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Richard Stallman's political discourse on sex
(drewdevault.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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Free and Open Source Software
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why?
Imagine a interview where employer tries to know every aspect of your personality and ideas, before hiring you.
Seems quite impossible.
For a celebrity like Stallman seems easy. But imagine checking the background of a random candidate just to see if she posted something bad years ago. And rejecting her application because of a post defendig the wrong ideas.
I agree we already have courts and police. If he did something illegal, there's a course of action there.
For a random, non-public-facing employee, sure. But Stallman is the founder, and has always been the face and the voice of the FSF. He's their mascot, their evangelist. He's the one people see and think of when they think of the FSF. If he's out here spouting extremely problematic views, and the FSF continues to employ him, then it looks like the organization as a whole is supporting those views.
I'm pretty sure that most people are mature enough to differentiate between an organization that makes software and nothing at all to do with kids and/or sexuality and that old wierdo's personal views.
We live in a world where huge corporations with a revenue higher than the GDP of many countries routinely exploit child labour and work their workers to death or suicide, burning whole countries and pushing climate change while at it. And yet we collectively shrug and still buy Nestle, Apple, Samsung or H&M.
A shitstorm towards such a niche and unknown organisation as the FSF really doesn't matter. We all know the Stallman and the FSF, because we are into computers, software and/or open source. But ask any random person on the street, thew wouldn't know who Stallman or the FSF is if you told them that it's not Android but actually Chrome/Android SDK/Dalvik/Toybox/Linux that runs on their phone.
That's not how PR works.
This is just whataboutism.
So just because the FSF is a niche org, we should just ignore the problematic public statements by it's founder and the person who's always been at the forefront of their PR?
Tbh, this just sounds like free speech absolutism apologia. Yes, people can say whatever they want. But they are not free from consequences. I want nothing to do with an org that would have Stallman as a part of it. I don't want to be associated with anyone who would. If you continue supporting an org that supports someone like Stallman, then both you and the org approve of the things he's saying. Period. Your words mean nothing. Your actions speak for themselves.
Your actions do nothing. You complain on the internet about some guy that said something you don't like. Nobody from FSF is gonna read it. And neither will Stallman or anyone that matters.
I don't see you boycotting software related to FSF. And even if you do, it doesn't even matter, since the overwhelming majority of FOSS users never donate any money at all.
You are no customer of the FSF, you just enjoy their stuff for free.
So your actions amount to angry screaming into a box.
Doesn't the phrase "wrong ideas" worry you a bit? I don't agree with everything Stallman says, but I think he has a right to say it, just the same as others have the right to say they don't like it and think he's a horrible pig or whatever. This is, of course, very different from acting on beliefs like his, which could certainly end up being harmful.
But when we as a society get to the point where we say an idea is wrong, it provokes the individual to act on the idea rather than talk about it. That's why freedom of speech is so important. Let the idea air and argue with it in a civilised way, and these things will sort themselves out.
You're right.
I used the phrase "wrong ideas" precisely to evoke that sentiment. Stallman's ideas may be "wrong" for us, for good reasons. But that doesn't make them objectively wrong. And he doesn't seem to cross any legal boundary using his blog to defend some ideas we don't like.
And neither should we mix the work of FSF with Stallman's weird blog posts.