Much of what is being said are opinions or interpretation not facts. And because they are controversial, and often connected to trauma,, people don't tend to broadcast them until a "crisis" like the current one encourages sharing stories and makes it safer to do so.

But view the video linked to in child comments to the one you're replying to, and draw your own conclusion about what RMS actually said and the context in which it was said.

My view is that the comment you're replying to describes an incident that grossly mischaracterises what actually occurred. There were problems, and there was an inadvisable sexual joke, and probably some women were probably put off contributing to OSS, and it echoed some aspects of misogyny taking place in the rest of their lives - workplace, home, everywhere.

Consider, at the same event, the person you replied to admits that someone thought what they were saying was problematic too (thus the yanking of the mic from their hand). So, at very least, there were strongly differing views at the time.

I think it's good that people, on occasions of heightened awareness like this, feel able to share their presumably long history of traumatic and unwelcoming experiences, in OSS and in society elsewhere.

The shit women (among others) have had to endure, and still do, continues to be awful, both in OSS and elsewhere.

But it's terrible that the same phenomenon involves people empowering themselves in groups by gathering to destroy other people from more or less the same "side", when the social errors being committed by each person are not that different from each other, and what I'd call the "real criminals" (rapists, abusive partners, abusive bosses etc) are strangely not targetted in the debate.

For a movement that is supposed to be based on high principles of inclusion, empowerment, and social justice, it's tragic to those principles made weak and breaking down, because people don't know how to apply them in situations like this.

I like that you want to talk about the danger of tendentious interpretation! I also like that you'd clearly rather skate by on "problematic" than talk about how, as can be seen in the part 2 of the video you linked - the only other video I posted on that account, so should be easy to find! - my callout in the Q&A had to do with RMS's "get saved or fry in hell" contempt for ordinary users who prefer software they can use, and the way that GNU software's typically execrable usability and accessibility militates directly against its appeal to the nontechnical, goal-oriented wider userbase that RMS, in his talk, by turns spoke of wanting to attract, and lavished with contempt.

That was what got my mic cord yanked. That was what the people who thanked me after, were thanking me for saying. I understand why that happened, and I understand why you might not want to talk about it, but don't you think it's a little inconsistent to complain about tendentious interpretations in the same breath in which you utter one?

It's also interesting to me that you understand this kind of discussion to be taking place instead of, rather than alongside, that about "what [you'd] call the "real criminals" (rapists, abusive partners, abusive bosses etc)".

Wherever do you come by that idea? It's certainly an odd one. In any case, we're not talking about those people here; those conversations are taking place, even now, elsewhere, and thanks to the Internet, you can find them if you so choose. This conversation is about Richard Stallman, and the fashion in which much of his recent behavior (and not so recent, I gather) has affected both people involved with and adjacent to the GNU project, and the prospects of that project itself. Please don't use matters irrelevant to the topic at hand to try to steer this conversation away from its purpose.

I guess my point wasn't made clearly.

What I mean it looks to me like RMS made social errors such as the one shown in the video, which are indeed problematic and need to be dealt with. But many people now villifying him are almost certainly guilty of plenty of social errors of a similar magnitude of harm to others themselves (thought not all the same kind of harm), and they are being hypocritical in focusing on grouping him with the "real criminals" in public perception, while said hypocrits aren't really all that perfect themselves, could in many cases find the same thing happens to them someday, and are quietly benefiting right now from the spotlight not being in their direction, and safety in group dynamics.

A remarkable theoretical twist on argumentum ad hominem, I concede - but argumentum ad hominem all the same.

It's in the context of public character assassination.

The debate is to determine what is right, just, fair, and proportionate.

Fairness in justice does, in fact, depend on the character and behaviour of the assasinators and wider social group, not just the target in isolation from them.

If you want to argue against those principles, that's fine obviously, but argumentum ad hominem fallacy does not apply where the character and behaviour of the debators is properly relevant.

(Character and behaviour are also relevant to the question of estimating how much to believe, when people are acting as witnesses rather than debators.)

This is the same argument that's frequently used against victims of rape and other sorts of assault - used to deny them justice, on no better grounds than that their own past behavior has been merely human, and thus fallen short of whatever arbitrarily absurd standard of impossible purity that unsympathetic interlocutors choose to establish - and to re-establish, as often as necessary, in order to make absolutely certain that the standard cannot be met.

I wouldn't find that a terribly comfortable place to stand. That you seem to find it congenial gives me to wonder about the quality of your own character. Ordinarily, of course, such doubts would be unworthy of this sort of discussion. But since you've found it meet to broach the subject, why shouldn't we start the inspection of character with you? Clearly you feel yourself above reproach in this regard, so I'm not sure what reason you could possibly have to demur, when I require that you prove, to my satisfaction, your standing to argue as you do on this subject.