The consequences here are out of line. You can be reprimanded to take your discussions to a non company venue, in a situation like this, but fired is over the top.
Stallman said “it is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”
It's pretty clear with the age difference being what it is, this is exactly what statutory rape laws are for. But it is also incongruous that somehow if she was a year older it would be ok. It's also fucked up that if Minsky were 19, the consequences would be the same. Maybe there's a better law to be had here, but how would we ever know if you can't even have the discussion?
I'm appalled by how free speech is under attack lately by the outrage machine.
I agree with this statement.
Stallman has been a problematic person for a long time. I'm no fan of his. If after a while the university had said, "Enough is enough, Richard, you need to shape up or get out." I would have understood that.
However, that's not what I think happened. What happened was he shared an opinion on a hot-button issue, pedantic and maybe gross, and unfortunately had that go viral and was so hounded out of his position.
If Stallman's position is wrong, we should be able to rationally come to that conclusion as a society. He should be allowed to be wrong. If his opinion is so problematic that it makes him a real liability for the university, his removal should come after a period of deliberation, not after a flash of public outrage.
I can understand arguments that Stallman's position is a questionable hill to die on regarding the Epstein revelations, that even choosing to weigh in on this makes it seem like his priorities are out of order. I can also understand the argument that the email list he was arguing on was the wrong location to voice his opinions and he was making students uncomfortable. I also understand the idea that he should have been corrected by the university, either for this event or for his past behavior.
But what I don't understand, is this idea that firing people in response to media shit-storms is somehow something to be applauded.
I share this frustration, unfortunately with many HN discussions as well.
When someone states a position that the majority finds repugnant, IMHO the most productive (long-term) approach is this:
Step 1. Identify where the minority and majority views diverge in terms of logical justification. With majority-repugnant views, this may require going back to very basic assumptions. E.g., rape is morally wrong, it's appropriate public policy to prevent moral wrongs, etc.
Step 2. Starting from there, try to understand why the views diverge, and debate which side (if either) has better justification.
I think this approach fails at least half the times I try it, though. A few guesses why:
- During Step 1, people jump to the assumption that I'm advocating the majority-repugnant position, rather than working within this two-step process. Once my character / motives are impugned, reasoned discussion seems to end.
- Many people are unable to engage in logical debate regarding ethics. And in frustration, or to subconsciously avoid having to accept that gaps exist in their ability to logically debate some topics, they are unwilling to engage in proper debate.
- Something in my mannerism is off-putting, or I'm in a forum where few people are willing to engage in a debate lasting more than several minutes :(
The point of this is that as people start to integrate political views into themselves (as opposed to just a view - something that's subject to change as the evidence does) it makes debate difficult. In many ways we're becoming more akin to religious nations. You're unlikely to find a nice healthy debate about the value, worth, and viability of Islam in most Islamic Nations. It is because such values have been integrated into the individuals themselves instead of being kept at arm's length.
And as a tangent one thing I would add is that it obviously was not always this way. During the Islamic Golden Age Islamic nations were world leaders in learning, education, and the collection of wisdom. We still retain fragments of this time in our language today. For instance Algebra, from the title of Ilm al-jabr wa'l-muḳābala by al-Khwarizmi around 800AD. During this time of growth and learning all things were open to question, including Islam itself. And then along came a lovely man by the name of Al-Ghazali [2].
In response to religious skepticism, which Al-Ghazali was unable to effectively combat on direct logical grounds, he chose to develop a new philosophy. And in his new philosophy he preempted skepticism by suggesting that there were no natural laws at all. When a leaf catches fire it is not because it was exposed to a fire or because it reached a certain level of heat but because, and only because, God willed it happen at that exact moment. And so the study of 'natural laws' is nonsensical, as detailed in his work 'The Incoherence of the Philosophers.'
And that idea, enabling one to revoke all logic and criticism and simply adopt the dogma without question or concern, was met with resounding praise and endorsement. That was 900 years ago, but this ideology remains a key component of Islam to this day. At the same time this was happening a lust for learning was just starting to take off in Europe... Kind of interesting to imagine that we could be on another precipice of change when 200 years from now e.g. China has become the world leader in education and people ponder the decline of the anglosphere.
Or this could be little more than the regular waxing and waning of insanity that in 20 years, perhaps sooner, will feel as distant as parachute pants.
[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/17/is...
He's clearly a freethinker, and we have all gotten a lot of advantages from his courage doing his thing and making his vision for FOSS a reality.
Now he's said his thoughts on this too... it's legitimate for him to do so and "problematic" everyone is in a huge panic to punish him in case the mob should get set on them.
He was a terrible human being, and surely not very aware of how to treat other humans. He had no place in a research institution, or getting paid to pretend to be relevant on free software.
Good riddance, whatever reason we can find in his statements (yeah sure, I was 18 when my wife was 17, it wasn't rape, surely... but is that really the point people were making about his nice friend of Epstein ?).
People aren't for free speech, at all and anywhere: they are for people having the same opinion as them or follow an official line. He didn't do either, now he pays. For a genius like him, it should have been easy to understand you have to adapt if you want to lead, or you shut up if you see you can't lead.
According to the Register, this is the position of both the SFC and GNOME
> On Monday, the Software Freedom Conservancy called for his resignation. "When considered with other reprehensible comments he has published over the years, these incidents form a pattern of behavior that is incompatible with the goals of the free software movement," the group said in a blog post. "We call for Stallman to step down from positions of leadership in our movement."
> So did the GNOME Foundation's executive director Neil McGovern, who said Stallman's Minksy defense email was "the straw that broke the camel’s back."
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/17/richard_stallman_in...
TBH I wouldn't expect that if they did for it to be public knowledge. In fact I'd assume that has happened.
1. RMS wasn't just some random guy in the foundation, he was supposed to be a leader which means he should be held to a higher standard. Firing someone who doesn't meet that standard means your organisation has integrity which is important and should be applauded.
2. The downsides for keeping him around, especially since RMS didn't seem to be all that apologetic, are also important. The goals of the FSF are not advanced by being pushed into this media storm.
If FSF didn't do something, they would have been forced to answer alot of questions in the media about how they actually feel about age of consent laws, whether they took any money from Epstein and/or Minsky, how they felt about Epstein and/or Minsky, etc., and would then have had to give a number of awkward statements about this mess. Then they would have also had to answer many of those same questions from their donors. And likely if the controversy gained traction, their largest donors may have then been forced to answer their own set of awkward questions from the media about this whole mess. Especially if those donors also had ties to MIT. At some point, many of them would have also reconsidered whether they wanted to donate money to FSF, which would also be bad for the organisation.
All of which is to say that it's not about free speech, it's about protecting the organisation.
Your conflation that free speech is under attack is disappointing - That's not what is happening here.
This has also been said before, but free speech specifically includes the right of others to dissociate from you because of your speech, as a central aspect of their freedom of speech, and in fact such dissociation is a central part of the concept of the marketplace of ideas supported by free speech.
> the idea that someone's livelihood is under threat due to their speech can be just as coercive as threatening a fine or jail for their speech
Yes, the fact that our society doesn't provide a minimal non-market guarantee of livelihood makes free interaction coercive economically coercive for many people. The problem is not with free interaction, however.
If people don't want to associate with a person who says awful things, it's not a violation of their freedom of speech to disassociate with them.
Neither MIT or FSF should be required to continue to associate with RMS if his views are repugnant to their organizational core.
I don't think the distinction between government and private institutions is that meaningful though. When a constitution is preventing the government from infringing upon a right it's usually a good idea if that right is protected against other people as well. In fact freedom of speech is covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly wasn't intended to only protect people against their own governments.
That's why it's called the court of public opinion.
If Mr.Stallman were to be in Epstein's Island well that is whole level of any issue.
Committing Rape and Questioning the logic behind defining the "act" of rape are not the same.
Basically, looks like this situation was a long time coming.
Source: http://wordsideasandthings.blogspot.com/2012/03/instrumental...
An example of the concept being applied to quasi-public entities, with enough generality for the legal realm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...
I don't take "free speech" to mean anyone can say anything without consequence. The government has a whole lot of power and it comes with limits like free speech.
That doesn't mean that people in my employ can say awful things and I should just ignore it.
Free speech doesn't extend to being protected from consequences for how you express yourself.
It's atrocious that our academic institutions, which used to be a bulwark of free-speech are leading the charge here.
Stallman made questionable, but reasoned statements. He perhaps should not have made them in a work forum, but the consequences here are way out of proportion to the "crime".
You've been throwing a lot of stones here, but I'm sure you've held or expressed viewpoints just as questionable at some time in your life. I know I have. Should you now be denied the right to make a living if they come to light?
But at this moment in time, they've intersected with the real-world activities of organizations that he has considerable influence over. He seems to have prioritized theoretical point-making over the organizational necessity of addressing people's concerns.
Running things and debating things are two different activities, and for Stallman those things are currently in conflict. Maybe he's tempermentally incapable of dealing with conflicting imperatives; in any case he seems to have taken the absolute route to resignation.
What exactly is it that we're trying to "express ourselves" about here? what "progress" are we trying to make on old men having sex with young girls?
If there's change to be made, then someone is going to have to weather the cultural storm that speaking out about it brings in order to bring change. If it's not worth weathering that storm, then maybe it's not worth having that discussion in the first place.
This was not just a "work forum", it was a mailing list containing thousands of people in the MIT computer science community, including professors, researchers, administrative assistants, graduate students, and hundreds of undergraduates.
This isn't just a matter of his comments being inappropriate, it's also about him arguing them in an effectively public forum.
Look, that's the reason he's gone. So you said it yourself. That was his decision.
These problematic statements were made in the context of someone who has a long, long history of upsetting, angering and offending people with bad behaviour. People in CSAIL kept plants around them because Stallman hates plants and it functioned like garlic to a vampire.
Firing him may be disproportionate to the moment, but it's overdue given the history. The guy who fired him literally said "straw that broke the camel's back."
In so far as Stallman was discussing the law, he was genuinely engaging in political dialogue; in so far as he was speculating about Minsky or the situation in question he was not.
To say that we can exercise speech but must face the “consequences” is just begging the question — what “consequences” are compatible with a free society? If my boss says it would be a great thing if California secedes from the Union, and I say I doubt that would go well, we rely so much on other states for water, &c, &c ... I may definitely offend him. How acceptable is it that a person be fired in that situation?
In my country it's illegal to fire people for their political views even if the employer finds them immoral and incompatible with the culture they want to foster. It's part of legal and social framework to protect freedom of expression. Freedom of expression neither starts nor end with what The Constitution says about it.
There are clearly mob reactions to things, but there are also clearly inappropriate speech that should have consequences.
What he said here wasn’t in isolation as some idle musing. context matters. He wasn’t talking about the theoretical of a 19 year old. He was talking about this in context of Minsky being a 74 year old man with a 17 year old girl. Maybe he wasn’t aware of the impact of his words, but that shouldn’t get him a free pass.
That's what Joe McCarthy and the House Committee for Un-American Activities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) said to leftists, union organizers, communists, and others in the 1950s. Is that the kind of company progressives prefer to keep, intellectually speaking?
Apparently the only difference between progressives and conservatives is which sacred cows that they're willing to mob you for for insulting. Fellow liberals, I beg of you, take heed; progressives are not our friends.
First, "lynch mob" is inappropriate and irrelevant. Given Stallman's statements, in the forum in which they were made, many reasonable employers would have fired him, with or without some "lynch mob."
Second, Stallman didn't express his views in private conversation, but rather in a forum where those views would have made it very hard for colleagues to continue working with him. If I'm X and you tell me or to Y in private conversation, "X is an idiot" or something of the sort, then that's one thing. If you say so in a forum where others can read it, then you're showing public disrespect towards colleagues, which is a fireable offense.
Here's what he could have said instead: "Have we seen evidence that Minsky himself engaged in illegal activity?" That's it. It would have expressed his point just as well, and would not have shown disrespect toward colleagues.
Media are trash. Cancel culture steamrolls everything, there is no way to avoid being their target other than complete submission. You can word what you say as carefully as you like, but if they perceive that you're a good target, it won't matter one bit.
It's not about what is said, this is simply a war.
But I agree it's a war. It's a war that's been waged for centuries and even millennia between the hegemony and the margins, and it's a war we'll win, because we always have (well, it's complicated, but if you want to speak in those terms, that's fine by me).
So is Stallman's speech in question here odious? At first glance, not really. But when you put it in context:
The entire brouhaha starts with a sexual predator whose actions are known to but ignored by associates because money (or equivalently, power). Stallman is defending an associate of his who is tainted by association with Epstein. In the kinder light, this defense is essentially pedantry (just rape, not sexual assault). In the harsher light, this defense is "there's nothing inherently wrong with the entire situation here."
In this situation, I think the harsher light is closer to RMS's intent. He has made statements in the past saying that he believes there is nothing inherently wrong with having sex with children (although he has now walked back those statements). In addition, he appears to have acquired a reputation as a sexual harasser among women at MIT over the past few decades.
With that context, it does look like Stallman shares a lot of attributes with "prominent people whose sexual harassment has been ignored because they're powerful people, and who is not sorry about it." And pushing him out of leadership positions because of those views is acceptable consequences in my opinion. More so because it appears to me that he doesn't appreciate how power differential may affect the ability of people to give consent, he is in a position of power, and he appears to desire consent that may be unwilling.
I bet everyone here has one opinion that can definitely and very quickly destroy their lives. Let people be wrong, let them speak, let them think ... We can then convince and converge into a common good. Cancelling the guy that gave his life for the cause is appalling and is showing how evil social media is.
Where and by whom is appropriateness and timeliness determined?
It probably wouldn't be okay. She was coerced and trafficked, and many laws exist to make having sex with those people illegal.
In some places it's illegal even if you don't know they were coerced or trafficked.
I'm not saying I agree with Eich - far from it. Seeing as an awful lot of people on this very thread were outraged by his behaviour, it strikes me as being contrary to be more understanding towards RMS for what is arguably far more heinous simply because they admire him more. Both Gates and Jobs are/were relentlessly and repeatedly pilloried for their "immoral" approach to business and freedom, but to question what constitutes rape or a suggestion that paedophilia is harmless is forgiven readily, because the individual "likes" the perpetrator is abhorrent.
I can't speak for everyone, but while I strongly disagree with his (implicit) views on gay marriage (I even protested against Prop 8 leading up to it passing, though I unfortunately wasn't quite old enough to vote against it at the time), I also was - and still am - pretty harshly critical of him being pressured to resign from the organization he co-founded solely because of his political leanings. He was the right leader for Mozilla, despite his politics; while it's possible that maybe he was some raging egotist bringing down Mozilla and running counter to its mission, I've yet to see a whole lot of evidence for that.
Meanwhile, Stallman is well-documented to be abrasive, uncooperative, and egotistical even to the people who supported him, and while this specific incident was rather benign, I can understand it as a "straw that broke the camel's back" situation. His dogmatic views - while sometimes absolutely spot-on - were also often at the detriment of the free software movement (e.g. the hard stance against OpenBSD's "blobs", and the hard-line stances against non-FOSS programs on FOSS operating systems despite multiple GNU subprojects releasing supported builds for Windows).
Stallman, in other words, was to the FSF as Ballmer was to Microsoft in the sense of being both passionate about their organizations and also being the reasons why their organizations were hemorrhaging influence. Ballmer's departure allowed Microsoft to regain its footing, shake off some of its more toxic dogmas, and become actually decent(-ish; shoving ads down the throats of paying Windows users is pretty scummy, but other parts of Microsoft have actually started to be better members of the broader tech ecosystem). Hopefully Stallman's departure will have a similar effect for the FSF.
https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20June%20...
Brendan Eich is a shill controlled by Google and US goverment agencies. The social media mob attack on him was actually a planned marketing campaign with aim to create an image of an independent, anti-establishment and alternative leader.
His actual goal is to create a "controlled opposition" for Google Chrome and a replacement for Tor Browser. Brave project is needed by Google in order to avoid antitrust charges from the EU when Chrome reaches ~90% market share. It will be still selling user data to Google and it will contain TOR backdoors known only to the US agencies (which will be easier to hide in proprietary browser).
The “selling user data” line betrays ignorance of how data is valued. Google doesn’t sell bulk data to advertisers, it gives API access to ad exchange operations that leak data but not the whole user profile, especially not the valuable correlations, brand loyalties, and shopping searches that run for weeks in case of cars or other major purchases.
Brave builds client only alternatives for anonymous donations and private ads that pay the user 70% of gross. We are making this verifiable on chain in the next stage of our BAT roadmap. If we defected and stole money or data, we would thus be caught and roasted into the ground by our lead users. This is by design.
Last thing: I am hardly an anti establishment leader. I am too busy running a startup, trying to get revenue to cross over based on flat and small/standard fees that leave the big fee to the user.
If you want to find controlled opposition, ask to see the terms of Google’s search deals with other browsers, especially the ones that have been slow and weak on tracking protection that is on by default. A Microsoft contact last year said he suspected those terms include proscription of tracking protection that is on by default, or at least that impairs Google search ads confirmation.
Now if he was a pedophile, he should be in jail. But he is not, he is exersizing free speech, no matter how disgusting it is, he is entitled to it. Should Nabokov have been made unemployable too for writing Lolita?
You are free to say what you like, but the rest of us are free to take actions in response to that so long as those actions don't violate your constitutional rights.
There's no constitutional right to a job or a board membership.
The way I look at this is through responsibility. It's like what we learned in Spiderman, "With great power, comes great responsibility."
So it's not that Stallman can't have this conversation anywhere. It's that when he has it so publicly, it makes people question whether he is wielding his power well.
Sometimes responsibility means not saying anything at all. Presumably, Stallman is at MIT for computer science and free software. Why is he speaking off topic to MIT students and alum? Presumably he could develop non-MIT relationships and have whatever crazy conversations he wanted.
More often, I think the responsibility is just to do a lot more work. If you're famous and you speak off the cuff on topics that you haven't researched, then your comments get a reach that's undeserved. It's a misapplication of your fame.
I thought that about PGs most recent luggage comments. This is something that had an answer that he could look up and share with people. Or if that's too hard, he could have gotten a thorough answer privately. Seeing him be so willfully and publicly ignorant made me question whether he deserved the power that comes with fame. Laziness like that is diminishing and eventually it gets to the point where people are so diminished that they should lose their jobs and/or positions of authority.
In that context, fired is more than fair. His image being linked with pedophilia (on top of the other issues he has) makes him a really bad choice for the public face of a movement/foundation.
If he was, say, a lead engineer whose work was not tied to his image, we could have an argument - but that's quite clearly not the case.
Can you provide some examples of people who have been made "completely unemployable" by the twitter lynch mob?
The FSF is even worse because he's supposed to be in a position of leadership there and represents the organisation. And they shouldn't be put in a position where they have to decide whether to support some controversial statement about age of consent laws just because one of their leaders decided to stick up for one of his friends. It's just not worth it.
Just ask James Damore and his memo on a certain ideological echo chamber. I read his document, and found his view point to be sadly misinformed; yet his right to speech wasn't protected. He was fired.
That was the moment I realized free speech isn't really a thing any more if it touched certain topics. Yes constitutionally we still do, but we can easily lose everything that matters to us even if we win the court battle.
There's a hundred years of history explaining why the balance point between freedom of speech and freedom from fear has been calibrated thusly.
The man has no understanding of the concept of consent, and why a child is unable to grant it. He can have whatever opinions he wants, but as a spokesperson for the FSF, he sure as shit shouldn't be broadcasting that one.
This isn't some rando who works for an organization being punished for airing their opinion. This is someone whose job is public speaking, speaking in a way that actively harms any organization he is associated with.
I generally don't see the hacker community jump to the defense of someone who has so colossally mucked up at his one job, but here we are, turning ourselves in knots in the defense of the right of a public speaker to remain employed when his speech is actively harming his employer.
It should also be noted, without the faintest shred of irony that the man consented to resign. I don't see why everyone is making such a big deal out of it...
