Forget about the content of the statements for a moment.

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.

This may be an appealing idea in the abstract, but there are people who sincerely hold the view others are subhuman and deserve to be raped and killed, and there are people who believe it’s fine to have sex with kids.

Society can absolutely decide not every point of view is worth debating.

Good debate helps us get to a deeper understanding of the way the world works, or maybe about ourselves.

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.

If there is a belief that is backed up by evidence (and in this case there is) then the first response should always be to provide that evidence.

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.

Is that also the second response? And the 100th? It isn't like Stallman provided new arguments or new evidence here. This wasn't the first response. It was the 100th.

> Just because someone sincerely believes that others are subhuman doesn't mean the conversation ends immediately.

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.

Thanks to people that instead of refusing to debate the deniers choose to show proof of why they were wrong, nowadays, 74 years after the horrors, we have readily available proof to counter the lies of whom, with malice, try to deny it again. If people had chosen the first tactic of refusing to debate the most probable thing would be that we wouldn't have this amount of proof to counter them today.

We should always explain why something is wrong and try to convince to avoid future trouble.

The problem of course being, that Holocaust victims were asked to be more logical about genocide while denialists defended the notion that it didn't happen at all.

If someone using a tactic in bad faith means we can't use the tactic any more, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. People talking about things they don't understand and being in need of correction goes a bit deeper than "well, Holocause deniers ask questions too!".

Stallman is not a serial Holocaust denier. He is a software philosopher.

And insofar as he is an agitator, on most of his pet topics time has proven him to be right rather than to be a troll.

And for centuries society decided that 1 was the correct view and anyone who disagrees with it was to be shunned or worse.

> Society can absolutely decide not every point of view is worth debating.

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.

Most of us are at risk for losing our jobs over far less. Our boss can decide he doesn’t like the way we dress, and we’ll be looking for a new job before the end of the day.

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!

> What’s the slippery slope here?

The slippery slope is that today RMS is the kook, ejected without due process or objective standards.

Tomorrow, you'll be the kook.

That's not, like, how arguments work? You don't just get to say "it's a slippery slope, it'll expand to include you, Q.E.D."

Parent asked what the slippery slope argument to be had here was, and aazaa responded with the answer to that question. Why are you confused?

I could already be fired for far less important reasons. Where’s the slope?

I think the purported slope is that currently you can be fired at the whim of your boss (who presumably knows you well), but in the future you might be fired at the whim of a blogger (who has never met you). You have only one boss to keep happy, which is stressful but substantially under your control. Giving equivalent power to myriad bloggers scares people because there is less accountability and more possibility of false accusations.

I don’t know. I don’t say gross things about women and I still manage to have a job.

Maybe some ideas are in fact so "settled" that anyone being seriously skeptical of them is either trolling (and not worth our time) or frighteningly unethical (and should not be in a position of power).

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.

Well, if their job involves serving female customers, managing sub-human employees or providing day care, then yes they absolutely should be fired. Otherwise, no, of course not. Because while it may be "obvious" to you that eating toddlers is bad, it is self-evident that large numbers of people can be convinced that e.g. blasphemy is just as bad. What protects us there is this principle that people can mostly say whatever they want without fear of punishment. What you're suggesting is that only popular ideas should be protected. Popular ideas do just fine even without protection, so this is tantamount to not protecting any ideas at all.

...sub-human employees? What?

It's not just about free speech, it's about his position of leadership in those organisations. He needs to either moderate his public viewpoints in order to look out for the best interests of the people there, which is what a good leader would do, or he needs to resign because he clearly doesn't understand his job.

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.

This is a false choice. There are other options and context and content matter.

I think you just coined "Stallman exit"?

It's something that unfortunately needs a name now.

How would you respond if someone said something like:

"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.

Are those the only two choices?

For what it's worth he retracted that statement. https://www.stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_Septe...

...two days ago after numerous articles came out highlighting his gross views.

Damage control at best, hard to give it much weight given the circumstances.

I've argued couple of people into doing things my way; the typical pattern is that they disagree vehemently in conversation for a few hours and then a few days later start doing what I asked them to do. On rare occasions it takes a few months. And I've occasionally been on the receiving end of that treatment.

Minds don't change in seconds, particularly around what language to use to describe an issue; it usually takes a few days of thinking.

It might be damage control, but realistically this whole blow up is absurd for a few emails on an academic mailing list. Academic mailing lists are supposed to be the best place in the world to encounter views that will change people's minds.

He does it using his alternative to singular they: "Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically." Doesn't really seem sincere when he's grinding another axe at the same time. https://stallman.org/articles/genderless-pronouns.html

Another variant of his invented nomenclature besides per is perse which I'd rather not be called. It sounds like a child of purse and hearse.

you must not be very familiar with rms if you think he's not being sincere for "grinding another axe at the same time". stallman has been grinding all of his axes, at all times, without exception.

this is the only time to my knowledge that stallman has ever gone back on one of his fundamental positions.

No one is asking you to support his statement. No one agrees with someone else on every issue. I don't agree with him either.

The important thing is to agree on the issue at hand: software.

Perhaps the "issue at hand" can be as simple as software for you.

Most people kinda rank pedophile apologia--and, yes, I did read what he wrote, and yes, the chinstroking "most plausible scenario" is pedophile apologia--above that, though, and I would hope that you would at minimum grant that the level of understanding you seek to demand of everyone else.

> Perhaps the "issue at hand" can be as simple as software for you.

Ok. You're actually right. I regret saying that software is the only important thing.

Honestly, I guess that part of my comment was a post-rationalization, but what actually bothers me is the hypocrisy of the media and society in general, because they don't apply the same rigor when an institution or person does or says much more despicable when they like those things. But that has nothing to do with this specific issue.

>the chinstroking "most plausible scenario" is pedophile apologia.

Nope, it isn't. Many of his comments actually are, but if you analyze the "most plausible scenario" quote, it has nothing to do with it.

The FSF is foremost about community, and only incidentally about software. He is, to put it absurdly nicely, not the sort of people person who should be leading such an organization.

> The FSF is foremost about community, and only incidentally about software

I fear that this has become true, but the only reason anybody gives a damn about the FSF and the only reason this is even newsworthy is because of the software and licenses produced by the FSF.

If you take the software away the FSF is nothing, so I don't understand how you can claim it's primarily a community.

Why do those licenses matter? Because of the community they created. Nobody would care about the GPL if it was only used for the FSF’s software.

> Because of the community they created

Why does the community they created matter? Because they produce more software.

Right, the foundation produces community, and the community produces software. RMS’s role is almost entirely about leading that community, not producing that software.

The people he has abused and driven out of the community would have written some kick-ass software.

He's a liability to the organization and to the legitimacy of the software it endorses.

Ironically if everybody had done that, things wouldn't have played out this way.

When at work, confine it to work stuff folks. There's a genius to it. It automatically renders you incapable of things like gossip, harassment, gaffes like this, and most other trouble. The only trouble left for you to get into is saying stupid things about the work itself, which I can't help you with. But remember you're working in a complex world with different people who don't share your opinions and ideally aren't your friends and you ideally don't need them to be, because you've got a vibrant life outside of work, and you go to work, to work on work, and talk about work, and when the work's done, you leave.

I don't know if I want to live in that world, a full day around people with which any kind of normal conversation is strictly forbidden.

In the majority of my career I've been in workplaces with colleagues, many like-minded but plenty not, to whom I felt I could say more or less whatever the fuck I want. That seems much better to me, but who knows.

Did I say forbidden? I'm talking about self-discipline. The ideal would be to be so engaged and absorbed with work, that that's the thing you want to talk about. Ideally you're enjoying it. And anyway, just because some Angry Poo-Poo Face Boss Guy made me mad by telling me to focus on the work long ago, doesn't mean it's a bad idea for me to do it now, on my own, for my own reasons. Kind of like how lifting a heavy-ass weight, which sucks, actually is a good idea because it makes me stronger.

I also feel like your saying whatever you want, and having it be fine, depends on certain things, like both people being okay with it. For example (and I'm not saying this is you), a lot gets said and taken for granted between white males in software, that wouldn't be okay for non-white non-males and shouldn't be taken for granted. What's normal conversation for one person might not be normal for others. That is absolutely what happened with Mr. Stallman here. Questions of right or wrong should be hashed out with people you trust and share a foundation with, and upon whom you don't depend for rent money. Because everybody else is too fucking crazy now. AND, anyway, more to my main point, ideally you're too busy getting shit done!

Edit: Again, that's until work's over, at which point you make a clean break and go do whatever else. I'm a fan of the dividing line.

'Nuther edit: This case is actually more of a gray area because the Epstein thing affects the Media Lab and the whole Institute. It's all intertwined. So, ironically, it's a quasi-work-related conversation. But you can still say that the topic was more thrust on everyone, as opposed to being and having always been a natural part of the work. In fact, whoever caused the two things to mix in the first place [Epstein's money and MIT] done fucked up. Which is what everybody's saying, obviously, but they're saying it because of the moral murk of it, whereas I'm saying, my simpler philosophy about not mixing things, also would have prevented it just as effectively. My objection can simply be that Epstein and his horseshit have nothing to do with the work and have no place at the Institute. Somebody smart could've seen that right off, of course, but they were tempted by the money. Upton Sinclair bla bla "...when his [gittin' PAID] depends on his not understanding it."

> The ideal would be to be so engaged and absorbed with work, that that's the thing you want to talk about.

Sure, but aren't breaks necessary at some point during a full workday? It's just nice to work with people with whom it's fun to get lunch, coffee, beer. I also suspect it makes for stronger teams, because humans are naturally more inclined to go out of their way for people we're friendly with. But that's just conjecture.

As for RMS... it seems to me that his statements are being intentionally and loudly distorted, and that in itself is very concerning. But it's also beyond obvious that the FSF is better off without him. Its leader cannot be posting irrelevant stuff that they fully know will be emotionally divisive in the community. His job is to grow the free software community, not divide it. If he can't make his feelings about statutory rape subordinate to that, then he cannot be its leader.

But I don't think this extends all the way to "remain silent at work, it can only be used against you" attitude, especially among peers who respect each other and not situations with junior employees or even a public audience of thousands or millions.

Yeah this is definitely a multi-leveled and rich situation, no question. And you're right that my suggestion isn't like, universally applicable. Sometimes an ideal is just that, an ideal (which is just an idea).

I don't think the many people who have experienced his abuse directly, or the victims he is trying to minimize, would agree with your assessment of what's important.