Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
I don’t think anything in the report is new, is it? Isn’t this the exact weirdness that got him kicked off the board in the first place? I was shocked when he was quietly added back to the board; I really thought the allegations would stick the first time.
Nice to have it all in one place though.
Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this
I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn’t know how much of a fool RMS was. : “RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.” (It gets worse btw).
the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.
of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein’s victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn’t underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around
Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it’s even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn’t help.
Very serious people at HN at it again:
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like “sexual harassment is not a real crime” or “we shouldn’t give our employees raises because otherwise they’ll soon demand infinite pay” or “there’s no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn’t going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead” you’re a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.
Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
What do these people think leadership is?
No, obviously opinions like
- “if my MIT AI Lab mentor had sex with an underage sex worker on Epstein’s teen rape island, that was only because he thought she consented”,
- “stealing a kiss from a woman is fine and not a sexual assault, maybe perhaps at most it’s supposedly sexual harassment which is not real and is actually fine”,
- “I don’t believe in bereavement leave. What if all your close friends and family die one after another? It’s conceivable you would be gone from the office for days, or weeks, if not months.1 What if you lie about who is dying?”,
- “Overtly sexualizing ‘parody’ ceremonies for a semi-fictitious church of Emacs centering around unprepared girls and women in my audience are fine and when people participate in them, there is certainly no peer pressure involved, not that I care if there is”,
- “It’s fine to throw a tantrum about Emacs supporting another compiler infrastructure Not Invented Here. LLVM/Clang is supported by Apple and has a permissive license instead of GPL so it’s basically proprietary, right?”,
- “
You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>”,
are in the same category as “I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting” when it comes to evaluating someone’s aptitude as a leader.
I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I’d be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.
1: It’s conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it’s conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).
