We don't have to tolerate people who make women feel unsafe and unwelcome in our (or any) industry.
You seem to be arguing the usual tired old thing: "but he's a genius and does such great work that we should tolerate the bad things he does". I really thought we'd started to move past that over the last few years.
Also, you're doing a bait and switch, neuro-atypical covers a large swathe of people including autistic people. May be you're using it here as a mere synonym for "autistic" for lingual flare, but it includes people who are generally typical in social settings.
It's absolutely true that neuro-atypical people can learn from others, even if they can't pick up on social cues the way neurotypical people can. I'm guessing stallman just goes unchallenged on much of this stuff because of the lingering effects of the rockstar syndrome in tech, where "great men," geniuses, whatever, get cut a lot of slack because of their position in the industry.
It's only recently that I've seen a shift away from prizing our jerk 10x rockstars ("hey, he's so smart he can keep the whole codebase in his head!") to valuing better-behaved people. stallman seems like he'd be even more isolated than the typical one of those, with less chance to have the rough edges smoothed off in the rock tumbler of social interaction.
Again, not an excuse, but I'm more interested in, "how did we get here?" (where "here" is a decades-long public figure questioning the wrongness of pedophilia and making jokes like the "emacs virgin" thing well into the 2000s).
Stallman's job as head of FSF wasn't just to be technically competent, which he has in spades, but to forward the mission of the foundation and a certain level of social acuity is a necessary part of that.
It has quotes you might be able to follow up on.
No it's not an insult to anyone. It's an attemoted explanation of why some neuro-atypical people behave in atypical fashion.
The original claim was that saying that someone's anti-social behaviour was due to being neurological atypical, was an insult to everyone who is neurological atypical. This is clearly nonsense.
I certainly would not excuse him! Nor should anybody else!
But given his stature, it's surely worth discussing and understanding him. And any attempt to do that would certainly have to include his famously black-and-white and self-described borderline autistic thinking.
Pointing out that somebody is austistic (or left-handed, or that they have psoriasis, or dyslexic, or seven feet tall, or...) and thinking about how that may affect their actions isn't excuse-making. It is empathy. It is critical thinking.
I did. To me, it says "I've known a lot of creepy people; as long as they get their work done, it's ok". And I don't agree with that.
> self-described borderline autistic thinking.
That's another thing: has he actually been diagnosed? If not, well, he may still be autistic, but that just sounds like RMS himself hiding behind a shield of autism that he's crafted himself, which is pretty low.
> Pointing out that somebody is austistic and thinking about how that may affect their actions isn't excuse-making. It is empathy. It is critical thinking.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what was written. The parent even said "if RMS was some random superhacker doing his thing" he'd defend him. To me, that's excuse-making, not empathy or critical thinking.
But I do agree that autism can certainly explain some behaviors, and it's worth trying to understand people, even though the explanations may not excuse the behavior. The parent's post just did not strike me as that.
Nobody thinks this of RMS. He's a competent developer who was in the right place at the right time to found a new ideology: The idea that software should work for the user, the only way for software to do so is to empower the user to also be a developer themselves. That's all.
Being competent himself wasn't a sufficient condition for anyone to listen to him, but it was necessary.
Promoting intolerance of people we disagree with, even if we vigorously disagree with them, is perhaps not the best response.
If we want to talk about disagreement...
He only recently recanted (with quite suspicious timing) his view that pedophilia is fine if the child gives consent. No, I'm not going to tolerate that view. I wouldn't want to work for someone that had that view.
In the email thread under discussion, he wanted to redefine "sexual assault" and "child rape" to something that agrees more with his sense of linguistic purity. No, that's not ok.
At some point, when people keep having disgusting views, and won't change them, you give up on them entirely. It's just not worth the effort anymore.
Hand waving and quietly ignoring is the mark of tolerance. But one wonders exactly how polite society is. One certainly presumes the existence of both knights for justice and hot ladies in a nation of millions. What society are we talking about?
I don't expect MIT to be any more representative of society than the NFL. It is a magnet for extreme people who defer common sense and common acceptance in search of very particular goals. I wonder if we were to get rid of Stallman and replace him, deserving as he must be, for a bust in our Hall of Fame if our society could resist defaming his very image and existence.
A lot of people (mostly men) hugely overestimate just how fragile and vulnerable women are.
The semi-autistic are a lot more likely to be made unwelcome than women.
And yes, celebrities will get more of a pass than others. Which isn't ideal.
