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 socially incompetent man who makes super creepy attempts to connect opposite sex.
I have worked in jobs where there have been very strange creepy people, both women and men. Some are angry and tense. Some are odd and talk restless or slightly disturbing stuff that make everyone uncomfortable. But if they do their work well they can stay. Others give them some room. It's called tolerance.
If RMS was just random superhacker doing his thing. I would defend him. His boss should find a position for him where he can contribute and other people should feel free to feel uncomfortable and avoid him.
But RMS is de facto leader and public figure in movement that is also political. He does not deserve the same level of consideration as normal HR headache would. Even if everything against him would be completely unjust, there is no requirement for just treatment for top leaders. They can be sacked for any reason whatsoever.
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 pressure women into dating them by saying they'll kill themselves otherwise. All of those things describe RMS, things that have been mostly quietly ignored and hand-waved away for decades.
We don't have to tolerate people who make women feel unsafe and unwelcome in our (or any) industry.
You seem to be arguing the usual tired old thing: "but he's a genius and does such great work that we should tolerate the bad things he does". I really thought we'd started to move past that over the last few years.
Attributing all his behavior to his autism is wrong, you're right, but autistic people do have social problems that can influence some behavior, like the ability to pick up social cues and learn something is wrong before hearing others say it.
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.
My daughter who has autism constantly says things that could be considered offensive because she's not aware of sensitivities around race, gender, orientation, etc. It certainly can explain it for certain individuals. You can't say many neuro-atypical people don't say bad things so it can't be an excuse for him. "Neuro-atypical" is a huge, huge group of people who are very different.
Can you link to sources regarding Stallmans behavior towards women? It’s not that I don’t believe you but because I tried to google “Richard Stallman suicide threat” and couldn’t come up with anything... I do want to believe you, but I can’t propagate information without evidence.
> 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.
No it's not an insult to anyone. It's an attemoted explanation of why some neuro-atypical people behave in atypical fashion.
I didn't read the parent's post as "excusing" Stallman at all.
I certainly would not excuse him! Nor should anybody else!
But given his stature, it's surely worth discussing and understanding him. And any attempt to do that would certainly have to include his famously black-and-white and self-described borderline autistic thinking.
Pointing out that somebody is austistic (or left-handed, or that they have psoriasis, or dyslexic, or seven feet tall, or...) and thinking about how that may affect their actions isn't excuse-making. It is empathy. It is critical thinking.
> "but he's a genius and does such great work that we should tolerate the bad things he does". I really thought we'd started to move past that over the last few years.
Nobody thinks this of RMS. He's a competent developer who was in the right place at the right time to found a new ideology: The idea that software should work for the user, the only way for software to do so is to empower the user to also be a developer themselves. That's all.
Being competent himself wasn't a sufficient condition for anyone to listen to him, but it was necessary.
It seems to me that nobody who remains within the bounds of the law, but consistently flirts with the bounds of polite society deserves no respect from polite society but every bit of due process in a nation of laws. So the only matter that seems of any value is constraining the scope of 'bad behavior' within the context of polite society.
Hand waving and quietly ignoring is the mark of tolerance. But one wonders exactly how polite society is. One certainly presumes the existence of both knights for justice and hot ladies in a nation of millions. What society are we talking about?
I don't expect MIT to be any more representative of society than the NFL. It is a magnet for extreme people who defer common sense and common acceptance in search of very particular goals. I wonder if we were to get rid of Stallman and replace him, deserving as he must be, for a bust in our Hall of Fame if our society could resist defaming his very image and existence.
It is you and those like you that make people feel unsafe and unwelcome. RMS is quirky and weird and he says what many don't feel safe to talk about. The recent assault based not on fact or principle but rather implied (assumed)intent is a farce and wont lead to good things. Tech is dead and RMS is a fallen king. Take your PC bullying and wreck havoc over everything the geeks or "autists" created. I'm moving on but the industry is no longer a place of inclusion and all of the safe guards put in place were not enough to stop societies wicked. Enjoy eating each other in your Brave New World.
>But RMS is de facto leader and public figure in movement that is also political
What does this mean ? He is a leader of an organisation related to software freedom (or more pedantically, the choice of licences used for software). How is it relevant ? All you are saying is, "Famous people can't talk like that".
* General principle that people in influential positions have less protections and should have more scrutiny than average John Doe. Celebrities and influential people have less legal privacy protections.
* People are free to speak as individuals, but they may not be free to speak while they have public position in the organization. Elected members of the organization like FSF don't have the same protections as employers have. They represent the organization even outside the work. Their public position gives them a platform where what they say goes trough bullhorn and private becomes public and reflects the organization. If something they say harms the organization they should go even if they are right.
If you are the leader for an organisation focused on advocacy (i.e. raising awareness and communicating), then your words become de facto the words of the organisation, even with comments not related to your organisations purpose.
If your leader appears to advocate pedophilia, then your organisation no longer becomes "that organisation that advocates for free software", but "that organisation run by a pedophile apologist".
Well, he started the movement and got it very far, with the dominant OS using his foundation's license. Despite his limitations. There is no one in the movement who should have the authority to sack him.
He said things as a certain role model or in a setup where he shouldn't.
It's just reasonable to remove him from those positions.
Independly I find it very weird what he was saying nonetheless and for this he falls under a category of humans which I don't think are worth it to give such amount of support.
There are other people out there which are worth it more.
I stopped working with people who might be technical good or very good but dicks. I hate working with dicks. There is no amount of brilliance which justifice being a dick.
You write this like it's an insult, but with a dozen stuff and million dollar budget he's done more for the world than most of us could do with 1000 staff and a billion dollar budget.
> That's not working well in the current climate where words carry perceived intent.
I agree that there's a current climate that's even less amenable to open discussion than at other times. However, I disagree that words carrying perceived intent is something new. Any time you make an assertion about individual facts of a particular situation, people's first assumption is going to be that you're pushing the narrative best supported by that assertion. Telling people what you're not saying will continue to be important even if the current climate improves.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm stating a general principle, not saying anything about what RMS did or didn't say, or did or didn't intend to say. I don't have time to dig into all that.
> But RMS is de facto leader and public figure in movement that is also political. He does not deserve the same level of consideration as normal HR headache would. Even if everything against him would be completely unjust, there is no requirement for just treatment for top leaders. They can be sacked for any reason whatsoever.
If his past behavior was sufficient justification for his sacking, then that should be enough. However, that is not why he was sacked. He was sacked on the basis of false allegations, and as an attempt by MIT to deflect from their own complicity in the Epstein scandal.
This is not (only) about finding a place for weirdo super-hackers to contribute to society (without bothering people too much) but about the truth dammit.
> He does not deserve the same level of consideration as normal HR headache would. Even if everything against him would be completely unjust, there is no requirement for just treatment for top leaders. They can be sacked for any reason whatsoever.
The only people who deserve less consideration are those that pick and choose who to treat justly.
"When I was a teen freshman, I went to a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant in Central Square with a graduate student friend and others from the AI lab. I don’t know if he and I were the last two left, but at a table with only the two of us, Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he’d kill himself if I didn’t go out with him."
As someone actually autistic, he doesn't get to blame being a douchecanoe on being autistic.
> His socially clueless black and white thinking makes it look like he is far in the spectrum.
Then _learn_. Also, we're not talking about not getting social cues about when it's okay to start talking, we're talking his considered and repeated position on issues such as sexual assault, and his _actual actions_ towards teenagers.
> But if they do their work well they can stay. Others give them some room. It's called tolerance.
Great tolerance for the people your creeps chase out or abuse, thanks. You actually do have to pick, and if you pick people like RMS, you pick against all the people that can't - and shouldn't have to - deal with an environment people like RMS create.
Sad to see that you're being downvoted. Richard Stallman's insane statements about child abuse have nothing to do with autism. The man has defended pedophilia and apparently also harassed women throughout his career. Absolutely disgusting behaviour that has nothing to do with being neuro-atypical.
> As someone actually autistic, he doesn't get to blame being a douchecanoe on being autistic.
Was he a douchecanoe? Is that even a helpful label for you to apply to him? Was he claiming he behaved / behaves the way you think he does solely because he's borderline autistic, or are you extrapolating?
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. This is completely backwards, anti-democratic, and anti-freedom. It brings a chilling effect on everyone, because suddenly people start to realize that they're living under the Sword of Damocles, which could destroy them at any moment without warning. You can never be sure if something you say or do is going to get you publicly pilloried in future, and destroy your career, friendships, and reputation in the blink of an eye. Far better to just sit quiet and never say anything that might offend someone. Far better not to participate at all.
Mob justice always turns ugly in the end. That's why we have courts.
I'm normally 100% on board with condemning this Malthusian environment that has sprung up in the last couple years, but I don't believe that Richard Stallman is a complete victim in this scenario.
He has a long history of using forums meant for technology discussion to promote borderline (and that's generous) social opinions, and of being openly hostile to people who don't tow his line. In this instance he ridiculously downplayed the most egregious instances of sex trafficking of minors, by a horridly evil individual... who happened to donate almost a million dollars to him!
His previous comments about minors on his personal blog, which I don't even want to dignify with a description (you can do your own search), leads me to wonder what other connections than money he had with Epstein.
For all of us that don't worship Stallman - I consider him a net negative to the FOSS movement - this has been a long time coming. It would have been a deserved resignation in a normal social environment.
"His previous comments about minors on his personal blog, which I don't even want to dignify with a description (you can do your own search), leads me to wonder what other connections than money he had with Epstein."
Speculation, which would not be allowed in a court of law, is unfortunately a perfectly acceptable character assassination methodology.
And this kind of tar-and-feathering is precisely why we need official processes for this sort of thing. Official reprimands leading to termination if unfixed, like all civilized peoples do. This ensures that it's made crystal clear what's acceptable and what's not, with time to mend one's ways. The alternative is arbitrary terminations, which makes everyone insecure.
Who jumped straight to the punishment phase? What punishment was doled out? "Removed outright" from what? MIT?
RMS chose to step down himself. That was his decision. Even if you think MIT told him to, that would ultimately be MIT's decision, not the work of some "mob".
Furthermore, stepping down from MIT is not destruction you're playing it up as being. People have done similar (and of course, worse!) things and, after being the subject of some number of embarrassing articles on the web and some larger number of angry tweets, are currently living their lives with new jobs just fine. RMS doesn't need us to feel bad for him. He's still free & healthy.
If you're worried about kangaroo courts and injustice, there's plenty to focus on somewhere where people's lives and livelihoods are actually at stake, like the US-Mexico border or Hong Kong.
>Even if you think MIT told him to, that would ultimately be MIT's decision, not the work of some "mob".
The mob pressured MIT and the FSF to remove him from his positions. It's ultimately their decision, sure, in the same way that it's ultimately up to a local business owner whether they purchase a "protection plan" from the nice salesmen with the baseball bats.
>RMS doesn't need us to feel bad for him. He's still free & healthy. If you're worried about kangaroo courts and injustice, there's plenty to focus on somewhere where people's lives and livelihoods are actually at stake...
You could just easily say "Hong Kong doesn't have it that bad, they have food and shelter. Focus on conditions that are actually bad, like starving child soldiers in Africa."
This just seems like deflection. Conditions being worse elsewhere doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss the issues that are more local to us.
Yup. There are many things I disagree with Stallman on, but I still can’t get behind mob mentality accusations and indictments. But in this day and age people want instant retribution for wrongs as well as perceived wrongs and are perfectly willing to bypass due process. Just fire them! Now! Someone said they said something bad!
On the other hand even with this resignation he doesn't appologize for anything. He could even have made his point of thinking it's a misunderstanding and appologize, but didn't.
"Headlines say that I defended Epstein," Stallman wrote. "Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a 'serial rapist,' and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him — and other inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said. I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding."
Kevin Hart apologized for some offensive jokes, he apologized as advised by the academy, and still got cancelled. Apologizing only serves to augment the conviction of a mob intent on finding fault.
It wasn't a misunderstanding caused by his poor wording; It was caused by poor (and possibly malicious) misquoting.
He has nothing to apologise for in this respect, but he does say:
> I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding.
This could be seen as an apology, "I'm sorry" often is; but in context you can see it is not. It is literally "I'm sorry I could not prevent this hurt" without any sense that He is responsible.
Ironically, this sentiment only brought on more criticism: The claim that this was a "false apology", i.e. something masquerading as an apology despite not being one - but that was Stallmans intention, it is thwarted by all the other sentences in the same paragraph that make it clear he is being misquoted.
While redemption is one of the themes in the book sadly the internet has not quite developed that level of sophistication so we are stuck with denouncement/punishment.
RMS is not encountering any judicial or criminal sanction.
He is merely encountering actual consequences for saying absurd, indefensible things -- and, likely, also finally encountering consequences for being a well-known source of creepy behavior towards women for a very long time. People lose jobs all the time for less.
Yeah, he's done some good things. And maybe (MAYBE) he's actually not neurotypical. But that doesn't mean he gets a pass on being a creep forever.
Do you not think people have tried to get RMS to stop talking about how injust statory rape is, or that he should probably stop talking about how child porn is ok?
This isn't a one off and he's one of the least likely people to mend his ways.
>> "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."
How many years and incidents is enough to move to removal?
The challenge is: there is ample evidence that misogyny (and similar offenses) has been unacceptable for years, but it continues. Part of the me-to movement, the election of Trump, ( and the Epstein blowback) is that we need to just stop. And that's why the pressure is there if people can't understand that this sort of behavior in unacceptable in 2019, they need to GTFO.
it's rather interesting how all the information technology (social media, etc...) is slowly moving our culture towards increasing self-censorship. One has to have the right opinion or stay quiet.
Having the wrong opinion about certain topics is getting more expensive. Stay away from taboos or else... never mind the fact that what we regard as wrong changes across different societies over time.
Weirdly all the information technology is steering towards being more similar in our opinions and in what we can say without facing consequences.
Recently I started to thing about how in spite of having the ability to share, and change, and store information better and with more ease than ever, we seem to be going in the opposite direction.
Instead of having more transparent institutions, everything is getting more "opaque" (so to speak) towards the public (even it this is happening due to overload).
does anyone remember "information wants to be free"? I don't think anybody says that anymore, but I remember reading that a bunch on slashdot in the early 00s
> One has to have the right opinion or stay quiet.
I don't really see how this is so hard. Don't treat women poorly, in person or online. Don't talk authoritatively about subjects you don't understand, especially when those subjects (like rape and human trafficking) cause people intense pain.
If you really do want to act this way, then you probably should exercise some self-censorship, and rethink your views, perhaps.
> ...in what we can say without facing consequences.
What you say should have consequences. No one should censor you (what you say should be up to you), but you don't live in a vacuum. What you say has a real effect on others, and if that effect is bad, you should be held accountable.
I don't really see how this is so hard. Don't treat women poorly, in person or online. Don't talk authoritatively about subjects you don't understand, especially when those subjects (like rape and human trafficking) cause people intense pain.
Morality is constantly changing and what is considered treating someone poorly changes too. More recently it appears to be changing faster than ever. That can make it hard to remain with the bounds of what is in the current instance of time considered socially acceptable by the majority. There is no absolute morality even though it may seem like it if you are thinking with the span of an hour or a day. Stretch it out and it's a constant shifting. In any case, I don't think anyone should be silenced. If they say something that the majority feels is foolish, they can be considered a fool, or a debate can be had to convince them of why they may be wrong, but to silence externally, or increasingly, self silencing with self censorship, in my opinion is dangerous as that means ideas cannot be discussed openly.
> What you say has a real effect on others, and if that effect is bad, you should be held accountable.
Speech is just a tool to share a thought, if a thought effects some one it is for them to bare alone.
The idea that sharing thoughts should have consequences upsets me greatly, maybe it shouldn't but it does. Your speech has filled me with bad feelings and troubling thoughts is that burden mine to bare alone or should I hold you responsible?
Self-censorship is a norm which always existed as a social behavior, even online. In a small geeky world of early days of Internet, when community of connected people was small and more homogeneous, it was easier to touch certain topics without receiving strong reactions, but it didn’t mean self-censorship did not exist. It just concerned different things and the worst that could happen was a ban on the forum or IRC channel. It’s still the case for unimportant people: no one cares what random Joe says online. Everyone expects that opinion leader conforms to the norms of society - hence all those crazy scientists are being ostracized for spreading nonsense outside their field of research.
Phpbb forums didn't go away because of self censorship, they were simply replaced with bigger sites like Reddit. If you're trying to create a community around a niche topic, a subreddit is substantially easier to create than deploying and maintaining a forum.
I think what is perceived by a community as right or wrong changes as the composition of the community changes...I mean Trump doesn't self-censor because he reflects the values of his broader base and his base eats up whatever he says....RMS' hugs and kisses, free love, anything goes attitude might have been ok during the hippie era of the 70s and 80s during the formative years of his career but does not reflect the values and sensibilities of today's broader development community....which means he needed to adapt or step down.
-- The Dark knight quote - "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain" seems apt in this scenario.
I think that it has next to nothing to do with technology. MIT was still reeling from the fall out with the Media Lab and Epstein. If it wasn't for that, they might have gotten by with a simple apology, but that wouldn't be enough at this point.
There is also a history of controversial stuff related to his time at the FSF which meant that probably wouldn't settle for a simple apology either (not that RMS seemed willing to give one).
As organisations change over time, what they need in leadership also changes. In this case, they didn't need an ideologue with a history of generating controversy, they needed someone who can keep the ship going forward so that the projects they are overseeing don't lose enough talent that they become irrelevant.
I think without heavy proponents for free software, we would be in a worse place, especially technologically. Never met a software developer that wasn't dependent on free software to learn about the fundamentals of programming and system design.
Calling him an ideologue in contrast to current pioneers in the software industry is a bit much, maybe he just had some hard principles.
> wouldn't settle for a simple apology
To whom? To those that endorsed questionable business relations that drew attention in the first place that still are in leading positions at the MIT?
> need in leadership also changes
Visionaries and thought leaders can probably have a positive influence. I doubt we will get a adequate replacement. There also is no strong leader/mentor that can make you magically smart. He would need to inspire you to learn yourself which I would argue Stallman did pretty well.
"Controversies" are seldom intellectually engaging and if you look at the core of his statements, the subject and reactions become quite ridiculous.
He also sort of tried to apologize and ended up making it worse because he was obviously neither sorry nor interested in how to avoid doing the same thing in the future.
The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful take on the situation. If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. There are no Internet vigilantes hunting down dissenters. There are people trying to downplay sexual assault. As the internet and as the tech community, we absolutely have the right to condemn public figures when they say stuff like this. That’s what free speech actually means.
If you or I said what Stallman said, but to a coworker or to the boss, we would get fired - justifiably. This is not a new concept unique to the digital age, nor is it a concept that should be done away with. The popularity of your comment depresses me deeply.
I didn't read RMS's "take" as in any way excusing what happened to Giuffre, but rather disputing whether it was accurate to accuse Marvin Minsky of "sexual assault", if from Minsky's perspective at the time nothing seemed wrong. (Sensationalist reporting and selective paraphrasing, like you've done here, has conflated the two issues.)
Suppose there's a boxer, "Joe", and he has a scheduled fight against a named opponent. It's set in a legitimate venue, is freely advertised as if the promoters have nothing to hide, includes a normal ref & audience, and then proceeds like any other boxing match, including the traditional cordialities between opponents before and after. To "Joe", nothing's wrong. But then, years later, it's discovered that the opposing boxer was coerced into fighting, perhaps with threats of violence or blackmail.
Is "Joe" now guilty of physical assault, for repeatedly punching the other boxer, even if to "Joe" at the time it seemed like a normal voluntary encounter, no seedier than any other boxing match?
Maybe RMS's take was dumb. Maybe my analogy is dumb! But it's not "shameful" to try to work out the reasonable characterizations, given Minksy's possible mental state, the law, or common-sense. It might even be possible, under formal legal definitions, for Giuffre to have been "assaulted" while at the same time Minsky's actions don't rise to the level of "assault".
Essentially Stallman takes issue with accusing Marvin Minsky of sexual assault because:
> The word "assaulting" presumes he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way.
And then Stallman goes on to point out there is no evidence to suggest that Minksy acted violently toward the victim, and may have been unaware that the victim had been coerced by Epstein.
Given that the definition of "assault" is "a physical attack", I can't really disagree with him from a purely semantic perspective. And I would agree that there are other terms terms such as "statutory rape" and "soliciting prostitution" that may better describe what Minsky is accused of.
Is it "shameful" for me to see some merit in his argument?
> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career.
I mean, given everything in the news these days, this is blatantly untrue. I suspect it wasn't ever quite that true before either. Maybe it should be but I don't think it's quite that easy.
> The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful take on the situation. [...] There are people trying to downplay sexual assault.
I'm hesitating to respond to this (self-censorship and all) but I'm not a public figure so I can risk being wrong, right? Right?!?
This isn't exactly what RMS was getting it and you're kinda missing the point in the same way RMS kinda missed the point. He didn't get why we use the term "sexual assault" as broadly (and reasonably so) as we do, and it doesn't sound like you get why he decided to argue the semantics of it.
His point was that he felt calling what Misnky had done "sexual assault" seemed to imply that Misky hadviolently attacked and raped her in a physically restraining sorta way instead of, to his best knowledge, in a "she was coerced by a third party without his knowledge" sort of way.
He missed the point that regardless of those details she was sexual assaulted. Further, he seems oblivious to the fact that splitting hairs defending his friend distracts from the real issue: that this isn't about any of them, it's about what happened to the victims. I think that take is fair enough but I agree making that case is bone headed. Not because he shouldn't speak his mind, but that it's just besides the point.
I think you're missing the fact that at all RMS was about was just clearing up the record of what Minsky did and didn't do. Not even that he was fully innocent. I agree it was in poor taste but I think if he was any less a public figure it would have been read more charitably with an awkward sigh instead.
You believe free speech actually means not being able to express an opinion on anything anywhere that someone else could be offended by or lose your ability to live/eat/get medicine you need to survive. This is what getting fired means to normal people lest you forget.
Having a a factually or morally incorrect viewpoint on a public happening isn't an assault on a victim. Its an opportunity to help that person learn better and even more importantly to help the many more who believe the same as the speaker but who wont speak up learn as well.
Silence dissent and you lose that opportunity and everyone is poorer for it.
> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career.
Sadly this is not true; it's been routine for all kinds of authority figures to blame the victim and excuse the perpetrator in cases of sexual assault and rape. Including police and judges.
The only way we've moved forward is the public making very clear that that is not acceptable, but this actually has a low hit rate. For every Stallman there is a Kavanagh, and a hundred rape apologists to back then up.
> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career.
"I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. [...] Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
I'm quite certain that in '50s USA there were almost no problem saying racist comments and jokes in front of a public audience, but decades later there were. And I guess people from those same '50s were complaining during this change period that they could not express their opinions freely.
Having the wrong opinion about certain topics is getting more expensive
This is an excellent point. More and more, there is no middle ground in consequences. Nothing like a suspension? or leave of absence etc. I don't recall how things used to be but I really lament the lack of some sort of gradient scale for punishment.
I wouldn’t call “not actively espousing hateful or bigoted views” “self-censorship”. And if people are afraid to be hateful or creepy in public, I’d call that a win. You don’t get to proclaim the advantages of chattel slavery and be magically immune from everyone’s responses, and afterwards you can’t complain about self-censorship when you think twice about writing or saying something abhorrent.
I am afraid to be mis-interpreted as hateful or bigoted, and have to spend an inordinate amount of time/effort either choosing my words for my audience (which is really hard on the internet with such a broad audience) or correcting knee-jerk responses.
The general over-reaction and constant jousting at windmills seems like a net loss to me.
Your argument assumes that there's some objectively right definition of which views are hateful or bigoted that exactly corresponds with the ones that will bring the social media mob's wrath down on someone. There clearly isn't:
- How someone is treated depends heavily on whether they're perceived as being part of the right clique. For example, a few years ago Nintendo sacked someone who thought it was a great tragedy that owning photos and videos of kids being raped was illegal and bloviated about this on social media. (Probably not for that reason as it turns out, although her job did involve interacting with kids.) She was in the clique and the people who drew attention to this weren't, so all the right-thinking folks and publications rewrote her views into something much less objectionable, then insisted that repeating what she actually said was a bigoted lie and the whole thing was a misogynistic attack against her. I'm pretty sure there's a heavy overlap between those people and the ones going after Stallman by rewriting what he said in the opposite direction now.
- The views you have to hold in order not to be a bigot aren't consistent from year to year. For instance, there's a faction of self-proclaimed feminists who're really hateful to trans people and have successfully lobbied for some rather bigoted laws. A few years ago any trans woman who merely pointed out the harm they'd done was labelled as a terrible misogynist. Sometime around 2016 this flipped and all the same people who'd been demanding everyone shut up decided those views were now so evil that they justified beating up elderly women merely for holding them, and that the people who were uncomfortable with this violence were the bigots. There was zero overlap between the views that were acceptable before and after the flip, and no room for a more moderate position. That faction has become increasingly irrelevant over the years, so fighting them is actually less important than it used to be.
The larger your audience, the more likely one of them will consider your views hateful or bigoted (regardless of what your views are).
Are there perhaps some views that you think are not quite hateful or bigoted, but aren't totally fine to state? Maybe, "err on the side of caution" type views?
I wonder what Zeno would think on moving your views from completely hateful to completely fine: first you must go halfway-hateful, then half of that, and so on. Perhaps one will never find a completely fine view to state!
I'm picturing someone from China saying "if people are afraid to say things that undermine the stability of our country in public I'd call that a win".
The fun is always in defining what exactly should be in the category "hateful"/"undermining stability of our country".
As a side note, I've advocated for chattel slavery in the past, it actually didn't go too badly.
Yeah, people should be afraid to be "creepy" in public. Bring back that good old high school dynamic where nerds knew their place. Next headline: RMS stuffed into gym locker. Right on!
Consider this then: People who are not allowed to speak their mind will simply be hateful and creepy in the privacy of their home. Wouldn't you rather know who exactly is hateful and creepy to avoid them entirely, rather than create a fake atmosphere of safety.
If it was as simple as a disagreement, that would be fine. But it's not just simple disagreements anymore. It is costing people their livelihoods and futures because they're not toeing the ever shifting line.
By disagree you mean people might put pressure on your employer until you are fired in order to silence you and anyone who thinks about expressing such thoughts.
Gervais is hugely powerful because he has the money to survive being unpersoned. Not everyone is in his position. His comment is like Shaquille O’Neal saying you actually can walk around and punch anyone you like in the face, because nobody retaliates when he does it (just a hypothetical, of course Shaq wouldn’t do that).
That’s why I mostly use pseudonymous channels these days, like this one. I treat everything I say with my real name like I’m publishing it on the front page of the New York Times and submitting three copies to the Library of Congress.
Many fewer of my current associates hear any real thoughts of mine compared to 20 years ago. I used to get into all kinds of arguments like Stallman’s, on public email lists, which thankfully haven’t surfaced online (yet).
Wait until the AIs get a little better at forensics. Might not be wise to post comments you wouldn't want to come back at you at a forum that doesn't let you delete them, pseudonymous - for now - or not.
> Weirdly all the information technology is steering towards being more similar in our opinions and in what we can say without facing consequences.
Patently that is false.
Given the sheer amount of ad revenue that youtube, twitter et al get from hosting stuff that if printed or broadcast, would be liable to fines. (at least in the UK)
Self censorship is what defines empathy. When your child has done something hilariously stupid and hurt themselves, you comfort them, you don't stand back and tell them how incredibly stupid they are.
99.999% of people would never Mock a grieving spouse in person, why should you be enabled to broadcast that to millions of people on the internet?
I recently deleted all my “controversial” tweets (about 3 or 2). I just don’t share the same opinion than the majority in a couple of topics. I never got into any kind of trouble because of that, my tweets were far from inflammatory, but after reading so many stories of people losing their jobs after someone found an old tweet, I couldn’t risk it, I just can’t risk my family’s stability just for expressing an opinion.
> it's rather interesting how all the information technology (social media, etc...) is slowly moving our culture towards increasing self-censorship.
It's not. Take it from me, a guy who predates social media by decades.
If you go back and look at what Gary Hart dropped out of the 1988 presidential race for, and compare it to what Donald Trump said on social media before, during, and after being elected President, there's just no comparison.
Racial, misogynistic, derogatory, offensive sentiments you can easily find being published on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or most other social media platforms would not have passed muster in any mass-media channel or public conversation 30 or even 20 years ago.
On the positive side, social media has been a tremendous boon to marginalized communities like gay/lesbian/bisexual, transgender, heck, even furries. It has allowed like minds to find and support each other, and allowed the rest of us normies to see these communities for the constructive, positive forces so many of them are. I am convinced that social media aided in their growing public acceptance.
In fact, I'd say that social media has opened up the discourse so much that even the resignation of a powerful figure over controversial remarks about pedophilia--an outcome which would have been expected and commonplace for at least the past 70 years of U.S. society--are taken as somehow problematic.
In other words, things are so de-censored now that even the most anodyne and obvious objections to gross statements by powerful figures is taken as censorship. The Overton Window has moved way over to one side, but people still complain when they hit the edge of it.
You're conflating two very different environments. Mass media of yesterday was the establishment broadcasting carefully considered things. Social media today is individuals chatting to other individuals in a manner that can incidentally be seen by everyone. People using say, hackernews, aren't modelling this interaction as if they are on the stage being broadcasted to the world, they are modelling it as if they were talking to someone at a pub.
The proper comparison is not what a politician could say 20 years ago, but rather what a well-known software figure could say on a mailing list. "Predating social media by decades", you should appreciate how online communication was before the status-gamers got here and reasserted their tribalistic bullshit.
I hate that the parent is being downvoted. It speaks to the poor quality of the community at HN. Parent is absolutely right: twenty or thirty years ago, you were driven from the public sphere for merely a fraction of what passes today as 'within bounds'. Every cry of how we're self-censoring and being chilled rings hollow with every tweet by the pussy-grabber-in-chief. Whining about the boundaries now is just a confession of how little history you know.
It's an interesting dynamic. I would agree that on the whole, you're probably correct that there is less censorship in the society.
However, it seems that the political division is greater than ever. It is almost as if there are two Overton windows now, one for liberals and one for republicans (roughly).
The republican one shifted to much less self-censorship, while the liberal one shifted very slightly to more self-censorship.
And RMS seems to be caught in the liberal one. He has held his opinions for a long time, and nobody really cared that much.
He is also not a particularly powerful figure. If anything, FSF is weaker than it has been in the 90s. That's also an interesting change in dynamics, the shifting of both windows now affects powerful and powerless alike, where in the past, it was I believe considered less decent to have "wrong opinions" if you were powerful, and the wrong opinions of the powerless were tolerated much more. (Basically, the difference between elites and proletes, and agreement who is what, is now morphing into a difference between liberals and republicans.)
I feel like this censorship is mostly caused by centralization of information on closed/proprietary platforms, and the stakeholders of these platforms put it upon themselves to censor content they deem inappropriate or incompatible with their bottomline.
People can say that these platforms are privately-owned and freedom of speech is only about government censorship, but where do you speak when these platform are well established and chances of dethroning them with a decentralized and open alternative are slim to none?
You say people should be able to to say what they want on one hand but that other people should not be able to say what they want on the other hand.
You’re free to say what you want and I’m free to not want to associate with your or not want to do business with you and encourage others to do the same.
Yes, it's sad that there are 50 ways to instantly send photos to your friends, but for bringing disparate opinions together it's pretty much just https://www.kialo.com/
I agree the internet is getting locked down, it'll end up like daytime tv if we're not careful. But I'm two clicks away from access to Nazi and extremist content right now. The internet still is the wild wild west version of a library, in terms of access to content, but now there's laws and archiving of everything typed and read applied on top of that too.
This Stallman case is edge-case fallout from a massive political movement. He could have probably discussed the age of consent in public pre-2013 and maybe get a few disgusted reactions but generally be fine. The political control of internet arguments is more obvious than ever, and the quest for advertising money.. but I'm fairly sure I can start and run a website/subreddit/blog for whatever niche idea and be left alone.
> But I'm two clicks away from access to Nazi and extremist content right now
So? Don't make these clicks and you'd never see them.
> The political control of internet arguments is more obvious than ever, and the quest for advertising money
Advertising money has nothing to do with it - FSF doesn't need advertising money. They're just live in deathly fear of the woke Red Guards, as many before them (e.g. Mozilla) - and that fear may be very well justified.
> but I'm fairly sure I can start and run a website/subreddit/blog for whatever niche idea and be left alone.
Sure you can. If you can do without: hosting, DDoS protection, DNS, advertising, search engines, social media, payment processing, etc. All those have recently been engaged in deplatforming people for political considerations. But yes, you are free to lay your own cable infrastructure, set up your own data centers, build out your own internet, and there have you own website about whatever you want, completely free.
If you start expressing opinions about how sex with a sex-trafficked child should be legal, won't your friends and family raise some questions about your character?
Unless we're talking of morally flexible individuals. And at least parents should raise an eyebrow, since we have this natural reaction to protect our children.
> information wants to be free
Whomever said that was probably thinking of facts, of knowledge, s/he was probably not thinking of having opinions about pedophiles.
EDIT: don't get me wrong, I think there's a time and place to argue that consensual sex with teenagers might be ok and I think people should be free to make that argument, the problem in this case is that the sex couldn't have been consensual, in which case age becomes relevant, as that teenager isn't fully developed, therefore the harm done is amplified.
And also these opinions have been delivered by a very public figure, with a history of harassing women.
Words matter so the lesson here is don't be a jerk, as technology won't save you from that.
Edit: Particularly relevant to the topic of self-censorship: "unmeasured vituperation, enforced on the side of prevailing opinion, deters people from expressing contrary opinion, and from listening to those who express them."
> If you start expressing opinions about how sex with a sex-trafficked child should be legal
Good thing RMS never did that then.
And your comment is a good representative of the modern debate climate: People will exaggerate whatever their opponent said, and they will assume no good faith in their opponents what so ever. They will not consider an argument something to be learned from, but rather something to be "won".
Getting someone fired over having the "wrong" view is merely a bonus, but a bonus the SJW-crowd loves aiming for none the less.
No wonder we're all getting dumber, when merely trying to have a discussion can get you fired. Of course people will stop debating, and stop gaining insights from that debate.
People seem to be saying a variety of things about RMS: He's a genius, so let him be. He doesn't understand interpersonal communication. He didn't say the things people thought he said. People are too quick to judge. And so forth.
I was there, about 20 years ago, when he sent e-mail urging all free-software advocates to protest a bill under consideration in the US Congress. I asked him if he had read the bill. "No," he said, "I don't surf the Web." I saw that as a huge cop-out; how could someone claim any moral or leadership authority when he called for protests and a letter-writing campaign on a subject he didn't know about first hand?
It's certainly true that RMS has been remarkably consistent over the 30 years or so in which I've interacted with him -- starting when I was a reporter for the MIT student newspaper, and then maintained the Emacs FAQ, and then wrote for Linux Journal. (No, not GNU/Linux Journal. Sheesh.) He's an extremist. He's a purist. He indeed doesn't get the nuances of interpersonal communication.
But you know what? You can't both lead an organization and be tone deaf to people. You can't be a public figure, demanding respect, and then show such disrespect to others. You can't expect that people will pay attention to what you say when you have so little respect for what they say.
Stallman has long been difficult, obstinate, and rude to people in general -- and a general drag on the cause of open-source (or "free") software. But I had no idea that he was known to be so terrible to women.
But even if he had treated women well -- which doesn't seem to be the case -- it's pretty hard to imagine anyone, anywhere defending Jeffrey Epstein in any way, shape, or form. The guy was terrible, did horrible things, abused a huge number of women, and amassed wealth and power in the most disgusting ways possible. To defend Epstein, or the people who were associated with him, is unacceptable.
Again: You want to defend Epstein in your own personal life? Go for it; you won't have many friends or colleagues afterwards, but that's up to you. But if you do it as the public face of a well-known activist organization? You can't possibly stick around there.
Your argument against Stallman seems to hinge on him defending Epstein, which is something he didn't do. He was defending his late friend, Minsky. Specifically, he was unhappy with the language used to describe his conduct evoking imagery worse than the actual conduct.
I'm very glad to read this here. I'm sorry it's so far down the page.
RMS achieved a sort of secular saintly status early on, and as a result has been excused from developing any sort of interpersonal skills or, apparently, human decency for most of his adult life. Now we say he identifies as autistic, like this excuses it, but in the absence of an actual diagnosis (and maybe even WITH one), it feels like a cop out.
It's well past time to accept that rms may well have damaged the FOSS movement with his behavior as much as he's helped it in recent years.
The free & open software world can do better. It deserves better. We ought to demand it. Moving on from rms is a great first step.
>how could someone claim any moral or leadership authority when he called for protests and a letter-writing campaign on a subject he didn't know about first hand?
...
>You want to defend Epstein in your own personal life? Go for it; you won't have many friends or colleagues afterwards, but that's up to you. But if you do it as the public face of a well-known activist organization? You can't possibly stick around there.
You criticise him for not having read the bill, yet you rant about him without having read his emails? Where did he defend Epstein?
> To defend Epstein, or the people who were associated with him, is unacceptable.
Sorry, but Epstein's crimes, and the horrible things he did to a lot of people, and the growing web of powerful people involved with these crimes, are not something to have trivial fights over.
Maybe RMS was just defending Minsky's participation in Epstein's sex trafficking scheme. That's bad enough to me.
> He's an extremist. He's a purist. He indeed doesn't get the nuances of interpersonal communication.
When people say "getting the nuances of interpersonal communication", they usually mean "Not telling the truth when it may hurt other people's feelings or your own reputation".
It's perfectly reasonable to not not tell the truth —and even lie— in those cases, but I would prefer if you stated this idea like it is.
"Getting the nuances of interpersonal communication" is saying it like one doesn't understand that people don't act rationally and will throw logic completely out of the window when one of their religious ideas gets questioned.
Stallman is not an idiot, he knows he will get shit for saying what he says, he perfectly gets the "nuances" (i.e. irrational behaviour) of personal communication. He just doesn't care about them.
I did read his e-mail, actually. And what's why I wrote:
> To defend Epstein, or the people who were associated with
him, is unacceptable.
He's defending Minsky, who was indeed an inspirational genius in many ways, for being part of Epstein's sex trafficking.
Sorry, but there's no possible defense there. Trying to say something nice, or claim that Minsky didn't know, or say that we shouldn't use terms like "sexual assault" because they are laced with moral judgment, is all pretty bad.
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 pit.
I certainly respect RMS for what he created and his idealism (although last time I saw him talk he spent about half the time negatively pontificating about Linus and Linux, which seriously damaged his credibility IMHO).
It must be devastating to be on the receiving end of such ire.
Because RMS isn't just another socially awkward engineer. He is a leader and a part of a larger community and is therefore held to a higher standard. The reason for the higher standard is simple, leaders are entrusted with power and need to wield that power better than others. RMS has failed that test today.
> He is a leader and a part of a larger community and is therefore held to a higher standard.
I see plenty of political and tech leaders set extremely low moral standards. Why is RMS being used to set an example? Do you think RMS actually hurt any children?
His comments are tragically inept - but this seems to boil down to being targeted by breaking headlines such as the New York Post: "MIT scientist says Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was ‘entirely willing’".
Find a few women who've met RMS and ask them about their experience. For years I've been hearing stories from women about RMS that paint a pretty clear picture, and if you look on twitter, there's a number of threads about his abusive behavior towards women. One example: people kept plants around because he hates plants and that made it less likely he'd come around to harass them.
He's discussed his views on pedophilia for a very long time, and this was just the latest on that. It's finally the last straw that was able to bring enough attention on him for action to be taken. It should have been taken decades ago.
> He's discussed his views on pedophilia for a very long time, and this was just the latest on that
Yes, he has.
This is his view as of Friday[0]:
> Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
Can you help me understand what's wrong with that view?
Everything you said is conjecture. This is one of the most baseless and accusatory comments I've read here. It's so low effort and it's immediately transparent that you just don't like the guy.
This wasn't a witch hunt. This should have happened a long time ago. He is a creep, and has been problematic for years.
“He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it. Many female students avoided the corridor with his office for that reason…I was one of the course 6 undergrads who avoided that part of NE43 precisely for that reason. (the mattress was also known to have shirtless people lounging on it…)”
— Bachelor’s in Computer Science, ‘99
All this and more https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...
>
This wasn't a witch hunt. This should have happened a long time ago. He is a creep, and has been problematic for years. “He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it. Many female students avoided the corridor with his office for that reason…I was one of the course 6 undergrads who avoided that part of NE43 precisely for that reason. (the mattress was also known to have shirtless people lounging on it…)”
Sorry, but you have to be explicit with your accusations. Call me naive, but if you say 'mattress and all the implications that went with it' in the context of hacker culture : the obvious implication is that he is a hacker, who likes to immerse himself in his work, pulls all-nighters. At worse it implies a lack of hygiene and a healthy separation between life and work. Okay a mattress might be taking to the concept a bit far but bean-bag culture is rooted in the earliest days of Xerox PARC, Microsoft, Apple (both Steve Jobs and Bill gates have talked about a lifestyle of sleeping in their office and not going home for days on end), Homebrew club, etc.
I read the medium article and its accompanying appendix, and imo, its scant on facts, and filled with weasel-wording, political posturing and self-obsession.
There is mention of a report of sexism in AI labs. But what are the facts of the report. Was Stallman implicated in this report? The article doesn't say so. It looks like the author ju just put it out there to make a association between RMS and sexism in the minds of the readers.
The only real factual account( by 'factual' account i mean explicit about the alleged details and facts of events) is the one where the management undergrad was hit on in the restaurant.
I think that targeting a "creepy" social misfit is one definition of a witch hunt.
We can mostly defend against men that give out creepy social cues. Guys that are not creepy are far harder to defend against or get justice against: a guy that knows how to present himself understands social signals (almost self defining) and they can often get away with a lot because of that.
Plenty of guys hit on young women (I saw a study that showed that men of any age say they want a 21 year old). Are we surprised to find out "teen" is a major keyword on porn sites? Many men with a social standing (or money) use that to their sexual advantage. Go to the pub and listen to some drunk bro's: there is a large number what a lot of men say is extremely disturbing. I think they are highly immoral; but the attitudes are common and we usually avoid the moral argument and simplify it with a legal argument (statutory rape laws which rightly protect our weak and vulnerable).
I don't doubt that RMS has been an arsehole, and his workplace, voluntary workplaces, friends, family and acquaintances should definitely make him accountable, and take action against arseholery.
However, what seems to be happening here is that Richard is getting publicly shamed and publicly tried and judged guilty for being creepy - no accountability required.
He slept in his office, and had ever since his house caught on fire, some years before I met him. I met him in 1984. When he moved his office to a rebuilt floor at tech square, he had a wall dividing the office into two halves. One half was his sleeping space, and the other, which was accessible from the hallway, was his working space.
If you read the medium post the author admits she had no idea who Stallman is and that it was not really about him, and instead of admitting she was wrong on several point she went on and digged some stuff and put them together trying to paint RMS in a way that fit her accusation and her call for his removal.
Coming from someone who admits to have written out of anger accumulated from different personal experience, admitting she iss after someone she had no idea who he is, who misrepresented what was said to fit her views and narrative, I would not give much credit to anything that was added afterwards in this appendix.
Stallman sounds shady, but what's our basis for concluding that it wasn't for sleeping and was instead a creepy sex invitation? The word of a blogger who put words in Stallman's mouth and got him fired for them? I would appreciate a corroborating source, preferably one who didn't have as big of an ax to grind.
Saying we wouldn't have anyone left in power of they were held up to this standard seems more damning to our current power structure than the moral standard at play here
1. If you are attacked by the media, you will lose in the court of public opinion (I expect we wouldn't know about this at all except for the egregiously misleading "news" headlines).
2. Never ever discuss toxic topics (particularly if you are either a little odd, or politically weak).
3. If you publically question anything about a witch hunt, you too will be branded as a witch.
4. Beware of getting poisoned by association (Epstein -> Minsky -> Stallman -> anyone defending RMS).
From what I can tell, the actual morals of RMS don't seem to be the actual issue here.
There is surely a modern Grimm parable in all of this.
I disagree, it feels like a witch hunt because it is one.
I read the original post that started this witch hunt and my baloney detector went off all along, in particular when I read the quote from RMs stating one thing and the author calling for his removal misrepresenting and misunderstanding them as if they said the exact opposite.
It's not true. I don't particularly like RMS, I don't agree with his views about free software and I don't like GPL as a license. I also think his views on many political issues are naive, go against human nature and if implemented would cause a lot of harm.
Still, I think the way he was forced to go is shameful. Some journalists couldn't interpret a simple statement (sadly very common), started an outrage and the pressure became too much. I hope he sues them and wins enough money to have a peaceful retirement. I don't want a world where some of the biggest contributors to technological wealth we have access to can't freely state their views, qualms and doubts or even start a discussion about controversial moral issues.
I personally hate to see important free software and opensource contributors quitting because of some stupid reason that could have been handled without immediately weaponizing what someone said to start a twitter or news shit storm.
That was definitely a witch hunt. He worked hard to give advice that he thought would be useful for improving diversity at Google. Nothing he said was outside of the scientific consensus, yet he was demonized[1] and fired for it. The whole thing is absurd.
1. Check out some Googler's responses to his document (which, in case you forgot, was deliberately leaked without diagrams or citations): https://imgur.com/a/S48QN Several want him physically battered for his opinions.
Before jumping to criticize Stallman, be aware: there is a big difference between what today's round of headlines claim Stallman wrote, and what he actually wrote. Given the relatively clear-cut nature of the lies the press has told about him, I think he ought to be suing for libel.
What is the counter argument for what Stallman wrote? I've seen that the "press is going too hard on him", but, honestly, I think they were justified. What is the "big difference" to you? If someone, personally, said to me that that someone be absolved of a crime, because the other, coerced, party was "willing" at that moment, I'd seriously question their morals.
Stallman wrote:
"We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates."
These headlines do not match what Stallman wrote. They wrote awful words, and put them in his mouth, in order to support a narrative in which he said something which he didn't. That's not okay.
Mens rea ("guilty mind" aka criminal intent) is an important element for many crimes. People - generally - are inconsistent with regard to how much they think impact matters for a crime and how much they think intent matters. The law is also inconsistent, with itself, and with the opinions of the citizenry. In this case, US law (but not the laws of all countries) makes sex trafficking and statutory rape strict liability laws - only impact matters, not intent.
Stallman raised the question of Minsky's mens rea, suggesting that Minsky might not have had any criminal intent at all. To people who feel that mens rea should always be a criteria in criminal and moral judgement (such as myself), the existence or lack of existence of mens rea matters to Minsky's moral culpability.
With all that in mind, I'm dubious that Minsky could have been approached by a young woman and not had some degree of mens rea. At the very least, Minsky must have assumed the woman was a paid sex worker and recognized at least some possibility that she was trafficked and/or underage. I can't abide the notion that a old man would have mistaken the invitations of an uneducated young girl as genuine attraction.
I'd say the big difference is that the press is accusing him of defending Epstein when in fact he's defending Minsky. Of course people may think that's still problematic, but that's not what the headlines are accusing him of doing.
I mean, let's put aside whether the person might have reasoned the other party was willing. This line of reasoning is ridiculous. If someone appears 100% willing to you, and there's absolutely nothing different from a genuinely willing person, why should you be at fault because somebody else put that person under duress, or because they were lying (under duress or otherwise).
If someone does a 100% legal thing according the information they know, and is not otherwise negligent, there is no crime they should be charged with. As it happens, in the US, statutory rape is the only one I'm aware of that does not follow this criterion; even manslaughter requires negligence (although I'm not making a point about that).
Even if the person who commited the crime had no knowledge that the other party was coerced? Why are they at fault because they were lied to and tricked into commiting a crime?
He'd have a very hard time winning. In many jurisdictions there is a "substantial truth" doctrine: if a statement gives an impression that's substantially close to the truth, it's considered OK, even if technically false. Once you add in how many people typically react to this sort of thing...
The claim "he defended Epstein and says his victims were willing", as for example the Vice article writes, is not substantially close to the truth. It is false absolutely.
Not unexpected, but I'm surprised it happened so soon after he resigned from MIT/CSAIL.
Earlier today the director of the GNOME Foundation requested that RMS resign from the FSF, and said severing ties with the FSF could happen if he didn't step down.
I think there was more social pressure for him to resign from FSF, and more institutional pressure for him to resign from MIT/CSAIL. The institutional pressure probably wasn't as painful, but was more forceful. I think he'd probably been holding back the pressure he felt to get the FSF thing over with for a while, but hoping for the controversy to die down, but when he was forced (or practically forced) to resign from MIT/CSAIL it became clear he wasn't going to win, and he decided to get it over with. Perhaps he'll be sleeping better tonight.
What he said was stupid and disgusting. People sometimes over-estimate the amount of latitude the organization they work for will give them to do this.
The technology industry is taking baby-steps towards actual inclusivity and diversity of thought -- and not this dumbass "I want to be free to say stupid offensive shit with impunity" flavor of "inclusivity" that people around here seem to champion. That is a Good Thing and organizations like MIT and the FSF need to be very careful about whom they let represent them.
As far as I'm aware Stallman has neither been arrested nor has his website been torn down, so he's welcomed to continue to make whatever good and bad points he feels like and the rest of us are welcomed to judge him as we wish: smart, stupid, ignorable, or maybe even abhorrent to the point where maybe he shouldn't be representing a place like MIT. Or the FSF.
If your "inclusivity" stops at Stallman, it seriously lacks performance. You use the wrong word. What you desire is conformity.
edit: Additionally, because I think this isn't obvious here, Stallman opened up the knowledge about software to the whole world and put energy in keeping it that way. Anyone was able to profit from this.
He wants people to be treated in a uniform and equitable way, yes.
That doesn't mean people "have to conform", but that our treatment of people should not be diverse: it should be the same for everybody, and accomodating of their diversity within the bounds of acceptable behaviour.
RMS has been treated in the same way anybody else would be. He hasn't been given special treatment. We are therefore being consistent as a society in our treatment of him.
Right now, I can hear people already screaming about diversity of opinion, but they're missing the point: equality and diversity is not about a right for anybody to behave however they want, but for the treatment of those behaviours to be fair and equitable.
RMS has been treated fairly and equitably: he has not been arrested or imprisoned. MIT have behaved in a way consistent with any other employee, and FSF have been consistent with any other organisation trying to protect a public perception for a wider cause.
In this respect, he is not a brave contrarian warrior tackling an unjust society. He's a man who treats other people rudely and says things 95% of the population find unjustifably crude and offensive who has found himself at odds with clear and explicit employment law and codes of conduct.
There have also been numerous stories from those around him at MIT about inappropriate conduct with students and staff.
The flip side of diversity is inclusion and those actions ran counter to MIT's own policies on an inclusive workplace (if you want a legalistic justification for him needing to leave).
At the same time, though, diversity can't be a cover for actions that are harmful to the larger community. Many places in the world still have strict social pressures against other sexual orientations. Saying you want diversity and inclusion, but excluding gay people—that would be conformity. However, being around queer folks does not actively harm the workplace environment or social culture. However, asking new female students if they want to go out with you, or being grossly insensitive to the plight of sexual assault victims is harmful to a non-trivial portion of the lab.
I would argue that, while RMS is a rightfully accomplished activist and computer scientist, his removal at this point in time makes CSAIL a more inclusive place. Those who might stay away because they're worried about his reputation or hurtful insensitivity—say, young female students, often underrepresented in science—may be more willing to work there.
> You use the wrong word. What you desire is conformity.
This seems to be a pretty common paradox.
The people who promote "diversity" (and sometimes even diversity of thought!), never accept anyone who wants to debate the nuances of that concept, nor how that may best be implemented.
Basically they demand conformity to the one "diverse" view and their definition of diversity. You're either with them or you're "part of the problem".
You'd think at some point they would notice how they come off ass utterly hypocritical.
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I have worked in jobs where there have been very strange creepy people, both women and men. Some are angry and tense. Some are odd and talk restless or slightly disturbing stuff that make everyone uncomfortable. But if they do their work well they can stay. Others give them some room. It's called tolerance.
If RMS was just random superhacker doing his thing. I would defend him. His boss should find a position for him where he can contribute and other people should feel free to feel uncomfortable and avoid him.
But RMS is de facto leader and public figure in movement that is also political. He does not deserve the same level of consideration as normal HR headache would. Even if everything against him would be completely unjust, there is no requirement for just treatment for top leaders. They can be sacked for any reason whatsoever.
We don't have to tolerate people who make women feel unsafe and unwelcome in our (or any) industry.
You seem to be arguing the usual tired old thing: "but he's a genius and does such great work that we should tolerate the bad things he does". I really thought we'd started to move past that over the last few years.
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.
No it's not an insult to anyone. It's an attemoted explanation of why some neuro-atypical people behave in atypical fashion.
I certainly would not excuse him! Nor should anybody else!
But given his stature, it's surely worth discussing and understanding him. And any attempt to do that would certainly have to include his famously black-and-white and self-described borderline autistic thinking.
Pointing out that somebody is austistic (or left-handed, or that they have psoriasis, or dyslexic, or seven feet tall, or...) and thinking about how that may affect their actions isn't excuse-making. It is empathy. It is critical thinking.
Nobody thinks this of RMS. He's a competent developer who was in the right place at the right time to found a new ideology: The idea that software should work for the user, the only way for software to do so is to empower the user to also be a developer themselves. That's all.
Being competent himself wasn't a sufficient condition for anyone to listen to him, but it was necessary.
Promoting intolerance of people we disagree with, even if we vigorously disagree with them, is perhaps not the best response.
Hand waving and quietly ignoring is the mark of tolerance. But one wonders exactly how polite society is. One certainly presumes the existence of both knights for justice and hot ladies in a nation of millions. What society are we talking about?
I don't expect MIT to be any more representative of society than the NFL. It is a magnet for extreme people who defer common sense and common acceptance in search of very particular goals. I wonder if we were to get rid of Stallman and replace him, deserving as he must be, for a bust in our Hall of Fame if our society could resist defaming his very image and existence.
A lot of people (mostly men) hugely overestimate just how fragile and vulnerable women are.
The semi-autistic are a lot more likely to be made unwelcome than women.
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What does this mean ? He is a leader of an organisation related to software freedom (or more pedantically, the choice of licences used for software). How is it relevant ? All you are saying is, "Famous people can't talk like that".
* General principle that people in influential positions have less protections and should have more scrutiny than average John Doe. Celebrities and influential people have less legal privacy protections.
* People are free to speak as individuals, but they may not be free to speak while they have public position in the organization. Elected members of the organization like FSF don't have the same protections as employers have. They represent the organization even outside the work. Their public position gives them a platform where what they say goes trough bullhorn and private becomes public and reflects the organization. If something they say harms the organization they should go even if they are right.
If your leader appears to advocate pedophilia, then your organisation no longer becomes "that organisation that advocates for free software", but "that organisation run by a pedophile apologist".
But, he resigned himself. This is moot.
FSF was pressured. RMS did not decide this all on his own of his free will.
It's just reasonable to remove him from those positions.
Independly I find it very weird what he was saying nonetheless and for this he falls under a category of humans which I don't think are worth it to give such amount of support.
There are other people out there which are worth it more.
I stopped working with people who might be technical good or very good but dicks. I hate working with dicks. There is no amount of brilliance which justifice being a dick.
But sure, he is probably a dick so let us remove them...
You know what? He actually probably isn't the easiest person to be around. Just saw him once and he certainly isn't the guy to move crowds.
But let us be certain that we have very distinct definitions of what constitutes "being a dick".
Linux foundation and FSF have small staff and budget but the total economic value of the projects they steer is in tens of billions.
That's a testament to his vision and leadership.
I agree that there's a current climate that's even less amenable to open discussion than at other times. However, I disagree that words carrying perceived intent is something new. Any time you make an assertion about individual facts of a particular situation, people's first assumption is going to be that you're pushing the narrative best supported by that assertion. Telling people what you're not saying will continue to be important even if the current climate improves.
EDIT: To clarify, I'm stating a general principle, not saying anything about what RMS did or didn't say, or did or didn't intend to say. I don't have time to dig into all that.
If his past behavior was sufficient justification for his sacking, then that should be enough. However, that is not why he was sacked. He was sacked on the basis of false allegations, and as an attempt by MIT to deflect from their own complicity in the Epstein scandal.
This is not (only) about finding a place for weirdo super-hackers to contribute to society (without bothering people too much) but about the truth dammit.
The only people who deserve less consideration are those that pick and choose who to treat justly.
Really?
https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...
As someone actually autistic, he doesn't get to blame being a douchecanoe on being autistic.
> His socially clueless black and white thinking makes it look like he is far in the spectrum.
Then _learn_. Also, we're not talking about not getting social cues about when it's okay to start talking, we're talking his considered and repeated position on issues such as sexual assault, and his _actual actions_ towards teenagers.
> But if they do their work well they can stay. Others give them some room. It's called tolerance.
Great tolerance for the people your creeps chase out or abuse, thanks. You actually do have to pick, and if you pick people like RMS, you pick against all the people that can't - and shouldn't have to - deal with an environment people like RMS create.
I was trying to give explanation, not excuse.
I was trying to communicate understanding, not acceptance.
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Was he a douchecanoe? Is that even a helpful label for you to apply to him? Was he claiming he behaved / behaves the way you think he does solely because he's borderline autistic, or are you extrapolating?
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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. This is completely backwards, anti-democratic, and anti-freedom. It brings a chilling effect on everyone, because suddenly people start to realize that they're living under the Sword of Damocles, which could destroy them at any moment without warning. You can never be sure if something you say or do is going to get you publicly pilloried in future, and destroy your career, friendships, and reputation in the blink of an eye. Far better to just sit quiet and never say anything that might offend someone. Far better not to participate at all.
Mob justice always turns ugly in the end. That's why we have courts.
He has a long history of using forums meant for technology discussion to promote borderline (and that's generous) social opinions, and of being openly hostile to people who don't tow his line. In this instance he ridiculously downplayed the most egregious instances of sex trafficking of minors, by a horridly evil individual... who happened to donate almost a million dollars to him!
His previous comments about minors on his personal blog, which I don't even want to dignify with a description (you can do your own search), leads me to wonder what other connections than money he had with Epstein.
For all of us that don't worship Stallman - I consider him a net negative to the FOSS movement - this has been a long time coming. It would have been a deserved resignation in a normal social environment.
Speculation, which would not be allowed in a court of law, is unfortunately a perfectly acceptable character assassination methodology.
And this kind of tar-and-feathering is precisely why we need official processes for this sort of thing. Official reprimands leading to termination if unfixed, like all civilized peoples do. This ensures that it's made crystal clear what's acceptable and what's not, with time to mend one's ways. The alternative is arbitrary terminations, which makes everyone insecure.
Is there any evidence of this? There is a big difference between the place he works at taking money and him taking money.
I don't think its right to hold an employee responsible for their employers actions.
How often does he bring it up and how often is it in response to someone else saying something that is technically wrong?
RMS chose to step down himself. That was his decision. Even if you think MIT told him to, that would ultimately be MIT's decision, not the work of some "mob".
Furthermore, stepping down from MIT is not destruction you're playing it up as being. People have done similar (and of course, worse!) things and, after being the subject of some number of embarrassing articles on the web and some larger number of angry tweets, are currently living their lives with new jobs just fine. RMS doesn't need us to feel bad for him. He's still free & healthy.
If you're worried about kangaroo courts and injustice, there's plenty to focus on somewhere where people's lives and livelihoods are actually at stake, like the US-Mexico border or Hong Kong.
The mob pressured MIT and the FSF to remove him from his positions. It's ultimately their decision, sure, in the same way that it's ultimately up to a local business owner whether they purchase a "protection plan" from the nice salesmen with the baseball bats.
>RMS doesn't need us to feel bad for him. He's still free & healthy. If you're worried about kangaroo courts and injustice, there's plenty to focus on somewhere where people's lives and livelihoods are actually at stake...
You could just easily say "Hong Kong doesn't have it that bad, they have food and shelter. Focus on conditions that are actually bad, like starving child soldiers in Africa."
This just seems like deflection. Conditions being worse elsewhere doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss the issues that are more local to us.
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
He has nothing to apologise for in this respect, but he does say:
> I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding.
This could be seen as an apology, "I'm sorry" often is; but in context you can see it is not. It is literally "I'm sorry I could not prevent this hurt" without any sense that He is responsible.
Ironically, this sentiment only brought on more criticism: The claim that this was a "false apology", i.e. something masquerading as an apology despite not being one - but that was Stallmans intention, it is thwarted by all the other sentences in the same paragraph that make it clear he is being misquoted.
So he's being punished for thinking out loud and not apoligising for thinking out loud?
While redemption is one of the themes in the book sadly the internet has not quite developed that level of sophistication so we are stuck with denouncement/punishment.
The point of the Scarlet Letter is that its victims are forever oppressed by the masses, and those near to the victim are made guilty by association.
It doesn't matter what the crime is; forever punishments are unjust, and prone to abuse.
He is merely encountering actual consequences for saying absurd, indefensible things -- and, likely, also finally encountering consequences for being a well-known source of creepy behavior towards women for a very long time. People lose jobs all the time for less.
Yeah, he's done some good things. And maybe (MAYBE) he's actually not neurotypical. But that doesn't mean he gets a pass on being a creep forever.
This isn't a one off and he's one of the least likely people to mend his ways.
This is one of the reasons it took so long for homosexuality to become accepted.
How many years and incidents is enough to move to removal?
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But what we've seen instead is cowardly throwing someone to the baying crowd.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/17/richard_stallman_in...
> The guy has a long history endorsing pedophillia.
This is a big accusation, do you have source to back this up?
I don’t know the guy but that’s a big accusation.
Among the many things one can say about RMS, this is not one of them.
This is just slander.
Having the wrong opinion about certain topics is getting more expensive. Stay away from taboos or else... never mind the fact that what we regard as wrong changes across different societies over time.
Weirdly all the information technology is steering towards being more similar in our opinions and in what we can say without facing consequences.
Recently I started to thing about how in spite of having the ability to share, and change, and store information better and with more ease than ever, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. Instead of having more transparent institutions, everything is getting more "opaque" (so to speak) towards the public (even it this is happening due to overload).
does anyone remember "information wants to be free"? I don't think anybody says that anymore, but I remember reading that a bunch on slashdot in the early 00s
I don't really see how this is so hard. Don't treat women poorly, in person or online. Don't talk authoritatively about subjects you don't understand, especially when those subjects (like rape and human trafficking) cause people intense pain.
If you really do want to act this way, then you probably should exercise some self-censorship, and rethink your views, perhaps.
> ...in what we can say without facing consequences.
What you say should have consequences. No one should censor you (what you say should be up to you), but you don't live in a vacuum. What you say has a real effect on others, and if that effect is bad, you should be held accountable.
Morality is constantly changing and what is considered treating someone poorly changes too. More recently it appears to be changing faster than ever. That can make it hard to remain with the bounds of what is in the current instance of time considered socially acceptable by the majority. There is no absolute morality even though it may seem like it if you are thinking with the span of an hour or a day. Stretch it out and it's a constant shifting. In any case, I don't think anyone should be silenced. If they say something that the majority feels is foolish, they can be considered a fool, or a debate can be had to convince them of why they may be wrong, but to silence externally, or increasingly, self silencing with self censorship, in my opinion is dangerous as that means ideas cannot be discussed openly.
Then it's time to just shut down HN in general, eh?
Speech is just a tool to share a thought, if a thought effects some one it is for them to bare alone.
The idea that sharing thoughts should have consequences upsets me greatly, maybe it shouldn't but it does. Your speech has filled me with bad feelings and troubling thoughts is that burden mine to bare alone or should I hold you responsible?
The sword you are flailing is sharp at both ends.
No one is allowed to have an opinion unless they're an "expert"
(Sarcasm)
I think the trend's moving more quickly towards self-censorship than anyone realizes. How can we even quantify that? Those who censor just disappear?
What stands out for me is the obvious monoculture we're developing.
I miss custom PHPBB boards for every little interest and opinion.
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There is also a history of controversial stuff related to his time at the FSF which meant that probably wouldn't settle for a simple apology either (not that RMS seemed willing to give one).
As organisations change over time, what they need in leadership also changes. In this case, they didn't need an ideologue with a history of generating controversy, they needed someone who can keep the ship going forward so that the projects they are overseeing don't lose enough talent that they become irrelevant.
Calling him an ideologue in contrast to current pioneers in the software industry is a bit much, maybe he just had some hard principles.
> wouldn't settle for a simple apology
To whom? To those that endorsed questionable business relations that drew attention in the first place that still are in leading positions at the MIT?
> need in leadership also changes
Visionaries and thought leaders can probably have a positive influence. I doubt we will get a adequate replacement. There also is no strong leader/mentor that can make you magically smart. He would need to inspire you to learn yourself which I would argue Stallman did pretty well.
"Controversies" are seldom intellectually engaging and if you look at the core of his statements, the subject and reactions become quite ridiculous.
FSF entire purpose is to push for the adoption of Free Software licensing (in opposition to Both "Open Source" and Commercial licensing)
If you or I said what Stallman said, but to a coworker or to the boss, we would get fired - justifiably. This is not a new concept unique to the digital age, nor is it a concept that should be done away with. The popularity of your comment depresses me deeply.
Suppose there's a boxer, "Joe", and he has a scheduled fight against a named opponent. It's set in a legitimate venue, is freely advertised as if the promoters have nothing to hide, includes a normal ref & audience, and then proceeds like any other boxing match, including the traditional cordialities between opponents before and after. To "Joe", nothing's wrong. But then, years later, it's discovered that the opposing boxer was coerced into fighting, perhaps with threats of violence or blackmail.
Is "Joe" now guilty of physical assault, for repeatedly punching the other boxer, even if to "Joe" at the time it seemed like a normal voluntary encounter, no seedier than any other boxing match?
Maybe RMS's take was dumb. Maybe my analogy is dumb! But it's not "shameful" to try to work out the reasonable characterizations, given Minksy's possible mental state, the law, or common-sense. It might even be possible, under formal legal definitions, for Giuffre to have been "assaulted" while at the same time Minsky's actions don't rise to the level of "assault".
> The word "assaulting" presumes he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way.
And then Stallman goes on to point out there is no evidence to suggest that Minksy acted violently toward the victim, and may have been unaware that the victim had been coerced by Epstein.
Given that the definition of "assault" is "a physical attack", I can't really disagree with him from a purely semantic perspective. And I would agree that there are other terms terms such as "statutory rape" and "soliciting prostitution" that may better describe what Minsky is accused of.
Is it "shameful" for me to see some merit in his argument?
I mean, given everything in the news these days, this is blatantly untrue. I suspect it wasn't ever quite that true before either. Maybe it should be but I don't think it's quite that easy.
> The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful take on the situation. [...] There are people trying to downplay sexual assault.
I'm hesitating to respond to this (self-censorship and all) but I'm not a public figure so I can risk being wrong, right? Right?!?
This isn't exactly what RMS was getting it and you're kinda missing the point in the same way RMS kinda missed the point. He didn't get why we use the term "sexual assault" as broadly (and reasonably so) as we do, and it doesn't sound like you get why he decided to argue the semantics of it.
His point was that he felt calling what Misnky had done "sexual assault" seemed to imply that Misky hadviolently attacked and raped her in a physically restraining sorta way instead of, to his best knowledge, in a "she was coerced by a third party without his knowledge" sort of way.
He missed the point that regardless of those details she was sexual assaulted. Further, he seems oblivious to the fact that splitting hairs defending his friend distracts from the real issue: that this isn't about any of them, it's about what happened to the victims. I think that take is fair enough but I agree making that case is bone headed. Not because he shouldn't speak his mind, but that it's just besides the point.
I think you're missing the fact that at all RMS was about was just clearing up the record of what Minsky did and didn't do. Not even that he was fully innocent. I agree it was in poor taste but I think if he was any less a public figure it would have been read more charitably with an awkward sigh instead.
Having a a factually or morally incorrect viewpoint on a public happening isn't an assault on a victim. Its an opportunity to help that person learn better and even more importantly to help the many more who believe the same as the speaker but who wont speak up learn as well.
Silence dissent and you lose that opportunity and everyone is poorer for it.
Sadly this is not true; it's been routine for all kinds of authority figures to blame the victim and excuse the perpetrator in cases of sexual assault and rape. Including police and judges.
The only way we've moved forward is the public making very clear that that is not acceptable, but this actually has a low hit rate. For every Stallman there is a Kavanagh, and a hundred rape apologists to back then up.
"I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. [...] Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
This is an excellent point. More and more, there is no middle ground in consequences. Nothing like a suspension? or leave of absence etc. I don't recall how things used to be but I really lament the lack of some sort of gradient scale for punishment.
The general over-reaction and constant jousting at windmills seems like a net loss to me.
I am forced to exercise self-censorship.
- How someone is treated depends heavily on whether they're perceived as being part of the right clique. For example, a few years ago Nintendo sacked someone who thought it was a great tragedy that owning photos and videos of kids being raped was illegal and bloviated about this on social media. (Probably not for that reason as it turns out, although her job did involve interacting with kids.) She was in the clique and the people who drew attention to this weren't, so all the right-thinking folks and publications rewrote her views into something much less objectionable, then insisted that repeating what she actually said was a bigoted lie and the whole thing was a misogynistic attack against her. I'm pretty sure there's a heavy overlap between those people and the ones going after Stallman by rewriting what he said in the opposite direction now.
- The views you have to hold in order not to be a bigot aren't consistent from year to year. For instance, there's a faction of self-proclaimed feminists who're really hateful to trans people and have successfully lobbied for some rather bigoted laws. A few years ago any trans woman who merely pointed out the harm they'd done was labelled as a terrible misogynist. Sometime around 2016 this flipped and all the same people who'd been demanding everyone shut up decided those views were now so evil that they justified beating up elderly women merely for holding them, and that the people who were uncomfortable with this violence were the bigots. There was zero overlap between the views that were acceptable before and after the flip, and no room for a more moderate position. That faction has become increasingly irrelevant over the years, so fighting them is actually less important than it used to be.
Are there perhaps some views that you think are not quite hateful or bigoted, but aren't totally fine to state? Maybe, "err on the side of caution" type views?
I wonder what Zeno would think on moving your views from completely hateful to completely fine: first you must go halfway-hateful, then half of that, and so on. Perhaps one will never find a completely fine view to state!
The fun is always in defining what exactly should be in the category "hateful"/"undermining stability of our country".
As a side note, I've advocated for chattel slavery in the past, it actually didn't go too badly.
From what I’ve read about the Cultural Revolution and Jaquereies, what’s going on looks pretty much the same mob pattern.
Many fewer of my current associates hear any real thoughts of mine compared to 20 years ago. I used to get into all kinds of arguments like Stallman’s, on public email lists, which thankfully haven’t surfaced online (yet).
Patently that is false.
Given the sheer amount of ad revenue that youtube, twitter et al get from hosting stuff that if printed or broadcast, would be liable to fines. (at least in the UK)
Self censorship is what defines empathy. When your child has done something hilariously stupid and hurt themselves, you comfort them, you don't stand back and tell them how incredibly stupid they are.
99.999% of people would never Mock a grieving spouse in person, why should you be enabled to broadcast that to millions of people on the internet?
It's not. Take it from me, a guy who predates social media by decades.
If you go back and look at what Gary Hart dropped out of the 1988 presidential race for, and compare it to what Donald Trump said on social media before, during, and after being elected President, there's just no comparison.
Racial, misogynistic, derogatory, offensive sentiments you can easily find being published on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or most other social media platforms would not have passed muster in any mass-media channel or public conversation 30 or even 20 years ago.
On the positive side, social media has been a tremendous boon to marginalized communities like gay/lesbian/bisexual, transgender, heck, even furries. It has allowed like minds to find and support each other, and allowed the rest of us normies to see these communities for the constructive, positive forces so many of them are. I am convinced that social media aided in their growing public acceptance.
In fact, I'd say that social media has opened up the discourse so much that even the resignation of a powerful figure over controversial remarks about pedophilia--an outcome which would have been expected and commonplace for at least the past 70 years of U.S. society--are taken as somehow problematic.
In other words, things are so de-censored now that even the most anodyne and obvious objections to gross statements by powerful figures is taken as censorship. The Overton Window has moved way over to one side, but people still complain when they hit the edge of it.
However, it seems that the political division is greater than ever. It is almost as if there are two Overton windows now, one for liberals and one for republicans (roughly).
The republican one shifted to much less self-censorship, while the liberal one shifted very slightly to more self-censorship.
And RMS seems to be caught in the liberal one. He has held his opinions for a long time, and nobody really cared that much.
He is also not a particularly powerful figure. If anything, FSF is weaker than it has been in the 90s. That's also an interesting change in dynamics, the shifting of both windows now affects powerful and powerless alike, where in the past, it was I believe considered less decent to have "wrong opinions" if you were powerful, and the wrong opinions of the powerless were tolerated much more. (Basically, the difference between elites and proletes, and agreement who is what, is now morphing into a difference between liberals and republicans.)
People can say that these platforms are privately-owned and freedom of speech is only about government censorship, but where do you speak when these platform are well established and chances of dethroning them with a decentralized and open alternative are slim to none?
Social media is not social, it's corporate.
You’re free to say what you want and I’m free to not want to associate with your or not want to do business with you and encourage others to do the same.
I don’t see how you have one without the other.
This Stallman case is edge-case fallout from a massive political movement. He could have probably discussed the age of consent in public pre-2013 and maybe get a few disgusted reactions but generally be fine. The political control of internet arguments is more obvious than ever, and the quest for advertising money.. but I'm fairly sure I can start and run a website/subreddit/blog for whatever niche idea and be left alone.
He did. People don't remember, but his home page used to have articles regarding age of consent, which he later took down.
So? Don't make these clicks and you'd never see them.
> The political control of internet arguments is more obvious than ever, and the quest for advertising money
Advertising money has nothing to do with it - FSF doesn't need advertising money. They're just live in deathly fear of the woke Red Guards, as many before them (e.g. Mozilla) - and that fear may be very well justified.
> but I'm fairly sure I can start and run a website/subreddit/blog for whatever niche idea and be left alone.
Sure you can. If you can do without: hosting, DDoS protection, DNS, advertising, search engines, social media, payment processing, etc. All those have recently been engaged in deplatforming people for political considerations. But yes, you are free to lay your own cable infrastructure, set up your own data centers, build out your own internet, and there have you own website about whatever you want, completely free.
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If you start expressing opinions about how sex with a sex-trafficked child should be legal, won't your friends and family raise some questions about your character?
Unless we're talking of morally flexible individuals. And at least parents should raise an eyebrow, since we have this natural reaction to protect our children.
> information wants to be free
Whomever said that was probably thinking of facts, of knowledge, s/he was probably not thinking of having opinions about pedophiles.
EDIT: don't get me wrong, I think there's a time and place to argue that consensual sex with teenagers might be ok and I think people should be free to make that argument, the problem in this case is that the sex couldn't have been consensual, in which case age becomes relevant, as that teenager isn't fully developed, therefore the harm done is amplified.
And also these opinions have been delivered by a very public figure, with a history of harassing women.
Words matter so the lesson here is don't be a jerk, as technology won't save you from that.
That is not what Stallman said, wrote or advocates so that's kind of a strawman hypothetical that continues to pedal a false narrative.
> Whomever said that was probably thinking of facts, of knowledge, s/he was probably not thinking of having opinions about pedophiles.
John Stuart Mill is probably rolling over in his grave from this conversation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Liberty#Of_the_liberty_of_t...
Edit: Particularly relevant to the topic of self-censorship: "unmeasured vituperation, enforced on the side of prevailing opinion, deters people from expressing contrary opinion, and from listening to those who express them."
Good thing RMS never did that then.
And your comment is a good representative of the modern debate climate: People will exaggerate whatever their opponent said, and they will assume no good faith in their opponents what so ever. They will not consider an argument something to be learned from, but rather something to be "won".
Getting someone fired over having the "wrong" view is merely a bonus, but a bonus the SJW-crowd loves aiming for none the less.
No wonder we're all getting dumber, when merely trying to have a discussion can get you fired. Of course people will stop debating, and stop gaining insights from that debate.
These kind of comments are clumsy claims to moral authority, useless flame fodder.
-He argued that rape is no the same as having sex with a minor. He is right, that's not the definition of rape.
-A minor is not necessarily a child. You can be a minor and the next day be 18 in a porno movie.
-Never did Stallman said it was ok, He just raised the question whether Minsky knew She was being coerced by Epstein. Clearly not the same.
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I was there, about 20 years ago, when he sent e-mail urging all free-software advocates to protest a bill under consideration in the US Congress. I asked him if he had read the bill. "No," he said, "I don't surf the Web." I saw that as a huge cop-out; how could someone claim any moral or leadership authority when he called for protests and a letter-writing campaign on a subject he didn't know about first hand?
It's certainly true that RMS has been remarkably consistent over the 30 years or so in which I've interacted with him -- starting when I was a reporter for the MIT student newspaper, and then maintained the Emacs FAQ, and then wrote for Linux Journal. (No, not GNU/Linux Journal. Sheesh.) He's an extremist. He's a purist. He indeed doesn't get the nuances of interpersonal communication.
But you know what? You can't both lead an organization and be tone deaf to people. You can't be a public figure, demanding respect, and then show such disrespect to others. You can't expect that people will pay attention to what you say when you have so little respect for what they say.
Stallman has long been difficult, obstinate, and rude to people in general -- and a general drag on the cause of open-source (or "free") software. But I had no idea that he was known to be so terrible to women.
But even if he had treated women well -- which doesn't seem to be the case -- it's pretty hard to imagine anyone, anywhere defending Jeffrey Epstein in any way, shape, or form. The guy was terrible, did horrible things, abused a huge number of women, and amassed wealth and power in the most disgusting ways possible. To defend Epstein, or the people who were associated with him, is unacceptable.
Again: You want to defend Epstein in your own personal life? Go for it; you won't have many friends or colleagues afterwards, but that's up to you. But if you do it as the public face of a well-known activist organization? You can't possibly stick around there.
Good riddance.
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RMS achieved a sort of secular saintly status early on, and as a result has been excused from developing any sort of interpersonal skills or, apparently, human decency for most of his adult life. Now we say he identifies as autistic, like this excuses it, but in the absence of an actual diagnosis (and maybe even WITH one), it feels like a cop out.
It's well past time to accept that rms may well have damaged the FOSS movement with his behavior as much as he's helped it in recent years.
The free & open software world can do better. It deserves better. We ought to demand it. Moving on from rms is a great first step.
Being autistic does not automatically make a person act shitty towards others and statements like that do a great disservice to autistic community.
...
>You want to defend Epstein in your own personal life? Go for it; you won't have many friends or colleagues afterwards, but that's up to you. But if you do it as the public face of a well-known activist organization? You can't possibly stick around there.
You criticise him for not having read the bill, yet you rant about him without having read his emails? Where did he defend Epstein?
> To defend Epstein, or the people who were associated with him, is unacceptable.
Sorry, but Epstein's crimes, and the horrible things he did to a lot of people, and the growing web of powerful people involved with these crimes, are not something to have trivial fights over.
Maybe RMS was just defending Minsky's participation in Epstein's sex trafficking scheme. That's bad enough to me.
When people say "getting the nuances of interpersonal communication", they usually mean "Not telling the truth when it may hurt other people's feelings or your own reputation".
It's perfectly reasonable to not not tell the truth —and even lie— in those cases, but I would prefer if you stated this idea like it is.
"Getting the nuances of interpersonal communication" is saying it like one doesn't understand that people don't act rationally and will throw logic completely out of the window when one of their religious ideas gets questioned.
Stallman is not an idiot, he knows he will get shit for saying what he says, he perfectly gets the "nuances" (i.e. irrational behaviour) of personal communication. He just doesn't care about them.
> To defend Epstein, or the people who were associated with him, is unacceptable.
He's defending Minsky, who was indeed an inspirational genius in many ways, for being part of Epstein's sex trafficking.
Sorry, but there's no possible defense there. Trying to say something nice, or claim that Minsky didn't know, or say that we shouldn't use terms like "sexual assault" because they are laced with moral judgment, is all pretty bad.
I haven't seen anyone actually make that argument, but I have seen a lot of people arguing against it.
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 pit.
I certainly respect RMS for what he created and his idealism (although last time I saw him talk he spent about half the time negatively pontificating about Linus and Linux, which seriously damaged his credibility IMHO).
It must be devastating to be on the receiving end of such ire.
I see plenty of political and tech leaders set extremely low moral standards. Why is RMS being used to set an example? Do you think RMS actually hurt any children?
His comments are tragically inept - but this seems to boil down to being targeted by breaking headlines such as the New York Post: "MIT scientist says Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was ‘entirely willing’".
It's a shame that this shitstorm started due to blatantly dishonest reporting, but I'm not sad he's gone.
A leader doesn't just keep their head down and stick to whatever the prevailing zeitgeist is, that's what followers do.
He's discussed his views on pedophilia for a very long time, and this was just the latest on that. It's finally the last straw that was able to bring enough attention on him for action to be taken. It should have been taken decades ago.
Yes, he has.
This is his view as of Friday[0]:
> Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
Can you help me understand what's wrong with that view?
[0] https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
Try and find a primary source for that "fact". You are just repeating black rumours, which signals that you have no credibility.
From what I read, he loved to stick them up his nose in front of people. I believe he admits to it on his website.
Sorry, but you have to be explicit with your accusations. Call me naive, but if you say 'mattress and all the implications that went with it' in the context of hacker culture : the obvious implication is that he is a hacker, who likes to immerse himself in his work, pulls all-nighters. At worse it implies a lack of hygiene and a healthy separation between life and work. Okay a mattress might be taking to the concept a bit far but bean-bag culture is rooted in the earliest days of Xerox PARC, Microsoft, Apple (both Steve Jobs and Bill gates have talked about a lifestyle of sleeping in their office and not going home for days on end), Homebrew club, etc.
I read the medium article and its accompanying appendix, and imo, its scant on facts, and filled with weasel-wording, political posturing and self-obsession.
There is mention of a report of sexism in AI labs. But what are the facts of the report. Was Stallman implicated in this report? The article doesn't say so. It looks like the author ju just put it out there to make a association between RMS and sexism in the minds of the readers.
The only real factual account( by 'factual' account i mean explicit about the alleged details and facts of events) is the one where the management undergrad was hit on in the restaurant.
We can mostly defend against men that give out creepy social cues. Guys that are not creepy are far harder to defend against or get justice against: a guy that knows how to present himself understands social signals (almost self defining) and they can often get away with a lot because of that.
Plenty of guys hit on young women (I saw a study that showed that men of any age say they want a 21 year old). Are we surprised to find out "teen" is a major keyword on porn sites? Many men with a social standing (or money) use that to their sexual advantage. Go to the pub and listen to some drunk bro's: there is a large number what a lot of men say is extremely disturbing. I think they are highly immoral; but the attitudes are common and we usually avoid the moral argument and simplify it with a legal argument (statutory rape laws which rightly protect our weak and vulnerable).
I don't doubt that RMS has been an arsehole, and his workplace, voluntary workplaces, friends, family and acquaintances should definitely make him accountable, and take action against arseholery.
However, what seems to be happening here is that Richard is getting publicly shamed and publicly tried and judged guilty for being creepy - no accountability required.
Coming from someone who admits to have written out of anger accumulated from different personal experience, admitting she iss after someone she had no idea who he is, who misrepresented what was said to fit her views and narrative, I would not give much credit to anything that was added afterwards in this appendix.
1. If you are attacked by the media, you will lose in the court of public opinion (I expect we wouldn't know about this at all except for the egregiously misleading "news" headlines).
2. Never ever discuss toxic topics (particularly if you are either a little odd, or politically weak).
3. If you publically question anything about a witch hunt, you too will be branded as a witch.
4. Beware of getting poisoned by association (Epstein -> Minsky -> Stallman -> anyone defending RMS).
From what I can tell, the actual morals of RMS don't seem to be the actual issue here.
There is surely a modern Grimm parable in all of this.
Because it is a witch hunt, in an age where witch-hunting is the most popular sport on the internet.
How do you fell about James Damore?
I read the original post that started this witch hunt and my baloney detector went off all along, in particular when I read the quote from RMs stating one thing and the author calling for his removal misrepresenting and misunderstanding them as if they said the exact opposite.
Still, I think the way he was forced to go is shameful. Some journalists couldn't interpret a simple statement (sadly very common), started an outrage and the pressure became too much. I hope he sues them and wins enough money to have a peaceful retirement. I don't want a world where some of the biggest contributors to technological wealth we have access to can't freely state their views, qualms and doubts or even start a discussion about controversial moral issues.
That was definitely a witch hunt. He worked hard to give advice that he thought would be useful for improving diversity at Google. Nothing he said was outside of the scientific consensus, yet he was demonized[1] and fired for it. The whole thing is absurd.
1. Check out some Googler's responses to his document (which, in case you forgot, was deliberately leaked without diagrams or citations): https://imgur.com/a/S48QN Several want him physically battered for his opinions.
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Here's the Vice headline (https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-sci...): Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As 'Entirely Willing' (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965319 )
New York Post (https://nypost.com/2019/09/14/mit-scientist-says-epstein-vic...): "MIT scientist says Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was ‘entirely willing’: report"
Fox News (https://www.foxnews.com/us/mit-professor-jeffrey-epstein-ass...): "MIT scientist defended Jeffrey Epstein associate in leaked emails, claimed victims were ‘entirely willing’"
These headlines do not match what Stallman wrote. They wrote awful words, and put them in his mouth, in order to support a narrative in which he said something which he didn't. That's not okay.
Stallman raised the question of Minsky's mens rea, suggesting that Minsky might not have had any criminal intent at all. To people who feel that mens rea should always be a criteria in criminal and moral judgement (such as myself), the existence or lack of existence of mens rea matters to Minsky's moral culpability.
With all that in mind, I'm dubious that Minsky could have been approached by a young woman and not had some degree of mens rea. At the very least, Minsky must have assumed the woman was a paid sex worker and recognized at least some possibility that she was trafficked and/or underage. I can't abide the notion that a old man would have mistaken the invitations of an uneducated young girl as genuine attraction.
If someone does a 100% legal thing according the information they know, and is not otherwise negligent, there is no crime they should be charged with. As it happens, in the US, statutory rape is the only one I'm aware of that does not follow this criterion; even manslaughter requires negligence (although I'm not making a point about that).
Scroll down to the inline doc reader widget. Background: https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420...
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-sci...
http://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/substantial-truth
Earlier today the director of the GNOME Foundation requested that RMS resign from the FSF, and said severing ties with the FSF could happen if he didn't step down.
https://blog.halon.org.uk/2019/09/gnome-foundation-relations...
The technology industry is taking baby-steps towards actual inclusivity and diversity of thought -- and not this dumbass "I want to be free to say stupid offensive shit with impunity" flavor of "inclusivity" that people around here seem to champion. That is a Good Thing and organizations like MIT and the FSF need to be very careful about whom they let represent them.
As far as I'm aware Stallman has neither been arrested nor has his website been torn down, so he's welcomed to continue to make whatever good and bad points he feels like and the rest of us are welcomed to judge him as we wish: smart, stupid, ignorable, or maybe even abhorrent to the point where maybe he shouldn't be representing a place like MIT. Or the FSF.
It's a free country, after all.
edit: Additionally, because I think this isn't obvious here, Stallman opened up the knowledge about software to the whole world and put energy in keeping it that way. Anyone was able to profit from this.
That doesn't mean people "have to conform", but that our treatment of people should not be diverse: it should be the same for everybody, and accomodating of their diversity within the bounds of acceptable behaviour.
RMS has been treated in the same way anybody else would be. He hasn't been given special treatment. We are therefore being consistent as a society in our treatment of him.
Right now, I can hear people already screaming about diversity of opinion, but they're missing the point: equality and diversity is not about a right for anybody to behave however they want, but for the treatment of those behaviours to be fair and equitable.
RMS has been treated fairly and equitably: he has not been arrested or imprisoned. MIT have behaved in a way consistent with any other employee, and FSF have been consistent with any other organisation trying to protect a public perception for a wider cause.
In this respect, he is not a brave contrarian warrior tackling an unjust society. He's a man who treats other people rudely and says things 95% of the population find unjustifably crude and offensive who has found himself at odds with clear and explicit employment law and codes of conduct.
The flip side of diversity is inclusion and those actions ran counter to MIT's own policies on an inclusive workplace (if you want a legalistic justification for him needing to leave).
At the same time, though, diversity can't be a cover for actions that are harmful to the larger community. Many places in the world still have strict social pressures against other sexual orientations. Saying you want diversity and inclusion, but excluding gay people—that would be conformity. However, being around queer folks does not actively harm the workplace environment or social culture. However, asking new female students if they want to go out with you, or being grossly insensitive to the plight of sexual assault victims is harmful to a non-trivial portion of the lab.
I would argue that, while RMS is a rightfully accomplished activist and computer scientist, his removal at this point in time makes CSAIL a more inclusive place. Those who might stay away because they're worried about his reputation or hurtful insensitivity—say, young female students, often underrepresented in science—may be more willing to work there.
Inasmuch as any organization must have a set of goals and principles that everyone within that organization must adhere to: Yes!
No one has taken away Stallman’s freedom of speech.
This seems to be a pretty common paradox.
The people who promote "diversity" (and sometimes even diversity of thought!), never accept anyone who wants to debate the nuances of that concept, nor how that may best be implemented.
Basically they demand conformity to the one "diverse" view and their definition of diversity. You're either with them or you're "part of the problem".
You'd think at some point they would notice how they come off ass utterly hypocritical.
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