201–210 of 580 posts
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Is he actually autistic? Or is it a convenient diagnosis people give him to excuse his behavior? (I can't find any actual reference to him being autistic on the web. Please enlighten me.)
Easily the most autistic person I know. No contest.
Here[0] is a post by someone else who (by his own account) "worked for RMS longer than any other programmer." While he obviously has had a long relationship with Stallman, one of his key takeaways was: "RMS’s loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because the…
Bushnell* writes a very reasonable piece. It deals with a number of issues with Stallman as a leader of the FSF and MIT and suggests Stallman is unlikely to come back to either of those institutions. But he doesn't deal with what the big problem here is - the way this was done is concerning. Stallman wasn't forced to resign by people like him - who are quite happy to say "Look, Stallman, you've dedicated your life to…
We are, sadly, entering a new age of conformity. Aligning yourself with what main stream society thinks is correct is now more important than anything else. The response of course is that "bad behavior should never be excused, regardless of ability!" which leads to a losing argument in which we try to say what kind of good excuses what kind of bad. But this presupposes the conformist stance: that fitting in with the…
Yes there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. Stallman was viewed as a toxic individual who caused harm, and this is what our society is trying to weed out. I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you. And this is something that everyone needs to do, w…
If you read the article she notes that the infamous "hot ladies" photo was the result of someone else writing and then snapping that shot of his office door. People only see what they want to see. I see a bunch of people beating up on and attacking an awkward "nerd". It reminds me of high school.
Assuming that's correct, and that the "hot ladies" thing happened as she describes, how do you excuse away all the other inappropriate and harassing behavior he's displayed over the years?
What exactly are you claiming he did to harass people?
What exactly did he do that was inappropriate?
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Assuming that's correct, and that the "hot ladies" thing happened as she describes, how do you excuse away all the other inappropriate and harassing behavior he's displayed over the years?
Why isn't the harassing behavior being brought up through the right channels? Is internet rage the right way to do this?
So people eventually share their stories through social media and even that doesn't work sometimes (see: Riot). His behavior doesn't have to cross into illegality to be reprehensible.
The open source movement was created because of his involvement, yet flourished in spite of his personality.
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I don't understand why his pronoun scheme is antagonistic. He still respects that you want gender neutral pronouns, he just won't use they because he thinks they has a standard plural meaning. I don't understand why people have an obligation to use "they" specifically as long as they respect the gender neutral concept.
> I don't understand why people have an obligation to use "they" specifically as long as they respect the gender neutral concept. The same reason we use people's names. Or their nicknames. Or their middle names sometimes. Or their stage names, noms de plume, or noms de guerre. When you are introduced to someone you expect to be spending some time around, you might ask them, "Do you prefer Henry or Hank? Charles or Ch…
If someone upon introduction said "actually, I prefer to be addressed by '$confusing_ambiguous_overloaded_word'" then I just might use the less preferred alternative - no harm intended.
The other individual's preference isn't the only thing that matters. If it bothers me to speak that way, or I find it confusing and it interferes with the flow of my own thought processes while communicating, then I'm going to respectfully fallback to the easier form.
You're not some special princess that gets to interject a cache miss into my thinking every time you're referenced.
You're just being a pain in the ass.
When I introduce myself to people I give a variety of names and monickers of varying degrees of complexity and let them pick whatever they prefer. I have an ethnic first name, it often requires spelling it to clarify its pronunciation. So I usually give my middle initials as an alternative and get the hell on with life.
I'm far more interested in the free exchange of ideas than being treated like royalty requiring that I be addressed by some awkward unnatural contortion, like honorable judge pain in everyone's ass.
the more i think about it the more i dislike him. on his personal website he has pages about why not to use popular services like airbnb. one of his reasons is because they use proprietary code in their app. another it because you have to register with identifying information. hes an annoying zealot who will literally never be satisfied. a person who draws purpose from the act of contradicting and belittling other people. a person who has no sensibility whatsoever when it comes to society, the big picture or the subtle insights of social grace. good fucking riddance.
Dude has gone out of his way to make other people uncomfortable. I use singular they for my pronouns. He's so bothered by this that he goes out of his way to not only tell me I'm wrong for doing so, but to invent his own language for referring to folks who use gender neutral pronouns (which no one will understand, because it's not widely used). I would certainly question whether I was welcome at an event where he was…
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You're missing the nuance of the language as selected. "I am skeptical" clearly prefaces a desire to be made aware of actual scientific evidence, to have the citations (references to the evidence) provided. Further, you, and others who keep beating this dead horse, do not realize that it is part of a larger, ongoing, discussion in which (IIRC from prior HN threads), RMS had that skepticism resolved with knowledge by…
The facts are that these days you just can't discuss some topics "logically" in a public setting. There are forbidden topics that only have one acceptable position. For example, it's not acceptable for anyone to discuss why blackface is offensive and clowns/mimes are not.
It's because one of those two things was used for over a century to convey a belittling and dehumanizing view of a group of people.