[Causification]

It is a very common flaw in reasoning that one party assumes that the opposition disagrees because they are scared or secretly agree. Atheists are all secretly christians, homophobes are all secretly gay, liberals are scared of "the truth."

People who mock Stallman for taking his shoe off and eating things he picked off his foot in the middle of a presentation are not terrified of him shattering their paradigm. They just think it's gross.

[icebraining]

But people who use it as if it somehow disproves his position on the ethics of software are stupid or dishonest. Simple as that.

[Herring]

Stallman is a walking PR nightmare, and you're getting mad at human nature?? I don't believe this.

99.9% of humans won't take you seriously if you eat your toejam. That's normal. Stallman is nearly the worst thing to happen to the FSF. He should sit back & let Eben Moglen do the talking.

[icebraining]

Well, that's a bit of a false dichotomy. Disliking prejudice doesn't mean I don't wish RMS was a better spokesperson.

But I wasn't really taking about the people who take him less seriously, but those who use that as an argument in a discussion. The former is a flaw (from which I suffer too), but the latter is much worse.

[Causification]

Except that kottke didn't say anything at all about Stallman's ethics, position on software, or the FSF. He just said it was ridiculous for him to put two paragraphs about parrots in his rider. Simple as that.

[gojomo]

He didn't say it was 'ridiculous'. He said it was 'crazy and amazing'. Not quite the same thing; even 'crazy' can be a compliment in some contexts. ("Here's to the crazy ones...")

[icebraining]

I'm pretty sure Weiner is talking about Stallman critics in general, making kottke just an example. This kind of reasoning is common amongst them.

[dasil003]

The way your comment was going, I seriously thought you were going to say that people had a closet desire to publicly eat toejam.