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Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

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Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#441

Post by JaimeThompson »

ng12 wrote: post #424
input_sh wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness. June 28th 2003: http://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html > I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based…

Can you explain why these opinions are inappropriate? What makes someone with aggressively libertarian views unsuitable to lead the Free Software Foundation?

Should a 10 year old be allowed to smoke, drink, and do harder drugs? If no then why should a 10 year old be able to pick their adult sex partner(s)?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#442

Post by _pgmf »

zaroth wrote: post #82
flippinburgers wrote: post #67

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.

But on Twitter all you see is this; https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1172283772428906496?s=21

Sarah Mei alternates between aggressive, mocking, and combative. She has no sense of humor. Her worldview is unbelievably bleak and threatening. And she views herself as special -- someone "woke". It's terrible to behold.

The truth is that people make mistakes. People are entitled to their own opinions, however much you may disagree with them. The world exists outside one's self, and any one person just a small, small part of it. The world is not to blame if I feel hurt or threatened, and life is not fair. But within this world we have complete freedom. Do not try to take that away.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#443

Post by ng12 »

JaimeThompson wrote: post #441
ng12 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why these opinions are inappropriate? What makes someone with aggressively libertarian views unsuitable to lead the Free Software Foundation?

Should a 10 year old be allowed to smoke, drink, and do harder drugs? If no then why should a 10 year old be able to pick their adult sex partner(s)?

There are plenty of anarchists in the world who would respond with an emphatic "yes".

Should we be taking steps to ensure anarchists aren't allowed to write software or work at a university?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#444

Post by eej2ya1K »

prepend wrote: post #401
Arnt wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he stayed as a guest at the home of one of the DKUUG regulars and his girlgriend, who afterwards wrote an angry article about it in the DKUUG-nyt. I see the early-nineties issues have been scanned, http://www.dkuug.dk/wp-content/themes/dkuug/arkiv , but I haven't the time to look through them now. The main issues were matters of personal hygiene and the way he treated the girlfriend. Much the same all been posted…

I still don’t understand what you mean by “fouled up his room?” Do you mean he messed up the furniture? Spilled tomato sauce on everything? Overflowed the toilet?

There's a reason all these stories stay so vague - as soon as the details come out, it turns out to be lies, exaggerations or really really minor stuff.

By keeping the narrative at the level of "fouled up his room", "made women feel uncomfortable", "drove people out of open source" the people who attack him can make sure that no one can prove them "wrong". Of course, they also ensure that they can't prove anything themselves, but it's not really about that.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#445

Post by sgt »

Arnt wrote: post #363
kragen wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fouled up his room? What do you mean, like, he couldn't figure out how to operate the hotel room door lock?

No, he stayed as a guest at the home of one of the DKUUG regulars and his girlgriend, who afterwards wrote an angry article about it in the DKUUG-nyt. I see the early-nineties issues have been scanned, http://www.dkuug.dk/wp-content/themes/dkuug/arkiv , but I haven't the time to look through them now. The main issues were matters of personal hygiene and the way he treated the girlfriend. Much the same all been posted…

That archive is a gem on its own! I can't find the article about RMS though, and I've scanned through about 16-17 issues so far. Do you happen to know which issue it is?

Aside from that, this is a great magazine and it's so much fun reading through old articles from the 80s and 90s about Unix. I didn't know Denmark had such a large Unix scene back then.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#446

Post by monktastic1 »

overgard wrote: post #113
mlevental wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there's a large contingent of people on hn (in tech, in the world) that fetishize "logic" and believe it always trumps "feelings". i put both in quotes because to this contingent both of those concepts have absolutely zero relation to their actual form. i too used to be quite fond of making completely dispassionate arguments about controversial things (race, gender, class, etc.) because i believed that the entire con…

The whole point of rational dispassionate discussion is exactly because everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. I mean lets pretend its true. So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to en…

> everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion.

You don't have to "put them aside." You have to incorporate them into the reasoning. It's true that some people are petulant and try to end discussion with the "you can't know what it's like" meme, sometimes it's really just what it looks like: a plea to try and understand what it's like to be me, instead of the caricature of me I see being constructed.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#447

Post by roenxi »

JaimeThompson wrote: post #441
ng12 wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why these opinions are inappropriate? What makes someone with aggressively libertarian views unsuitable to lead the Free Software Foundation?

Should a 10 year old be allowed to smoke, drink, and do harder drugs? If no then why should a 10 year old be able to pick their adult sex partner(s)?

If there is a requirement that the head of the FSF is easily understood by ordinary people there can't be a head of the FSF. Ordinary people don't understand or care about software freedom. The acknowledgement of that was why the Open Source people split from the Free Software people back in the day. The best anyone can do is make arguments that are correct if someone takes the time to read and think through them. Stallman is that sort of person, and that is likely the sort of person who is going to be at the head of the FSF if they are effective and not just a vague cheerleader. This current 'scandal' is probably a sign that the Free Software movement will die and be subsumed into the Open Source world - anyone promoting freedom is going to be a radical.

In this case, I expect but don't have time to check that Stallman is using a very wide definition of coerced that captures most or all of whatever you are uncomfortable with and he is going to be technically correct on most if not all of his original points. That is completely in his style.

And more to the issue at hand, these are questions that are irrelevant to Stallman's position as head of the FSF or his role in MIT. He is not using his position to push pro-adultery themes. He is calling on people to think about what words mean and what the implications of those meanings are. People can't kick up a stink for something that happened 10 years ago and claim that nothing has changed. Stallman is perfectly happy to stand up and say that he's changed his mind on many points. A couple of lines on a personal website are just not that insightful into his character.

Also, whether alcohol or drugs should be available for consumption by anybody is still an open question. That is a different debate. Most of the arguments as to why a 10 year old shouldn't be drinking can actually be applied to a 40 year old. The major difference (brain development) is a big deal but there are a lot of other problems with addictive substances that are not age dependent. Why should it be acceptable for a 40 year old to drink but not a 10 year old? There are interesting aspects to consider there and to logically pin down the reasoning to a moral framework requires quite a bit of thought and probably discussion with others.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#448

Post by lostjohnny »

faissaloo wrote: post #411
mirimir wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why you should develop a second personality ... Why stop at two?

No reason, you should definitely have at least one other than your main though.

What if someone can't?

What if they are both equally bad?

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#449

Post by lostjohnny »

_skel wrote: post #122

His job, as the head of the FSF and GNU, was to represent those organizations to the public, which includes many people who don't know him. Being judged and vilified by people who don't know you is what happens to public figures. If your behavior brings disrepute on the organizations you represent, you should let those organizations find different representatives. RMS was right to step down. He is still free to say w…

> Being judged and vilified by people who don't know you is what happens to public figures

Nope.

I don't judge and vilify people that I don't know, I judge their opinions.

In this case Stallman's opinion were completely rational, he's been judged for who he is and his past, by people that didn't know him super charged by people who knew him and held a grudge against him.

It's called character assassination.

Or mob.

> If your behavior brings disrepute on the organizations you represent

Is the FSF stops bringing dispute, it becomes useless.

If FSF doesn't challenge the status quo or what's considered taboo, what is it good for?

It's not a marketing agency that need people to buy the product even if the product sucks, it's a no profit org that needs people believing in the cause, especially when it's hard.

Re: Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

#450

Post by lostjohnny »

dirtybird04 wrote: post #437
ng12 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that Stallman has been this way for decades -- he's always been outspoken, nitpicky, and aggressively libertarian -- and FSF has flourished under his sole leadership. It's only in 2019 that internet culture and clickbait media have made it a "problem". To me, that is significantly more harmful than any of the wonky things RMS sometimes says.

I don't know or care much about Stallman and the situation, don't really have a dog in this fight. What I do know is that "It's been like this for decades" is never an appropriate defense.

> What I do know is that "It's been like this for decades" is never an appropriate defense.

You know what?

He got better with time, given where he came from.

So he's still better than the majority of puppets lurking in his background to find something to use against him.

For example: he never threatened anybody nor accused anybody falsely nor asked for somebody to be "removed".

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