people pointing out that what the man said and did was fucked is somehow a character assassination attempt?

Literally none of the factual claims of “RMS said X” have been false, it’s pretty much all been on the record.

On the contrary, literally every single claim about what RMS said or did was fabricated, or pulled out of context so badly you could still see the severed threads trailing behind. The original posts and subsequent press articles were one big patchwork of lies and manipulative statements; this was all trivial to verify and apparent to anyone except those who, for some reason, really wanted to believe it's true.

Look, if you take any public figure, and spend enough time looking through all the things they ever written or said in their lives, you can probably find some terrible thing to paint them as a terrible person. Someone could be a role model, have a lifetime of charitable work and positive achievements, bbbbbbut years ago they once said they didn't like gay people (or whatever), all of a sudden none of their achievements matter and they're actually monsters!

Any of us with a long posting history on the Internet probably at one time said something that wasn't nice. Cherry picking that one thing and holding it up as the summation of who we are, is character assassination.

I also remember him being called a creep because he used to sleep in his office.

And at no point was any kind of change of opinion and/or public apology even hinted at.

It didn't feel like an honest attempt at all.

This is especially important, as time moves forward and people who never even met RMS read about this, to make sure we are relying on contemporary reports and not just fading memories.

You're defending the indefensible - why?

0 - https://stallmansupport.org/debunking-false-accusations-agai... (with links to primary sources throughout).

That’s certainly the one I remember, and everything else was just people piling on to try and provide more ammo or more legitimacy to that claim because “look he’s a creep in other ways too!”.

But the claim that he defended pedophilia is itself false. The lady making the claim quoted him as saying one thing and then immediately criticised the quote as if it said another thing. I don’t remember the details now, but I remember reading the original open letter at the time and being baffled by how that was considered as evidence against RMS.

Im not saying he’s not a weirdo or creep, I don’t know if he is or not, just that the accusations against him about his comments on minsky’s visit of epstein’s island were strawnan accusations.

rms seems to forget that people will read not the words you write, but what they interpret you to be driving at based on the words you write. They took this to mean he was defending pedophilia (when in fact he wrote no such thing, being both neurodivergent and precise).

This is rms' fault for being bad at PR whilst being a public figure and leader.

They weren't. The things he actually said played a minor role in that kerfuffle - it all started with a lot of smears thrown at RMS by a person with some grudge. Additional quotes came later, as people started fishing for them.

> rms seems to forget that people will read not the words you write, but what they interpret you to be driving at based on the words you write. They took this to mean he was defending pedophilia (when in fact he wrote no such thing, being both neurodivergent and precise).

Why exactly are you defending people being irrational or engaging in power plays? You note yourself what the facts were, so why justify mistaking them?

> This is rms' fault for being bad at PR whilst being a public figure and leader.

RMS was doing fine until someone decided to destroy him for personal gain. Do you expect every person doing something interesting in a niche community should behave like a Hollywood celebrity or a politician, having their communications managed by teams of spindoctors, on the off chance someone wants to destroy them and picks mass media as their weapon of choice?

He was not destroyed, literally or figuratively. If that is the basis of your claim, then everything else based upon that has no supporting evidence.

Who do you assert yielded personal gain, and how? I saw nothing of the sort.

He's bad at communicating. It may be because he's autistic, but ultimately that part is not relevant.

The way humans in bulk receive public communications is a fact of nature; it would be like someone swimming in the ocean and drowning and saying that it was bad that the ocean couldn't accept their style of swimming.

He's a public figure and certain actions undertaken by public figures when communicating with millions of people are bad. He undertook those actions and suffered the negative consequences. It's ultimately not related to his neurodivergence; there are autistic people who don't make huge PR blunders.

That's what happens when you put all your eggs into one basket, and then realize that basket had a hole. Maybe free software would be better off if the FSF had spent time building a resilient movement rather than a church to RMS.