torthrowaway999

>If I steal an apple from you and grow more apples from it and give them away, there is no difference to the act of stealing your apple and eating it.

Certainly, but we talk about digital good here, stealing the first apple harms me (unless if I was not going to use it regardless), copying it however does not.

>RMS seams to be totally against "stealing" digital GPLed code.

Please explain what you mean by stealing here. He is against taking GPLed code, modifying it, compiling it, and then distributing the binary without distributing your modifications. He has no problem with selling the application/code. He has no problem with keeping the modifications to yourself as long as you do not share the binary. He has no problem with distributing the unmodified binary and/or code.

What about neither? Have you accounted for that option?

Possession of CP is not an accessory-after-the-fact. CP is also not a physical good. This argument is similar to the argument comparing piracy to stealing a car.

Pronouns are just a way to refer to an entity in your text, the issue with classical pronouns like he, she, and it is that they imply certain properties about the entity that they refer (that they are a single entity, their gender, and whether they are a human). The pronoun itself is not a gender and I just can't see how using any polite pronoun that tries to not make any assumptions regarding properties of said entity is transphobic. Another alternative is to use the person's name to refer to them.

I guess using gender neutral pronouns exclusively for transgender people can be considered transphobic but this is not something that stallman advocates for. In fact his statements regarding gender neutral pronouns do not mention transgender people at all, it seems that he advocates for the gender neutral pronouns to be used for _everyone_ (which should in the long run be advantageous to transgender people).

Regardless though, he himself uses the pronouns that people ask him to use for them. So he is basically being accused for being a transphobe for... saying that having a single gender neutral pronoun to replace all pronouns is better? Really? It saddness me that people decide to "cancel" him instead of engaging in a (public or private) dialog with him. There is a good chance that he hasn't even heard their arguments.

He refers specifically to possession, which is true. The arguments against it tend to be very similar to the arguments against piracy (they even include the whole "illegal prime" concept). He does not say that producing child pornography does not hurt anyone however.

Is there anything specific that you disagree with? I personally find his comment totally sensible.

No, it is rather a defense of skepticism rather than of specific opinions. It does not say that both of them are the same.

>RMS deserves all the rejection he is getting for this sentiment alone

How so? He posts his raw thoughts in his blog. Surely we would not want to discourage skepticism and rationalism just because these thoughts are not currently common.

Please remember: the paradox of tolerance concerns these who withdraw from public dialog and instead take actions against these with different opinions and characteristics instead of engage them in a debate.

As for the other charges, they are similarly dubious at best.

Could you please publish your results? Exploring this would be interesting. Did you account for non-english and gender neutral names? So far it seems that Americans are over-represented in the open letter.

It is a joke on "business or pleasure" and he gave it to both men and women https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26574720

This is the first time that I read that "he was asked to stop".

>But without citing the untrue claims they're debunking

I can link you a few, such as the titles of https://www.thedailybeast.com/famed-mit-computer-scientist-r... and https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scient...

>after this all blow up

He changed his mind on or before 2016, before this all blew up https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Biograp...

Is it wrong to be skeptical of stuff? We aren't all born with the innate knowledge that "voluntarily pedophilia harms children", it is not something that I personally agree with but surely you also at some point thought of something that the wider society would consider as disgusting, his blog just served as a place to put some random raw unprocessed thoughts that he had on news stories.

Did you ask him? Surely he knows more about it than some random person on HN. I am glad that he did not remove his previous statements though, it would be akin to rewriting history, although I think that a note saying that he changed his opinions would be nice.