Richard Stallman Has Been Vilified by Those Who Don’t Know Him

For the record, as someone who saw that whole movement first hand, I disagree with the whole “free love” movement and think sex should only be done in a lifetime monogamous commitment.

I have met and have had dinner with RMS; he came off to me as a very kind person who has very strong principles. I do not see the imaginary monster that the outrage clickbait media is trying to make RMS be in him.

That was not the Stallman I saw at CSAIL. There are many good things to be said about Stallman, but in multiple years there I never saw either tolerance or inclusivity.

(source: former FSF board member)

Seems like he still holds a grudge.

Isn't it stange that the other one calling out Stallman, Matthew Garret, is a Googler too?

Furthermore his quotes are pretty fucking creepy.

I've heard nasty things come out of that man and I have no interest in listening to him.

The truth is that people make mistakes. People are entitled to their own opinions, however much you may disagree with them. The world exists outside one's self, and any one person just a small, small part of it. The world is not to blame if I feel hurt or threatened, and life is not fair. But within this world we have complete freedom. Do not try to take that away.

https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/1073234104311734273

Most of "examples" that were in circulation for past days were usually misunderstood jokes that others made at his expense. Seriously - how can one treat somebody mentioning "if he ever hits on you, just tell him you use vim" as an example of what's wrong with rms seriously? Stories about plants being kept by female professors just to scare him away? Please. You need to be completely missing the context to interpret it even remotely close to how it's being used now.

What exactly are you claiming he did to harass people?

What exactly did he do that was inappropriate?

Autism isn't an excuse for bad behavior. It can explain some bad behavior, but that bad behavior cannot continue over decades; it must be dealt with in some manner.

I cannot believe people keep defending him given the accounts of what he's actually done (assuming you believe the accounts). What about the women who have been creeped out or harassed by him, or who have left the field because of him? Don't they get any consideration?

As Matthew Garrett has pointed out (through personal experience with RMS), "the problem isn't that he's unable to understand, the problem is that he's unwilling to"[0]. So I don't buy the "because autism" line here.

[0] https://twitter.com/mjg59/status/1172422966904160257

We have indications from many of those closest to RMS that he was willfully dismissive of others feelings. It wasn’t that he was unaware, he was both aware of his difficulties reading others, and made a choice to be dismissive.

It’s painful, I get it. I met RMS many times and still consider him to be one of our era’s great minds and one who’s actions have had nothing short of an incredible impact on society. However, he has–despite this article from his publicist–a long history of bad actions.

I believe there should always be a path forward if people wish to remain a public figure. But this path can’t start with easily disprovable excuses.

If someone cannot handle social situations without making people feel unsafe they should not be in a leadership position.

(I can't find any actual reference to him being autistic on the web. Please enlighten me.)

I keep hearing this - has he ever been diagnosed?

Why do people keep saying this?

In the meantime a completely mentally disabled person is leading the country and attacking every imaginable person in the world for years and… nothing happens at all!

Weird times.

this is literally the "we need better mental health facilities because of gun violence" argument. the vast majority of autistic people do not behave like stallman. it's not a pass. if he's so fucking smart why didn't he figure out how to comport himself better amongst the normies?

That's quite bleak.

Could you provide some actual evidence of RMS being formally diagnosed as autistic?

Because otherwise you're basically spreading a rumor that RMS has a mental disorder, which is not right.

Please. He's not been "autistic" in that conversation thread. He's been rational. That's not a kind of disability that needs to be excused.

Certainly we can't discount logic, but praising logic as some sort of solution, while ignoring people's emotions, is a great way to be completely ineffective at, well, nearly everything.

Indeed, and that deserves some emphasis, I think. Applying "logic" to complex issues in real life is fraught with difficulties, because there aren't really any obviously and fully true premises to base logical arguments on in the first place, and a lot of common sense or "self-evident" inferences are either false or only weakly or unreliably true.

Experience and feelings encode a lot of implicit knowledge about how the world works. When someone makes a dispassionate "logical" argument, they essentially throw these heuristics away and instead work their way up from axioms. Which sounds good in theory, until you realize these axioms are simplistic assumptions that often fail. For example, you might base an economic theory upon the axiom that economic actors are rational. In reality, though, that's not true, and you'd be better off incorporating some of your personal experiences and feelings because they may give you an intuitive grasp of when to trust the axiom, and when not to.

Logical, dispassionate arguments are (not always, but often) like arguments about spherical cows. Sure, they are technically valid, but they rely on simplifying assumptions, sometimes to the point of uselessness. The people who do that have undue confidence in a lot of platitudes, which makes them blind to the fact they are building their arguments on sand.

I think it's right to shut up when "logic" hurts people's feelings AND there's nothing to gain from saying it, but when there's an injustice and we can at least try to fight back, I think the right thing to do is just saying the "logical" truth, even if people's feelings get hurt.

I don't mean to say that my view is always the correct one, but rather that there's some subjacent right, "logical" system that we should strive to discover and apply. My opinion is simply my best effort at trying to discover that subjacent truth.

Please don't create accounts to break HN's guidelines with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Imagine that multiplied by all the someones that didn't do any of the things that had an awkward/offensive interaction with Stallman did those things.

These behaviours, ESPECIALLY by someone in such a influential position in our industry, have a chilling effect on every person they affected.

Many incidents have occurred, enough to demonstrate that they’re a trend rather than “the first” one-off.

Many folks have noted that most people in Stallman’s position would have chose to learn to be better people to those around them.

He did not make that choice, and the result is that many stories told about him paint him in a severely negative light.

Please don’t use threats here; “I better not see anyone here [any action here]” has no place in this forum’s conversations.

(For anyone that reading, no, my observation here is not making a claim about the justness of the treatment of RMS, if you can’t see that upon a re-read you too may be projecting.)

Except he keeps making the same point. He has not changed his mind about images of child sexual abuse. He now knows that these cause harm to the people shown in them, but he thinks censorship is worse than that harm.

And you're entirely missing the point. It doesn't matter if he has changed his mind.

He must know that child abuse is an emotive topic. He must understand that the emotion imposes an extra responsibility to be careful with the way he says things.

His point - that he isn't sure if child abuse is harmful or not - was very easy to find information about. There's a wide range of reputable sources that discuss the harms caused by images of child sexual abuse and by child abuse. Mostly, we have testimony from the abuse people themselves. This stuff is not hidden away, and it appears to have been persuasive to him. So he just didn't bother looking before he made his comments.

Then he should directly comment on all of the statements on the subject he has made over the years [1], particularly since they still exist on his personal website in unedited form, and are easily linked. Honestly, he could easily go back and write an "Updated: I no longer think this because X. I held this idea for a long time because Y."

He hasn't done that. He's free not to do so if he chooses, though I think this is one of the things he needs to shore up if he is to recover his reputation. I had no knowledge of these quotes prior to this incident, and while I still support free software, I will look to other folks for leadership on the topic.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=pedophile+site%3Astallman.or...

Also, for what it's worth, I think defending something somebody said by calling it an "unpopular opinion" is a really easy trope to fall into that makes your tone seem dismissive to the opposing viewpoint (the "popular" viewpoint).

Now, that doesn't mean that RMS (or anyone else) absolutely certainly deserves being vilified by people who don't know them, but the entire premise is false: knowing someone (personally, I assume is the implication?) is not a necessary condition for condemning their behavior.

why? i don't understand this. if he's entitled to his unpopular opinions why in the world isn't everyone else held to the same standard? i'm entitled to my unpopular opinion (at least on hn) that he's a socially inept idiot who shouldn't be in a public facing position. will i be spared downvotes and a slew of responses harassing me? i doubt it (it's already happened twice).

this has literally always been in the court of public opinion because guess what? he's not an engineer and we're not assessing the quality of his work here - we're assessing his ability to be a public persona.

I am "healthily skeptical" about the moral compass of people who use serial child rapists as a springboard to questions about consent on the part of minors.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile_sexual_abuse_scan...

> 05 June 2006 (Dutch paedophiles form political party)

> Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.

> [Reference updated on 2018-04-25 because the old link was broken.]

> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.

https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20Jun...

> 04 January 2013 (Pedophilia)

> There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

> Granted, children may not dare say no to an older relative, or may not realize they could say no; in that case, even if they do not overtly object, the relationship may still feel imposed to them. That's not willing participation, it's imposed participation, a different issue.

http://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_January_20... / https://stallman.org/archives/2013-jan-apr.html#04_January_2...

(Note the site is currently being _very_ slow to load, so the second one is quoted from the most recent Internet Archive)

They've been on his site for over decade, certainly longer than I've been a programmer (>8 years)

[0] https://stallman.org/cgi-bin/showpage.cgi?path=/archives/201...

To me this whole ordeal is simple to look at:

RMS: created software that shaped today's world and hurt some people's feelings.

RMS' criticizers: ...?

The same reason we use people's names. Or their nicknames. Or their middle names sometimes. Or their stage names, noms de plume, or noms de guerre. When you are introduced to someone you expect to be spending some time around, you might ask them, "Do you prefer Henry or Hank? Charles or Chuck? William or Bill?" And if they say, "Actually, I use my middle name, David." you wouldn't immediately say, "I'll go ahead and use your full first name because it's an equally equivalent name for you, because I'm respecting the concept of you.

Culturally, we already accept a wide variety of markers for people in a host of different situations, and have generally settled on "it's polite to try and refer to people in the way they prefer."

To me, it's as if RMS had posted a blog post that said, "I propose we use only people's full and legal names when referring to them, because I believe that system works better."

I have no reason to think Stallman didn't support whatever gender people in whatever roles, he seems more like a gender nihilist than anything. But it's pretty weird to spend time arguing with people about what their own personal experience is and I can see why it would make someone uncomfortable and unwelcome. It's very intrusive.

It's this exhausting, endless series of crusades against these utterly ridiculous things because of some kind of poorly defined principle.

Like history has decided hundreds of years ago that singular "they" is entirely appropriate, just as singular "you" is in common-use. Language changes. That's why we don't write "ye" any more, mostly because we decided to kick the letter þ (thorn, or "th") to the curb.

I think one of the tensions here is between people who think that providing one non-gendered pronoun is a sufficient individual vs. societal customization setting versus those who think that every(-ish) stated individual pronoun choice being mandatory is the appropriate and respectful customization setting.

I first started thinking about these issues not from a trans / non-binary / fluid direction, but from the point of view of removing unnecessary gendering when it was irrelevant to the situation under discussion. So, from that perspective a single unambiguous non-gendered pronoun seemed sufficient.

I wasn't looking at things in terms of providing people with fine-grained customization to express themselves.

I find the desire for fine-grained gender-expression customization in tension with the desire to de-emphasize gender. But I can also see how he/she/they sounds suspiciously like he/she/other(not normal) and could be interpreted as alienating or insulting.

I still don't really understand, but frankly I don't have much skin in the game.

I'm half and half white/black so I've never really felt the urge to identify with either. I identify as a tennis player or scientist or programmer.

We live in a society where these days lefties are not disadvantaged, although they were brutalized in the past, and I see no intense desire among lefties to identify as lefties. It makes me wonder whether, if we did not brutalize non cis-gender conforming people, would we see such intense desire for recognition and affirmation of fine-grained gender identity? But obviously we don't live in that world yet.

I may have offended someone here, but I hope it's clear from my care and tone that it's not from a place of disrespect, but one of unfamiliarity and desire to understand.

EDIT> By "lefties", I mean left-handed people.

For progress to be possible, people must be able to say offensive things that others find unpleasant.

You might say, but it’s not those kinds of “harmful” views we want to stop, only the genuinely harmful ones. But who gets to decide which views are harmful?

On a different note, I think that, for creativity, it’s important to be able to think and express yourself without always needing to second guess yourself. And I think we’re creating a society where everyone has to always second guess everything they think and say in case they accidentally say something that may bring in the outrage mob, either now or at some point anywhere potentially years later.

I'll repeat what I said above, this is why his ouster should have been through a fair hearing rather than in a hurried response to public intrigue.

i cannot think of a more principled and consistent individual in the realm of technology than RMS, nor someone who's actually completely trustworthy in this day and age. in the tech sphere his logic was talmudic as far as i can tell: not only that, but his principles probably cost him millions of dollars or more - whatever some BigCorp could pay him to shut the hell up, or buy/relicense GCC, or whatever.

honestly, it's a miracle that everything isn't completely proprietary already. that RMS and others were able to hold that line, to the extent that they did, against the money their enemies had, was nothing short of heroic.

who is next in line? who else can you trust in a world of selling every morsel of data, invading every possible private nook of our lives still remaining? i really can't think of anyone off the top of my head. unfortunately, that means we'll probably even faster acceleration of proprietary crapware added in to various devices.

that he's insufferable or whatever in person is regrettable, but one cannot merely ignore the insanely principled views he espoused, contributions he made, and rights he defended for the sake of anyone consuming technology today.

I'm trying to keep an open-mind here. But can anyone cite specific examples of a person that Stallman hurt in some way or another? And I'm willing to take a very liberal definition for "hurt" here.

Because Stallman's "toxicity" keeps getting brought up again and again. Yet no specific instances are being cited besides vague rumors, anonymous claims, or "you know it, I know it, everybody knows it" type allusions.

So, it's just a simple request. Any actual, specific, non-anonymous claim of somebody being hurt by Richard Stallman in some identifiable way. (For example Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey would have no trouble meeting this criteria.) Maybe, I'm just out of the loop, but I'm certainly seeing a repeated pattern or allusions without specifics in these threads.

Let's say then, if we want to enforce some kind of hard limit on what other people are allowed to do or not to do (and even on the kind of people they want to be), that there must be objective and shared ways to establish harm. It cannot be sufficient for someone to say "I felt harmed" to exclude someone else from society (because this what being silenced and removed from one's job means). And we need to have the courage to doubt those who claim they've felt harmed, and to draw a line between tolerable and intolerable amounts of harm (as every action can end up harming somebody, even slightly).

Turns out that laws do precisely this, and define harm in objective ways that allow society to agreee on behaviours that should be punished without limiting personal liberty in arbitrary ways.

Frankly, I think this is ridiculous.

At issue, negative beliefs are postulated to be the cause of social ills such as racism and sexism. Therefore, what Richard Stallman believes is the core objection, because simply holding a belief is now viewed as the root of injustice. To wit, you see, again and again, attempts to claim moral credit from the leveling the assertion that Richard Stallman is a toxic asshole guilty of no particular crime, but instead an accrued debt of micro-aggressions that together represent a pattern of behavior unambiguously identifying his as a thought criminal.

Seriously. He once messed up a hotel room, and had a sign on his office door, and clumsily asked someone on a date. From this we know that he has harmful opinions.

If it were just any one of these things, perhaps there'd be some room left to think it's all a misunderstanding, to wonder if he doesn't actually believe this or that... which we must indecently rush to exclaim that we certainly do not also believe! oh no! I, for one, think stigmatizing people for their beliefs is wrong, which is why I have never messed up a hotel room or caused anybody pain! Cancel RMS!

It is extremely painful dealing with this level of dishonesty. Perhaps RMS's thoughts on free software are more relevant than his opinions on other things, and we should ignore his thoughts on the age of consent, because, if we don't, we're going to find that there has never once been a good idea from a mind that did not also harbor bad ideas.

Whose? Isn't that exactly the issue?

It depends on other people around you, too!

If people around me are scumbags and they get offended for reminding them what they are, I think it's alright.

It sure is. By shutting up and never speaking your opinions or thoughts to anyone. That's what you and half the people on this thread are advocating for. That people should only share opinions that the rest of society agrees with lest someone somewhere be offended. As if to be offended is to be physically harmed. Otherwise, should one dare to speak, one should be fired and ostracized. Frankly, that's one sick and boring society that's will produce little to nothing of value. Who knows what other voices will be silenced by this kind of censorship? No one will know because in this society of self censorship, people will be too afraid to voice any kind of opinion. That's the type of place America is becoming and the type of society it is trying to export to the rest of the world. Having lived in a society where the vast majority were afraid of speaking anything against the norms, I can tell you it was a horrible place, full of fear with little room for creativity or advancement of any sort. Yet here in America, where one is protected from the government, this growing movement of censorship is created by the people themselves, as if in the absence of government censorship, many Americans take it upon themselves to create an institution of censorship to prevent any and all discourse, creative thought, and advancement. They do the censorship for the government the government can't do for itself.

Ironic and ugly this society that has been created. So much for freedom. Whatever little freedom the government has left to the people, the people here are choosing to take it away from themselves. All so someone somewhere doesn't get offended. Of course, someone will always be offended. That's what great writers and thinkers and inventors and creators do: they offend. When you lose that, you lose all innovation and even the ability to think critically about anything. You end up with a conformist monoculture that cannot fathom of anything different. So much for diversity.

When nonconformity is the norm, it becomes conformity

Because they are the people who have been made uncomfortable by his behavior. If it were men, or also men, I'm sure the parent post would have read "men or women". This is not an abstract case, so implying that somehow men are underrepresented when dealing with a person whose (alleged) behavior has been targeted at women sounds a little petty.

Imagine someone is accused of abusing children, and the local prosecutor says "if we find that any children have been harmed, we will press charges". Do you really think you need to correct them by saying "but what about adults?" It's unnecessary, and distracts from the actual case.

If flamebait is off limits, why aren't good-stallman / bad-stallman articles on an indefinite hiatus?

I think that Trump be ousted via impeachment or in the next election, and then there will be an international sigh of relief, and a lot of these outraged mobs will stop gnashing their teeth so much. Everybody will go back to enjoying the amenities provided by the decline of human civilization.