| > the doling out of punishment grossly unproportional to the crime. Like in this case - ruining one's entire career for the crime of being pedantic and tactless on a semi-public mailing list The person I was discussing with agrees that Stallman's actions and history, combined, merited his resignation or removal. Yet they used the phrase "cancel culture" anyway. Please don't blame anyone but Stallman for ruining his career. His history of pedophilia-apology, his history of acting badly, possibly to the level of harassment, around women at MIT, and recently his need to "well-acktually" statutory rape ruined his career. > You'll note here that the final impact is not correlated with the scale of the initial wrongdoing, but with how many people get outraged how fast, and how far they reshare, all of which is moderated by how misleading can the story be made and by what else is currently on the news. No, I don't note that. Pressure was put on MIT leadership by women at MIT, women who had historically been ignored when they raised similar issues about the same person in the past. As MIT said, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. > that's awfully convenient and points towards the actual reason not being related to past behavior. No it doesn't. It points to the trigger not being past behavior, with which I fully agree. It says nothing about the scale of the reaction by MIT or the FSF. Those were without a doubt informed by a pattern of behavior. |
Perhaps because his resignation/removal didn't happen as a direct result of the combined history of transgressions, but only after someone took a fresh, minor offense and blew it out of proportion, so that it ended up in mass media. There's a difference between resigning (or being forced to) because of a pattern of bad behavior, and that plus having your name in the Forbes under a headline that contains a lie.
> Those were without a doubt informed by a pattern of behavior.
If this issue didn't blow up across the whole Internet, do you think they'd terminate him now?