Richard Stallman Gets SJW'd

[Zenaan Harkness]

Heated mega discussion ongoing at LWN at the moment.

Here's a fundamental:


  Richard Stallman and the GNU project
  https://lwn.net/Articles/801933/
  Posted Oct 10, 2019 7:34 UTC (Thu) by zenaan (subscriber, #3778)

  "dkg":
  >> Richard has persistently, willfully ignored the impact of his
  >> sexist behavior (and dismissal of other contributors when they
  >> disagree with him). Can you see why this is might be an
  >> indicator that a leadership role isn't the right role for him if
  >> we want a healthy, growing, vibrant community that will defend
  >> everyone's Freedoms?

  "frostsnow":
  > His leadership role was created and earned by his dedication to
  > the cause of Free Software. I am not convinced that any of these
  > agitators are both able and willing to bear that burden.

  OK "frostsnow" - I am fully on board with your position, and you
  missed a fundamental - miss the fundamental and your "give me
  convenience and bugger off with your freedom politics" opponents
  WILL walk all over you!

  NOTE: The ground was laid by your opponent with these words:
  "Richard has persistently, willfully ignored the impact of his
  sexist behavior"; these words epitomize the endemic disregard for
  freedom of speech in the world today, and the widespread
  "snowflake" demands to "consider the feelings of those who hear or
  might hear your words, and don't speak if they might get upset".

  This ground is absolutely abominable - on the surface it sounds
  nice and fluffy "consider the emotions of others", but inherent is
  the implicit DEMAND that the world cower to emotionally and/or
  psychologically weak, damaged or ill people who need emotional
  and/or psychological healing, counselling, etc, just to function in
  society.

  SUCH IS AN UNFAIR TACTIC - a tactic used by those who cannot
  properly defend their own position otherwise, a low blow against
  basic human rights - the right to freedom of communication, which
  implies the right to say things which other's may find offensive.

  Give up freedom for "safety or safe spaces", and you WILL
  eventually lose both!

  The strong (e.g. RMS) are asked to water down everything they say
  that might be "sexist" "racist" or in any other way "emotionally
  too challenging", so that "those who are weak and timid might find
  the safe space to contribute to our community".

  This demand, and the faux "consider the weak" so called
  "principle", is the sledge hammer used to suppress free expression,
  to suppress free speech, and to suppress views, positions and
  arguments which "differ from mine, but I cannot defend without
  unfair tactics".

  THIS IS AN ENDEMIC PROBLEM we see all throughout the mainstream
  media today.

  The strong and the principled are pummeled into submission under
  the excuse of "think of the weaklings" which is just the modern day
  variant of "think of the children" - a pathetic attempt, usually
  successful, to appeal to base or raw emotional instinctive
  reactions thus bypassing the critical and reasoning faculties of
  the human mind.

  "Discrimination" used to be an admired thing. Now discrimination is
  "evil" in the popular consciousness, and those who discriminate are
  evil patriarchy.

  And the true evil is that the vilification of "those who
  discriminate" is effectively to justify evil - in this "RMS case",
  the evil 'means' of "vilify RMS, humiliate him by causing his
  resignation from the FSF which HE FOUNDED, and effectively destroy
  his present career" is justified by the ends "we will finally have
  our utopian 'community' where everyone is welcomed, even
  emotionally crippled and psychologically ill humans - yay for
  community!"

  RMS implicitly asks all who cross his path to be robust enough to
  hear contra views, contra positions, to be willing to be challenged
  in their thinking, to be possibly offended in the hearing of
  something they did not expect to hear - words, not sticks and
  stones!

  Those who cannot challenge RMS' "freedom politics" (really, his
  principles so true, so fundamental that these principles cannot be
  successfully challenged), have stooped to using snowflake
  technology to belligerantly hammer Stallman and those like him into
  the ground, whilst feeling powerful with the mob of much of the
  main stream world behind them, heedless of the candles of truth and
  righteousness they snuff out with their egotistical will to destroy
  "freedom politics" in the name of "muh convenience and muh better
  software."

  If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything.

  Create your world,





On Sun, Sep 29, 2019 at 05:38:16PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 11:26:23AM -0400, Ric Moore wrote:
> > On 9/17/19 9:56 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> > 
> > > RMS, founder and originator of the Free Software Foundation, did not
> > > have sufficient support for his simple and straightforward words
> > > about words used to conflate or mislead readers (or listeners) about
> > > Epstein or anyone else for that matter, and RMS has now resigned from
> > > the FSF.
> > 
> > Would you trust RMS to babysit your 8 year old daughter? I bet not. His
> > biggest problem is that he has spouted off for way too many years without
> > being hauled to task for what comes forth from his mouth. He's an idiot, plain
> > and simple, for ignoring "convention" and separating himself from "polite
> > society". No need for me to go into detail, it's all just a google away.  Ric
> 
> Actually yes and without hesitation - I hosted RMS in Sydney some 20
> years ago (spent a few days with him in total), and despite him being
> a little "conversationally confronting", including to me personally,
> he was principled, precise, and caring of other humans, all to a
> fault.
> 
> He gets taken the wrong way sometimes and I get that - haven't we
> all?
> 
> So I did a google for "rms stallman egregious" and came up with the
> below -- all I can see is talk of "precise", email, discussion, and
> -implications- therein.
> 
> And some people got upset or felt confronted and ultimately hold that
> RMS "should be taken down" and that "it's good RMS lost his job at
> the FSF, who gives a rat's arse if he founded it".
> 
> Neither robust, nor permitting of robust conversations, nor
> "intellectually honest", as far as I can tell!
> 
> 
> I believe it is NOT appropriate that we lynch anyone merely for
> differing points of view!
> 
> This is freedom of speech at its absolute most basic.
> 
> Either we hold to the principle, or we are sluts to safe spaces,
> cowering pathetically to the snowflakes of the world.
> 
> 
> No, thank you, but no.  Really, no!  That is not me.
> 
> 
> Here's to the right of not only RMS, but you, I and everyone else, to
> say and argue for and against, whatetever they bloody well choose to.
> 
> This is the world -I- want to live in.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>  https://www.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight/comments/d7v1kf/a_reflection_on_the_departure_of_rms/
> 
>   > While it is true we should not treat Minsky unfairly, it was
>   > not — and is not — a pressing concern, and by making it his
>   > concern, RMS signaled clearly that it was much more important
>   > to him than the question of the institution’s patterns of
>   > problematic coddling of bad behavior.
> 
>   RMS did merely take part in a mailing list discussion, it's the
>   media that blew it up. It's not like he stepped on a pedestal,
>   creating big signals. It's about as public as talking to people in
>   a coffee shop with a journalist eaves dropping in the background.
> 
>   It's a shame really, we can only have those slick politician like
>   lizard tongue PR people in leading positions. The most important
>   quality today is being dishonest and persuasive at the same time,
>   getting away with it.
> 
>   That's how we got the corporate landscape today, that late stage
>   capitalism where politics, media and industry are all alike, all
>   keeping each other in position rather than in check, all infected
>   with the disease of our times. It's disgusting, one ticket to the
>   moon please...
> 
> [And the 3rd comment, most poignant indeed:]
> 
>   I don't understand why society has accepted this concept of "you
>   said a thing I don't like so you don't get to have a job anymore".
>   Like what does one's personal opinions have to do with their job,
>   as long as they're doing their job why does it matter.
> 
> [And perhaps most telling - the "ba da bing, ba da BOOM":]
> 
>   Per Wikipedia, this guy [A KEY RECENT COMPLAINTANT ABOUT RMS] was
>   fired by Stallman in 2001 for failing to perform any work or
>   respond to emails.
>   Did he last speak to Stallman 18 years ago? If not, when?
>   I'd take this account with a huge grain of very salty salt!
> 
> 
>  https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/cr2en6/i_generally_support_stallman_but_come_on/
> 
>   
> 
> 
> 
>  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21055756
> 
>   That's what makes me so furious at the morons who deplatformed RMS
>   over some silly devil's advocate defense of Minsky on an internal
>   mailing list. The guy has an important idea that he put most of
>   his life into developing. In the process, he made programming much
>   more inclusive than anyone could dream about in the days of
>   proprietary operating system with compilers that sold for
>   thousands of dollars. So even if having to deal with a difficult
>   old man makes you feel a little less inclusive, it's not too crazy
>   to give him some breaks. The kids who ran him out of town only
>   know how to destroy, not how to create anything comparable to what
>   he did.
> 
> ...
>   It wasn't just this incident. RMS alienated so many women from
>   open source and free software over the last 30 years, and we've
>   lost all of those potential contributions. He's been getting
>   breaks for 30 years.
> 
>   That he has also done some very good things isn't a good
>   argument for continuing to tolerate his harmful behaviour after
>   he's been asked to fix it for literally decades, and hasn't.
> 
> ...
>   > Which things specifically, and in what way?
> 
>   Saying that we shouldn't call sexual assault "sexual assault", and
>   implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man can
>   "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has extraordinary
>   power over, and who, in in this case was his friend's trafficking
>   victim.
> 
>   The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important than
>   harm in what happened to Giuffre perpetuates rape culture. It
>   perpetuates the idea that women are worth less than men, and that
>   it's okay for famous men in CS to rape girls. That emboldens other
>   rapists and makes CS very unwelcoming for rape victims.
> 
>   Minsky should have known. Implying there's any way what he did was
>   okay creates an unwelcoming environment for women, especially young
>   women and girls at MIT.
> 
>   (Background and links from
>   https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21... ) 
> 
> ...
>    > implying that there's any way a rich, famous, 73-year-old man
>    > can "have sex with" (rape) a 17-year-old girl, whom he has
>    > extraordinary power over, and who, in in this case was his
>    > friend's trafficking victim.
> 
>    ...what are the scare quotes for? Is "have sex with" not a
>    definitional superset of "rape"? As far as I can tell, Stallman
>    does not assert that Giuffre was not raped, only that Minsky would
>    probably not have known. (As far as he knew, she could equally
>    have been one year older and legally, voluntarily engaged in
>    prostitution...?) You could argue that (and I think that if Minsky
>    did indeed have sex with her, you would have a very good case)
>    that Minsky was extremely naive and/or irresponsible to not
>    suspect anything amiss in the setting, but sexual (or any other)
>    assault, in the view of many people, requires intent to harm
>    someone against their will.
> 
>    Here, it seems that the intent, and hence the primary guilt for
>    the assault, most likely was squarely with Epstein and his
>    associates: if a gun salesman takes you to his shooting range and
>    tells you to fire a weapon at a target that he actually secretly
>    tied a person to the back of, and you shoot that person dead, you
>    are not on the hook for murder even if you should really have
>    known that something is off and recall hearing muffled screams
>    from somewhere at one point in hindsight.
> 
>    > The idea that Minsky's "honour" is in any way more important
>    > than harm in what happened to Giuffre
> 
>    Where did Stallman claim that?
>   [NEVER GOT ANSWERED]
>