Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ccalf 2450 days ago
There is none; the people who keep promulgating this falsehood about Stallman say that because of one paragraph that anyone who can pass the SAT reading comprehension tests, parse standard English, or understand the basics of logical reasoning, would have understood that it is simply a wrong interpretation at the level of how 1+1 = 3 is wrong.

It is much better to accuse Stallman in that instance that he was mansplaining and contributing to workplace toxicity, and/or to accuse Stallman of a historical pattern of objectifying women. Those are better because they are closer to the truth. But people like simpler narratives, that he said this one horrible thing, when it is not even that far fetched to show using the exact same quote that he was actually arguing quite an opposite, or orthogonal, point.

The other thing about this is that people ignore the context of the speaker; in this case Stallman was talking about media abuse of terminology. To complain about media manipulation is a very standard, leftist position. So like the above, to implicitly suggest that he was using this position as a cover for his personal misogyny, has merit, but nobody cares about this angle, because again it's too complicated to sort through.

1 comments

So simple that it requires so many words to explain ;)
Actually, the SAT reading comprehension questions are not that simple and trip people up. Which is really my point of analogy. They're the kind of questions where you either got the right answer or not, but explaining it to the person who got it wrong can be non trivial.
Almost an opposite of NP problems. Easy to solve, but hard to convince someone else that your solution is correct.