I'll never forgive the people that tried to kick him out of FOSS projects. He's made such a positive contribution to tech, and we need people like him more than ever.
I'm not going to justify what happened to Richard Stallman because I don't want to dig through that history. Maybe what happened to RMS was wrong, perhaps RMS was wrong. I want to challenge the idea that past positive contribution might justify bad behavior.
Past positive contribution should not be enough to warrant continued involvement if their current contribution is toxic. This isn't just about the future of the projects but also about honoring their past contribution. Toxic leadership is the fastest way to undo previous good works.
I don't remember who led that effort, but Stallman's statement that Epstein's victims likely presented themselves as willing is obvious. He was pushed out for his hypothetical claim that if Minsky wasn't aware of the coercion and did have sex (nobody ever claimed he did), that he was innocent. Did this end up protecting Minsky and others like Stallman wanted?
His claim here that generative AI shouldn't be called intelligent because it generates bullshit is funny because isn't that ~95% of published human writing, like much of what he's experienced directly?
You can debate what "presented as willing" means, and other things, but then you get to the point that many of these girls were 13-16 years old, and generally "looked young" - that was Epstein's modus operandi - he didn't want "plausibly adult" girls (either as a result of his own proclivities, or to further his (alleged/hypothesized) attempts at blackmail, or both). As Donald Trump famously said, "many of them on the younger side". Ghislaine Maxwell was introduced to Trump at 14 - and said she was 14 at the time.
So then you run into this awkward thing of how many plausible deniability criteria are we going to work with? "Presented as willing"? "Never asked age"? What else?
These are all valid points, but Stallman never said anything to defend either Epstein or his associates. I’m not advocating for Stallman’s position either by questioning if it was effective or by laying it out here, but this is the subject that got him in trouble
Stallman basically believes in freedom, love, and the precise use of language. He doesn’t even like people using “they” pronouns, preferring other gender-neutral pronouns like “pers,” because it’s singular. That’s the kind of argument he usually gets into.
Here, he was objecting to the use of the term “sexual assault” for people who had only been accused but not found guilty of anything because it carries so much force. He attempted to show that most plausible situations didn’t involve force or coercion on the part of the accused in this case. He doesn’t care about the consensus popular or legal definition of “sexual assault,” only the most precise one.
His problem is he doesn't know when to keep his Goddamn mouth shut. Talking about free software is one thing. Holding forth on the nuance of what is and isn't child abuse, in a society where anything more moderate than "feed the pedos feet first into a woodchipper and let God sort 'em out" is fundamentally untenable, is quite another. Even if he were technically right, especially given his history of massive faux pas in this particular area, he should have kept his opinions to himself.
> His job is to be a gigantic neckbeard. That he is uncouth and pedantic is not only expected, but the reason that many of us have jobs.
His job is to give talks about Free Software, its ethics and benefits. Being uncouth and pedantic and a giant neckbeard is not at all required to do his job. In fact as time goes on and the programming community diversifies beyond being primarily composed of people who look, think and act like him and share his proclivities, his personality and behavior hinder the cause more than help.
But of course, many of his supporters only see though the lens of culture war, so there's really no point in doing anything but wait for him to die so the free software movement can move on from him and his cult.
Can't we have some safety for pedantic nerds in computing of all fields?
It's also amazing to me that RMS was the only person at MIT to see consequences. All these prominent MIT people had Epstein connections, but the guy who's too weird to even get invited is the one we scapegoat? Over ill-advised forum posts?
Richard Stallman is the safest, most protected pedantic nerd in pedantic nerd-dom. He resigned from the FSF and was just let back in because he's Richard Stallman, without so much as a vote or a note to the membership.
I get the feeling you're trying to turn this into a "normies hating the neurodivergent" argument or something, which I've seen done countless times in defense of RMS, but that isn't what this is about. No one is out to get the guy who's too weird. He defended pedophilia passionately in those ill-advised posts for years and only bothered to retract after the whole debacle went down. Only once, afaik, almost as an afterthought. And he had a history of creepy behavior towards women that people aggressively ignore, discount or otherwise invalidate.
This is the issue - The reaction to him and to his words was perfectly reasonable even if he didn't mean what people thought he meant. If RMS were anyone but the ur-neckbeard "install Gentoo" avatar of nerdkind, with his history and paper trail, no one here would be giving him the benefit of the doubt.
That this is the first thing people talk about now is the point. It's not even relevant if RMS was right or wrong, it was that he lacked any awareness of how his argument must look to most bystanders.
As Cardinal Richelieu said: If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
It's perfectly clear what Stallman said and what he meant by it. But if there are bystanders with their own agendas, perhaps Stallman isn't the problem here.
It's not at all clear to me. I still don't get why he elaborated on his naive nonsense instead of just sticking with "let's maybe not judge dead people when they can't defend themselves for things that have not yet been proven even in other cases".
