Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

He is welcome to his thoughts and opinions, and everyone else is entitled to their freedom not to associate with him as a result.

View on HN

More to the point, everyone else is entitled to their freedom to associate with him, despite his thoughts and opinions. He is entitled to be the head of the GNU project because it's his fucking project. And if other people are willing to contribute money or code to that project, fucking FINE.

That's what this is about. Sarah Mei is coming from a place of, "Because RMS said this Very Bad Thing, no one should associate with him at all." Carrying with it an implied threat: if you continue to associate with a Bad Person, then you are a Bad Person and maybe whoever signs your checks should know just what a Bad Person you are.

FWIW I have never heard of Sarah Mei until today. I had a quick look at her Twitter account. There must be over 100 tweets and retweets about Stallman and the FSF over 10 days, that's when I stopped scrolling.

I have no horse in this race, this is too much of a hot topic to take a stance about personally, but I can't say I'm enjoying the modern viral Twitter shit-storm phenomenon very much.

The loudest campaign, wrong or right, wins by deafening everybody and amplifying their moral stance through that platform.

I have nothing against Mei personally, but I _loathe_ the modern Twitter driven moralism. Does everything have to be a crusade?

People have literally written the same thing about me and DNSSEC, both here and on Twitter. If you don't want to pay attention to Sarah Mei, you don't have to. People are allowed to decide what they care about, and to advocate for those things.

That being the case, Stallman is free to ignore his critics (and probably has; I think this is probably just vandalism).

Indeed. When he resigned from the FSF, I wondered myself -- was that a concession of defeat or a mic drop?

It was a concession of defeat; the Free Software Foundation does not belong to Richard Stallman.

> He is entitled to be the head of the GNU project because it's his fucking project.

Sure, but others are entitled to tell him he should step down, and he's entitled to do so if he feels like it.

Exactly. We could actually be more inclusive if we simply focused on people's actions within their domain, and ignored any flippant, tactless, or awkward _statement_ they may make when talking of other things.

That's a literal definition of the word "inclusive" that is at odds with its idiomatic meaning.

Yes! That is the paradox. The narrower the focus of your group, the more people you can include because they don't have to agree on all these other issues, too.

And that is precisely the problem - not that the Government or other explicit power structure is stepping on him, but that it's becoming fashionable for individuals to refuse to associate with anyone who has said or done anything they don't like, regardless of how much good they have done or how nice and helpful they have been otherwise.

Political changes tend to follow behind cultural changes here. If this cultural change has legs, then I have to wonder how long it will be before the Government does start acting more directly against anyone who has views outside of the mainstream. Social Credit score, anyone?

I really don't see anything "precise" in the way you've connected the dots from "people exercising their right not to associate with others whose behavior offends them" to "the Government is going to enact a social credit score".

Government Social Credit Scores are bad. It does not follow that people don't have reputations.

Heh, when your org’s image is a hostage of few short-minded haters, it is not particularly strong definition of freedom. Those haters could unassociate with him by simply not associating. “Remove <humanname>” is completely different.

That's true, I agree. But then everyone loses what he has to offer as well ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com