMS. The way this attack came suddenly out of the depths make…
It’s the new wave. Applebaum resigned with ‘a claim from an anonymous victim, which, was quashed by witnesses and alleged other victim’. Linus got his wang cut by ‘women kernel developers thought it was mean ’. And Stallman lost everything for saying his opinion. Good times to stay alive, eh?
Has it swung too far? Perhaps. I have a rule: "society always over-corrects."
Should it swing back? No. Some moderation might be in order, but I'm not interested in going back to the time of "but Michael Jackson was so talented!"
(I'm not comparing Stallman to Michael Jackson, just using the latter as an example of a mentality.)
I don't personally have a dog in this fight, but I do get the sense that perhaps this was not an isolated incident but more of the straw that broke the camel's back.
Why does this feel like such a witch hunt? It is clear RMS was stunningly clueless to write anything about this, but surely we all know of similar engineers that would make a similar error? If everyone were held up to the same moral standard, we wouldn't have many people left in power! Just to be clear: I'm definitely not supporting hurting children (directly or indirectly) - I hope I'm not falling into the same tar…
I never much liked Richard Stallman. But he's a freethinker, and freethinkers necessarily exist outside the mainstream. So, despite not liking him, I also don't like this turn of events. It does seem arbitrary to me that the same sexual encounter is classified as rape in Arizona and not rape in Virginia. I suppose we have to draw that line somewhere arbitrary. But I wonder if it was a mistake to classify what is call…
I don't think he saw it as a hill worth dying on, just a random hill he happened to be shot on. It's part of a random scattering of thoughts he makes public.
Either way, I'm cancelling my FSF donations for caving into this witch hunt. It's long demise will be helmed by people that stand for nothing less they offend someone.
I don't agree with many things RMS says, but I am not a fan of this cancel culture where character assassinations are orchestrated routinely.