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- the MIT mailing list discussion of a few years ago where he got a lot of flakes for what I indeed believe was a lot of misunderstanding. He seemed reasonable to me, but you really need subtle and careful reading to notice this. It was easy to misread and understand the contrary of was he thinks. I think he should have refrained from participating in this discussion though. While I don't know if it was intentionally driven by opponents, I do think he was defamed a lot, regardless one's opinion on this story.
- his inappropriate behavior with women, who mostly had to (find tricks to) avoid him, from was I read there and there. I don't think he is misogynistic (many examples on stallman.org supports the opposite) but I believe there's no excuse for this inappropriate behavior if true. He should have shown more respect and learned to avoid making people and women in particular uncomfortable. He is incredibly clever, I can't imagine he would be unable to learn what patterns to avoid, he should have bothered more. I know it's difficult in particular for some autistic people (which he might be) to take hints, but I also know some who became incredibly good at it after learning (better than non-autistic people even, precisely because it was a conscious process - not saying it's easy; it is exhausting for some people). And it does not require being able to take subtle hints to avoid obvious sexist behavior. I was thinking of this and the many times he was mean to someone when I mentioned "unacceptable" in my first comment.
I've worked with some very clever people in the past, and many of them are indeed no longer around (in the industry) because of their flabbergasting capacity to not pick up on 'patterns' that would save them from social assassination.
As well as the rest of the population can learn about the difficulties autistic people can encounter in a mostly non-autistic setting and be more understanding / show some empathy.
It's a long way though.
Intent, outcome and self-image can drift apart quite substantially. Few misogynists would consider themselves as such. Usually because misogynist behavior is still considered normal by quite a few people and pushback against the status quo comes at a social cost.
Let me precise my phrasing: you might have read this thing with "really subtle and careful reading" and reached a different opinion from mine. I believe it. It's fine. But I do maintain that, in any case, you need really subtle and careful reading to avoid jumping to widely wrong conclusions. I think it was easy to understand horrible things from his wording by skipping a word or two or thinking too fast. The thing with Stallman in particular is that he is particularly very careful with his wording, and I think this whole MIT discussion was no counterexample to this. It's up to us to understand the right thing and it is clear that strongly different interpretations emerged this time, for some reason. And what's worse is that his clarifications might have strengthened both interpretations.
Anyway, that's why I said "Regardless on one's opinion" on the matter. It's easy to find inappropriate comments on RMS that defame him.
A lot of people need to learn that culturally engrained bad behaviors aren't the same as intentionally being a bad person. But neither does it free you from responsibility for your behavior.
I don't agree. I questioned his statements quite hard. Because I already knew at the time that he was not well-behaved with women.
Now, be aware that I almost fully agree with the rest of this comment and your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37699851#37702338. [*]
What one thinks / what one's ideals are is different from how one actually behaves. Especially when speaking about sexism. Apart from obviously bad behavior, there are many things we do that are sexist without even us noticing and it's important to be aware of this so it can be fixed.
[*] With a difference: I understand a "misogynist" as someone who actively dislike women. See [1]. Sexism ≠ misogyny.
Hang on, no. It's those that claim that someone is misogynistic (let alone very misogynistic) that has the burden of showing that the accused has hatred or prejudice against women, not on others to disclaim it.
If, to that, we add the absolute vilification against anyone trying to defend the accuse, then the allegations can't be evaluated properly in such an environment and deserve nothing but dismissal.
Is that how we operate now? You have to see evidence that a claim isn't true?
Really? Should OP just bask in Stallman's glory and not notice things that were bad etiquette even in the Victorian era?
Stallman's done some amazing somethings, some average things and some repugnant things (including the field of software engineering/Free Software; see the Emacs and GCC forks, his maintanership of Emacs in the latter part of his time as main maintainer, etc).
No. But I 'm not sure whether you 've read OP's other comments in this topic (about Stallman's cancer), some of which are hidden due to downvotes.