Imagine a person expresses skepticism of an idea you consider "settled." Do you:
1. demand the person be let go from his/her current position
2. provide evidence that counters the skepticism
If the correct response is (1), then you yourself are at risk of a Stallman exit. Every one of us holds at least one point of skepticism that one or more groups will be deeply offended by.
The liberal idea, under assault form all shades of the political spectrum, depends on (2) being the correct response.
Society can absolutely decide not every point of view is worth debating.
Bad debate at best gives a platform for truly repugnant points of view, and at worst causes human pain as victims feel their pain dismissed.
Just because someone sincerely believes that others are subhuman doesn't mean the conversation ends immediately. We could try providing evidence and clarifying whether they are dead-centre wrong or just dealing with a technical detail before turning to exclusionary tactics.
I mean, seriously. If the choices are (1) end the conversation, try and get someone to resign and (2) try and convince someone to take a different view through conversation over a few days then (2) is far superior. We have a lot of people working in, eg, law and the upper echelons of business who are fantastic contributors to the general good despite having extremely questionable moral stances.
Holocaust deniers used this very tactic under the banner of "skepticism".
They wrote books, they gave speeches. They participated in "academic debate" as if the authenticity of the holocaust was something to be debated.
And they caused a lot of pain to those that did live through the holocaust -- only to hear from someone making false claims that it did not, in fact, happen.
We could have decided that three hundred years ago too, in which case the divine right of kings would still be a thing.
EDIT: A lot of people seem to think that the divine right of kings would not have been a thing worth strongly defending back in the early 1700s - and certainly far more than they would have defended the rights of people in the west indies or far east to not be "raped and killed". Do you have any argument to back this up? Would bumping things to five hundred years change that?
If banning discussion of things outside the overton window wouldn't have had results you'd like then, why would it do so now? There might be reasons! But I haven't heard people bringing them up.
Millions of workers labor under threat of starvation just for standing up for themselves a little bit. Expressing a straightforward opinion like “it is illegal to work off the clock” or “a 30 minute lunch break is mandatory in this state” can be enough to provoke retaliation.
Why are people so eager to spend so much energy defending a guy who, at the very least, wrote a bunch of inappropriate things in a completely inappropriate place?
What’s the slippery slope here? “If a man can’t rant about the unfairness of statutory rape laws on a computer science mailing list, then....” I don’t know how that sentence is supposed to end.
There are so many more important things to worry about. A kook is losing his platform. He’ll have to shout into the void like the rest of us. Oh, the horror!
The slippery slope is that today RMS is the kook, ejected without due process or objective standards.
Tomorrow, you'll be the kook.
For example:
1) Men should be dominant over women. Women should have no rights, and be little more than property.
2) Certain races are inferior and should be put back into chattel slavery.
3) Eating toddlers is fine, actually.
Would you bother trying to counter those ideas in good faith? Or should the people expressing those views maybe be fired/punished/etc.
When you're the head of the FSF, or any other organisation really, you can't just be some kind of agitator, throw out a bunch of controversial nonsense, and then expect it to not look bad for the people you're supposed to represent. It's not an "assault on free speech" to get kicked to the curb for making your organisation look bad, it's cause and effect.
"The literal-minded personalities we often encounter in the engineering profession are just not cognitively capable of handling leadership positions. They suffer from autism, a form of mental illness, and while they are fit for highly logical and problem solving tasks are not fit for tasks that involve social or political decision making. It's important that they be kept away from positions of influence or outward-facing communication and properly managed."
Would you call for that person's resignation? I sure as hell would.
If Stallman thought UFOs were clearly alien spacecraft or that Bigfoot was a real surviving prehistoric hominid, I don't think anyone would care. If he took some positions that were more politically charged, like denying evolution or climate change, people might get mad or call him names but I doubt they'd call for his resignation from the FSF or MIT over it.
There is no broad based "witch hunt" against divergent opinions, but there is a new-found extreme intolerance for a certain narrower set.
The opinions in question are those that denigrate other human beings or deny them equal rights or dignity, such as the choice to engage in pedantic hair splitting to defend the sexual exploitation of children.
Other well known cases of "cancel culture" follow the same pattern: Brendan Eich apparently funding campaigns to deny rights to homosexuals, a Google engineer taking the time to write a wall of text explaining why women are "on average" less suited for engineering work, and so on.
So the question becomes: do you think it's right for society or our peers to react so strongly to those kinds of opinions? Is there value in debating them?
P.S. As for the extreme reaction: sexual abuse of children and adolescents is fairly prevalent. Statistically it's pretty likely that at least a small double-digit percentage of free software authors and people involved in the free software community are victims. Seeing Stallman go out on a limb to defend or at least apologize for that kind of thing probably angered quite a few people for reasons that are entirely understandable, especially in the context of his past comments about pedophilia. Sometimes it's tough to see what the big deal is when it's not about an issue that directly relates to you, hence the artificial example I wrote up above.
The important thing is to agree on the issue at hand: software.
