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I'm talking about there being options other than either "giving him a pass" or "off with his head."
After almost 30 years of people giving him a pass and trying to make him understand, I am glad that he is getting some reckoning. His views are abhorrent and he gives no indication he is willing to change them.
[1] - https://fossforce.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/RMSleisure....
The text is: sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance tender embraces unusual sense of humor [contact details]
There is perfectly benign interpretation of this expressing the things from which he derives pleasure. The most plausible and available interpretation of "pleasure card" is a dad joke level word play on "business card", especially when considering his role in de-commercializing software.
Talking to women isn't a crime. If he didn't take no for an answer or asked women out in inappropriate circumstances, that's a problem; but we have no accounts of him doing that. All we have here is an Nth hand story [3] in which he supposedly left a conference with a woman (singular, you made it plural.) and then gave her his card. If we choose to imagine there was romantic intent, a) there's no suggestion he coerced her into leaving and b) he took pains to respect the conference's CoC. Even this extremely reaching accusation has zero implication that he disrespected an individual's volition. Sage Sharp's indictment that he "skirted around the conference's CoC" is bizarre unless the real intent is that men like Stallman should be closeted heterosexuals.
There are numerous aspects to all this hand wringing about his cards and interest in meeting women that one has to choose to view through a prurient lens to make it sexual. Even then, it's only problematic to a puritanical world view in which it's wrong for people to be sexual beings and individuals are dispossessed of their self-determination.
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch14.html [2] http://ju.outofmemory.cn/entry/119457 [3] https://twitter.com/_sagesharp_/status/1173637158181072900
This just happened. Let's check in with him in six months, and see if he's still breathing. If his experience is like many of the shitty men whose misbehavior has been unmasked as part of the MeToo movement, I'm sure he'll end up back on his feet at some point, whether he deserves to or not.