521–530 of 1001 posts
It's unfortunate that scarlet letter offences are still alive and well in today's culture. Normally, when someone engages in behavior seen as offensive, the procedure is to pressure the person to apologize and mend his ways, and only get rid of him if he refuses to do so. But when a "scarlet letter" offence is involved, we jump straight to the punishment phase, removing the person outright with no judicial process. T…
Just as much as RMS was right[1], ESR was right[2]. The "cancel culture" is harming the free software movement by practicing human version of Microsoft's EEE[3]. The cancel culture enters the community, establishes interests groups, and starts knocking down prominent contributors. The demands are backed by angry crowds on social media rather than by contributions. It's time for us to defend each other, and to hold co…
This has nothing to do with 'SJWs' unless you're implying that 'statutory rape is bad' is a political stance of the far-left. I think it's much more likely you're clinging to buzzwords.
>I think it's much more likely you're clinging to buzzwords.
The ESR's article[1] you are referencing is so much more than just headline. I encourage you to read it, and try to re-construct the events, the thoughts, and the emotions that led ESR to post a piece that explosive. The comment section alone spans some 760 responses over four years, with people chipping in with their observations from the trenches and with their shattered dreams. While writing, ESR was in communication with several victims of then-recent social media mobs, and conveyed their woes.
The two bits of article that stood out to me:
>The hacker culture’s norm about inclusion is clear:
>anybody who can pull the freight is welcome
>We must (...)
>learn to recognize their thought-stopping jargon and kafkatraps
[1] "Why Hackers Must Eject the SJWs", http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
I'm so relieved to find that at least on hacker news people can still evaluate this situation with reason. Out there it's a witch hunt and Stallman is now a witch. RMS is a great man but sadly has difficulties communicating with the wider world. This has been true of many great minds throughout history. It's sad to see it happen to one of my own heroes but I believe history will do him justice if we continue to fight…
Apart from a very few, every accomplished technologist have started using Twitter and their followers to attack others. This is nothing but the witch hunt from medieval times done differently.
I have interacted with RMS in Emacs developer list, he has a strong opinion and nothing more, nothing less. He is not trying to create a mob and nor is he starting an upraising. If you have an opinion, voice it and leave it. Yes, I agree RMS needed a PR to tread the land mine ridden modern life.
Overall, it is sad to see RMS and his work getting trivialized for totally unrelated reasons.
RMS has called himself "borderline autistic". His socially clueless black and white thinking makes it look like he is far in the spectrum. RMS is anal about meanings of terms and their use. That's not working well in the current climate where words carry perceived intent. I find myself agreeing with RMS with most of the terminology and its use in this case. Women who tell stories about him paint a picture of lonely s…
Can we please stop excusing bad behavior with some form of "oh because autism"? It's an insult to the many, many neuro-atypical people who don't say shitty, stupid things online, who don't act creepy around women, who don't have a sign on their MIT office that says "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)", who don't have a gross mattress in their office where they encourage people to lie topless, who don't try to pres…
No it's not an insult to anyone. It's an attemoted explanation of why some neuro-atypical people behave in atypical fashion.
- Minsky is accused, by a credible victim of a non-credible, convicted pedophile, of receiving sexual contact with a woman who was underage at the time, and who was dispatched to him as part of her employment.
- RMS says the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to Minsky as entirely willing. He also says that the difference between 17 and 18 is a minor detail and it's an injustice to refer to it as a sexual assault.
- RMS fails to understand that an adult with a teenager is unacceptable creeping due to the imbalance of power in several different ways, in this context he's right that 17/18 is a minor detail because both are unacceptable. But 17 is also illegal. What if he didn't know she was 17? Irrelevant because he surely knew she was a very young woman, and by implication relished the power imbalance rather than properly backing away. In fact, Minsky should never have accepted friendship with Epstein who was clearly creeping on teenagers in a completely overt way. And RMS shouldn't be defending it.
- RMS also fails to understand how the employer-employee relationship compounds this with yet another axis of undue power, and how these together make the presentation of being "entirely willing" impossible to tell apart from having no choice. This impossibility is why age of consent laws exist even though teenagers can speak and express their opinion. They don't have the structural power to speak freely. To be honest, 18-year-olds don't either. When someone has sexual contact with someone who has no power to say no, that's sexual assault, or it's rape.
- By taking the side of a man he knows, who was doing wrong, over a woman who was vulnerable, and by brushing off the implied possibility of coercion, RMS shows that he is part of the systemic problem of sexist, exploiter-friendly men in tech which the Epstein scandal has uncovered.
RMS has called himself "borderline autistic". His socially clueless black and white thinking makes it look like he is far in the spectrum. RMS is anal about meanings of terms and their use. That's not working well in the current climate where words carry perceived intent. I find myself agreeing with RMS with most of the terminology and its use in this case. Women who tell stories about him paint a picture of lonely s…
Can we please stop excusing bad behavior with some form of "oh because autism"? It's an insult to the many, many neuro-atypical people who don't say shitty, stupid things online, who don't act creepy around women, who don't have a sign on their MIT office that says "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)", who don't have a gross mattress in their office where they encourage people to lie topless, who don't try to pres…
Also, you're doing a bait and switch, neuro-atypical covers a large swathe of people including autistic people. May be you're using it here as a mere synonym for "autistic" for lingual flare, but it includes people who are generally typical in social settings.
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…
Why does this feel like such a witch hunt? Because you like him. If he were somone you did not like you'd be "good riddance". How do you fell about James Damore?
I'm so relieved to find that at least on hacker news people can still evaluate this situation with reason. Out there it's a witch hunt and Stallman is now a witch. RMS is a great man but sadly has difficulties communicating with the wider world. This has been true of many great minds throughout history. It's sad to see it happen to one of my own heroes but I believe history will do him justice if we continue to fight…
> I wish somebody would have simply advised him not to speak on such matters because nothing good could become of it. Maybe he needed a PR manager. That sounds awful, but apparently this is what the world wants: carefully filtered speech that doesn't stray far from what people already agree with. The world needs everyone to speak about every topic. If we all self censor then only the extremists will be speaking.
actually stallman was one of the extremists and he wasn't happy if somebody with the middle ground spoke about free software/open source software.
RMS has called himself "borderline autistic". His socially clueless black and white thinking makes it look like he is far in the spectrum. RMS is anal about meanings of terms and their use. That's not working well in the current climate where words carry perceived intent. I find myself agreeing with RMS with most of the terminology and its use in this case. Women who tell stories about him paint a picture of lonely s…
Can we please stop excusing bad behavior with some form of "oh because autism"? It's an insult to the many, many neuro-atypical people who don't say shitty, stupid things online, who don't act creepy around women, who don't have a sign on their MIT office that says "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)", who don't have a gross mattress in their office where they encourage people to lie topless, who don't try to pres…