12 ms·

Cancel We The Web? (2020)

407 points by r3856283 5y ago

ggm 5y ago
Well worth reading. Lucid, clear. Didnt make me like Stallman more, but articulated some of the issues well. On the whole, I think the cancel/trigger thing has got out of hand. People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.
- etrabroline 5y ago
  >People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think. This sounds like a very Orwellian way of saying people shouldn't be fired for wrong-think if they profusely apologize afterwards. Is that what you mean?
  - ggm 5y ago
    No. That isn't what I mean. I think your wrong-think is a very big stretch from what I said. Can you show me the chain of thinking which took you there please?
    - narag 5y ago
      Don't shoot me, just trying to make sense of what the other guy wrote. I believe that he's arguing that even if he said that, he shouldn't be punished. Only doing bad things is relevant.
  - salawat 5y ago
    I think you may have read that wrong. What the poster is saying is that people should be accountable for what they actually say, not what other people assume they must have meant. It's subtle, but let me try to highlight the difference: Take as an example, Stallman saying "...it is entirely possible Minsky could have been unaware of the coercive dynamic [between Epstein and the young womem] going on at the time. We'll call this P. Also take, "We should wait for the facts and evidence before jumping to conclusions". We'll call this W. What Stallman said is just " We don't know if P or not P, therefore W". There's nothing wrong that was said there. People read things though that were not said; i.e. that since Stallman said P, it must mean he thought that the young women must have been voluntarily doing it. (We'll call this V). Much of the hulabaloo around the time came from people, (and journalists) adding in context that simply wasn't even there, which a quick perusal of CSAIL quickly made evident. Stallman never said it was the case that anyone involved was doing it of their own volition, merely that Minsky may not have picked up on the fact there was coercion going on, because if someone is being coerced, odds are they have been specifically instructed to hide the coersion. The fact is, one presupposes the knowing complicity of an individual by doing otherwise. Stallman cautioned that one should wait for evidence before coming to a hasty judgement. Communication is hard. One must transmit, and another must receive, and both people be able to demonstrate they took from the exchange a shared understanding of a common arrangement of circumstance and subject, mapping to the same circumstances and subjects in the real world. The clincher though, is that there is so much low stakes communication that goes on in our lives where errors in reception or coding of meaning don't have readily tangible effects that become apparent within a short enough time for people to recognize a miscommunication happened, or that even if they recognize one happened, that it will adversely effect the outcome of the attempt at communication as a whole. As a result, there is a tendency to chronically underestimate the difficulty of communication overall. EDITS: wording, punctuation, sentence flow.
    - ggm 5y ago
      Thank you. That pretty much said it, better than I did.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  Nadine's point was that people should not be unduly punished for making intellectual arguments for or against anything. "Being punished for what they say" is precisely what happened to Stallman.
  - ggm 5y ago
    No, I don't agree. He was partly punished for what people THOUGHT he had said, and for past transgressions, and in large part for what people were TOLD he had said. Not for what he actually said.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
      *Alleged past transgressions.
      - ggm 5y ago
        Yes. important distinction. Things he said and did in the past, which people got upset about, which are completely unrelated to the current Epstein context.
    - sneak 5y ago
      He wasn't punished, he was fired. You're allowed to revoke consent to an interaction or business relationship at any time. It's not a punishment to anyone else to say "this situation (employing rms) isn't for me and I don't want to be in it any longer". Firing isn't punitive.
      - moistbar 5y ago
        Firing is absolutely punitive.
        sneak 5y ago
- colanderman 5y ago
  Stallman clearly has issues as many have attested. But reading these specific excerpts of his now... they just read like tone-deaf pedantry. Sarah Mei's response to someone else who pointed this out in a leveled, non-confrontational manner, of > That means you are also racist, misogynist, and a colonial apologist. Nice job just comes off as needlessly toxic escalation intended to shut down dialogue. I have several autistic friends and see this sort of interaction now and then. They will state some observation or make an argument rooted in logical pedantry, not pushing any political agenda (or, supporting certain politics but trying to cast it in a more logical framework). Someone takes offense at this and accuses them of being racist/misogynist/whatever. They are hurt. The conversation is not advanced. Both sides lose. Chalk it up to "normies" just... completely not understanding the autistic approach to the world I guess. I wish political activists were less reactive against those who just want to explore -- and ultimately strengthen -- ideas.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    I think its because the point is not understanding - the point is gaining power, in this case - power over who leads the OSS movement. If you want to use one's words against them, you do not look for understanding, you look for maximally uncharitable and hurtful meaning possible, and declare this is the only meaning that matters. That's why political activists do it - because it gives them power.
- sneak 5y ago
  > People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think. I disagree. What people believe what someone thinks, even if incorrect, is a legitimate basis for someone's choice of free association. It's entirely legitimate for someone to avoid someone else (including fire them) on the basis of false beliefs about that person, due to failing to spend enough time understanding the nuance of the situation or person. I would never hire rms, for example, because he is a drama llama, and I find constantly creating controversy (intentionally or otherwise) to be mostly unproductive, even if all of the things he is saying are accurate and correct and true. Freedom of association does not require fairness or due process. Our time and attention is our own, to allocate unfairly, incorrectly, or on any other unscientific, inaccurate basis we feel is best.
  - moistbar 5y ago
    So every alleged criminal should be treated as guilty until proven innocent?
    - sneak 5y ago
      Yes, this is entirely permissible by society and people who know them. Violence undertaken by the state to enforce the law is a different matter, where the maxim of the law is "innocent until proven guilty". The topic of this thread is not law enforcement by the state, however. There are people I know who have been credibly accused of crimes. No trial occurred. I still treat them as if they were guilty of the crime: I assiduously avoid them. Such is my right.
etrabroline 5y ago
> Luckily, another co-author on the book has spent a lot of time pondering inclusion, women’s rights, children’s rights, and free speech. Her name is Nadine Strossen and her credentials run deep. She served as the first female President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), America’s largest and oldest civil liberties nonprofit, from 1991 to 2008. When she stepped down as President, three Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell luncheon (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter). Strossen is a Professor Emeritus at New York Law School and currently an advisor to the EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the ACLU, and Heterodox Academy. She is the author of the widely acclaimed books HATE: Why we should fight it with speech not censorship (2018) and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (1995). She has far too many awards, publications, and prominent appearances to name. A credential sheet of PC accolades long enough to whip a horse shouldn't be required to publicly disagree with the ideology of Google and ACLU without being fired.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  Working with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is definitely not a “PC allocade”. They are the main organization that tries, from a legal perspective, to protect people from being canceled for their speech at colleges in the US.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Nor is heterodox academy (I'd categorize it as essentially the opposite). She's certainly well credentialed, and worth listening to, but not, at all, because she's "PC".
  - themolecularman 5y ago
    Yup I recently donated to FIRE as they're an organization that seems more important now than ever. If anyone else is interested go to thefire.org/donate.
- smsm42 5y ago
  It shouldn't be, but it surely helps to not be eaten by piranhas immediately. Somebody without this kind of shield - especially somebody, say, having a misfortune of being a male and of European descent - might be. I personally have been told many times that I do not get to have opinion about cancel culture and ideology because of my identity. Having credentials that even PC zealots can't deny surely helps to make it harder to dismiss her.
r3trohack3r 5y ago
A different take: Microsoft, Oracle, et. al. waged a war against OSS in the 90s. They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness). It’s not a coincidence the class of human that weathered the storm looks like Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al. That’s what it took. The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover. These humans grew up amongst OSS activists that also weathered the storm. They carried the flag when no one else would. Vilifying them now, at a time where Microsoft just purchased the two largest infrastructure/tooling providers for the commons (npm, GitHub) is concerning to me. Without them, the commons wouldn’t be what it is today.
- jarfil 5y ago
  On the other hand, following that logic, in times of peace the soldiers of yesteryear are out of work. I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but it might be just a sign that priorities have changed for people. Maybe the basic software liberties are enough for most, and it's no longer enough to fight for OSS, but instead time to consider "how" to fight for it. In a sense, it could be seen as a victory.
  - r3trohack3r 5y ago
    “Good times breed weak [humans]” But I see it differently. I feel the wolves are in sheep’s skin, and are trying to convince me the sheep are wolves.
    - _euac 5y ago
      I'm always curious about this line of thinking. What exactly do you think people are gaining by - say - denouncing sexism or other kinds of awful behavior? What's so wolfish about that?
      - r3trohack3r 5y ago
        Here is how a wolf would disrupt the commons: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Liberals hate cops and unjust laws but are the first to ignore Omerta the moment it goes against their views.
- kitotik 5y ago
  What do you call the group that loves cops and unjust laws?
  - protomyth 5y ago
    Historically, that would be dictators or authoritarians.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
    They only believe in unjust laws for the opposition.
readflaggedcomm 5y ago
>Progressives are right now advocating for the release of criminals, even murderers. To then have exactly the opposite attitude towards something that certainly is not committing physical violence against somebody, I don’t understand the double standard! Barabbas understood.
- ExcavateGrandMa 5y ago
  epic comment :)
- DoofusOfDeath 5y ago
  Once again, brevity is the soul of wit. Well played.
wyldfire 5y ago
> Activists quickly found his reputation for asking women out and making jokes about “EMACS virgins." I'm all in favor of believing victims of sexual harassment and assault. Those claims are so very rarely made falsely that they should be taken very seriously. But what about claims that a man/woman made sexual jokes or "inappropriate" innuendo? Certainly they can be cause for concern if the accused is someone who has responsibility over the victim. But what if they're peers? How can we righteously distinguish between flirting that results in the furtherance of a relationship and flirting that's not reciprocated? Or just plain boorish behavior?
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  You also should not tell racist jokes, sexist or other off color jokes etc at work. However everyone is able to discuss how they loved the new Chappelle skit. How does that make sense? Context maybe, but I'm not sure.
  - mimikatz 5y ago
    It doesn't. The rules people claim are the rules aren't the rules. There is a different set of rules, but they change all the time so you have to be on top of it and follow those. It sounds hard, but really you just do what everyone else is doing and you will be fine. Step outside what everyone else is doing and you are at risk.
    - rootusrootus 5y ago
      > really you just do what everyone else is doing and you will be fine. Step outside what everyone else is doing and you are at risk. This, sadly, is exactly the correct advice. The path of least risk for most people is to just be like everyone else. Don't try to be more pure, or more boorish, just be alike. Conformity is almost always more beneficial than not.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      It's not that simple. Do that today and you're not in trouble today. You may be tomorrow, though, because the rules change overnight. And when they do, there's no forgiveness based on "it was within the rules at the time I did it".
donsupreme 5y ago
> Sarah Mei then went through the board members involved one by one, digging into each of their histories, and tweeting what she viewed as fire-worthy infractions. The crimes included: “being super involved with Wikipedia,” retweeting a “hideous” New York Times editorial, and being friendly with famed democracy activist and law professor Lawrence Lessig. Publicly calling out each board member in turn with a clear implication: associate with a thought criminal and you too could be in jeopardy. Did she really do that? wow
- duck 5y ago
  Here is the thread in question: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1172283772428906496.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1172283772428906496.html
  - innagadadavida 5y ago
    Has anyone done any investigations whether she had a profit motive doing what she did? Did she get paid by someone? Did she just do it out of spite to RMS? Or just to get plain attention?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - young_unixer 5y ago
      She's been doing this for the last ~4 years or so. Everytime I stumble upon her name, it's never for a good reason, it's always some sort of controversy or attack against someone, so I would say no, it's not money, she actually is that way.
  - 1024core 5y ago
    This Sarah Mel character is the one who should be "cancelled".
    - smsm42 5y ago
ApicalDendrite 5y ago
Wasn't part of the issue with Stallman that his behavior, not just his ideas, were problematic. Like telling a college freshman that he'd kill himself if she didn't go out with him: https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrace https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrac...
- dralley 5y ago
  Yes. https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84 https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa... (Above is a piece by someone who worked with RMS for years, explaining why it was not this one event that got him canned, but a long pattern of poor behavior, which he partially bore witness to)
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > And, I think, some of those focusing themselves on careful parsing of RMS’s words are falling into the same pitfall as he. His intentions do not matter nearly as much as his actions and their predictable effects. ... I was around for most of the 90s, and I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS’s behavior was a concern at the time ... To my shame I didn’t recognize the dynamic myself when I was around it. So it doesn't matter what he said, or what his intentions were, all that matters to the author is what they now believe, 30 years later, some people were feeling around RMS in the 90s.
  - mst 5y ago
    The long term poor behaviour is a reasonable argument for the end result. I just wish the people lying about him to make him look even worse than the facts did had faced some consequences for that as well.
- kstenerud 5y ago
  Actually, it just comes off as ex-post-facto rationalization of doing something hasty and mean.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 5y ago
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Barrin92 5y ago
>For many, the conclusion was clear: Richard Stallman must be “cancelled.” Many failed to make any distinction between what Stallman had done, question age-of-consent laws, and an actual pedophile or child rapist. These discussions about cancel culture truly have taken a strange turn. I hope the author is not suggesting that the barrier for getting fired is to be an 'actual child rapist'. The response to that is prison. Firing someone for holding views that go as far as defending sexual predators (Minsky/Epstein mentioned in the article), defending pedophilia, having a history of misbehaving towards students and so on has nothing to do with cancel culture. That is just responsible behavior because we should expect basic moral standards from people in leadership positions. I won't give money and I wouldn't want my company associated with institutions that put people in charge who trivialize child abuse. You don't need to be a literal sex offender to be unfit to run a public-facing organisation. These contrarian cancel culture blogs have become bizarre.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Sounds like you didn't understand the piece.
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    care to enlighten me on what part I didn't understand?
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      The part where it mentions that he isn’t defending sexual predators.
      - Barrin92 5y ago
        He is, and I'll quote the relevant part from Stallman's statement that is included in the article: "The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X... The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing... We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing." Not only is Stallman wrong about the fact that sexual assault requires force or violence, sex between a 73 year old man and a 17 year old is not only sexual assault but statutory rape, something which Stallman in another post declared to be a 'technicality'.
edfletcher_t137 5y ago
Let's be honest, RMS needed to fade away long before September 2019. It was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
- Snetry 5y ago
  Did he though
  - edfletcher_t137 5y ago
    Yes
  - edfletcher_t137 5y ago
    "If the people who came before me--those who taught me the game of avoiding rms--had spoken up, the community could have healed before I even came on the scene. If I and others had stood up fifteen years ago, we'd have another couple generations who were more used to respect, inclusion, welcoming and safety. The FSF board could have done their job back in 2018. And perhaps if more of us had spoken out in 2019, the FSF board would have found the strength to stand strong and not accept rms's return." https://hartmans.livejournal.com/100652.html https://hartmans.livejournal.com/100652.html
    - geenew 5y ago
      Like all other tell-alls that have emerged, there is nothing of substance in that article that would condemn Stallman. The only actual offense is interrupting people on stage. Hitting on someone by talking about emacs would be funny if it weren't for the insinuation of some sort of sexual assault that was attached to it in the article. Speechifying when talking with someone about codes of conduct is at most boorish. It may well be a burden to have someone butt into your work and lecture you on ethics, but to conflate social discomfort with a loss of personal safety is self-serving and dishonest. One uncharitable way to view this saga is that the people who failed to effectively argue with Stallman on his moral points have resorted to slander by misrepresenting disregard for superficial social convention as malice.
m463 5y ago
Interesting that I didn't see this when it came out almost a year ago.
CanceledAccount 5y ago
I was canceled on Twitter last year. Hundreds of people were harassed for being associated with me, my social circles were ripped to shreds, and I feared for my safety. I got into right wing shitposting and logs from a small private chat group were leaked. It was one of the worst experiences of my life and I haven’t recovered. They feel like they’ve made the world a better place.
- dguaraglia 5y ago
  Have you ever pondered if your 'shit posting' led to other people being harassed and led them to question their safety?
  - google234123 5y ago
    Has Dave Chappell's (or any other comedian's) jokes led to other people being harassed and led them to question their safety? Should they be "cancelled" and erased from society?
    - dguaraglia 5y ago
      There's a whole gaping chasm between Dave Chappelle - a world-famous comedian - making what is clearly a joke on a stage and some anonymous person posting edgy white supremacist shit 'for the lulz'. In case you haven't been following the news, that's the kind of radicalization tool that resulted in a not insignificant amount of the population believing that QAnon was real and that storming the capitol and killing a policeman were justified. So yeah, people who are there just to 'shit post right wing stuff' should definitely consider what they are doing.
      - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
        There's certainly a chasm, but is there anything in the chasm beyond mere social status? I don't want to strawman your argument, but that really seems to be the core; it's a joke if a world-famous comedian says it, but "edgy white supremacist shit 'for the lulz'" if an anonymous nobody does.
yurielt 5y ago
LIKE LOOK AT THIS https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/994010501460865025?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E994010501460865025%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wetheweb.org%2Fpost%2Fcancel-we-the-web https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/994010501460865025?ref_s... please lets stop giving a platform to this fake mentally ill people that are at best cointelpro like figures made to destroy free software
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
> Sarah Mei then went through the board members involved one by one, digging into each of their histories, and tweeting what she viewed as fire-worthy infractions. What a [negative adjective removed at moderator's request] human being. Worst of all, she probably views her activity as a worthy contribution to society.
- axaxs 5y ago
  Careful now, the world missed out on all of her genius open source in the 90s, and are obviously much worse off.
  - meibo 5y ago
    > Currently stirring the pot at @SalesforceUX Seems like Linux UX wouldn't have been much better off with her!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't do this here. You may not owe the third party better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
twirlock 5y ago
Yet another casualty of blue checkmarks identifying a systemic issue and then using it to go after individuals while actually defending the system.
jimbob45 5y ago
Individuals get canceled when their support dries up from those would previously have offered them funding and employment. How then does one go about avoiding cancel culture? Simple. You just avoid cancel culture. Anyone who claims to support BLM or ActBlue or any liberal politician who has support cancel culture in the past should be avoided with extreme prejudice. These organizations actively fight free speech and routinely bully others into silence. If you want to avoid getting canceled, all you have to do is cancel them back. Stop listening and supporting anyone who would wantonly wield their influence to shut down others. Corporations exist to perform jobs. They should not have consciences or wield power - those roles are what we invented government for.
- jonathanlb 5y ago
  > You just avoid cancel culture. Anyone who claims to support BLM or ActBlue or any liberal politician [...] should be avoided with extreme prejudice. So, to avoid cancel culture, you should cancel others?
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    No, not others. Just those who would themselves cancel. After all, how did we solve McCarthy if not by removing him from power?
    - adolph 5y ago
      With the highly publicized Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year, McCarthy's support and popularity faded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy According to the theory, when articulating preferences individuals frequently tailor their choices to what appears socially acceptable. In other words, they convey preferences that differ from what they genuinely want. Kuran calls the resulting misrepresentation "preference falsification". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification Now this is a system where if one of us decides for whatever reason that we’re going to call a spade a spade and say this system doesn’t work, I don’t like it, I go out in the street and I start demonstrating — a lot of other people are going to follow. So what’s happened is ultimately, when some demonstrations began, and it happened to be the demonstration started in East East Germany, these demonstrations started growing every week, more and more people found in themselves the courage to say what they believed and to come out against the regime. https://moses.land/eric-weinstein-and-timur-kuran-on-the-portal-podcast-episode-4/ https://moses.land/eric-weinstein-and-timur-kuran-on-the-por...
renewiltord 5y ago
Ms. Strossen's response is actually quite well argued and uses principles of mainstream American Liberalism that cannot be dropped without significant modification to the school of thought itself. Anyway, no one is stupid enough to talk about lots of interesting problems in public anymore. The Internet isn't a safe place to do so. That's okay. But I wonder if there is a safe way with a discovery medium built in. Maybe Reddit since the anonymity keeps you safe and you can discuss on each topic as a different identity.
- CyberRabbi 5y ago
  It can be perfectly safe again once PR departments realize they can ignore the vocal minorities of Twitter without negative consequences to their bottom line.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    There's negative consequences in ignoring marketing opportunities, so I can't see PR departments losing interest. A public relations nightmare is the PR departments wet dream. There's no such thing as negative publicity, only free advertising and marketing opportunities.
mjg59 5y ago
Any writeup of this that concentrates on external responses and ignores the strong response from many within the communities that RMS led is failing to tell the complete story. There's no shortage of people extremely familiar with his work and behaviour who felt his continued involvement was inappropriate, but instead we're exposed to story after story about how a group of people pushing a one sided narrative unjustly silenced RMS. Which is ironic, given that they're only presenting one side of the events in question.
- r3856283 5y ago
  I wonder what you are talking about? He got a ton of bad press that no one wanted to be associated with, but when it came down to the communities he leads, they were largely supportive of him. GNU is a collection of programs that publicly ascribe to ethical principles he advocates for and helps define, but when it comes to the actual work of development, they are lead by their individual maintainers, not RMS. A small minority wanted him to step down, largely because they wanted someone who would lead GNU on issues like technical direction and marketing, and they were told new leadership is welcome, there's no need to remove RMS for that, and wanting a leader doesn't make one magically appear and so it didn't go anywhere. He is a maintainer of Emacs, no one there wanted him gone, and he is a leader of a couple people who are called the GNU webmasters, and none who were active wanted him gone. Nadine doesn't know all that, but the opinion of an outsider who doesn't have personal involvement skewing their views is extremely worthwhile.
- oaiey 5y ago
  In 2019 I read a statement that within the MIT media labs every women actively avoided him. That is maybe not enough to "cancel" him but speaks a clear message also.
- darawk 5y ago
  This may well be true, but it wasn't the centerpiece of his cancellation. And if it is true, it hasn't been publicly articulated in any coherent way, as far as I can tell. I'm not saying that it isn't the case, it's well known that RMS can be abrasive. But if he was actually forced out for that reason, it seems like someone familiar with it should have written that up in some way. I've seen a few off-hand accusations that he made women uncomfortable in non-specific ways. I can certainly believe that might be true, and may indicate some greater transgression lurking behind the scenes. But to my knowledge nobody has actually said what that is.
AussieWog93 5y ago
My Lord. If Stallman truly is the reason that this Sarah Mei character didn't participate in Open Source for over a decade, I think the best thing we can do as a community is to make as many clones of him as possible.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  I wonder if maybe we need age segregated social media sites. I wonder if twitter/facebook/reddit segmented their content so that teenagers and young adults could run amok, without it being visible to the adults on the site - if that would stop companies from taking all this bullying seriously. Sarah Mei herself isn't a teenager, but looking at the comments that she got, a huge percentage of the people that liked/shared/upvoted are. Teenagers and young adults amplify irrational voices on social media. We need to give them their own playground.
smnplk 5y ago
Sarah Mei has a toxic personality. People like her are allowed to much. Does anyone know if RS filled a lawsuit against her ?
CyberRabbi 5y ago
As an often brow beaten defender of liberalism in the face of progressivist cancel culture and zeal for censorship, I’m glad Strossen is standing up for liberalism. On the other hand, I’m that much more disappointed in our apparent moral cargo cult that it takes a voice like Strossen’s for liberal criticisms of progressivist cancel culture to be taken seriously.
etchalon 5y ago
The article goes out its way to ignore the allegations of Stalman's behavior, choosing the easier to defend ground of ambiguous, or easily misunderstood, posts, so that it can mount its premise on the "wrong-think!" criticism of cancel culture. I suspect it's less meant to be "persuasive" than it is meant to be defensive.
darawk 5y ago
We have to stop feeding the trolls. I think someone like Stallman probably made the choice to resign "for the good of the FSF". He probably reasoned, like so many people in this situation, that staying on would be detrimental to the goals of the organization at this point, and he cares more about free software than he does about personally leading it. I think that's admirable, but I think it's wrong-headed. It may be true in a narrow sense that caving was what was best for the FSF in that moment, but it was bad for the larger world of free software, because of the precedent that it set. It was bad because it fed the trolls. These mobs feed on success. When they see themselves getting people fired, that is incredibly energizing, and that energy points only in one direction: more. Who are we going to cancel today? The trolls are hungry. Internet communities have been dealing with trolls for decades now, and it is actually a fairly well understood problem. The only way to kill the trolls is to starve them. Don't engage with them, and most of all, do not cave to them. When they see that their tactics aren't working anymore, they'll stop doing it. Unfortunately that may mean a temporary rough period for your organization, if you are the victim of something like this, but it will pass, and it will probably pass more quickly and with less harm than you think. Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting that organizations ignore serious abuse. If something is reported and your board actually believes a real transgression occurred, it should absolutely be dealt with. But I don't believe that's what happened in the Stallman case. I don't believe for one second that the FSF board wanted him to resign. I think they felt they had no choice, due to mob pressure. And that's the situation in which I implore people to resist. Do not give in to mob pressure that you don't agree with.
amanzi 5y ago
What a great post - I wish I had read it when the controversy happened because it sums up my views on the issue in a perfectly articulate manner.
jancsika 5y ago
> “Stallman… is a hard man to like. He is driven, often impatient. His anger can flare at friend as easily as foe. He is uncompromising and persistent; patient in both.” I advocate for the four freedoms. I think a large chunk of open source development and a large chunk of free software development are essentially a programmer's take on the scientific method. However-- and bear with me here-- I don't want to be an insufferable asshole to my friends. Finally-- and again, bear with me-- I don't want to regularly communicate with core allies who are insufferable assholes. Where is the place for me? lights dim, string intro for the aria

407 points by r3856283 5y ago

ggm 5y ago

Well worth reading. Lucid, clear. Didnt make me like Stallman more, but articulated some of the issues well. On the whole, I think the cancel/trigger thing has got out of hand. People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think.

etrabroline 5y ago
>People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think. This sounds like a very Orwellian way of saying people shouldn't be fired for wrong-think if they profusely apologize afterwards. Is that what you mean?
- ggm 5y ago
  No. That isn't what I mean. I think your wrong-think is a very big stretch from what I said. Can you show me the chain of thinking which took you there please?
  - narag 5y ago
    Don't shoot me, just trying to make sense of what the other guy wrote. I believe that he's arguing that even if he said that, he shouldn't be punished. Only doing bad things is relevant.
- salawat 5y ago
  I think you may have read that wrong. What the poster is saying is that people should be accountable for what they actually say, not what other people assume they must have meant. It's subtle, but let me try to highlight the difference: Take as an example, Stallman saying "...it is entirely possible Minsky could have been unaware of the coercive dynamic [between Epstein and the young womem] going on at the time. We'll call this P. Also take, "We should wait for the facts and evidence before jumping to conclusions". We'll call this W. What Stallman said is just " We don't know if P or not P, therefore W". There's nothing wrong that was said there. People read things though that were not said; i.e. that since Stallman said P, it must mean he thought that the young women must have been voluntarily doing it. (We'll call this V). Much of the hulabaloo around the time came from people, (and journalists) adding in context that simply wasn't even there, which a quick perusal of CSAIL quickly made evident. Stallman never said it was the case that anyone involved was doing it of their own volition, merely that Minsky may not have picked up on the fact there was coercion going on, because if someone is being coerced, odds are they have been specifically instructed to hide the coersion. The fact is, one presupposes the knowing complicity of an individual by doing otherwise. Stallman cautioned that one should wait for evidence before coming to a hasty judgement. Communication is hard. One must transmit, and another must receive, and both people be able to demonstrate they took from the exchange a shared understanding of a common arrangement of circumstance and subject, mapping to the same circumstances and subjects in the real world. The clincher though, is that there is so much low stakes communication that goes on in our lives where errors in reception or coding of meaning don't have readily tangible effects that become apparent within a short enough time for people to recognize a miscommunication happened, or that even if they recognize one happened, that it will adversely effect the outcome of the attempt at communication as a whole. As a result, there is a tendency to chronically underestimate the difficulty of communication overall. EDITS: wording, punctuation, sentence flow.
  - ggm 5y ago
    Thank you. That pretty much said it, better than I did.
chrisco255 5y ago
Nadine's point was that people should not be unduly punished for making intellectual arguments for or against anything. "Being punished for what they say" is precisely what happened to Stallman.
- ggm 5y ago
  No, I don't agree. He was partly punished for what people THOUGHT he had said, and for past transgressions, and in large part for what people were TOLD he had said. Not for what he actually said.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
    *Alleged past transgressions.
    - ggm 5y ago
      Yes. important distinction. Things he said and did in the past, which people got upset about, which are completely unrelated to the current Epstein context.
  - sneak 5y ago
    He wasn't punished, he was fired. You're allowed to revoke consent to an interaction or business relationship at any time. It's not a punishment to anyone else to say "this situation (employing rms) isn't for me and I don't want to be in it any longer". Firing isn't punitive.
    - moistbar 5y ago
      Firing is absolutely punitive.
      - sneak 5y ago
colanderman 5y ago
Stallman clearly has issues as many have attested. But reading these specific excerpts of his now... they just read like tone-deaf pedantry. Sarah Mei's response to someone else who pointed this out in a leveled, non-confrontational manner, of > That means you are also racist, misogynist, and a colonial apologist. Nice job just comes off as needlessly toxic escalation intended to shut down dialogue. I have several autistic friends and see this sort of interaction now and then. They will state some observation or make an argument rooted in logical pedantry, not pushing any political agenda (or, supporting certain politics but trying to cast it in a more logical framework). Someone takes offense at this and accuses them of being racist/misogynist/whatever. They are hurt. The conversation is not advanced. Both sides lose. Chalk it up to "normies" just... completely not understanding the autistic approach to the world I guess. I wish political activists were less reactive against those who just want to explore -- and ultimately strengthen -- ideas.
- smsm42 5y ago
  I think its because the point is not understanding - the point is gaining power, in this case - power over who leads the OSS movement. If you want to use one's words against them, you do not look for understanding, you look for maximally uncharitable and hurtful meaning possible, and declare this is the only meaning that matters. That's why political activists do it - because it gives them power.
sneak 5y ago
> People need to be accountable for what they say, not what people believe they think. I disagree. What people believe what someone thinks, even if incorrect, is a legitimate basis for someone's choice of free association. It's entirely legitimate for someone to avoid someone else (including fire them) on the basis of false beliefs about that person, due to failing to spend enough time understanding the nuance of the situation or person. I would never hire rms, for example, because he is a drama llama, and I find constantly creating controversy (intentionally or otherwise) to be mostly unproductive, even if all of the things he is saying are accurate and correct and true. Freedom of association does not require fairness or due process. Our time and attention is our own, to allocate unfairly, incorrectly, or on any other unscientific, inaccurate basis we feel is best.
- moistbar 5y ago
  So every alleged criminal should be treated as guilty until proven innocent?
  - sneak 5y ago
    Yes, this is entirely permissible by society and people who know them. Violence undertaken by the state to enforce the law is a different matter, where the maxim of the law is "innocent until proven guilty". The topic of this thread is not law enforcement by the state, however. There are people I know who have been credibly accused of crimes. No trial occurred. I still treat them as if they were guilty of the crime: I assiduously avoid them. Such is my right.

etrabroline 5y ago

> Luckily, another co-author on the book has spent a lot of time pondering inclusion, women’s rights, children’s rights, and free speech. Her name is Nadine Strossen and her credentials run deep. She served as the first female President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), America’s largest and oldest civil liberties nonprofit, from 1991 to 2008. When she stepped down as President, three Supreme Court Justices participated in her farewell luncheon (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, and David Souter). Strossen is a Professor Emeritus at New York Law School and currently an advisor to the EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center), FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), the ACLU, and Heterodox Academy. She is the author of the widely acclaimed books HATE: Why we should fight it with speech not censorship (2018) and Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex, and the Fight for Women’s Rights (1995). She has far too many awards, publications, and prominent appearances to name. A credential sheet of PC accolades long enough to whip a horse shouldn't be required to publicly disagree with the ideology of Google and ACLU without being fired.

fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
Working with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is definitely not a “PC allocade”. They are the main organization that tries, from a legal perspective, to protect people from being canceled for their speech at colleges in the US.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  Nor is heterodox academy (I'd categorize it as essentially the opposite). She's certainly well credentialed, and worth listening to, but not, at all, because she's "PC".
- themolecularman 5y ago
  Yup I recently donated to FIRE as they're an organization that seems more important now than ever. If anyone else is interested go to thefire.org/donate.
smsm42 5y ago
It shouldn't be, but it surely helps to not be eaten by piranhas immediately. Somebody without this kind of shield - especially somebody, say, having a misfortune of being a male and of European descent - might be. I personally have been told many times that I do not get to have opinion about cancel culture and ideology because of my identity. Having credentials that even PC zealots can't deny surely helps to make it harder to dismiss her.

r3trohack3r 5y ago

A different take: Microsoft, Oracle, et. al. waged a war against OSS in the 90s. They went as far as using mental illness as a weapon against the community (equating participation in the commons as an equivalent to mental illness). It’s not a coincidence the class of human that weathered the storm looks like Stallman, Linus, ESR, et. al. That’s what it took. The toxicity in these communities is a result of what was leftover. These humans grew up amongst OSS activists that also weathered the storm. They carried the flag when no one else would. Vilifying them now, at a time where Microsoft just purchased the two largest infrastructure/tooling providers for the commons (npm, GitHub) is concerning to me. Without them, the commons wouldn’t be what it is today.

jarfil 5y ago
On the other hand, following that logic, in times of peace the soldiers of yesteryear are out of work. I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but it might be just a sign that priorities have changed for people. Maybe the basic software liberties are enough for most, and it's no longer enough to fight for OSS, but instead time to consider "how" to fight for it. In a sense, it could be seen as a victory.
- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  “Good times breed weak [humans]” But I see it differently. I feel the wolves are in sheep’s skin, and are trying to convince me the sheep are wolves.
  - _euac 5y ago
    I'm always curious about this line of thinking. What exactly do you think people are gaining by - say - denouncing sexism or other kinds of awful behavior? What's so wolfish about that?
    - r3trohack3r 5y ago
      Here is how a wolf would disrupt the commons: http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

Liberals hate cops and unjust laws but are the first to ignore Omerta the moment it goes against their views.

kitotik 5y ago
What do you call the group that loves cops and unjust laws?
- protomyth 5y ago
  Historically, that would be dictators or authoritarians.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  They only believe in unjust laws for the opposition.

readflaggedcomm 5y ago

>Progressives are right now advocating for the release of criminals, even murderers. To then have exactly the opposite attitude towards something that certainly is not committing physical violence against somebody, I don’t understand the double standard! Barabbas understood.

ExcavateGrandMa 5y ago
epic comment :)
DoofusOfDeath 5y ago
Once again, brevity is the soul of wit. Well played.

wyldfire 5y ago

> Activists quickly found his reputation for asking women out and making jokes about “EMACS virgins." I'm all in favor of believing victims of sexual harassment and assault. Those claims are so very rarely made falsely that they should be taken very seriously. But what about claims that a man/woman made sexual jokes or "inappropriate" innuendo? Certainly they can be cause for concern if the accused is someone who has responsibility over the victim. But what if they're peers? How can we righteously distinguish between flirting that results in the furtherance of a relationship and flirting that's not reciprocated? Or just plain boorish behavior?

calvinmorrison 5y ago
You also should not tell racist jokes, sexist or other off color jokes etc at work. However everyone is able to discuss how they loved the new Chappelle skit. How does that make sense? Context maybe, but I'm not sure.
- mimikatz 5y ago
  It doesn't. The rules people claim are the rules aren't the rules. There is a different set of rules, but they change all the time so you have to be on top of it and follow those. It sounds hard, but really you just do what everyone else is doing and you will be fine. Step outside what everyone else is doing and you are at risk.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    > really you just do what everyone else is doing and you will be fine. Step outside what everyone else is doing and you are at risk. This, sadly, is exactly the correct advice. The path of least risk for most people is to just be like everyone else. Don't try to be more pure, or more boorish, just be alike. Conformity is almost always more beneficial than not.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    It's not that simple. Do that today and you're not in trouble today. You may be tomorrow, though, because the rules change overnight. And when they do, there's no forgiveness based on "it was within the rules at the time I did it".

donsupreme 5y ago

> Sarah Mei then went through the board members involved one by one, digging into each of their histories, and tweeting what she viewed as fire-worthy infractions. The crimes included: “being super involved with Wikipedia,” retweeting a “hideous” New York Times editorial, and being friendly with famed democracy activist and law professor Lawrence Lessig. Publicly calling out each board member in turn with a clear implication: associate with a thought criminal and you too could be in jeopardy. Did she really do that? wow

duck 5y ago
Here is the thread in question: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1172283772428906496.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1172283772428906496.html
- innagadadavida 5y ago
  Has anyone done any investigations whether she had a profit motive doing what she did? Did she get paid by someone? Did she just do it out of spite to RMS? Or just to get plain attention?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - young_unixer 5y ago
    She's been doing this for the last ~4 years or so. Everytime I stumble upon her name, it's never for a good reason, it's always some sort of controversy or attack against someone, so I would say no, it's not money, she actually is that way.
- 1024core 5y ago
  This Sarah Mel character is the one who should be "cancelled".
  - smsm42 5y ago

ApicalDendrite 5y ago

Wasn't part of the issue with Stallman that his behavior, not just his ideas, were problematic. Like telling a college freshman that he'd kill himself if she didn't go out with him: https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrace https://daringfireball.net/2019/09/richard_stallmans_disgrac...

dralley 5y ago
Yes. https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84 https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa... (Above is a piece by someone who worked with RMS for years, explaining why it was not this one event that got him canned, but a long pattern of poor behavior, which he partially bore witness to)
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > And, I think, some of those focusing themselves on careful parsing of RMS’s words are falling into the same pitfall as he. His intentions do not matter nearly as much as his actions and their predictable effects. ... I was around for most of the 90s, and I can confirm the unfortunate reality that RMS’s behavior was a concern at the time ... To my shame I didn’t recognize the dynamic myself when I was around it. So it doesn't matter what he said, or what his intentions were, all that matters to the author is what they now believe, 30 years later, some people were feeling around RMS in the 90s.
- mst 5y ago
  The long term poor behaviour is a reasonable argument for the end result. I just wish the people lying about him to make him look even worse than the facts did had faced some consequences for that as well.
kstenerud 5y ago
Actually, it just comes off as ex-post-facto rationalization of doing something hasty and mean.
deleted 5y ago
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Barrin92 5y ago

>For many, the conclusion was clear: Richard Stallman must be “cancelled.” Many failed to make any distinction between what Stallman had done, question age-of-consent laws, and an actual pedophile or child rapist. These discussions about cancel culture truly have taken a strange turn. I hope the author is not suggesting that the barrier for getting fired is to be an 'actual child rapist'. The response to that is prison. Firing someone for holding views that go as far as defending sexual predators (Minsky/Epstein mentioned in the article), defending pedophilia, having a history of misbehaving towards students and so on has nothing to do with cancel culture. That is just responsible behavior because we should expect basic moral standards from people in leadership positions. I won't give money and I wouldn't want my company associated with institutions that put people in charge who trivialize child abuse. You don't need to be a literal sex offender to be unfit to run a public-facing organisation. These contrarian cancel culture blogs have become bizarre.

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Sounds like you didn't understand the piece.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  care to enlighten me on what part I didn't understand?
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    The part where it mentions that he isn’t defending sexual predators.
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      He is, and I'll quote the relevant part from Stallman's statement that is included in the article: "The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X... The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing... We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing." Not only is Stallman wrong about the fact that sexual assault requires force or violence, sex between a 73 year old man and a 17 year old is not only sexual assault but statutory rape, something which Stallman in another post declared to be a 'technicality'.

edfletcher_t137 5y ago

Let's be honest, RMS needed to fade away long before September 2019. It was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

Snetry 5y ago
Did he though
- edfletcher_t137 5y ago
  Yes
- edfletcher_t137 5y ago
  "If the people who came before me--those who taught me the game of avoiding rms--had spoken up, the community could have healed before I even came on the scene. If I and others had stood up fifteen years ago, we'd have another couple generations who were more used to respect, inclusion, welcoming and safety. The FSF board could have done their job back in 2018. And perhaps if more of us had spoken out in 2019, the FSF board would have found the strength to stand strong and not accept rms's return." https://hartmans.livejournal.com/100652.html https://hartmans.livejournal.com/100652.html
  - geenew 5y ago
    Like all other tell-alls that have emerged, there is nothing of substance in that article that would condemn Stallman. The only actual offense is interrupting people on stage. Hitting on someone by talking about emacs would be funny if it weren't for the insinuation of some sort of sexual assault that was attached to it in the article. Speechifying when talking with someone about codes of conduct is at most boorish. It may well be a burden to have someone butt into your work and lecture you on ethics, but to conflate social discomfort with a loss of personal safety is self-serving and dishonest. One uncharitable way to view this saga is that the people who failed to effectively argue with Stallman on his moral points have resorted to slander by misrepresenting disregard for superficial social convention as malice.

m463 5y ago

Interesting that I didn't see this when it came out almost a year ago.

CanceledAccount 5y ago

I was canceled on Twitter last year. Hundreds of people were harassed for being associated with me, my social circles were ripped to shreds, and I feared for my safety. I got into right wing shitposting and logs from a small private chat group were leaked. It was one of the worst experiences of my life and I haven’t recovered. They feel like they’ve made the world a better place.

dguaraglia 5y ago
Have you ever pondered if your 'shit posting' led to other people being harassed and led them to question their safety?
- google234123 5y ago
  Has Dave Chappell's (or any other comedian's) jokes led to other people being harassed and led them to question their safety? Should they be "cancelled" and erased from society?
  - dguaraglia 5y ago
    There's a whole gaping chasm between Dave Chappelle - a world-famous comedian - making what is clearly a joke on a stage and some anonymous person posting edgy white supremacist shit 'for the lulz'. In case you haven't been following the news, that's the kind of radicalization tool that resulted in a not insignificant amount of the population believing that QAnon was real and that storming the capitol and killing a policeman were justified. So yeah, people who are there just to 'shit post right wing stuff' should definitely consider what they are doing.
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      There's certainly a chasm, but is there anything in the chasm beyond mere social status? I don't want to strawman your argument, but that really seems to be the core; it's a joke if a world-famous comedian says it, but "edgy white supremacist shit 'for the lulz'" if an anonymous nobody does.

yurielt 5y ago

LIKE LOOK AT THIS https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/994010501460865025?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E994010501460865025%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wetheweb.org%2Fpost%2Fcancel-we-the-web https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/994010501460865025?ref_s... please lets stop giving a platform to this fake mentally ill people that are at best cointelpro like figures made to destroy free software

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

> Sarah Mei then went through the board members involved one by one, digging into each of their histories, and tweeting what she viewed as fire-worthy infractions. What a [negative adjective removed at moderator's request] human being. Worst of all, she probably views her activity as a worthy contribution to society.

axaxs 5y ago
Careful now, the world missed out on all of her genius open source in the 90s, and are obviously much worse off.
- meibo 5y ago
  > Currently stirring the pot at @SalesforceUX Seems like Linux UX wouldn't have been much better off with her!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dang 5y ago
Please don't do this here. You may not owe the third party better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=online%20shaming%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...

twirlock 5y ago

Yet another casualty of blue checkmarks identifying a systemic issue and then using it to go after individuals while actually defending the system.

jimbob45 5y ago

Individuals get canceled when their support dries up from those would previously have offered them funding and employment. How then does one go about avoiding cancel culture? Simple. You just avoid cancel culture. Anyone who claims to support BLM or ActBlue or any liberal politician who has support cancel culture in the past should be avoided with extreme prejudice. These organizations actively fight free speech and routinely bully others into silence. If you want to avoid getting canceled, all you have to do is cancel them back. Stop listening and supporting anyone who would wantonly wield their influence to shut down others. Corporations exist to perform jobs. They should not have consciences or wield power - those roles are what we invented government for.

jonathanlb 5y ago
> You just avoid cancel culture. Anyone who claims to support BLM or ActBlue or any liberal politician [...] should be avoided with extreme prejudice. So, to avoid cancel culture, you should cancel others?
- jimbob45 5y ago
  No, not others. Just those who would themselves cancel. After all, how did we solve McCarthy if not by removing him from power?
  - adolph 5y ago
    With the highly publicized Army–McCarthy hearings of 1954, and following the suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester C. Hunt that same year, McCarthy's support and popularity faded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy According to the theory, when articulating preferences individuals frequently tailor their choices to what appears socially acceptable. In other words, they convey preferences that differ from what they genuinely want. Kuran calls the resulting misrepresentation "preference falsification". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification Now this is a system where if one of us decides for whatever reason that we’re going to call a spade a spade and say this system doesn’t work, I don’t like it, I go out in the street and I start demonstrating — a lot of other people are going to follow. So what’s happened is ultimately, when some demonstrations began, and it happened to be the demonstration started in East East Germany, these demonstrations started growing every week, more and more people found in themselves the courage to say what they believed and to come out against the regime. https://moses.land/eric-weinstein-and-timur-kuran-on-the-portal-podcast-episode-4/ https://moses.land/eric-weinstein-and-timur-kuran-on-the-por...

renewiltord 5y ago

Ms. Strossen's response is actually quite well argued and uses principles of mainstream American Liberalism that cannot be dropped without significant modification to the school of thought itself. Anyway, no one is stupid enough to talk about lots of interesting problems in public anymore. The Internet isn't a safe place to do so. That's okay. But I wonder if there is a safe way with a discovery medium built in. Maybe Reddit since the anonymity keeps you safe and you can discuss on each topic as a different identity.

CyberRabbi 5y ago
It can be perfectly safe again once PR departments realize they can ignore the vocal minorities of Twitter without negative consequences to their bottom line.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
  There's negative consequences in ignoring marketing opportunities, so I can't see PR departments losing interest. A public relations nightmare is the PR departments wet dream. There's no such thing as negative publicity, only free advertising and marketing opportunities.

mjg59 5y ago

Any writeup of this that concentrates on external responses and ignores the strong response from many within the communities that RMS led is failing to tell the complete story. There's no shortage of people extremely familiar with his work and behaviour who felt his continued involvement was inappropriate, but instead we're exposed to story after story about how a group of people pushing a one sided narrative unjustly silenced RMS. Which is ironic, given that they're only presenting one side of the events in question.

r3856283 5y ago
I wonder what you are talking about? He got a ton of bad press that no one wanted to be associated with, but when it came down to the communities he leads, they were largely supportive of him. GNU is a collection of programs that publicly ascribe to ethical principles he advocates for and helps define, but when it comes to the actual work of development, they are lead by their individual maintainers, not RMS. A small minority wanted him to step down, largely because they wanted someone who would lead GNU on issues like technical direction and marketing, and they were told new leadership is welcome, there's no need to remove RMS for that, and wanting a leader doesn't make one magically appear and so it didn't go anywhere. He is a maintainer of Emacs, no one there wanted him gone, and he is a leader of a couple people who are called the GNU webmasters, and none who were active wanted him gone. Nadine doesn't know all that, but the opinion of an outsider who doesn't have personal involvement skewing their views is extremely worthwhile.
oaiey 5y ago
In 2019 I read a statement that within the MIT media labs every women actively avoided him. That is maybe not enough to "cancel" him but speaks a clear message also.
darawk 5y ago
This may well be true, but it wasn't the centerpiece of his cancellation. And if it is true, it hasn't been publicly articulated in any coherent way, as far as I can tell. I'm not saying that it isn't the case, it's well known that RMS can be abrasive. But if he was actually forced out for that reason, it seems like someone familiar with it should have written that up in some way. I've seen a few off-hand accusations that he made women uncomfortable in non-specific ways. I can certainly believe that might be true, and may indicate some greater transgression lurking behind the scenes. But to my knowledge nobody has actually said what that is.

AussieWog93 5y ago

My Lord. If Stallman truly is the reason that this Sarah Mei character didn't participate in Open Source for over a decade, I think the best thing we can do as a community is to make as many clones of him as possible.

koheripbal 5y ago
I wonder if maybe we need age segregated social media sites. I wonder if twitter/facebook/reddit segmented their content so that teenagers and young adults could run amok, without it being visible to the adults on the site - if that would stop companies from taking all this bullying seriously. Sarah Mei herself isn't a teenager, but looking at the comments that she got, a huge percentage of the people that liked/shared/upvoted are. Teenagers and young adults amplify irrational voices on social media. We need to give them their own playground.

smnplk 5y ago

Sarah Mei has a toxic personality. People like her are allowed to much. Does anyone know if RS filled a lawsuit against her ?

CyberRabbi 5y ago

As an often brow beaten defender of liberalism in the face of progressivist cancel culture and zeal for censorship, I’m glad Strossen is standing up for liberalism. On the other hand, I’m that much more disappointed in our apparent moral cargo cult that it takes a voice like Strossen’s for liberal criticisms of progressivist cancel culture to be taken seriously.

etchalon 5y ago

The article goes out its way to ignore the allegations of Stalman's behavior, choosing the easier to defend ground of ambiguous, or easily misunderstood, posts, so that it can mount its premise on the "wrong-think!" criticism of cancel culture. I suspect it's less meant to be "persuasive" than it is meant to be defensive.

darawk 5y ago

We have to stop feeding the trolls. I think someone like Stallman probably made the choice to resign "for the good of the FSF". He probably reasoned, like so many people in this situation, that staying on would be detrimental to the goals of the organization at this point, and he cares more about free software than he does about personally leading it. I think that's admirable, but I think it's wrong-headed. It may be true in a narrow sense that caving was what was best for the FSF in that moment, but it was bad for the larger world of free software, because of the precedent that it set. It was bad because it fed the trolls. These mobs feed on success. When they see themselves getting people fired, that is incredibly energizing, and that energy points only in one direction: more. Who are we going to cancel today? The trolls are hungry. Internet communities have been dealing with trolls for decades now, and it is actually a fairly well understood problem. The only way to kill the trolls is to starve them. Don't engage with them, and most of all, do not cave to them. When they see that their tactics aren't working anymore, they'll stop doing it. Unfortunately that may mean a temporary rough period for your organization, if you are the victim of something like this, but it will pass, and it will probably pass more quickly and with less harm than you think. Now, to be clear, I am not suggesting that organizations ignore serious abuse. If something is reported and your board actually believes a real transgression occurred, it should absolutely be dealt with. But I don't believe that's what happened in the Stallman case. I don't believe for one second that the FSF board wanted him to resign. I think they felt they had no choice, due to mob pressure. And that's the situation in which I implore people to resist. Do not give in to mob pressure that you don't agree with.

amanzi 5y ago

What a great post - I wish I had read it when the controversy happened because it sums up my views on the issue in a perfectly articulate manner.

jancsika 5y ago

> “Stallman… is a hard man to like. He is driven, often impatient. His anger can flare at friend as easily as foe. He is uncompromising and persistent; patient in both.” I advocate for the four freedoms. I think a large chunk of open source development and a large chunk of free software development are essentially a programmer's take on the scientific method. However-- and bear with me here-- I don't want to be an insufferable asshole to my friends. Finally-- and again, bear with me-- I don't want to regularly communicate with core allies who are insufferable assholes. Where is the place for me? lights dim, string intro for the aria