"How is it we value free speech, but there are certain discussions you just cannot have, even in a rational and measured way, without risking making yourself completely unemployable. You should be able to have a questionable viewpoint in a discussion, without worrying about the lynch mob ending your career."

I agree with this statement.

Stallman has been a problematic person for a long time. I'm no fan of his. If after a while the university had said, "Enough is enough, Richard, you need to shape up or get out." I would have understood that.

However, that's not what I think happened. What happened was he shared an opinion on a hot-button issue, pedantic and maybe gross, and unfortunately had that go viral and was so hounded out of his position.

If Stallman's position is wrong, we should be able to rationally come to that conclusion as a society. He should be allowed to be wrong. If his opinion is so problematic that it makes him a real liability for the university, his removal should come after a period of deliberation, not after a flash of public outrage.

I can understand arguments that Stallman's position is a questionable hill to die on regarding the Epstein revelations, that even choosing to weigh in on this makes it seem like his priorities are out of order. I can also understand the argument that the email list he was arguing on was the wrong location to voice his opinions and he was making students uncomfortable. I also understand the idea that he should have been corrected by the university, either for this event or for his past behavior.

But what I don't understand, is this idea that firing people in response to media shit-storms is somehow something to be applauded.

Stallman hasn't been silenced in any way. Free speech does not mean you can say whatever you like without consequence from private institutions and citizens, only that you may say whatever you like without consequences from the government et al.

Your conflation that free speech is under attack is disappointing - That's not what is happening here.

I value free speech in that I value the government's inability to limit anyone's expression with only a few reasonable exceptions.

I don't take "free speech" to mean anyone can say anything without consequence. The government has a whole lot of power and it comes with limits like free speech.

That doesn't mean that people in my employ can say awful things and I should just ignore it.

Free speech doesn't extend to being protected from consequences for how you express yourself.

Free speech while extremely important cannot be used as a blanket cover to say whatever you want and expect not to suffer consequences. I’m free to call my girlfriend stupid every day, but I should expect the consequence of soon being single.

There are clearly mob reactions to things, but there are also clearly inappropriate speech that should have consequences.

What he said here wasn’t in isolation as some idle musing. context matters. He wasn’t talking about the theoretical of a 19 year old. He was talking about this in context of Minsky being a 74 year old man with a 17 year old girl. Maybe he wasn’t aware of the impact of his words, but that shouldn’t get him a free pass.

> You should be able to have a questionable viewpoint in a discussion, without worrying about the lynch mob ending your career.

First, "lynch mob" is inappropriate and irrelevant. Given Stallman's statements, in the forum in which they were made, many reasonable employers would have fired him, with or without some "lynch mob."

Second, Stallman didn't express his views in private conversation, but rather in a forum where those views would have made it very hard for colleagues to continue working with him. If I'm X and you tell me or to Y in private conversation, "X is an idiot" or something of the sort, then that's one thing. If you say so in a forum where others can read it, then you're showing public disrespect towards colleagues, which is a fireable offense.

Here's what he could have said instead: "Have we seen evidence that Minsky himself engaged in illegal activity?" That's it. It would have expressed his point just as well, and would not have shown disrespect toward colleagues.

Just as important as freedom of speech is freedom of association. If your speech is seen as extremely odious, other people have the right to cut ties with you. And if you're in a prominent officer position, the organization as a whole has a right to disassociate itself from you because of those views.

So is Stallman's speech in question here odious? At first glance, not really. But when you put it in context:

The entire brouhaha starts with a sexual predator whose actions are known to but ignored by associates because money (or equivalently, power). Stallman is defending an associate of his who is tainted by association with Epstein. In the kinder light, this defense is essentially pedantry (just rape, not sexual assault). In the harsher light, this defense is "there's nothing inherently wrong with the entire situation here."

In this situation, I think the harsher light is closer to RMS's intent. He has made statements in the past saying that he believes there is nothing inherently wrong with having sex with children (although he has now walked back those statements). In addition, he appears to have acquired a reputation as a sexual harasser among women at MIT over the past few decades.

With that context, it does look like Stallman shares a lot of attributes with "prominent people whose sexual harassment has been ignored because they're powerful people, and who is not sorry about it." And pushing him out of leadership positions because of those views is acceptable consequences in my opinion. More so because it appears to me that he doesn't appreciate how power differential may affect the ability of people to give consent, he is in a position of power, and he appears to desire consent that may be unwilling.

Completely agree with you and it makes me depressed that we are living on an age that we are giving up the imperfectness of humans in exchange for fake puritanism on a standard that cannot be achieved by anyone.

I bet everyone here has one opinion that can definitely and very quickly destroy their lives. Let people be wrong, let them speak, let them think ... We can then convince and converge into a common good. Cancelling the guy that gave his life for the cause is appalling and is showing how evil social media is.

> But it is also incongruous that somehow if she was a year older it would be ok.

It probably wouldn't be okay. She was coerced and trafficked, and many laws exist to make having sex with those people illegal.

In some places it's illegal even if you don't know they were coerced or trafficked.

So what is the difference between this and the way Eich was treated for his donation to Prop 8?

I'm not saying I agree with Eich - far from it. Seeing as an awful lot of people on this very thread were outraged by his behaviour, it strikes me as being contrary to be more understanding towards RMS for what is arguably far more heinous simply because they admire him more. Both Gates and Jobs are/were relentlessly and repeatedly pilloried for their "immoral" approach to business and freedom, but to question what constitutes rape or a suggestion that paedophilia is harmless is forgiven readily, because the individual "likes" the perpetrator is abhorrent.

It's not a company. It's a university, for God sake. If no free speech there anymore, then where? In the kitchen, like in the USSR?

Now if he was a pedophile, he should be in jail. But he is not, he is exersizing free speech, no matter how disgusting it is, he is entitled to it. Should Nabokov have been made unemployable too for writing Lolita?

Freedom is a two edged sword.

You are free to say what you like, but the rest of us are free to take actions in response to that so long as those actions don't violate your constitutional rights.

There's no constitutional right to a job or a board membership.

Consequences aren't out of line. Any person in any private company saying same stuff would be fired. Period. It is totally inappropriate and out of context.

> there are certain discussions you just cannot have

The way I look at this is through responsibility. It's like what we learned in Spiderman, "With great power, comes great responsibility."

So it's not that Stallman can't have this conversation anywhere. It's that when he has it so publicly, it makes people question whether he is wielding his power well.

Sometimes responsibility means not saying anything at all. Presumably, Stallman is at MIT for computer science and free software. Why is he speaking off topic to MIT students and alum? Presumably he could develop non-MIT relationships and have whatever crazy conversations he wanted.

More often, I think the responsibility is just to do a lot more work. If you're famous and you speak off the cuff on topics that you haven't researched, then your comments get a reach that's undeserved. It's a misapplication of your fame.

I thought that about PGs most recent luggage comments. This is something that had an answer that he could look up and share with people. Or if that's too hard, he could have gotten a thorough answer privately. Seeing him be so willfully and publicly ignorant made me question whether he deserved the power that comes with fame. Laziness like that is diminishing and eventually it gets to the point where people are so diminished that they should lose their jobs and/or positions of authority.

A point that I'm not seeing raised enough is that Stallman's current job is nowadays almost purely evangelisation and PR. He is a public figure.

In that context, fired is more than fair. His image being linked with pedophilia (on top of the other issues he has) makes him a really bad choice for the public face of a movement/foundation.

If he was, say, a lead engineer whose work was not tied to his image, we could have an argument - but that's quite clearly not the case.

The use of the word attack implies force. Clearly no one has been struck physically and there is no force involved. So the idea that free speech is somehow under attack must be misguided.

> without risking making yourself completely unemployable

Can you provide some examples of people who have been made "completely unemployable" by the twitter lynch mob?

Except it's not just about "free speech", it's about protecting the organisation's integrity which was already shot because of Epstein. Context matters, and in this case MIT couldn't afford to just let him off with a warning after already being hit for taking money from a sex trafficker. If RMS had thought about the big picture, he would have known better than to engage on the topic to begin with, especially in that forum.

The FSF is even worse because he's supposed to be in a position of leadership there and represents the organisation. And they shouldn't be put in a position where they have to decide whether to support some controversial statement about age of consent laws just because one of their leaders decided to stick up for one of his friends. It's just not worth it.

> How is it we value free speech, but there are certain discussions you just cannot have, even in a rational and measured way, without risking making yourself completely unemployable. You should be able to have a questionable viewpoint in a discussion, without worrying about the lynch mob ending your career.

Just ask James Damore and his memo on a certain ideological echo chamber. I read his document, and found his view point to be sadly misinformed; yet his right to speech wasn't protected. He was fired.

That was the moment I realized free speech isn't really a thing any more if it touched certain topics. Yes constitutionally we still do, but we can easily lose everything that matters to us even if we win the court battle.

Regarding the United States at least, there are topics that we, as a country, have decided are not up for debate in the workplace. That's a feature not a bug; we've had enough decades of, for example, observation of how covert and overt racism harms people it is directed against that we've made it the sort of thing that companies can be directly liable for if they allow it in their space.

There's a hundred years of history explaining why the balance point between freedom of speech and freedom from fear has been calibrated thusly.

Valuing free speech and valuing what others say are not one in the same.

The consequences here are not out of line, because this wasn't the first time that RMS made his views on statutory rape (he doesn't see the harm in it) clear.

The man has no understanding of the concept of consent, and why a child is unable to grant it. He can have whatever opinions he wants, but as a spokesperson for the FSF, he sure as shit shouldn't be broadcasting that one.

This isn't some rando who works for an organization being punished for airing their opinion. This is someone whose job is public speaking, speaking in a way that actively harms any organization he is associated with.

I generally don't see the hacker community jump to the defense of someone who has so colossally mucked up at his one job, but here we are, turning ourselves in knots in the defense of the right of a public speaker to remain employed when his speech is actively harming his employer.

It should also be noted, without the faintest shred of irony that the man consented to resign. I don't see why everyone is making such a big deal out of it...