[aonsager]

Yes there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. Stallman was viewed as a toxic individual who caused harm, and this is what our society is trying to weed out.

I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you. And this is something that everyone needs to do, whether you're in the majority or the minority.

[jamesrcole]

Social progress involves making-acceptable things that were previously offensive and outrageous to the majority. Things that were considered harmful to society. Things like equal rights for women, minorities, different sexualities.

For progress to be possible, people must be able to say offensive things that others find unpleasant.

You might say, but it’s not those kinds of “harmful” views we want to stop, only the genuinely harmful ones. But who gets to decide which views are harmful?

On a different note, I think that, for creativity, it’s important to be able to think and express yourself without always needing to second guess yourself. And I think we’re creating a society where everyone has to always second guess everything they think and say in case they accidentally say something that may bring in the outrage mob, either now or at some point anywhere potentially years later.

[solidasparagus]

> for creativity, it’s important to be able to think and express yourself without always needing to second guess yourself. And I think we’re creating a society where everyone has to always second guess everything they think and say in case they accidentally say something that may bring in the outrage mob

It's funny you should say this. This is one of the defining traits of Stallman in my memory. He would go out of his way to get loudly outraged about relatively trivial things that others would do. Email out asking for responses to a survey and reward people with Amazon gift cards? He would attack you for supporting the evil corporation Amazon, often derailing the original thread. Share an interesting article/webpage/project? He would attack you for not offering a javascript-free option. Set up a video-based experiment in the lab? Better make sure Stallman doesn't see that camera and disable it/make a huge scene about his privacy being infringed upon.

You reap what you sow I guess.

[noobermin]

This makes him an annoying true believer. This doesn't make him "harmful" in the sense that they seemed to mean.

[solidasparagus]

I was really only replying to that comment's last paragraph - the outrage culture that Stallman embraced has come back to bite him.

[glangdale]

I've finding it hard to understand what sort of progress is reached by, say, enabling weird dudes to constantly and inappropriately hit on women.

Suppose there is some future society that has decided that weird stinky dudes that make inappropriate remarks, stare at women's tits and compulsively hit on attractive women who are just trying to exist in a professional setting are actually A-OK. Why is that society's alleged values superior to our own?

If we are trending towards a direction that makes what we now regard as sexual harassment ok (again) then I would say we're going in the wrong way, and there's no more reason to regard that hypothetical futures' values as better than ours, any more than we regard the 1950s values better now.

This doesn't remotely analogize to "gay rights" or racial tolerance, etc. Being enraged/uncomfortable about, say, interracial marriage or consensual gay relationships was always a matter of people becoming involved in things that were none of their damn business (e.g. "I'm angry about what those gays are doing behind closed doors") or denying them to right to participate in society as equals. Not liking stuff like sexual harassment is something we do because of its effect on the person involved (e.g. "it's hard to be taken seriously as a professional and feel that I have dignity when Stallman makes remarks about my virginity and stares at my tits") or others like them.

IMO second guessing what you think (?) and say is hardly all that difficult. People could go a long way by (a) being kind and (b) acting (shock horror) professional in a professional context and not trying to use the workplace to get dates or get laid, and (c) shutting the hell up once in a while rather than treating us to their opinions about Every Goddamn Thing. Honestly, the sheer egomania of Stallman deciding the whole world needed to hear his thoughts on underage sex is pretty wild.

[yocheckitdawg]

The argument isn't that enabling weird dudes to inappropriately hit on women is the progress we are after, that is a complete misunderstanding of the point.

The argument is that often renegade and maverick thinkers are deeply deeply flawed on an individual level and would do stuff like that. This doesn't really fit well into the "progress category" of civil rights, it's more about advances in technology.

TBH I don't know jack about Richard Stallman, but my understanding is he played a huge role in developing the idea of free software which has had enormous benefit to the world in general.

The question is does the benefit the ideas and works of Richard Stallman have brought warrant the personal costs he has imposed on many people around him? And in the future, are the potential personal costs another Richard Stallman would bring worth the advances they could bring in another area?

To put it even more bluntly, will it be possible to have the types of significant progress we desire in technology or what area, while excluding people who on a more personal level we find deeply problematic? Can the best parts of a Richard Stallman or Steve Jobs be separated from the worst parts? Can we in a sense "sanitise" progress so that only people we find socially acceptable are the ones who will do it? What if the people who will do most for humanity's collective properity are (a) assholes (b) unprofessional, and (c) never the shut the hell up about stuff they know nothing about?

I don't have an answer here, but it is going to be an issue worth thinking about going into the future.

[glangdale]

I'm not sure that the entire careers of a Stallman or a Jobs are inseparable from them acting like dickheads at some point in their career.

It may be the case that having "Future Stallman" or "Future Jobs" be persuaded to rein in their excesses (rather than being tolerated and encouraged to be raging assholes, at least in some contexts and ways) might be of benefit both to the people around them, but also, the talented individuals themselves.

Maybe we can apply discussions of "the soft bigotry of low expectations" also to badly behaved white middle class people too, and they could do better?

[thatcat]

There's no future Jobs or Stallman who is going to change the status quo of technology, but be agreeable and not neurotic.

[glangdale]

First of all, this is bullshit. There are plenty of perfectly agreeable people in computing who have had massive impact. I've met Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, for example, and both were kind and pleasant people. I don't recall hearing that Berners-Lee is anything but pleasant. While there are plenty of disagreeable sorts (I hear Dijkstra was a bit of a Djick) there is by no means a hard and fast rule that those who change the status quo of technology are dickheads. And some of the people who were neurotic aren't necessarily bad to other people, and historically, it's easy to point to some people who might have had much saner lives but for the times they lived in (Alan Turing).

Second, even the people like Jobs and Stallman can moderate their toxic behavior towards other people if incentives are in place. That doesn't mean that they will be normal. They will almost certainly continue to be rude, abrupt, and a little weird. They don't have to be nice.

There's something bizarrely fetishistic about the assumption that letting people like Jobs and Stallman do whatever they want is essential to their success. It's like Delilah cutting Samson's hair and taking away his strength.

[jamesrcole]

> I've finding it hard to understand what sort of progress is reached by, say, enabling weird dudes to constantly and inappropriately hit on women.

I was reponding to these statements "there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw. ... I still believe ... that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you.". This is clearly talking about all cases where there's potential for causing hurt and pain, not the one specific case you're talking about.

You didn't address one of the main points in my comment: who gets to decide which views are harmful?

And when I talked about social progress, I didn't just mean that which has already occurred. There are things which are today considered offensive and harmful, that in the future will be considered just and good. This has always been the case, for any moment in time. If we decide it's important to shut down all offensive speech, it makes it much harder for society to evolve and improve.

[glangdale]

You're looking for a neutral principle that doesn't exist. Why is the trajectory of society towards "evolving and improving" assumed here? Why is someone's view of what is "just and good" in the future automatically better? What if we wind up in a dystopia and reintroduce slavery? Is that automatically "better" because it's out there in the future?

At this point people usually go looking for a get out of jail free card where they can conjure up a neutral principle and say "no, I meant progress towards good things", which of course "begs the question" in the classic sense.

[jamesrcole]

The principle I'm arguing for does not involve any specific view of what "better" is.

A norm of shutting down someone whenever a number of people consider that person's views or actions to be offensive or harmful will stifle change. It will stifle all change and evolution of norms and beliefs. It's an authoritarian impulse that will only ratchet up restrictions on what can be said and done.

If such a norm had been in place in the last few hundred years, it would have severely hampered all the past changes that are now widely agreed to have been good things.

[glangdale]

I think you've 100% missed the point here, but it's late, and I can't channel any more of Stanley Fish's "The Trouble with Principle" (very recommended, and readable) at this hour.

[widowlark]

If it was the government censoring you from saying those "harmful" things I would agree with you. Who gets to decide is society, and it's responding loud and clear to this issue.

[jamesrcole]

A view being the (supposedly) dominant one doesn’t therefore make it the correct or better one, as history clearly shows.

[noobermin]

This flattening needs to stop. RMS didn't harm anyone, he stated odious opinions most people disagree with. There is, in addition to the email thread, accusations of past toxic behavior. The article these comments are attached to dispute that or at least suggest that it may in part be due to him being neuroatypical. In fact, it directly disputes one of those anecdotes regarding a sexual joke attached to his door. This aside, I've heard enough he-said-she-said-they-said to feel like I really don't know the full story wrt actually toxic behavior beyond rms merely being unpleasant and pedantic, and it probably isn't fair at this point to make a call on it.

I'll repeat what I said above, this is why his ouster should have been through a fair hearing rather than in a hurried response to public intrigue.

[maximente]

no, that's not how he "was" viewed by those on the outside, at least; that's incredibly unfair and ignores the mountains of progress he fought and sacrificed for for many decades.

i cannot think of a more principled and consistent individual in the realm of technology than RMS, nor someone who's actually completely trustworthy in this day and age. in the tech sphere his logic was talmudic as far as i can tell: not only that, but his principles probably cost him millions of dollars or more - whatever some BigCorp could pay him to shut the hell up, or buy/relicense GCC, or whatever.

honestly, it's a miracle that everything isn't completely proprietary already. that RMS and others were able to hold that line, to the extent that they did, against the money their enemies had, was nothing short of heroic.

who is next in line? who else can you trust in a world of selling every morsel of data, invading every possible private nook of our lives still remaining? i really can't think of anyone off the top of my head. unfortunately, that means we'll probably even faster acceleration of proprietary crapware added in to various devices.

that he's insufferable or whatever in person is regrettable, but one cannot merely ignore the insanely principled views he espoused, contributions he made, and rights he defended for the sake of anyone consuming technology today.

[yibg]

I’m not informed enough to make a judgement either way with regards to Stallman, but someone can be principled and trustworthy in one realm and inappropriate and harmful in another.

Just because I volunteer at a shelter and help people there doesn’t mean I get pass for bad behavior else where.

[dcolkitt]

> Yes there is a benefit to radical thinking and nonconformity, but "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw.

I'm trying to keep an open-mind here. But can anyone cite specific examples of a person that Stallman hurt in some way or another? And I'm willing to take a very liberal definition for "hurt" here.

Because Stallman's "toxicity" keeps getting brought up again and again. Yet no specific instances are being cited besides vague rumors, anonymous claims, or "you know it, I know it, everybody knows it" type allusions.

So, it's just a simple request. Any actual, specific, non-anonymous claim of somebody being hurt by Richard Stallman in some identifiable way. (For example Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey would have no trouble meeting this criteria.) Maybe, I'm just out of the loop, but I'm certainly seeing a repeated pattern or allusions without specifics in these threads.

[strenholme]

There is a sexual harassment allegation from 1985:

>>>When I was a teen freshman, I went to a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant in Central Square with a graduate student friend and others from the AI lab. I don't know if he and I were the last two left, but at a table with only the two of us, Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he'd kill himself if I didn't go out with him.

I felt bad for him and also uncomfortable and manipulated. I did not like being put in that position — suddenly responsible for an "important" man. What had I done to get into this situation? I decided I could not be responsible for his living or dying, and would have to accept him killing himself. I declined further contact.

He was not a man of his word or he'd be long dead.

Betsy S., Bachelor's in Management Science, '85<<<

Source: https://medium.com/@selamjie/remove-richard-stallman-appendi...

I have seen in this very same thread other people saying there are accusations, but that the people in question do not want to come forward.

Another secondhand (third-hand?) accusation of sexual harassment:

>>>He made overt sexual advances to women at work [in the late 1990s at VA Linux]. One young woman who worked next to me was so upset from his multiple advances that she took it to senior management. She was able to deal with the problem without taking the issue outside the company. I don’t know the details, but she was given advanced warning anytime Stallman was headed over so that she could leave.<<<

Source: https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrac...

Personally, I still stay it was a witch hunt to force Stallman to resign, but if there were substantial sexual harassment allegations from this century [1] and a reasonably fair hearing, I would consider it fair to make him go.

[1] This will make me a heretic among some #MeToo advocates, but I think sexual harassment allegations need to have a reasonable statue of limitations. I don’t think people should be dragged through the mud for something they did 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years ago. [2] [3] [4]

[2] Tom Brokaw was dragged through the mud for allegedly sexually harassing two women over 20 years ago, as well as trying to kiss a woman (who was not his wife, but that bit doesn’t generally matter with the #MeToo crowd) over 50 years ago.

[3] Nolan Bushnell was dragged through the mud for supposedly having a hostile work environment at Atari over 40 years ago, but not one women who worked at Atari when Bushnell led it has come forward to complain, and multiple women who were there, including Loni Reeder, came forward and said Bushnell was very kind and inclusive towards women.

[4] Within reason. Many jurisdictions do not have a statute of limitations for rape; but asking someone out on a date when they are not interested is very different from sexual assault.

[dredmorbius]

Richard Stallman was never on VA Linux's board.

Eric Raymond was.

Gruber is quoting a third-party letter which appears to be unreliable.

[lostjohnny]

> > Richard Stallman told me of his misery and that he'd kill himself if I didn't go out with him. > I declined further contact.

This is not sexual harassment, there is no allegation, it was never filed.

This story was never confirmed, BTW.

But even if it happened, what's so bad about it?

That he's weird?

When it happened to me I offered support, I did not go to the police.

> but that the people in question do not want to come forward.

Stallman is not a well know powerful man that could pose a real danger to anybody.

He's not an Epstein that traffic girls.

> He made overt sexual advances to women at work [in the late 1990s at VA Linux

Who didn't in the 90s?

There were literally cocaine addicts running companies, snorting from their desks at the 24th floor in Manhattan and we are talking about Stallman making an alleged third hand advance?

Of course him being him, not Brad Pitt, and coming out weird when he tries to be friendly, scared women away.

Meanwhile the like of Epstein trafficked girls and were considered "highly respectable business men" because they dressed sharply, were good looking and moved a ton of money, the kind of money that could buy you an island.

While Stallman slept on a matress in his office .

It is hard to recall how bad the 90s were for those who never lived them, how bad the influence of the new born "global style industry" was and how not conforming to some social norm made you automatically an outcast.

There were movies like "Thrashin'" were the best skaters in the world (Caballero, Tony Hawk, Tony Alva) played the bad boys and the good guy of the time was Josh Brolin [1]

Now think about Josh Brolin in the 90s, the epitome of what a man should be according to showbiz industry targeting young people, and imagine being Richard Matthew Stallman.

Hell, there were even movies about nerds and they were all depicted as ugly, mean and with a bad hygiene.

Of course Snotty became my favourite!

[1] the good guy according to 80s and 90s culture http://ingridrichter.info/cheese/graphics/T/thrashin/brolin_...

[ng12]

Without a doubt Stallman has done several magnitudes of more good for society than harm -- from what I can tell the "harm" is mostly him being just a weird, semi-insufferable dude in a field of weird, semi-insufferable people.

[Udik]

> "do it without hurting others" is a reasonable line to draw

Let's say then, if we want to enforce some kind of hard limit on what other people are allowed to do or not to do (and even on the kind of people they want to be), that there must be objective and shared ways to establish harm. It cannot be sufficient for someone to say "I felt harmed" to exclude someone else from society (because this what being silenced and removed from one's job means). And we need to have the courage to doubt those who claim they've felt harmed, and to draw a line between tolerable and intolerable amounts of harm (as every action can end up harming somebody, even slightly).

Turns out that laws do precisely this, and define harm in objective ways that allow society to agreee on behaviours that should be punished without limiting personal liberty in arbitrary ways.

[raxxorrax]

Saying Stallman did hurt others in the context of all the work he did isn't just naive in my opinion. Try to weed out people from your society if that is your calling, but don't be surprised if people want to weed out you.

Frankly, I think this is ridiculous.

[ehvatum]

>I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you. And this is something that everyone needs to do, whether you're in the majority or the minority.

At issue, negative beliefs are postulated to be the cause of social ills such as racism and sexism. Therefore, what Richard Stallman believes is the core objection, because simply holding a belief is now viewed as the root of injustice. To wit, you see, again and again, attempts to claim moral credit from the leveling the assertion that Richard Stallman is a toxic asshole guilty of no particular crime, but instead an accrued debt of micro-aggressions that together represent a pattern of behavior unambiguously identifying his as a thought criminal.

Seriously. He once messed up a hotel room, and had a sign on his office door, and clumsily asked someone on a date. From this we know that he has harmful opinions.

If it were just any one of these things, perhaps there'd be some room left to think it's all a misunderstanding, to wonder if he doesn't actually believe this or that... which we must indecently rush to exclaim that we certainly do not also believe! oh no! I, for one, think stigmatizing people for their beliefs is wrong, which is why I have never messed up a hotel room or caused anybody pain! Cancel RMS!

It is extremely painful dealing with this level of dishonesty. Perhaps RMS's thoughts on free software are more relevant than his opinions on other things, and we should ignore his thoughts on the age of consent, because, if we don't, we're going to find that there has never once been a good idea from a mind that did not also harbor bad ideas.

[coleifer]

> our society

Whose? Isn't that exactly the issue?

[esyir]

And offense has now turned into harm.

[lostjohnny]

> I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you

It depends on other people around you, too!

If people around me are scumbags and they get offended for reminding them what they are, I think it's alright.

[mnm1]

> I still believe, perhaps naively, that it's possible to maintain not-normal opinions without causing pain to the people around you. And this is something that everyone needs to do, whether you're in the majority or the minority.

It sure is. By shutting up and never speaking your opinions or thoughts to anyone. That's what you and half the people on this thread are advocating for. That people should only share opinions that the rest of society agrees with lest someone somewhere be offended. As if to be offended is to be physically harmed. Otherwise, should one dare to speak, one should be fired and ostracized. Frankly, that's one sick and boring society that's will produce little to nothing of value. Who knows what other voices will be silenced by this kind of censorship? No one will know because in this society of self censorship, people will be too afraid to voice any kind of opinion. That's the type of place America is becoming and the type of society it is trying to export to the rest of the world. Having lived in a society where the vast majority were afraid of speaking anything against the norms, I can tell you it was a horrible place, full of fear with little room for creativity or advancement of any sort. Yet here in America, where one is protected from the government, this growing movement of censorship is created by the people themselves, as if in the absence of government censorship, many Americans take it upon themselves to create an institution of censorship to prevent any and all discourse, creative thought, and advancement. They do the censorship for the government the government can't do for itself.

Ironic and ugly this society that has been created. So much for freedom. Whatever little freedom the government has left to the people, the people here are choosing to take it away from themselves. All so someone somewhere doesn't get offended. Of course, someone will always be offended. That's what great writers and thinkers and inventors and creators do: they offend. When you lose that, you lose all innovation and even the ability to think critically about anything. You end up with a conformist monoculture that cannot fathom of anything different. So much for diversity.