RMS is a great man but sadly has difficulties communicating with the wider world. This has been true of many great minds throughout history. It's sad to see it happen to one of my own heroes but I believe history will do him justice if we continue to fight for free software.
I wish somebody would have simply advised him not to speak on such matters because nothing good could become of it. Maybe he needed a PR manager. That sounds awful, but apparently this is what the world wants: carefully filtered speech that doesn't stray far from what people already agree with.
But look past that into what was happening.
Stallman was trying to defend Minsky who had sex with someone, a teenager, nearly 60 years younger than him on a billionaire's private island. There isn't an imaginable circumstance where what happened there was not, even in the best possible light, incredibly creepy.
His intellectual arguments were understandable in a way, but in the context of defending Minsky and in the venue they were wildly inappropriate and indefensible.
It doesn't matter how "great" you are or how socially awkward, any institution should fire you for doing something like that.
Comments here seem to mostly equate this situation to a Cancel Culture outcry over an isolated remark. That's not what happened here. rms has had decades of inexcusable behavior for any individual, much less someone affiliated with MIT and heading something as large as FSF. He had to answer for this eventually.
I sincerely appreciate his contributions to this world. But I also sincerely feel that we can't give people free passes for their behavior (see: courtesy cards at conferences) just because they've done well in other respects. We need to end the acceptance of Brilliant Jerks.
RMS points out that she did not ever say that she and Minksy had sex, although the prosecutor implied it, and there was a witness account that Minsky declined and warned someone else about what happened during the event. Pointing this out should not be a problem.
So please look past the media's witch hunt and into what's actually been said.
However I can’t seem to find the original documents to verify that.
And reading too much about Giuffre, my god. The list of powerful people.
Epstein must of had blackmail on everyone.
Almost like a cartel leader in their nation, he made big philanthropic donations for good press and then kept many of the world’s richest and most powerful people under his thumb.
Why the hell the Media never puts up links to direct sources is what frustrates me the most. There's been some bad cases of this lately.
Minksy DIDN'T had the sex.
What the court documents said is:
A woman, that at the time was 17, said Epstein told her to OFFER sex to Minsky.
And another person that was present, Greg Benford, said that Minsky refused the offer.
Nowhere was stated that sex happened.
Here for example https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/computer-scientist-richard...
It went from "defended Minsky", to "Victims Were ‘Entirely Willing’" to "defended Epstein".
> Stallman was trying to defend Minsky who had sex with someone
I think that he was just trying to be rational. But being rational against a lynching mob is not a good idea (and hasn't ever been in human history).
> but in the context of defending Minsky and in the venue they were wildly inappropriate and indefensible
Would you mind expanding on that? Say that someone claimed that Stalin drank the blood of his victims, would it be "inappropriate and indefensible" to try to debunk such a claim (and thus defend Stalin) in the process?
Of course not.
Then, where is the line? If not 18, then, 25? 30? I get why it would be creepy from the perspective of the woman wanting to be with an old man, but why exactly is the man himself a creep?
IMO, all adults are attracted to the younger opposite sex. Men have a biological drive to be attracted to women who will give birth to healthy babies, survive the birth, and live long enough lives to ensure that child is supported.
I'm 30 now. I hope people never regard me as a creep for masterbating when I'm 60 to the teen section of PornHub.
The world needs everyone to speak about every topic. If we all self censor then only the extremists will be speaking.
actually stallman was one of the extremists and he wasn't happy if somebody with the middle ground spoke about free software/open source software.
Let's never forget that famous G.B. Shaw quotation, always appropriate in such situations. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/692.html
I don't want to live in a world where everyone has to take great care all the time to fulfil the FotM expectations of certain noisy people who believe they're a majority.
It's a hard balancing act, on the one hand people need to be able to deal with facts and reality, even if it's offensive to them. On the other hand we don't want our speech to act as sand in the machinery of communication.
Stallman:
> the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.
Selam G.
> [Stallman] says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”.
VICE:
> Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked.
New York Post:
> MIT scientist says Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was ‘entirely willing’
It could be true.
I'm not saying I agree with him or that I would have said the same things (I'm no Stallman, nobody cares about what I say anyway) but what he said was just the result of logical reasoning
For example if you look at the titles it's easy to dismiss RMS as someone who favours rapists, but in the article he's always quoted in full and the things he said are a bit different
For example quoting the VICE article
> RMS: “it is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”
And he's not entirely wrong.
Rape in rape even in space at the age of 93.
> Computer scientist Richard Stallmann, who defended Jeffrey Epstein...
> the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.
stop. stop and think about this. you’re telling me that some random person on the internet can sit there and claim, with a straight face, decades removed from the event, and completely unaware of what went down in that room, that “the most plausible scenario” is that she was willing? are you kidding me? how do you know? he wasn’t there. he doesn’t know this person. and why is this so plausible? on what actual basis here is he making this statement? oh, that’s right, nothing except his own prejudices.
he doesn’t know a damned thing about what happened in that room, and for him to jump to the conclusion that, well obviously, she wanted it, is freaking absurd.
he entirely deserves to get pilloried for this statement alone. he had no business jumping into this discussion, he has absolutely no basis on which to make his judgements except his high opinion of himself, and to go out of his way to engage in a public debate about such a highly sensitive subject when he knows jack squat about it shows an incredible lack of judgement.
the media didn’t do this to RMS, he did.
As we know, rms is a very dear person to most of the Computer Science and programmer community.
Through the years, he's said many shocking things. We've often disagreed with him. He's been extremely stubborn.
At some points it's been comical.
Yet we still see him as a technology treasure, and we should keep this in mind before judging him harshly based on a single e-mail.
rms is actually reacting logically here, yet also emotionally as he's wanting to protect his friend - the late Marvin Minsky. Seemingly by letting go of common sense, and sure enough this is just cause for harsh criticism.
But by simply removing a living legend from his position because he's not able to be politically correct, is far worse in my opinion. (I assume he was asked to leave).
This same lack of political correctness also happens to be one of his strengths. It built his character. It's not perfect.
I don't know what more to write at this point. It's ridiculous and turning into a witch hunt against someone we actually owe a great deal of gratitude.
That is what he was defending. The intellectual quibbles about this and that he was bringing up are irrelevant when faced with the above fact.
That isn't about political correctness, it isn't a "witch hunt". RMS did something incredibly inappropriate in an incredibly inappropriate place and was fired. He deserved it.
I have a soft spot for RMS like other people do but I don't want to donate to the FSF while he is talking this way as its president.
Maybe he is also a victim of his success. Free software has come so far in the past few decades that it's not as important as other social issues in computing at this point in time.
Imagining his (incorrect, head canon-fueled) pedanticism is “logical” is an insult to logic.
Apart from a very few, every accomplished technologist have started using Twitter and their followers to attack others. This is nothing but the witch hunt from medieval times done differently.
I have interacted with RMS in Emacs developer list, he has a strong opinion and nothing more, nothing less. He is not trying to create a mob and nor is he starting an upraising. If you have an opinion, voice it and leave it. Yes, I agree RMS needed a PR to tread the land mine ridden modern life.
Overall, it is sad to see RMS and his work getting trivialized for totally unrelated reasons.
Is that unrelated, trivial behavior that should be ignored?
This isn't a witch hunt, what he did was wildly inappropriate and the number of people defending his behavior because he's quirky and did great things is a little disgusting.
Edit:
I'm not saying the work of a person can't be good if he did bad things.
I think it's important not to glorify people.
Free software is important for all of us, but so is a stand against sexsim or the likes.
No one really needed media sensationalism to draw a pattern of behavior unbefitting the leadership of the FSF. That some random people overstated some aspects of his Epstein thoughts isn't really why this happened.
It's also a bit ironic you've decided to call it a witch hunt. Witch hunts happened when folks decided to start blaming women for everything without even a veneer of logic or civility. And here we are with a man, having possessed a long history of specific behaviors, being called to account for exactly those behaviors. It's ironic simply because the privileges RMS was exercising are so ingrained in your worldview that demanding he stop treating women like lesser beings is–to you, at least fundamentally irrational and unfair demand.
RMS had hundreds of other controversial opinions. Uttering them did not result in this. In fact, no single act of sexism got him here either. So suggesting that this is merely society punishing a misunderstood outsider on a whim is itself pretty uncalled for.
There is a new religion forming among those who have largely rejected religions of the past and Stallman is guilty of blasphemy. If he only loses his job he will be far luckier than others who are guilty of similar blasphemy.
I think that's blasphemy to anyone with an once of reason and compassion in this world.
It is not zealotry of some new paranoid movement that drove RMS failure. It was reason and good judgement.
I also prefer weirdos to Pearl Clutchers. A segment of the world may want homogeneity, but I don’t. I don’t particularly like Stallman, but I also appreciate his weirdness.
I very much prefer this, too, so long as they show they know what they did wrong and are clear that they'll work to do better in the future.
No... he needed a PR manager desperately and I'm very surprised that the FSF or MIT never even considered nor assigned one to him. I know he's a grown man and is responsible for what he says, but he is, was, whatever, a figure to the CS community and as such should have had his public comments vetted more.
You think he would have cooperated? I can't imagine Stallman being happy with having a filter for the things he wants to say or being told to not say something.
If he had cared about his political movement more than his dick we wouldn’t be here, but here we are.
No, it is sufficient already to not blurt out controversial things at bat-shit-insanely-bad timings. Similar to how people would be mad at Einstein if he pulled a non-ironic "Yeah, but to be honest he wasn't THAT great" a friends funeral.
I don't like mobs and I lament the fact that one such important figure in computing has such difficulties making himself understood. But that does not mean that the world has a problem somehow. It just happens to be a world that is not fine-tuned to Stallman-communication and that values reducing sexism higher than technical accuracy. Some people don't work that way, some people get therapy to allign themselves, some withdraw from society, some manage to get by. Stallman happened to fall on the friction side of things this time.
Words have consequences, and while you are free to say whatever, others are free to react to it too. You don’t get a free pass for saying ridiculous things just because free speech | difficulties communicating | you’ve done great things or whatever.
I don’t want a world where everything is filtered but I do want people to think about the impact of what they say before they say it.
He's been speaking on these topics for long enough to have heard thousands of people consoling him to stop.
Funny that you evoke misogyny at this point, given how RMS is primarily a godawful human being to women, the vast majority of which your comment is ignorant of, willfully or otherwise.
This has been his godawful personality and behaviour at MIT for decades. It hasn't gone unreported. It hasn't gone unnoticed. But few appear to have ever acted on it appropriately, and the appropriate action here is removing him from any and all communities where he can do damage. It's occurring years too late, but at least it's occurring. It's sad that it took his association with a worldwide pedophilia/human trafficking ring to accomplish this, given his decades of ghastly abuse of peers/colleagues/students.
Even more sad that after this association has been revealed, communities like this one are significantly in self-defense mode.
If your response to this story is to get defensive, or to use keywords like "free speech," you have questions you need to ask yourself. Very serious questions. Questions that I guarantee your various communities want answers to before you engage with them further.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d59r46/richard...
Everything good that came out of RMS is exactly because he didn't listen to those advising him to stay quiet.
