His problem is he doesn't know when to keep his Goddamn mouth shut. Talking about free software is one thing. Holding forth on the nuance of what is and isn't child abuse, in a society where anything more moderate than "feed the pedos feet first into a woodchipper and let God sort 'em out" is fundamentally untenable, is quite another. Even if he were technically right, especially given his history of massive faux pas in this particular area, he should have kept his opinions to himself.
> His job is to be a gigantic neckbeard. That he is uncouth and pedantic is not only expected, but the reason that many of us have jobs.
His job is to give talks about Free Software, its ethics and benefits. Being uncouth and pedantic and a giant neckbeard is not at all required to do his job. In fact as time goes on and the programming community diversifies beyond being primarily composed of people who look, think and act like him and share his proclivities, his personality and behavior hinder the cause more than help.
But of course, many of his supporters only see though the lens of culture war, so there's really no point in doing anything but wait for him to die so the free software movement can move on from him and his cult.
Can't we have some safety for pedantic nerds in computing of all fields?
It's also amazing to me that RMS was the only person at MIT to see consequences. All these prominent MIT people had Epstein connections, but the guy who's too weird to even get invited is the one we scapegoat? Over ill-advised forum posts?
Richard Stallman is the safest, most protected pedantic nerd in pedantic nerd-dom. He resigned from the FSF and was just let back in because he's Richard Stallman, without so much as a vote or a note to the membership.
I get the feeling you're trying to turn this into a "normies hating the neurodivergent" argument or something, which I've seen done countless times in defense of RMS, but that isn't what this is about. No one is out to get the guy who's too weird. He defended pedophilia passionately in those ill-advised posts for years and only bothered to retract after the whole debacle went down. Only once, afaik, almost as an afterthought. And he had a history of creepy behavior towards women that people aggressively ignore, discount or otherwise invalidate.
This is the issue - The reaction to him and to his words was perfectly reasonable even if he didn't mean what people thought he meant. If RMS were anyone but the ur-neckbeard "install Gentoo" avatar of nerdkind, with his history and paper trail, no one here would be giving him the benefit of the doubt.
That this is the first thing people talk about now is the point. It's not even relevant if RMS was right or wrong, it was that he lacked any awareness of how his argument must look to most bystanders.
As Cardinal Richelieu said: If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
It's perfectly clear what Stallman said and what he meant by it. But if there are bystanders with their own agendas, perhaps Stallman isn't the problem here.
It's not at all clear to me. I still don't get why he elaborated on his naive nonsense instead of just sticking with "let's maybe not judge dead people when they can't defend themselves for things that have not yet been proven even in other cases".
I don't agree with what he said, but I also don't give a shit what someone completely unrelated to the Epstein stuff says at all