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Thomas Bushnell, former maintainer of GNU Hurd until his dismissal by Richard Stallman, has opined in a biased blog post that the forced resignation of Stallman from MIT and the Free Software Foundation is deserved.
https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-departure-of-rms-18e6a835fd84
So Richard Stallman has resigned from his guest position at MIT and as President of the Free Software Foundation. You can easily find out all you need to know about the background from a web search and some news articles. I recommend in particular Selam G's original articles on this topic for background, and for an excellent institutional version, the statement from the Software Freedom Conservancy.
But I'll give you a personal take. By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer.
[...]4) RMS's loss of MIT privileges and leadership of the FSF are the appropriate responses to a pattern of decades of poor behavior. It does not matter if they are appropriate responses to a single email thread, because they are the right thing in the total situation.
5) I feel very sad for him. He's a tragic figure. He is one of the most brilliant people I've met, who I have always thought desperately craved friendship and camaraderie, and seems to have less and less of it all the time. This is all his doing; nobody does it to him. But it's still very sad. As far as I can tell, he believes his entire life's work is a failure.
6) The end result here, while sad for him, is correct.
The free software community needs to develop good leadership, and RMS has been a bad leader in many ways for a long time now. He has had plenty of people who have tried to help him, and he does not want help.
MIT needs to establish as best it can that paramount are the interests of women to have a safe and fair place to study and work. It must make clear that this is more important than the coddling of a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 23 2019, @03:21PM (16 children)
Does anyone else find this wierd, that after the epstein scandal the most important philosopher to the free software movement goes down?
The epstein scandal hit hundreds of organizations and individuals, and we are sitting here having to defend the person who has been most correct and predictive about the loss of freedom in technology.
Israel was totally tied to Epstein, waaaaay more than MIT, where are the Israeli universities and companis(carbyne, please kill this company) going down? Why does derschowitz still have a career? Why does ehud barak?
I have never seen media act so blindly and manipulative, it is truly insane. Unless you look at it from CNN's perspective, who owns that anyone? Oh yeah, Jeffrey Zuker, another zionist. If this doesn't scare you about how bad of a situation the united states is in with this israeli subversion of our government, then I have to start to wonder about you.
Highly intelligent people who make a lot of contributions are freeeeequently wierd, strange, not leaders. Intelligence tends to make people wierd in one way or another. Stallman is nto trying to be a leader, but because he is an easy target, and it distracts from the issue, he is getting the scrutiny of a presidential candidate. I don't want to defend everything he said, it does sound like there are some fine points worth arguing about, but Stallman is not abusing or trafficking children.
For 40 years he contributes in the shadows or sidelines, no headlines, it's as if he doesn't exist to the 'MSM'. This is how much power you get when you own a mass media channels, when your team really fucks up, literally, and everybody knows, you get to use your TeeVee apparatus to redirect all of your rage towards innocent people, *with whom you would rather not argue.*
And there is that phrase again.
thesesystemsarefailing.net
(and if you paid attention to ms maxwell's dailymail photo, of her walking free, the book she was holding was about the death of cia officers, so if even this doesn't piss you off, you're not american so you should leave, you're not one of us.)
(and epstein is not dead, if you believe the official story, you are allowed to think because you do not know how.)
(Score: 1, Troll) by epitaxial on Monday September 23 2019, @03:25PM (5 children)
I think your foil hat is falling off.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 23 2019, @03:49PM (4 children)
I think you are saying something that is anti-intellectual.
Try being intellectual, that is what we are all here for.
With the advent of mind reading technology and emf flooding, it is also not very crazy at all to consider faraday caging your personal space.
Also, if you are going to try to end a discussion with a thought terminating cliche, try to reformulate it somehow so you don't sound like a robot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:46PM
The beauty of being a robot is one faraday cage is built into skull, thus removal or slippage is less easy or more likely fatal when done so.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Monday September 23 2019, @07:07PM (2 children)
So you're saying the guy in jail who died was NOT Epstein? A body double or some poor random shmoe?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday September 23 2019, @08:18PM (1 child)
The main sauce for this conspiracy is a 4chan post (screencapped here) [twimg.com] which seems to have been posted slightly before the news hit the mainstream media, but after the death was leaked to 4chan by somebody else who didn't make the body double claim. Another piece of evidence is this commonly circulated profile comparison of his face before and after death, [twimg.com] which is supposed to show differences in the nose and ears. I think like the variance is explainable through changes over time, but I'm no expert on that. I feel like somebody with that kind of money might have been able to bribe enough people to pull off a body swap, but Epstein is probably actually dead. The fact that they took him off suicide watch so quickly after the first attempt does seem odd, though I could see a billionaire bribing his way off suicide watch just to die, too. If he did pull off a swap, it would raise the question of what the first suicide attempt was about. A botched first swap attempt?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Monday September 23 2019, @08:24PM
Oh, another thing is that the name was removed from his headstone to prevent vandalism. [israelnationalnews.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meustrus on Monday September 23 2019, @03:33PM (4 children)
Arguments against Israel, no matter what they are, have positive synergy with anti-semitism and neo-nazis. Those groups have a powerful negative synergy with #MeToo and SJWs in general.
Not saying you don't have a point. Just that the way the politics are aligned, and the way that anti-semites and neo-nazis can't STFU when anybody else criticizes Israel, there's no way to get collective attention and action to fix it.
--
P.S. It doesn't take an Israeli conspiracy to get powerful people to redirect the little peoples' anger back at each other. Powerful people do that in every nation, in every culture. There's nothing particularly special about "zionists" when it comes to abuse of power, and if you think there is, you're just not watching the bigger picture.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Monday September 23 2019, @03:47PM (3 children)
The united states is a multicultural place, indians, mexicans, chinese, black, white, svengali, that is the beauty of it and this can solve the problems in our world if our success were to spread, and they have quite a bit I believe over the last 50 years.
I also agree every country and every nationality has these things that go on, dutroux for example in the netherlands, but in My Country, there is one country that has a huge number of 'dual loyalty' people in 'key positions', including the president, acosta, treasury officials, fbi officials, etc etc.
So yes, I believe, as an American, I have to stand up for my country and say that this is a problem with israel.
Israel is also ruining the UN making it impossible to solve any other issues and is allowed to flaunt every foreign corruption law with aipac et al, which has led to russians, chinese and all manner of other countries following suit.
Israeli is a singular problem for the united states and the world. Full Stop. You are right this will attract some actual nazis thinking they can be my friend, they can not though because I'm not going to align with aryan nazis to fight zionist ones. Israeli mucky mucks will also try to provoke me into saying nazi things intentionally and may actually be funding right wing nazi-ish parties like the AFD because their real enemy is centrists like me and Bernie Sanders, a bunch of wingnuts in swastikas helps their cause in every way.
All jewish people are not israelis or zionists, just like all black people can't play basketball and all asians aren't good at math. But israeli zionists want to conflate and confuse this, and have been doing so for a very long time, playing the victim, taking over more 'key positions', cancel culturing their enemies like stallman, and I'm sick of it.
You should be too. It has no place in western civilization. None.
There is no such thing as holy land that belongs to a specific race or religion of people, this idea is absolute horseshit that is at risk of ruining the entire planet.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @06:14PM (1 child)
No, it's not "the beauty of it". It is the mistake that is coming home to roost.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:22PM
Ya, all those invading white people really ruined the continent. Thankfully some of the natives are returning :)
All mentally healthy wwhite folks are welcome, the rest will have to be deported back to where you came from.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @09:44PM
Close, but not quite. The Dutroux case was in Belgium.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @03:40PM
That's a lot of conspiracy right there. You know what I did about the inaccuracies? I wrote the publishers an e-mail. If more people would bother writing to publishers to correct facts, we would probably have better and more accurate coverage. Other than misrepresenting what Stallman said on csail-related, Techcrunch even wrote that Stallman advocated Open Software. As to Stallmans social interactions and political notes. That speaks for itself. Him telling people not to inflate what little information there is on Minskys connection with Epstein, was such a non-issue that it by itself means nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @04:56PM
This is probably just observational bias. I haven't seen much about RMS in mainstream media at all. I've mostly seen coverage in tech sites and leftist scandal sheets. Forbes is the only mainstream site that had any significant coverage (a short article from their tech beat writer right after it happened) and, being reputable journalists, they only covered the fact that it happened and the official statements from various places without the libel and defamation that you get from Vice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 23 2019, @05:49PM
Derschowitz and Barak don't give appearances on RT.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday September 23 2019, @11:45PM (1 child)
Nobody is making you defend anybody.
We can say, instead: "RMS was right about software, but wrong about pedophilia, sexism, and how to treat people. Therefor, we're going to hang onto his viewpoints about software and his work on software and rightly remember him for those contributions, but remove him from positions where his comments on pedophilia, his history of sexist behavior, and general curmudgeon demeanor are liabilities."
People are messy. If you think that somebody you admire never made a mistake or did something they shouldn't have done, you're almost definitely wrong. Your favorite larger-than-life figures, living or dead, were/are people who eat and poop and put their underwear on one leg at a time just like everyone else and also managed to do something interesting in the meantime but also probably have serious flaws in their personality just like everybody else. We can keep Michael Jackson's music and oppose his alleged pedophilia, we can keep Woody Allen's movies but oppose his marriage to his step-daughter, we can keep Plato's dialogues and oppose his pederasty, we can keep Apple's technical innovations and reject Steve Jobs' attempted disowning of his daughter Lisa, and so forth. It's all you can do when you have standards of morality and quality that are separate from what someone you consider a "leader" or "hero" tells you those standards ought to be.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Tuesday September 24 2019, @08:19AM
well said, +1, dave chappelle also talks about this, he's the only celebrity I know though who has dared.
I think people like us who think this way should note that our way of thinking of this is under attack in a very prejudicial, anti-intellectual way and concerted-propagandy manner. I find it terrifying and I am legitimately scared for what this means for my future and those I care about. Like I just wrote to buzzard, totalitarianism is a restaurant where you can't order anything off the menu and while the manager is ordering everything off the menu in plain site, your menu is shrinking and if you make one mistake, you're the one that is going to be on the menu, as a dish.
How could you raise a child in a world like this? (you'd have to ask someone who lived under Stalin or some such)
On one hand, associating with epstein if you are a billionaire is considered 'oh he probably didn't know' but if I say what you suggest, that I am not ready to throw the free software principles out the window because of some dubious behavior of the guy who first wrote them, there is an industry out there ready to cancel me, or I may be in some way blacklisted, or put on an investigation list, who knows. The people behind reddt, twittr and fb are definintely in on this, adn it is a conspiracy in the literal sense. Like I said, Stallman's 'daily beast' article with tons of vindictive manipulative commentary was on the front page of r/news for a really, really long time, and without even that many upvotes.
This is not a moment where intellectuals should go with the flow, we need to be loud, which is what I am trying to do(and I know it is a little annoying for people who may have heard it before, but the alternative is in my opinion worse.)
The hypacrisy is absolutely staggering, I have never read of anything so mendacious as the epstein scandal being redirected at MIT/stallman, it's shocking, I know few people more skeptical than myself and I never would have thought they could get away with this much.
They still won't, if I have anything to say about it.