Forget about the content of the statements for a moment.
Imagine a person expresses skepticism of an idea you consider "settled." Do you:
1. demand the person be let go from his/her current position
2. provide evidence that counters the skepticism
If the correct response is (1), then you yourself are at risk of a Stallman exit. Every one of us holds at least one point of skepticism that one or more groups will be deeply offended by.
The liberal idea, under assault form all shades of the political spectrum, depends on (2) being the correct response.
This may be an appealing idea in the abstract, but there are people who sincerely hold the view others are subhuman and deserve to be raped and killed, and there are people who believe it’s fine to have sex with kids.
Society can absolutely decide not every point of view is worth debating.
If there is a belief that is backed up by evidence (and in this case there is) then the first response should always be to provide that evidence.
Just because someone sincerely believes that others are subhuman doesn't mean the conversation ends immediately. We could try providing evidence and clarifying whether they are dead-centre wrong or just dealing with a technical detail before turning to exclusionary tactics.
I mean, seriously. If the choices are (1) end the conversation, try and get someone to resign and (2) try and convince someone to take a different view through conversation over a few days then (2) is far superior. We have a lot of people working in, eg, law and the upper echelons of business who are fantastic contributors to the general good despite having extremely questionable moral stances.
Is that also the second response? And the 100th? It isn't like Stallman provided new arguments or new evidence here. This wasn't the first response. It was the 100th.
> Just because someone sincerely believes that others are subhuman doesn't mean the conversation ends immediately.
Holocaust deniers used this very tactic under the banner of "skepticism".
They wrote books, they gave speeches. They participated in "academic debate" as if the authenticity of the holocaust was something to be debated.
And they caused a lot of pain to those that did live through the holocaust -- only to hear from someone making false claims that it did not, in fact, happen.
Thanks to people that instead of refusing to debate the deniers choose to show proof of why they were wrong, nowadays, 74 years after the horrors, we have readily available proof to counter the lies of whom, with malice, try to deny it again. If people had chosen the first tactic of refusing to debate the most probable thing would be that we wouldn't have this amount of proof to counter them today.
We should always explain why something is wrong and try to convince to avoid future trouble.
The problem of course being, that Holocaust victims were asked to be more logical about genocide while denialists defended the notion that it didn't happen at all.
If someone using a tactic in bad faith means we can't use the tactic any more, we're going to be in a lot of trouble. People talking about things they don't understand and being in need of correction goes a bit deeper than "well, Holocause deniers ask questions too!".
Stallman is not a serial Holocaust denier. He is a software philosopher.
And insofar as he is an agitator, on most of his pet topics time has proven him to be right rather than to be a troll.
> Society can absolutely decide not every point of view is worth debating.
We could have decided that three hundred years ago too, in which case the divine right of kings would still be a thing.
EDIT: A lot of people seem to think that the divine right of kings would not have been a thing worth strongly defending back in the early 1700s - and certainly far more than they would have defended the rights of people in the west indies or far east to not be "raped and killed". Do you have any argument to back this up? Would bumping things to five hundred years change that?
If banning discussion of things outside the overton window wouldn't have had results you'd like then, why would it do so now? There might be reasons! But I haven't heard people bringing them up.
Most of us are at risk for losing our jobs over far less. Our boss can decide he doesn’t like the way we dress, and we’ll be looking for a new job before the end of the day.
Millions of workers labor under threat of starvation just for standing up for themselves a little bit. Expressing a straightforward opinion like “it is illegal to work off the clock” or “a 30 minute lunch break is mandatory in this state” can be enough to provoke retaliation.
Why are people so eager to spend so much energy defending a guy who, at the very least, wrote a bunch of inappropriate things in a completely inappropriate place?
What’s the slippery slope here? “If a man can’t rant about the unfairness of statutory rape laws on a computer science mailing list, then....” I don’t know how that sentence is supposed to end.
There are so many more important things to worry about. A kook is losing his platform. He’ll have to shout into the void like the rest of us. Oh, the horror!
I think the purported slope is that currently you can be fired at the whim of your boss (who presumably knows you well), but in the future you might be fired at the whim of a blogger (who has never met you). You have only one boss to keep happy, which is stressful but substantially under your control. Giving equivalent power to myriad bloggers scares people because there is less accountability and more possibility of false accusations.
Maybe some ideas are in fact so "settled" that anyone being seriously skeptical of them is either trolling (and not worth our time) or frighteningly unethical (and should not be in a position of power).
For example:
1) Men should be dominant over women. Women should have no rights, and be little more than property.
2) Certain races are inferior and should be put back into chattel slavery.
3) Eating toddlers is fine, actually.
Would you bother trying to counter those ideas in good faith? Or should the people expressing those views maybe be fired/punished/etc.
Well, if their job involves serving female customers, managing sub-human employees or providing day care, then yes they absolutely should be fired. Otherwise, no, of course not. Because while it may be "obvious" to you that eating toddlers is bad, it is self-evident that large numbers of people can be convinced that e.g. blasphemy is just as bad. What protects us there is this principle that people can mostly say whatever they want without fear of punishment. What you're suggesting is that only popular ideas should be protected. Popular ideas do just fine even without protection, so this is tantamount to not protecting any ideas at all.
It's not just about free speech, it's about his position of leadership in those organisations. He needs to either moderate his public viewpoints in order to look out for the best interests of the people there, which is what a good leader would do, or he needs to resign because he clearly doesn't understand his job.
When you're the head of the FSF, or any other organisation really, you can't just be some kind of agitator, throw out a bunch of controversial nonsense, and then expect it to not look bad for the people you're supposed to represent. It's not an "assault on free speech" to get kicked to the curb for making your organisation look bad, it's cause and effect.
How would you respond if someone said something like:
"The literal-minded personalities we often encounter in the engineering profession are just not cognitively capable of handling leadership positions. They suffer from autism, a form of mental illness, and while they are fit for highly logical and problem solving tasks are not fit for tasks that involve social or political decision making. It's important that they be kept away from positions of influence or outward-facing communication and properly managed."
Would you call for that person's resignation? I sure as hell would.
If Stallman thought UFOs were clearly alien spacecraft or that Bigfoot was a real surviving prehistoric hominid, I don't think anyone would care. If he took some positions that were more politically charged, like denying evolution or climate change, people might get mad or call him names but I doubt they'd call for his resignation from the FSF or MIT over it.
There is no broad based "witch hunt" against divergent opinions, but there is a new-found extreme intolerance for a certain narrower set.
The opinions in question are those that denigrate other human beings or deny them equal rights or dignity, such as the choice to engage in pedantic hair splitting to defend the sexual exploitation of children.
Other well known cases of "cancel culture" follow the same pattern: Brendan Eich apparently funding campaigns to deny rights to homosexuals, a Google engineer taking the time to write a wall of text explaining why women are "on average" less suited for engineering work, and so on.
So the question becomes: do you think it's right for society or our peers to react so strongly to those kinds of opinions? Is there value in debating them?
P.S. As for the extreme reaction: sexual abuse of children and adolescents is fairly prevalent. Statistically it's pretty likely that at least a small double-digit percentage of free software authors and people involved in the free software community are victims. Seeing Stallman go out on a limb to defend or at least apologize for that kind of thing probably angered quite a few people for reasons that are entirely understandable, especially in the context of his past comments about pedophilia. Sometimes it's tough to see what the big deal is when it's not about an issue that directly relates to you, hence the artificial example I wrote up above.
Imagine a person expresses skepticism of an idea you consider "settled." Do you:
1. demand the person be let go from his/her current position
2. provide evidence that counters the skepticism
If the correct response is (1), then you yourself are at risk of a Stallman exit. Every one of us holds at least one point of skepticism that one or more groups will be deeply offended by.
The liberal idea, under assault form all shades of the political spectrum, depends on (2) being the correct response.