But my freedom of speech should trump your freedom to spin up angry Internet mobs that proceed to turn my words into lies that they use to rip my life apart.

Time will come there will be regulations aiming to fix that, because slander laws apparently aren't enough. And then people will come out and talk about freedom of speech, but the only answer will be, "you had it, and you misused it, and almost ripped the society apart".

There has to be a give and take, otherwise this logic can justify many things we've decided is wrong. Things for example like firing someone trying to unionize or for being black or a woman. There is a difference between freedom of association for an individual and freedom of association between a company/organization and its employees or members and that is part of why.

If somebody doesn't want to associate with somebody I think that's of course 100% fine, even if in response to nothing more than what somebody said. But if somebody chooses not to associate with somebody because of an online mob [1] - that's not so okay. Granted some line does have to be drawn here. I think it's great that social media was able to 'touch' an 'untouchable' like Weinstein that would have been impossible without the protection of a mob. But now that we've unleashed the beast, it's starting to gnaw at anything it can find. And Stallman's far from an innocent, but he's being depersoned here for some relatively tepid comments.

[1] - This event was started by somebody sending a copy of a discussion on a private mailing list to a third party. This third party then took social media and shared it. It fell flat, except for a handful of 'Twitter activists'. They then started spamming it off to their followers and media outlet they could find. Some of the clickiest baitiest institutions took it up along with some completely unrelated Twitter personalities. It all spun what were relatively innocuous comments into limited context outrage bait and that then caught the outrage train spot on.

If someone was raped, I assume there will be a court case that will ultimately decide if this was the case?

"Well, as it turns out, your Hollywood career promptly ended and you were blacklisted by every studio for saying, in the middle of the 50s Red Scare, that Karl Marx had some good ideas about the sociology of capital. But a court ruled that none of that treatment violated the First Amendment, therefore no one is allowed to be worried or have any negative emotion about what happened you, and hence no one's speech could have been chilled into silence by those events."

What about the right to air a private conversation in front of general public for express purpose of forcing one's employer to disassociate from a person?

Consider this: were you to come to GP's office and show GP's boss a printout of them saying controversial things on HN, demanding GP's termination, GP would most likely keep their job and there would be a good chance you'd get kicked out by security. In order to get a company to fire someone, there needs to be a public mess, and those rarely happen organically. In this case, and other similar firings for wrongspeak that I can think of, a public storm was created intentionally.

Can't see it as anything else than a weaker, non-lethal form of swatting.

Does society have a right to not be associated with it? If every individual has that right, then a collection of those individuals working together retain that right if they so choose to do so.

If grouping up people does cause them to lose that right, perhaps that characteristics of rights kicks into effect when dealing with sufficiently large institutions, especially ones who have significant tie in with government far beyond some small mom and pop employer.

Ah yes, the new term for "consequences"

I rather wonder the opposite. Not "what will become of Stallman, without the FSF", but "what will become of the FSF, without Stallman". Will the FSF still have the public forum it once had without Stallman using his public speaking and his standing in the free software community on their behalf? It is perfectly conceivable that Stallman will move on to bigger and better things and the FSF will sink into obscurity.

Honestly? I hope not, but the guy suddenly and unexpectedly got kicked out from FSF and MIT, two institutions that form the core of his life - and I imagine self-image. And now other organizations related to the movement he started publicly disassociated from him. That had to hit hard, and as 'seanmcdirmid points out, he's also 66 and essentially unemployable now.

So if you take everything a man has in life - everything he anchors his identity to - and destroy it, and leave little to no chance of regaining it, what do you think happens? Personally, I am worried.

I've never heard that phrase used in a positive light.

In a way it is. I propose that taking someone's messages from an e-mail group and publicly spinning them with intent to cause public outrage to force their employer to fire them is deeply unethical and should be discouraged regardless of and orthogonally to the content of messages in question.

There is a group of people on-line who like to point to the "paradox of intolerance" as a justification for Internet lynch mobs. But this paradox works both ways. What it says is that society needs to combat people who label others as undesirables, intending to remove them from said society. But if someone fighting the intolerants ends up labeling tangential people as undesirable and unleashing pitchforks on them, that person is an intolerant too, and needs to be stopped as well.

Or, it was annoying but tolerable, until an opportunity presented itself to score virtue points while having past problematic behavior to use for plausible deniability.

Politics. He disregards politics and politicians and they eventually had enough weaponry to remove the threat his disregarding their political aims was to them. Nothing more.

Yes, and it is also broader than just the first amendment. Part of being able to maintain a free society is having cultural norms that do not require employers to fire someone just because they said something that others disagree with or find objectionable.

The first amendment is really of no use if expressing opinions outside the norm causes you to be fired by social convention. In that case, only being independently wealthy affords one any freedom.

In this case, even founding his own organization based on his own values did not protect him from being fired.

But do you feel free speech is genuinely under attack in the one case, and genuinely not in another?

Does a person or institution have to be literally owned lock, stock and barrel by the public to act in a public capacity?