In my opinion, what he actually said on the listserv is very benign compared to the consequences he faced for it. If that is the whole story, he was treated unfairly.
Here's another part of the story http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2019/10/15/fsf-rms.html
I liked this line:
"The message of universal software freedom is a radical cause; it's basically impossible for one individual to effectively push forward two unrelated controversial agendas at once."
In some ways, that made him less effective as a free software advocate, as did many of his other more controversial views on just about every topic. In others, that made him more honest.
That's not what's being reported, though.
Were there people who didn't care about the issue at hand but just wanted him to go for other reasons who opportunistically seized upon the issue to finally rid themselves of the troublesome monk? Of course, and I have some particular people in mind. But the converse is also very much true. RMS is a complex person and you cannot pull but one thread from the fabric.
> And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power.
That's simply whataboutism, not an argument. The rms issue is the rms issue. I would be delighted if you worked on some of the other injustices in the world as well.
RMS has suffered a crippling emotional blow but he will get back on his feet. In these regards rms is hardly unique: he grew up in a community of people very much like him, many of whom routinely make far more shocking statements than he ever did. Leaving that environment for Harvard, and later MIT demonstrated and developed in him an ability to learn, which few apparently can see (and which even fewer possess themselves).
My experience with people going after corruption (n>3):
No one is perfect. Everyone breaks some laws, does something taboo, holds some controversial view, or does something improper. If you're going after power structures, they'll take that and pull on it to destroy you unless you back down.
This was done to an extreme in Communist regimes. For the most part, people didn't go to prison for criticizing the government. People who criticized the government went to prison for some other, complete inane but technically correct reason.
For a public examples, See Hunter Biden. Compare to Donald Trump. Yes, there appears to be corruption with Hunter. No, it's not out-of-mainstream for DC. Yes, it's greater than Trump's family. Only Biden has the resources to defend himself -- half the country is supporting him. Unless you're a presidential candidate, something like that WILL take you down.
Allowing that to work really benefits the power structures who can do PR and hire investigators. And it really harms anyone out of the mainstream or with unpopular views, where a simple cancel culture can kill your career.
None of those people should remain in positions of power, including faculty positions at MIT. The fact that RMS finally got consequences for the behavior we're discussing is good; the fact that the others didn't is bad; the fix is to apply consequences to the places where they're deserved but missing, not reverse some just deserts that were finally given.
EDIT: Your other comment makes me thing you're 100% serious about this. The fuck? We need to smear him because he's an awkward nerd? An awkward person is not inherently harmful simply for being awkward. What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
You're making an is-ought distinction. Of course we should not believe serious accusations against someone until they can back up their claims -- in an ideal world. In the real world, standards of evidence are routinely weaponized against decent people by assholes. Everybody knows that Trump has colluded with Russia, but no one can make anything stick.
As another example, there is a small but growing movement to weaken the standards of evidence for rape and sexual assault. These crimes are notoriously difficult to get evidence for that meets the burden of proof, and the result is a very low conviction rape and active harm to women and society by rapists on the loose. I find it increasingly hard to challenge this argument except on theoretical or procedural grounds, and some countries -- such as Spain, which has special violence against women tribunals where the burden of proof is essentially on the accused to prove innocence -- have already followed through with this idea in their laws.
> What harm has he "continually done" to deserve this?
Numerous women have come forward with stories about being sexually harassed by Stallman over the years. He creates what is known in law as a hostile work environment. Women are afraid to work with him because they might be inappropriately propositioned, and risk consequences if they turned him down. (Stallman was "protected" by people in the MIT community, including Marvin Minsky.) And of course, he actually did advocate for legalization of child rape earlier in his career.
> Numerous women have come forward with stories about being sexually harassed by Stallman over the years.
Sources? Not trying to be dismissive, but I can't find any on DDG or Google.
> And of course, he actually did advocate for legalization of child rape earlier in his career.
He never did that. He advocated for child consent. You may think I'm nitpicking but it's an important distinction. Child rape colloquially means unconsentual / forced sex, but technically means any sex since children cannot legally consent. If you say he defends child rape you are colloquially saying he defends unconsentual sex, when he never did such a thing.
No such thing. Children cannot legally consent to sexual activity because they cannot meaningfully consent to it in the moral sense, either. All sexual activity between an adult and a child is an abuse of the power dynamic between adults and children, and causes lasting psychological if not physical harm to the child.
Therefore, all sexual activity between an adult and a child is rape.
Therefore, Stallman is/was an apologist for child rape.
That is very jurisdiction-specific / cultural-specific position. In my home country, there is clear legal disctinction between child rape (non-consensual sex with child) and child sex abuse (consensual sex with child).
I would be surprised if the 'age-of-consent' laws (the age limit name is also cultural specific, here it is 'age-of-legal-competence') were generally motivated by legal fiction about children unable to give consent. That seems to me more like ex-post rationalization of such laws. IMHO these laws just codify social mores without need of specific rationalization (like incest laws).
What's curious is:
1) Going against social mores tends to cause psychological harm
2) Looking across history, plenty of cultures broke those mores without psychological harm
That's not just sexual mores. All sorts of things. Corporal punishment is harmful to kids in Western Culture, but not harmful to kids in many other cultures worldwide (yes, with good evidence).
The evidence for what constitutes healthy person-person relationships is mostly culturally-situated, whether that's parent-child, sibling, friends, work environment, or otherwise. The same behavior which might be considered a child abusing their parent in one country might be considered the parent abusing the child in another (and lead to actual psychological harm for the abused party).
It's helpful to look at mores across cultures and history to see which things are fundamental to humans, and which are culturally-situated. Of course, that doesn't make breaking culturally-situated norms okay -- it still causes psychological harm.
What is more problematic is that we can't talk about this in more than abstracts. I could pick dozens of concrete examples, and if I raised them in a public forum, my career would be dead.
I can abstractly conceive of philosophical arguments around emergence of ability to consent, but here in the real world I am solidly with the majority on this one.
That's not what Stallman advocated, or at least, that borders on a bad faith description of what he advocated, which was legalizing and normalizing sexual relationships between adults and children. He literally referred to the distinction as "voluntary pedophilia[0]" as opposed to "involuntary" pedophilia, believing that children were capable of giving informed consent to sexual relationships in some cases.
And bear in mind that he later recanted this view[1].
If you read his other posts[2], it becomes clear that his primary concern was not simply reducing the legal age of consent - context is important.
Add to that the numerous (albeit, granted, anecdotal) claims of unwanted sexual advances and harassment by Stallman over the years, then yes, I believe he should not have been in the position of leadership and advocacy that he was, which is what "cancellation" implies here.
Anyone other than Richard Stallman would have been run off campus and possibly out of town on a rail years ago for much less egregious behavior. But Richard Stallman, being the prophet of free software, could be found in flagrante delicto with a literal infant and half of this forum would praise him for his revolutionary anti-establishment behavior, and half of the rest would insist the infant was planted by Microsoft.
>I don't agree with this idea but it seems dangerous to pressure society to stop advocating for more controversial stuff.
Why? Simply because it's controversial? No, society shouldn't be run under the edgelord principles of a board on 4chan. Controversy is not in and of itself a value worth preserving for its own sake.
But bear in mind that Stallman's behavior and beliefs were tolerated until the point where they caused a social media shitstorm. He really wasn't even cancelled because of his controversial views, he was cancelled because his controversial views suddenly became a PR nightmare for MIT, which, remember, had taken donation money from Jeffrey Epstein.
> Just a few years back you would cancel me(or even worse) if I suggested interracial marriage is OK (what a deviant idea ...)
You're drawing a set of false equivalencies. Ideas can and should be judged, accepted or rejected on their individual merits or lack thereof. Opposition to pedophilia is not equivalent to opposition to interracial marriage along any moral or ethical axis.
[0]https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...
[1]https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
If you're wondering "How can a grown man not know that child sexual abuse causes harm?" well, this puts us back into awkward nerd territory: what you think is common sense may not be to a sufficiently awkward nerd.
If he'd put as much effort into distancing himself from his past beliefs as he did advocating for them, he likely wouldn't have found himself in the position where no one was willing to grant him the benefit of the doubt when he footgunned himself and MIT with an awkward, tediously pedantic argument on the nature of consent. What happened to him wasn't a smear campaign by enemies of free software, or a witch-hunt by prudish SJWs who hate neuro-atypicals, it was inevitable.
Perhaps it was inevitable that RMS would be taken down by neutral third parties, but now we'll never have any way to know. The reality is he WAS taken down by people who had been smearing him with exaggerations and half-truths for at least the last quarter-century, and this was part of that dynamic.
I don't feel bad if people are taken down fairly. I only feel a little bad if people are taken down by, in your words, "a witch-hunt by prudish SJWs." I feel very bad when people are taken down by enemies spreading half-truths.
"Richard Stallman resigns from FSF, MIT after defending child rape" - OSNews
Seriously. Yes, he's awkward around women, and has sometimes hit on women in sometimes cringeworthy ways. He's also awkward around men, for that reason. There's a difference like night and day between the actual issues, which are about on-par for much of the population, and what's reported. Heck, I'd say that's about on-par for about half of the MIT student body back when it was a genuine nerd school rather than the "#1 branded university in the world."
But he knows that no means no, he doesn't mean harm, and he doesn't abuse his power.
And compare the treatment he gets to other people in position of power. Compare that to the MANY MIT faculty who DO use power dynamics to abuse female students, and who DID fly to Epstein's island to party. Heck, compare that to executives and politicians, or, well, many others in positions of power. You're not going to convince me Stallman is worse than the median there, or even the 25th percentile. It's just that one group is politically savvy, and the other, socially awkward.
And this is exactly how you get a plausible smear. You start with a smaller issue, and you twist and exaggerate it until you have a pedophile-rapist. And yes, it was intentional.