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Richard M. Stallman resigns

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Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#911

Post by ryangee »

yoavm wrote: post #882
colechristensen wrote: post #679

RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island. There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky. The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other" they can because they're a fan of RMS is disturbing. This isn't us vs. them. This is a man who said something wildl…

It's frustrating and hard to find real information regarding what he did say and what he did not say, so I feel I shouldn't play the judge here. I did find this direct quote of him on his website, and it doesn't sound to me, from reading this piece, that he was trying to defend Minsky: > Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he dese…

> It's frustrating and hard to find real information regarding what he did say and what he did not say

I got your back: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-sci...

It's the PDF of the email thread (sigh) at the end of the article.

(Not gonna make any comments because of the mob roaming around.)

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#912

Post by bandrami »

zby wrote: post #842
colechristensen wrote: post #679

RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island. There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky. The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other" they can because they're a fan of RMS is disturbing. This isn't us vs. them. This is a man who said something wildl…

Come on - if I accuse you of being 74 and having sex with a a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island - then nobody can defend you? Minsky is dead and he cannot defend himself, the girl said she was directed to have sex with him - but she did not say she eventually did it, she did answer a question about where she went to do that and she answered that which would imply that she had sex with him - but it is…

Err... anyone can defend him. The fact that RMS did defend him is prima facie evidence that he was able to defend him.

Now, most people would mount a defense along the lines of "I don't believe Minsky would have sex with trafficked girls". RMS, always with the innovative methods, decided "Maybe it's not so bad to have sex with trafficked underage girls".

But, like it or not, he was clearly capable of making that defense. So I don't know where "can't defend" is coming from.

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#913

Post by throwaway99111 »

blub wrote: post #776
cf141q5325 wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island. Which until a few years ago was completely legal in for example Switzerland. As long of course as no one is coerced into anything. Playing the Advocatus Diaboli, why should i view this outcry as anything different then the Saudis stance on sex before marriage? Fundamentalist puritan…

It's still legal in large parts of Europe. What I don't get is the US... where the age of consent is I think 16, but everyone's making a huge fuss about the fact that someone was 17. Yes, it was rape and trafficking - that's terrible enough as it is, no need to make it look worse than it is. This is essentially diluting the most terrible crime of abusing young children.

I'll go ahead and say the quiet part loud. There is a changing definition of what is a child in the US. People generally under 24 are considered children, and I can recount a few people facing critique over dating people in their early twenties (A lot of the Epstein drama seems to be driven by two pieces, political connections to Trump and Clinton (so it touches "both" sides if you will) and the reaction of this changing definition of childhood to the exploitation of these teens at the hand of Epstein and the perspectives of people either older or from countries with different ideas of the propriety of the sexuality of teenagers. The changing range of who is a child is why what rms said so digusting, because it is considered in kind with say, rape of a toddler or a preteen in the popular mind as the social definitions are shifting.

The problem of course is this is very US centric, and there are of course people just living in different cultures and attitudes elsewhere. I have friends abroad were actually confused about the Epstein drama when they first read about it because to them, it was salacious but not as creepy as Americans think it is.

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#914

Post by chroma »

yibg wrote: post #785
mieseratte wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I welcome anyone to provide a counter-argument. Here's a counter. You're ascribing intent to one's writing, and unless you have a special relationship with Mr. Stallman - you don't know anything. Because of a radical, illiberal mob, Stallman's life's work has been taken from him. Few years ago I had had a Junior engineer on my team begin telling me how he finds certain speech so intolerable that he feels he has the…

Divining intent isn’t the right threshold to judge speech. If it were then I can say whatever I want in whatever environment, because how would you prove my intent? I yell fire in a crowded theatre, that’s ok it wasn’t my intent to cause panic.

> I yell fire in a crowded theatre, that’s ok it wasn’t my intent to cause panic.

The "fire in a crowded theater" analogy was coined by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Schenck v. United States.[1] Holmes used that analogy to send a Schenck to prison for protesting the draft in WWI.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#915

Post by balaksakrionon »

colechristensen wrote: post #652
marble-drink wrote: post #505

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…

There are a chain of media reports which inaccurately portray what Stallman was saying. But look past that into what was happening. Stallman was trying to defend Minsky who had sex with someone, a teenager, nearly 60 years younger than him on a billionaire's private island. There isn't an imaginable circumstance where what happened there was not, even in the best possible light, incredibly creepy. His intellectual ar…

Is it a fact that Minsky had sex with the girl?

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#916

Post by kova12 »

colechristensen wrote: post #679

RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island. There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky. The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other" they can because they're a fan of RMS is disturbing. This isn't us vs. them. This is a man who said something wildl…

I wonder where is the "liberal" rainbow-flag waiving mob, and why none of them remembers that gays were persecuted just a little while ago in exactly same manner. And if they do, why don't they speak out

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#917

Post by [deleted] »

colechristensen wrote: post #679

RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island. There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky. The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other" they can because they're a fan of RMS is disturbing. This isn't us vs. them. This is a man who said something wildl…

[deleted]

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#918

Post by sgt »

colechristensen wrote: post #679

RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island. There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky. The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other" they can because they're a fan of RMS is disturbing. This isn't us vs. them. This is a man who said something wildl…

"colechristensen" is basically spamming this thread with the same message, repeated over and over again. I counted 20 similar comments. One begins to question this guy's sanity.

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#919

Post by yellowapple »

sbuk wrote: post #828
eloff wrote: post #736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it we value free speech, but there are certain discussions you just cannot have, even in a rational and measured way, without risking making yourself completely unemployable. You should be able to have a questionable viewpoint in a discussion, without worrying about the lynch mob ending your career. The consequences here are out of line. You can be reprimanded to take your discussions to a non company venue, i…

So what is the difference between this and the way Eich was treated for his donation to Prop 8? I'm not saying I agree with Eich - far from it. Seeing as an awful lot of people on this very thread were outraged by his behaviour, it strikes me as being contrary to be more understanding towards RMS for what is arguably far more heinous simply because they admire him more. Both Gates and Jobs are/were relentlessly and r…

> Seeing as an awful lot of people on this very thread were outraged by [Eich's] behaviour

I can't speak for everyone, but while I strongly disagree with his (implicit) views on gay marriage (I even protested against Prop 8 leading up to it passing, though I unfortunately wasn't quite old enough to vote against it at the time), I also was - and still am - pretty harshly critical of him being pressured to resign from the organization he co-founded solely because of his political leanings. He was the right leader for Mozilla, despite his politics; while it's possible that maybe he was some raging egotist bringing down Mozilla and running counter to its mission, I've yet to see a whole lot of evidence for that.

Meanwhile, Stallman is well-documented to be abrasive, uncooperative, and egotistical even to the people who supported him, and while this specific incident was rather benign, I can understand it as a "straw that broke the camel's back" situation. His dogmatic views - while sometimes absolutely spot-on - were also often at the detriment of the free software movement (e.g. the hard stance against OpenBSD's "blobs", and the hard-line stances against non-FOSS programs on FOSS operating systems despite multiple GNU subprojects releasing supported builds for Windows).

Stallman, in other words, was to the FSF as Ballmer was to Microsoft in the sense of being both passionate about their organizations and also being the reasons why their organizations were hemorrhaging influence. Ballmer's departure allowed Microsoft to regain its footing, shake off some of its more toxic dogmas, and become actually decent(-ish; shoving ads down the throats of paying Windows users is pretty scummy, but other parts of Microsoft have actually started to be better members of the broader tech ecosystem). Hopefully Stallman's departure will have a similar effect for the FSF.

Re: Richard M. Stallman resigns

#920

Post by braneloop »

mieseratte wrote: post #745
colechristensen wrote: post #679

RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island. There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky. The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other" they can because they're a fan of RMS is disturbing. This isn't us vs. them. This is a man who said something wildl…

> I welcome anyone to provide a counter-argument. Here's a counter. You're ascribing intent to one's writing, and unless you have a special relationship with Mr. Stallman - you don't know anything. Because of a radical, illiberal mob, Stallman's life's work has been taken from him. Few years ago I had had a Junior engineer on my team begin telling me how he finds certain speech so intolerable that he feels he has the…

The idea that speech is not "real-world conduct" is, in my considered opinion, not just wrong, but actively corrosive to the fabric of our civilization. Ideas are powerful, speeches can incite revolutions, send millions to their deaths, or be used to fight tyranny and oppression.

Should we highly value the idea of free speech? I believe we should. But we should also recognize that there's no such thing as "just speech". What we say matters, particularly if, like Dr. Stallman in this case, we are public figures speaking in what (given the number and types of people involved) is a semi-public forum.

There are two well know aphorisms: "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword". But if one recalls the last is derived from a line in the Bible that says in whole: “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword."

Sometimes, we should put the pen back in its place, lest we kill or die by it in our hubris.

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