@strypey Yes, RMS has made an outstanding positive contribution to the world. He has also made a series of negative ones.
That article is selective in how it reports "the incident", including reductively defining the whole thing as "an incident" in the first place. Other people are characterising it as the final straw, where no-one expects that "the straw" in and of itself was significant, but that the accumulation of straws over time has become intolerable.
There don't seem to be many people who are discussing the whole issue without bias, which is to me a much more disturbing trend. Once again we have only "two sides" to a situation, with all the implied hostility that brings. There are many many more than two sides to anything.
@yojimbo @strypey if you haven't seen it, this (from, ironically, an ex-Fox News guy) is the most even handed treatment I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UbQ1kc1vQU
@lightweight @strypey Not a bad video presentation, he'll be worth keeping an eye on to report well on a lot of topics.
However both he and the WaPo failed to mention the long-term dissatisfaction with RMS's non-Free behaviour. I don't think the Gnome Foundation's ED asked FSF to drop him because of this incident alone (or more specifically, not because of the inaccurate press surrounding the incident).
I agree with @strypey on what I think his position is (assuming it's "this incident is not serious enough for the outcome"), but I suspect that the outcome is probably justified when looking back at the long list of "offences".
Partly I guess the dropping by MIT was more related to them having put themselves in an untenable position over the years. But the FSF presidency seems like a reasonable change.
@strypey @yojimbo @lightweight @mike
Crazy article, I did not know that when someone founded an organisation he should not step down from it at some point... Does this mean when someone founds an organisation he is bound to be the president of it for life, I guess I have to learn about democracy.
@grainloom @strypey @natacha I find the idea that Minsky just couldn't possibly find anything sufficiently unusual in this to raise his suspicions that the girl in question wasn't enthusiastically consenting to be entirely implausible.
This is a supportable (and, I think, most plausible) reading of the Medium article.
@grainloom @RAOF @strypey @natacha yes okay
but
context
he's defending his dead friend and mentor, founder of the AI lab on an MIT list of said lab, to kids, some of who are the age of the girl his dead friend is accused of having had (non-consensual) sex with, because one of those kids is trying to organise a protest against the director of the MIT, who knew, and who took money from the guy helping Minsky with his alleged endeavours.
@grainloom @RAOF @strypey @natacha here's another viewpoint to consider:
as long as protecting a dead old white man is more important than protecting young girls from him, what's the point of even getting them into this career? other than as fodder for these men…
@grainloom @RAOF @strypey @natacha obviously, yes.
but that means that we're, again, and forever, centering the viewpoints and stories of men, over the lives of women and girls.
i guess it's just really hard to empathise, or even sympathise with people who's stories are never told, and who's lives are always declared less important than those of men, or, heck, even the careers of men.
@strypey @hirojin @RAOF @natacha
Then he shouldn't be the figurehead of Free Software. Because his outbursts hurt the cause.
This thread goes into more detail on how:
https://pleroma.site/notice/9nh9bWH6RbrQinMp1M
@RAOF @strypey @natacha thank you for boosting my feminist posts, @grainloom! i usually reserve those for my human account, @meena.
who would've thought tech needs feminist viewpoints?!
@grainloom l it's good to be critical of one's opinions, to examine and re-examine one's movement(s)
and i have bad opinions, too: i agree that the social justice movement has turned toxic, af, and i blame two things on it:
it's mostly fought online, and it's mainly lead by queers who have not yet processed their own life's trauma, but have taken it up to process their community's trauma.
online, live, and with no filter or reflection.
@grainloom @hirojin @RAOF @strypey @meena
Indeed the issue is not the mob (I also hate them).
The question is: how not to get in that situation again, and furthermore, where do "we" as freesoftware people go from there? What do we do now? How do we organize in order to have a functional governance in between our different initiatives and across all our different opinions.
@strypey @grainloom @RAOF @natacha young girls are safe from Minsky*, but they are not safe from men like Minsky*, so long as men like Stallman go around acting as their shield
*the man Minsky is accused / alleged of being
@strypey @grainloom @RAOF @natacha if you think it's not wrong for a leader of such a movement to poison the streams and wells of potential new members with his massively misplaced pedanticism, then i have one very simple counter point: i disagree.
@grainloom @strypey @natacha
1) He was criticized for that over and over, and
2) I don't think he was accused of things he didn't say. Although some nuance was lost, what he said was: “The most plausible scenario is that [the 17-year-old sex-trafficing-victim] appeared entirely willing [to have sex with the 73-year old Minsky after having been flown with him on a private jet to a private island]”.