RMS seems to have a long history:
> The stories of thirty years of MIT women alumni.
* https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...
Also:
* https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix
The 2019 comments appear to just the latest in a long string of incidents that people are no longer willing to tolerate.
https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.git... and the open letter in support of RMS more generally: https://rms-support-letter.github.io
and, quoting the former president of the ACLU and civil rights activist Nadine Strossen on the Stallman matter:
May be this is the easiest thing people can do?
What are some alternatives to Firefox on GNU/Linux?
I find your remark on 'where society is heading to' very odd. You say you don't live in the west so might not have a full picture, but overall I wouldn't see any negative trend. Some things are sometimes taken to an extreme, but I would prefer excess caution around sexual harassment over, say, a culture which treats women as sub-human, as less than men, or as the property of men, as is sadly still the case in far too many countries.
It's not just the Minsky issue that makes people don't want RMS to be in power. It's also a pattern of sexual harassment towards women, since long back, in conferences and MIT. They can be found online, idk whether there is an article that details everything. I think most just want him not to be in a position of power. Just copying another comment from a flagged HN post below:
Here's some readings on why many don't want RMS in a leadership position.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20994216
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26545420
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535789
[5] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr...
. .
Some well-regarded papers on sexism in CS, which are still relevant.
[1] Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists (Ellen Spertus, 1991)
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040
[2] How to Encourage Women in Linux (Val Henson, 2002)
https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/
[3] What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You (Kathryn S. McKinley, 2018)
https://www.sigarch.org/what-happens-to-us-does-not-happen-t...
[4] Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2001)
https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-P...
[5] The Elephant in the Valley (by Michele Madansky and Trae Vassallo, 2015)
Are you using the non-American and leftist American definition of “liberal” (center-to-center-right capitalist) or the American center-right-to-right definition of “liberal” (anything left of the center-right) when you say “very liberal”?
> when I read Stallman's actual comments last year, I thought that it was very clear that he was only defending his friend, who was dead and couldn't defend himself.
A lot of the comments and actions at issue, including the separate general endorsement of “voluntary” child sex, had nothing to do with Minsky.
Not sure if it matters, since in both cases it's applicable:
1. From a true liberal (moderate capitalist) standpoint, RMS has every right to his views, and the FSF has every right to associate with RMS. If Mozilla doesn't like it, they can pound sand.
2. From a leftist perspective, RMS is pretty unambiguously leftist and libertarian (as is the FSF), whereas Mozilla is a for-profit corporation. Siding with Mozilla against RMS and the FSF is pretty hard to reconcile with being a leftist; yeah, there's plenty of room for nuanced opinion (no matter what extremists want to believe), but considering the interested parties it's pretty easy to interpret this whole controversy as a bunch of capitalists and their sympathizers making McCarthy proud in their demonization of socialists.
> including the separate general endorsement of “voluntary” child sex
Which he publicly recanted.
FYI libertarians nowadays, especially in the US, are basically anarcho-capitalists, and considered right on the political spectrum.
> Left-libertarian[14][15][16][17][18] ideologies include anarchist schools of thought, alongside many other anti-paternalist and New Left schools of thought centered around economic egalitarianism as well as geolibertarianism, green politics, market-oriented left-libertarianism and the Steiner–Vallentyne school.[14][17][19][20][21] In the mid-20th century, right-libertarian[15][18][22][23] proponents of anarcho-capitalism and minarchism co-opted[8][24] the term libertarian to advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights such as in land, infrastructure and natural resources.[25] The latter is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States,[23] where it advocates civil liberties,[26] natural law,[27] free-market capitalism[28][29] and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.[30]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
RMS himself is very anti-libertarians in their US form ( right-libertarian in the Wiki article):
Whether or not you support Stallman, whether or not you find the accusations of 'cancel culture' in some places misguided and unfocused, to say that activism hasn't taken a turn to moral purity and the impossibility of forgiveness betrays either an ignorance of modern activism (which I consider myself a part of), or non-involvement in how these processes form. Arguably, 'cancel culture' also forms part of the carceral turn of various activist projects.
When the worst thing you can do is admit a mistake and apologize, there's a problem. When most of the population, according to polls, says it is reluctant to make its true political views known (right or left) - there's a problem.
Or when TX sought to enforce a ban on gay sex in 2003, I really doubt the GOP sees that as cancellation. It’s a kind of failure to see the forest, even while pretending to have such moral clarity. The stakes aren’t a matter of Reddit hates you.
When a Christian refuses to bake a cake, sign a marriage certificate, or when they fight for the right to fire gay people, etc., the activity is not cancellation but spiritual observation.
And does one not remember that during the Bush presidential candidacy a major get out to vote issue for Christian conservatives was a US constitutional ban on gay marriage? Of course this is not cancellation. It was a Constitutional exercise.
These are points of pride for the GOP. This is what it means to energize the base.
Before one rushes to the aid of those who are powerful, one might first observe those who live underfoot. It is reasonable to say that in the lifetime of your children, it will still be a Constitutional right for Christian businesses and employees to deny gay employees or customers.
By definition those who are powerful don't need my aid, and I'm only here to learn.
Denying an employee (and even a customer, if one really wants so) for any real reason is already possible and done, by invoking any other reason. Such a Constitutional Right doesn't change anything.
Trying to coerce people into interacting with persons they don't like is either moot or, if apparently efficient for a while because "those who are powerful" enforce it, leads to a major clash as soon as this power vanishes.
A leftist not voting for Clinton, however, seems perfectly reasonable, considering that she is not even remotely leftist. She's a neoliberal, who ran on a neoliberal platform - one that would've made no meaningful effort to advance actual leftism in this country. It would've been, at best, appeasement.
The Republican Party in Europe would be a conservative right party while the Democrat Party would be a moderated center-right one with some liberal hints.
> He's not. https://mark-watson.blogspot.com/2016/01/i-will-not-vote-for...
Walk me through how that shows that he's not "a very liberal person."
That being said, there are people who are going too far, and this feels very much like that. I don't think people trying to oust RMS much appreciate the sheer weight of what they are up against, and that uphill fights like this are going to bring in "extremists" and just plain weirdos.
You're (at least at times) fighting literally the richest and most powerful people in the world, and only a tiny number of people even much understand what the whole thing is about, much less are on your side.
I'm a black person in tech, I'm well aware of both what it's like to have to deal with boorish powerful people, but I'm also close enough to older folks who've also been in real serious underdog type fights to understand that - you don't always get your choice of co-fighters when you're in the minority -- at the risk of being dramatic, it's darn near war.
This isn't just about him describing a "sex trafficking victim" as "entirely willing", and hence not a victim of "sexual assault". This is wrong on so many levels.
If it is true then that was bad, and I am sure that gave him a reputation that on a campus likely burned like a wild fire (it sure would do that on my university if anyone said something like that), but what is an appropriate reaction be now several decades later?
The second thing the appendix listed was a mattress in his office whose primary user were most likely RMS himself since he kind of had a reputation of living in the university.
Living in an office doesn't excuse having topless people on a mattress in your office.
The 80's was a different time, but not that different. Unless the "topless people" were RMS himself sleeping on it, I have a hard time believing it. In theory I can imagine (but I doubt it) a warm summer where a team of emacs collaborators were all living and sleeping in the university office room, but I strongly doubt the implication sex went on there.
Gotta love the mental gymnastics on HN sometimes.
This is so harmful to society, and is a dark path that the left has taken in my country. To put it plainly, my political party has turned into whinny little people.
People should lose their jobs over things like sexual or any type of harassment but when I read Stallman's actual comments last year, I thought that it was very clear that he was only defending his friend, who was dead and couldn't defend himself.
EDIT: for what it is worth, I just uninstalled Firefox.
EDIT #2: I just rejoined the FSF (well, I was still a member, I just started donating again).