[scohesc]

I'm pretty sure RMS exhibits most of all of the symptoms of Asperger's and would immediately get the diagnosis if he walked into a psychiatrists' office.

It's a bit ignorant for Bushnell to be degrading RMS by calling him a "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.

It's really unfortunate that people with Asperger's (potentially like RMS) are at a massive disadvantage when holding positions of any kind of power in a public setting.

[geofft]

> It's a bit ignorant for Bushnell to be degrading RMS by calling him a "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.

Have you interacted with RMS? Do you know what his cognitive limitations are?

Bushnell has. (And he doubtless knows plenty of people with Asperger's - it is certainly true that Asperger's is disproportionately common in this industry.)

Matthew Garrett, another person who has worked closely with RMS (in his case, on the board of the FSF), has said that he does, indeed, have the cognitive capacity to understand the impact of his actions, but chooses not to care: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html "I've spent a lot of time working with him to help him understand why various positions he holds are harmful. I've reached the conclusion that it's not that he's unable to understand, he's just unwilling to change his mind."

It seems like it is both unfair to RMS, unfair to people who have worked with him, and unfair to people with Asperger's to make this comparison.

[snowwrestler]

Some smart people do have Asperger's, per a professional diagnosis.

It does not help those people to just take anyone who acts weird but seems smart and say "they probably have Asperger's."

Mental disorders should be taken seriously. That means helping and accommodating people who suffer from disorders, including Asperger's. But it also means resisting the temptation to invent pop diagnoses in order to excuse behavior that would otherwise be objectionable.

[scohesc]

I have lived most my life with 3 people who have Asperger's and I've worked with many people who have Asperger's.

He's exhibiting 99.9% of the signs that he has Asperger's.

It's not a "pop" diagnosis of any sort.

[snowwrestler]

Unless you are literally a trained doctor, it is a pop diagnosis.

[viraptor]

> "a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently" when the man 99.9% likely cannot cognitively do so.

This is simply not a black and white situation. I'm familiar with people with Asperger's who can both behave nicely to others and who are aware of their limitations and actively work on thinking through their situation to counteract those limits. Being diagnosed is not a license to be a dick. If someone actually can't handle this, then it is a disadvantage for a public position and they likely shouldn't hold it.

[rongenre]

RMS has all the resources he needs to get an Asperger's diagnosis and appropriate therapy.

[dyno12345]

since there is no known therapy this comment can easily be construed as wrongly blaming those with autism spectrum disorder for not having solved their autism spectrum disorder simply out of laziness and lack of motivation. I'm not a fan of RMS in general, but we're saying that the apparently untreatable condition he is allegedly affected by is effectively his own choice and own fault, an attitude that at the very best fails to help anyone with untreatable mental conditions and is also not uncommon. It may help those without such condition feel like they're living in a just world, on the other hand.

[malandrew]

Why should those that are aspie modify themselves to satisfy those that are neurotypical instead of those that are neurotypical learning how to work with aspies?

Not saying the aspies shouldn't work on themselves, but it should be a two way street, where NTs also learn to recognize and tolerate aspies.

[geofft]

> Why should those that are aspie modify themselves to satisfy those that are neurotypical instead of those that are neurotypical learning how to work with aspies?

This isn't an either-or question. Everyone needs to learn how to work productively with other people, if they wish to succeed at multi-person endeavors. For some people it's harder, sure, but that doesn't change the reality on the ground that you can't just say "The fifty of us have decided that we prefer being antisocial, and therefore we're going to start a community for it" and expect it to work.

Also, this argument does quite a disservice to women with Asperger's who are harassed out of communities because they lack the inherent social confidence to stand up for themselves when a powerful man acts abusive and other people defend him by saying "He probably has Asperger's." Maybe neurotypicals should learn how to recognize those aspies and stand up for them?

[nonamenoslogan]

Yeaaaa...how about we don't use "The Autism Spectrum" (pseudoscience's latest pump-my-kids-full-of-drugs excuse for what ails anyone who's a little slow or a full blown snowflake) to levy criticism without having a clue? As someone else mentioned, its not fair to RMS and its not fair to the genuinely mentally affected.

[zozbot234]

It's far more than 'ignorant', Bushnell knows better than that. He's demonstrating a severe lack of empathy - and let's just say, he's not the only person who has shown tell-tale signs of this trait so far (and leave it at that). What I have to wonder is whether the radical activist politics that's becoming all-too-common in academia and elsewhere is making people less empathetic, or simply selecting for the least empathetic of us.

(As an aside, the notion that Aspergers sufferers "cannot cognitively" reach "the emotional maturity to treat people decently" is a deeply, deeply unfair stereotype that reflects a severe misconception as to Aspergers behavior. Autism and Aspergers has nothing, zip, zilch to do with sociopathy! The way sufferers might treat people may be less-than-satisfactory to us, perhaps even socially-impaired in some sense; but to say or to even imply that they they lack decency is simply outrageous. Sorry for the admittedly-pedantic nitpicking.)

[bbanyc]

From what I can tell, it's Stallman who lacks empathy here. If he had ever thought about the impact of his behavior on the people around him, maybe he wouldn't have driven them all away.

[dragonwriter]

Lacking empathy isn't exclusive; it's possible for multiple parties to the same issue to do that.

[zozbot234]

I have addressed this in another comment. Yes, one can certainly argue that RMS ought to have been cognizant of his social faults, and perhaps his moral failings as well. But there's at least a colorable argument to be made the other way, given how he was (to quote the article) coddled while at MIT. (Keep in mind that until very recently, MIT did not even have a policy on e.g. employee training wrt. sexually appropriate behavior in the workplace, if we are to believe activists' claims! There's plenty of institutional failure to go around in that place. So, no, I'm not going to blame the guy in the absence of deeper knowledge about the actual facts of the matter.)