TL;DR Stallman is a piece of shit and the FSF should die.
Before anyone starts defending Stallman on the grounds that he's very likely autistic, keep in mind that publicly shitting on and doubting the story of an Epstein victim is not in the DSM-V.
i dont think he doubted her as much as thought that there was potential that the perpetrator thought that the victim was an ordinary sex worker and was unaware of epsteins sex trafficking.
Well he had a few years to figure that out, yet he never seemed to learn her name.
We also have :epstein: so I'm not sure where we draw the line on removing emotes
I feel like an :epstein-shining: emote might be appropriate to drop on just about every Matt Gaetz story that gets posted, so there's that.
Aaron Schwartz? Cory Doctorow? Goddamn, are all the famous open source figures cishet white dudes?
Aaron Schwartz, Cory Doctorow, and Richard Stallman are all Jewish men. All 3 grew up with Jewish families in Jewish households and practiced Jewish cultures. Jewish men have faced discrimination that white men have not.
edit/ I can see your point that FLOSS communities lacking in diversity is a problem. Certain FLOSS communities have started to address this. Debian for example.
CW: discussion of shitty views regarding sexual assault from Stallman and other contemporary vaguely-left academics
I remember finding his blog back in college while doing a paper on copyright laws and alternatives for a POLSCI class, and it was like "Buy gas from Citgo to support Venezuela" and "Boycott Caterpillar for selling bulldozers that Israel uses for ethnic cleansing" and "Here's an article by a pro-rape academic who thinks sexual assault should be decriminalized." Like he was generally saying and supporting good things, and then just brings up vile libertarian-grade shit about age of consent laws and how sexual assault "isn't really that bad" or some shit.
The even worse thing is that back then that seemed like a fairly popular position among vaguely-left academia, that the trauma of sexual assault came more from social views about it than the act itself; I remember my anthropology professor talking about that shit too, literally doing moral relativism shit about societies where pederasty or sexual assault was normalized. I feel like I bring it up a lot, but back then there was a lot of these predatory chauvinist libertines that just sort of fell into the left by default because they didn't like the moralizing of theocrats on the right, and if there was one good thing to come from the reactionary culture war crystalizing around things like Gamergate it's that it drew clear lines against shit like that and forced them to either fuck off or reform.
That is the backbone of anthropology. Cultural relativism. When they are doing field work they can not apply their own cultural values on others. It can lead to them tolerating some awful stuff, but it is not their place to judge or change other cultures. However, it should never be used as an argument for what Stallman said in his blog.
I'd call it more the paradox of anthropology. You quickly fall into a infinite epistemological knot with these things - you'll always be using "your own" tools to answer every question you could possible ask about them, about you, about the very questions you're asking, about your tools themselves, etc. Here is a good essay on the ongoing debate if you're interested.
FSF workers had to unionize several years ago in part as a defense against Stallman and his behavior. He has no business leading any organizations. https://twitter.com/paulnivin/status/1374499598853545986 and https://twitter.com/msw/status/1374542889531834371
I used to defend Stallman, for no reason other than I looked up to him. It wasn't until I became more involved in privacy and open source and talking to people who had to interact with him regularly that I realized just how toxic he actually is. His public behavior was so bad that employees at some organizations would call out sick or hide in their office when he would stop by. In private, he would hand out those creepy pleasure cards to women he met at conferences, along with getting a group to go to dinner to a place, usually a place that involves eating with your hands, where he would force feed others in the group with whatever he wanted them to try, usually sometime after taking his shoes off and putting lotion on his feet at the table. He's someone that has no business staying in any position of power or influence, we've moved past the need for him.
