It is clear RMS was stunningly clueless to write anything about this, but surely we all know of similar engineers that would make a similar error? If everyone were held up to the same moral standard, we wouldn't have many people left in power! Just to be clear: I'm definitely not supporting hurting children (directly or indirectly) - I hope I'm not falling into the same tar pit.
I certainly respect RMS for what he created and his idealism (although last time I saw him talk he spent about half the time negatively pontificating about Linus and Linux, which seriously damaged his credibility IMHO).
It must be devastating to be on the receiving end of such ire.
Because RMS isn't just another socially awkward engineer. He is a leader and a part of a larger community and is therefore held to a higher standard. The reason for the higher standard is simple, leaders are entrusted with power and need to wield that power better than others. RMS has failed that test today.
> He is a leader and a part of a larger community and is therefore held to a higher standard.
I see plenty of political and tech leaders set extremely low moral standards. Why is RMS being used to set an example? Do you think RMS actually hurt any children?
His comments are tragically inept - but this seems to boil down to being targeted by breaking headlines such as the New York Post: "MIT scientist says Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was ‘entirely willing’".
I agree with you here. Stallman's comments on this topic are characteristically appalling, insensitive and pedantic, but I think the headlines printed about him are inaccurate and malicious. These publications have no stake in the matter of Stallman's status at MIT save to entice readers with the promise of scandal. I'm certainly not going to defend Stallman's character, but I think the retaliation against him is disproportionate. One can't help the feeling that when it comes to this kind of scandal there are plenty of bad actors willing to fan the flames for personal gain. I would definitely call into question the motivation of the authors of the articles on this event.
Despite this, and despite the fact that I really dislike the modern use of the word 'problematic', I can't think of a better word to describe many of Stallman's statements and positions. For someone to be a community leader of any kind this kind of tone-deafness, even if only to politics, is unacceptable.
I wonder if any of what's been published about rms qualifies as libellous. His certainly seen serious damage to his reputation, and I think it's clear too that his words have been materially misrepresented.
That's not what happened at all. The headlines are reporting that Stallman said the girl was "willing", while the article you link to explicitly acknowledges what Stallman actually said.
It also happens to chronicle a ton of other bad behavior that he's been engaging in for decades.
I think the news (and many others) are misunderstanding what rms said (or they intentionally misrepresented his words).
The way I understand what rms said is that the victim would've acted ("presented herself") as willing to Minsky, while being coerced by Epstein. That does not imply she was actually willing in any way shape or form.
I think you're misunderstanding it too, based on your statement: "RMS doesn't seem to understand what willing means."
The way I see it, what rms did was (strategically) dumb and tactless, but not unethical at all.
It's funny how so many people try to split hairs regarding the exact wording, but even so: sleeping with an underage girl wouldn't have been fine, it would have been unethical, not to speak of illegal.
So RMS' defense of child abusers is stupid, harmful, malignant and yes, unethical.
RMS is being used because of cluelessness of the person who called for his removal:
"This was not, actually, all that much about Richard Stallman. Stallman was just the last straw. This was really about all the times I have heard about a classmate’s advisor crushing her dreams, about Seth Lloyd mocking female students, the number of women alumni that were too jaded to feel surprised by this revelation, the story I read from a 1987 alumn about the trauma she experienced at the MIT and the world of that era. This was really about everything that has come out before and after the Epstein revelations, before and after Richard Stallman’s emails.
Did I even really know who Richard Stallman was before those emails? To be honest, not really — I’m a mechanical engineer who didn’t pay enough attention, apparently."
If that's what a "newbie" discovers on a rough first sweep, just dismissing it as the ignorance of ill intent of an "outsider", and wanting to move on, is pretty damning.
> Why is RMS being used to set an example? Do you think RMS actually hurt any children?
That implies that there's some sort of process or council there deciding Stallman gets cancelled. Also this just isn't about his most recent comments about underaged trafficking victims potentially being entirely willing, he's had a long trail of classically sexist "look a girl" moments in speeches and really out there opinions about pedophilia and consent that he only outwardly came out against last weekend _after_ he started getting in hot water about those emails.
Often who gets hit and who doesn't isn't 100% about the most recent events and depends a lot on the story catching fire and in this case it caught and there was a whole barn of old dry tender that had largely been brushed aside because of his technical work.
It's a useful deflection from further examination of the slimy tentacles of Epstein's influence throughout tech and academia. Stallman is not terribly well-liked, and made the mistake of shooting off his mouth and grabbing onto the third rail hard with both hands at an inopportune time. He's a useful scapegoat to sacrifice up to Molloch.
That's not what happened. If RMS had actually argued the case objectively, he would have used reported testimony that cleared his friend. Instead he went off on some hypothetical to excuse the bad behavior (which reportedly didn't even happen) of his friend.
It was the wrong forum, the wrong topic, and the wrong argument. It shows a complete and total lack of good judgement. Combined with his history of such a lack of judgement, that is the standard which we should hold people to.
2 wrongs don't make a right. And again, there was a non-hypothetical, objective argument that could have been made to defend Minsky. RMS did not make that argument, instead he went off on some hypothetical that may or may not have happened, but there is at least one eyewitness testimony that says it didn't.
And this wasn't RMS's first time wading into bad positions on topics that honestly aren't up for debate.
Find a few women who've met RMS and ask them about their experience. For years I've been hearing stories from women about RMS that paint a pretty clear picture, and if you look on twitter, there's a number of threads about his abusive behavior towards women. One example: people kept plants around because he hates plants and that made it less likely he'd come around to harass them.
He's discussed his views on pedophilia for a very long time, and this was just the latest on that. It's finally the last straw that was able to bring enough attention on him for action to be taken. It should have been taken decades ago.
> He's discussed his views on pedophilia for a very long time, and this was just the latest on that
Yes, he has.
This is his view as of Friday[0]:
> Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
> Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.
Can you help me understand what's wrong with that view?
Maybe I'm missing something, but if I had made such a comment on a public platform and any of my previous employers learned of it, I could 100% expect to be terminated if it came to light. Whether his final philosophical view on the matter is morally correct or not is not the focus here. I can completely understand why a foundation would not want a man who apparently had to be talked into understanding why sex with a child is wrong to be its very visible leader.
You're talking about a role that has to inspire by example, someone responsible for advocating for your institution publicly, recruiting supporters, and so on. No one who has a history of making incredibly suspect comments about children and sex should expect to stay in such a role.
Incidents like this are NOT about setting up an ethics court and decide the morality or immorality of the person's views. They're about an organization waking up one morning and saying, You know what, we really would rather not have someone with a history of bizarre pro-pedophilic comments as our leader. For god's sake, how would you feel if your CEO had a personal web page with a history of arguing for lower age of consent laws? At a certain point people just don't want to come 'work for' such a person.
And really, who among us would be surprised to wake up and find "RMS indicted on child porn charges" on the front page news? People with normal views on child sex topics tend not to be the ones out there talking about 'ephebophilia' and "now I'm no psychiatrist, but here's my argument for why children actually CAN consent to sex with adults." I'm not saying I'm convinced he's a pedophile, or even that I believe him to maybe be one. It's just not a revelation that would shock me.
The cornerstone of modern justice system is that people can get fixed. Shall we cancel that and roll it back to slip-once-criminal-forever mob justice?
I don't know, would you be reassured when a 66 year old man says "Contrary to what I've written on the subject, I have recently learned that having sex with children is wrong"?
People can be fixed. But that doesn't mean that people will still be comfortable with them heading up their ideological non-profit, or that it's unreasonable to question whether or not he is fixed.
And even if he is fixed on the matter of his views on pedophilia, we still have all his creepy behavior toward women to contend with.
The social contract is you try to fix yourself up, society looks the other way on your old acts.
Of course, on some crimes it makes sense to put some limits directly for directly related stuff. E.g. not employing ex-child-rapists in schools.
But shunning people for their opinion, not even what they acted on, in an unrelated field... What's the incentive in getting in line with the society then?
You're joking, right? A 66 year old man just managed to learn last week that having sex with a literal prepubescent child is harmful for the child?
And this guy has been the leader and public face of the FOSS movement for decades? And everyone was fine with his views on sex with children? I had no idea, truly incredible.
The fact that he held the view that "voluntary pedophilia" is harmless for over 10 years, and only publicly recanted during this shitstorm is... not a good look, to say the least.
Everything you said is conjecture. This is one of the most baseless and accusatory comments I've read here. It's so low effort and it's immediately transparent that you just don't like the guy.
This wasn't a witch hunt. This should have happened a long time ago. He is a creep, and has been problematic for years.
“He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it. Many female students avoided the corridor with his office for that reason…I was one of the course 6 undergrads who avoided that part of NE43 precisely for that reason. (the mattress was also known to have shirtless people lounging on it…)”
— Bachelor’s in Computer Science, ‘99
All this and more https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...
>
This wasn't a witch hunt. This should have happened a long time ago. He is a creep, and has been problematic for years. “He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it. Many female students avoided the corridor with his office for that reason…I was one of the course 6 undergrads who avoided that part of NE43 precisely for that reason. (the mattress was also known to have shirtless people lounging on it…)”
Sorry, but you have to be explicit with your accusations. Call me naive, but if you say 'mattress and all the implications that went with it' in the context of hacker culture : the obvious implication is that he is a hacker, who likes to immerse himself in his work, pulls all-nighters. At worse it implies a lack of hygiene and a healthy separation between life and work. Okay a mattress might be taking to the concept a bit far but bean-bag culture is rooted in the earliest days of Xerox PARC, Microsoft, Apple (both Steve Jobs and Bill gates have talked about a lifestyle of sleeping in their office and not going home for days on end), Homebrew club, etc.
I read the medium article and its accompanying appendix, and imo, its scant on facts, and filled with weasel-wording, political posturing and self-obsession.
There is mention of a report of sexism in AI labs. But what are the facts of the report. Was Stallman implicated in this report? The article doesn't say so. It looks like the author ju just put it out there to make a association between RMS and sexism in the minds of the readers.
The only real factual account( by 'factual' account i mean explicit about the alleged details and facts of events) is the one where the management undergrad was hit on in the restaurant.
I think that targeting a "creepy" social misfit is one definition of a witch hunt.
We can mostly defend against men that give out creepy social cues. Guys that are not creepy are far harder to defend against or get justice against: a guy that knows how to present himself understands social signals (almost self defining) and they can often get away with a lot because of that.
Plenty of guys hit on young women (I saw a study that showed that men of any age say they want a 21 year old). Are we surprised to find out "teen" is a major keyword on porn sites? Many men with a social standing (or money) use that to their sexual advantage. Go to the pub and listen to some drunk bro's: there is a large number what a lot of men say is extremely disturbing. I think they are highly immoral; but the attitudes are common and we usually avoid the moral argument and simplify it with a legal argument (statutory rape laws which rightly protect our weak and vulnerable).
I don't doubt that RMS has been an arsehole, and his workplace, voluntary workplaces, friends, family and acquaintances should definitely make him accountable, and take action against arseholery.
However, what seems to be happening here is that Richard is getting publicly shamed and publicly tried and judged guilty for being creepy - no accountability required.
What’s truly remarkable is that you spent several paragraphs admitting that men tend to make offensive, sexist remarks and gestures, and then you use this to justify Stallman’s behavior. This is exactly why the tech industry NEEDS to do better.
>This is exactly why the tech industry NEEDS to do better.
By exchanging clearly visible markers against which action can be easily taken for unaccountable bullying and mob "justice" (which tends to unfairly advantage women in the same way you level your accusations)?
All you want is to give a different group the right to bully and oppress others rather than actually solving the problem. This isn't making things "better"; it's typically considered rather harmful, unless you're a sexist, racist, or both.
Calling Richard a creep is ad-hominum: judgement by social media.
I wasn't trying to say his behaviour is acceptable. It seems he needs to work on his social interactions (most of us need to work on that, and we should all fight for better).
The only reason for this brouhaha is that the media has attacked him. He wrote that she was coerced. The media has said he said she was willing.
Now plenty of words are being used to picture him as immoral.
What seems weird is that Richard comes across to me as idealistically moral, almost religiously moral: with the misfortune to have a popular wave crashing into his philosophical castle.
Homo is third declension masculine, hominum is plural genitive ("of men"). Here you need accusative, so ad hominem.
Case Singular Plural
Nominative homō hominēs
Genitive hominis hominum
Dative hominī hominibus
Accusative hominem hominēs
Ablative homine hominibus
Vocative homō hominēs
From a French education, I have learned a different order of cases for Latin declension tables (NVAGDA: Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Ablative). I was curious to know where it comes from, and apparently the order you used is more common in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#Order_of_the_...
He slept in his office, and had ever since his house caught on fire, some years before I met him. I met him in 1984. When he moved his office to a rebuilt floor at tech square, he had a wall dividing the office into two halves. One half was his sleeping space, and the other, which was accessible from the hallway, was his working space.
He slept in his office, and had ever since his house caught on fire
Yeah. This is true.
He was intermittently homeless while developing the free software stuff. It was kind of homeless lite because he was a hacker and often slept at work.
He was unable to register to vote at one point because he listed his work address and described himself as a squatter. He got his right to vote when some interview in some national publication came out stating the same thing. At that point, the registrar of voters accepted his work address on his application.
If you read the medium post the author admits she had no idea who Stallman is and that it was not really about him, and instead of admitting she was wrong on several point she went on and digged some stuff and put them together trying to paint RMS in a way that fit her accusation and her call for his removal.
Coming from someone who admits to have written out of anger accumulated from different personal experience, admitting she iss after someone she had no idea who he is, who misrepresented what was said to fit her views and narrative, I would not give much credit to anything that was added afterwards in this appendix.
Wow, she's just compiled a hit list and blogged about it: "if I had to ever be in the same room with Richard Stallman, how I would handle it, and how I could keep myself composed.".
I'm pretty sure we could assassinate the character of anyone that started writing on the internet before we knew it was going on your permanent record.
Perhaps Richard is a heel, but he doesn't deserve unaccountable bullying and mob justice.
Where is the accountability for the publications and bloggers portraying him to be a rapist apologist?
Good people don't want to hurt people. Corollary: People who want to hurt people who hurt people, might want to do it because they like hurting people.
Stallman sounds shady, but what's our basis for concluding that it wasn't for sleeping and was instead a creepy sex invitation? The word of a blogger who put words in Stallman's mouth and got him fired for them? I would appreciate a corroborating source, preferably one who didn't have as big of an ax to grind.
> In the days of the PDP-1 only one person could use the machine, at the beginning at least. Several years later they wrote a timesharing system, and they added lots of hardware for it. But in the beginning you just had to sign up for some time. Now of course the professors and the students working on official projects would always come in during the day. So, the people who wanted to get lots of time would sign up for time at night when there were less competition, and this created the custom of hackers working at night. Even when there was timesharing it would still be easier to get time, you could get more cycles at night, because there were fewer users. So people who wanted to get lots of work done, would still come in at night. But by then it began to be something else because you weren't alone, there were a few other hackers there too, and so it became a social phenomenon. During the daytime if you came in, you could expect to find professors and students who didn't really love the machine, whereas if during the night you came in you would find hackers. Therefore hackers came in at night to be with their culture. And they developed other traditions such as getting Chinese food at three in the morning. And I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown. It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, cause' that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp, you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night.
> Another tradition that we began was that of having places to sleep at the lab. Ever since I first was there, there was always at least one bed at the lab. And I may have done a little bit more living at the lab than most people because every year of two for some reason or other I'd have no apartment and I would spend a few months living at the lab. And I've always found it very comfortable, as well as nice and cool in the summer. But it was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly can hacking, because you just don't want to stop. And then when you're completely exhausted, you climb over to the nearest soft horizontal surface. A very informal atmosphere.
You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that women would have sex with RMS, let alone have sex with him on a mattress on the floor of his office. Jokes aside, this sounds downright unprofessional. I would have expected the institution to put this kind of behaviour in place.
considering according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20991909 he apparently was homeless and lived out of his office for a while, yeah that's probably the definition of unprofessional.
Saying we wouldn't have anyone left in power of they were held up to this standard seems more damning to our current power structure than the moral standard at play here
1. If you are attacked by the media, you will lose in the court of public opinion (I expect we wouldn't know about this at all except for the egregiously misleading "news" headlines).
2. Never ever discuss toxic topics (particularly if you are either a little odd, or politically weak).
3. If you publically question anything about a witch hunt, you too will be branded as a witch.
4. Beware of getting poisoned by association (Epstein -> Minsky -> Stallman -> anyone defending RMS).
From what I can tell, the actual morals of RMS don't seem to be the actual issue here.
There is surely a modern Grimm parable in all of this.
As to #4, if you're actively defending particular people's views on sex with underage people, then yeah, people are going to view you negatively by association. The vast majority of people vehemently disagree with that view, and for the most part, people assume that if you defend the view, it's probably because you agree with it.
Thing is here, RMS was talking about an accusation being misqualified in relation to Mens Rea and some person took offense and misrepresented his words to present him as saying something else[1].
Then again I beg to differ, the vast majority of people do not live in the US and have different local definition of underage, also the US has a reputation for having a fascination for sex with teenager (one of the most popular porn sites categories during the last 25-30 years).
Your garden-variety human being with even the slightest social wherewithal would know better than to say some of Epstein’s victims were “entirely willing”.
This is not the fault of the media looking for witches to hunt. This is the result of a massively intelligent man deciding to spit into the political wind.
The whole point is that Richard said she was unwilling.
Here's the context "...plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein...".
Richard is talking about her being coerced -- to pretend that she was willing.
The witch hunt is taking the context (Richard presumes she was unwilling) and then twisting his words to make it appear that he said she was willing.
The moral dilemma is: is someone willing if they pretend to be willing? Let's guess she was paid to pretend to be willing (why else was she doing it?). Perhaps she was paid to be a honeypot (entrap someone by pretending to be interested in sex - it is at least plausible). I think we can all agree that the girl probably would prefer not to have to screw some random. Of course, any underage sex is breaking the law, and ignorance won't help you (in court or the media).
Richard's words could have been better, but the quotes in the public media (and you repeating the two key words) are clearly twisting his meaning 180 degrees.
> This is not the fault of the media looking for witches to hunt.
The media is at fault when it radically perverts meanings just to get eyeballs. Why pretend that there can only be one single canonical root cause?
> This is the result of a massively intelligent man deciding to spit into the political wind.
It seems obvious enough to me that Richard is definitely not "massively intelligent" when it comes to social nuance. We all have our strengths and weaknesses: many engineers cut themselves using their blunt EQ knives.
The EQ point is interesting. If we simplify things a lot, engineers generally aren't "forgiven" for having a low IQ. Why should leaders of massive groups of people be forgiven for having a low EQ?
To me, showing a profound lack of the intelligence that is incredibly pertinent to your role is no different whether you're an engineer who can't write FizzBuzz or you're an OSS leader who says that sometimes it's fine to have sex with children.
I disagree, it feels like a witch hunt because it is one.
I read the original post that started this witch hunt and my baloney detector went off all along, in particular when I read the quote from RMs stating one thing and the author calling for his removal misrepresenting and misunderstanding them as if they said the exact opposite.
It's not true. I don't particularly like RMS, I don't agree with his views about free software and I don't like GPL as a license. I also think his views on many political issues are naive, go against human nature and if implemented would cause a lot of harm.
Still, I think the way he was forced to go is shameful. Some journalists couldn't interpret a simple statement (sadly very common), started an outrage and the pressure became too much. I hope he sues them and wins enough money to have a peaceful retirement. I don't want a world where some of the biggest contributors to technological wealth we have access to can't freely state their views, qualms and doubts or even start a discussion about controversial moral issues.
I personally hate to see important free software and opensource contributors quitting because of some stupid reason that could have been handled without immediately weaponizing what someone said to start a twitter or news shit storm.
That was definitely a witch hunt. He worked hard to give advice that he thought would be useful for improving diversity at Google. Nothing he said was outside of the scientific consensus, yet he was demonized[1] and fired for it. The whole thing is absurd.
1. Check out some Googler's responses to his document (which, in case you forgot, was deliberately leaked without diagrams or citations): https://imgur.com/a/S48QN Several want him physically battered for his opinions.
Just because you write up something that sounds "intellectual" and appears to have "reputable sources", it doesn't mean it is or it does. Damore's garbage post was just that: garbage.
It's really sad that people felt the need to stoop to threatening him with physical violence, but that doesn't mean he wasn't completely wrong and had to go.
Care to explain what was "garbage" about the memo? Word of caution: the memo did not claim that women were worse performers in tech due to biology, or that tech jobs are not and should not be people-focused. These were things stuffed into his mouth by shoddy coverage (the journalist that broke the story admitted that he did not actually read the original memo).
I'm not aware of Peter Singer's work, but from my reading of Scott Alexander and Steven Pinker, as well as rebuttals to their writing, I'm not sure I'd consider them authoritative.
It is clear RMS was stunningly clueless to write anything about this, but surely we all know of similar engineers that would make a similar error? If everyone were held up to the same moral standard, we wouldn't have many people left in power! Just to be clear: I'm definitely not supporting hurting children (directly or indirectly) - I hope I'm not falling into the same tar pit.
I certainly respect RMS for what he created and his idealism (although last time I saw him talk he spent about half the time negatively pontificating about Linus and Linux, which seriously damaged his credibility IMHO).
It must be devastating to be on the receiving end of such ire.