9 ms·

As a very liberal person, I have to say that I am disgusted by cancel culture. Disgusted. This is so harmful to society, and is a dark path that the left has t

As a very liberal person, I have to say that I am disgusted by cancel culture. Disgusted. This is so harmful to society, and is a dark path that the left has taken in my country. To put it plainly, my political party has turned into whinny little people. People should lose their jobs over things like sexual or any type of harassment but when I read Stallman's actual comments last year, I thought that it was very clear that he was only defending his friend, who was dead and couldn't defend himself. EDIT: for what it is worth, I just uninstalled Firefox. EDIT #2: I just rejoined the FSF (well, I was still a member, I just started donating again).

orra 6y ago
A plethora of women have come forward, with their stories of sexual harassment and manipulation by RMS. (See links in other posts; e.g. the first link in the open letter's appendix.) This isn't just about him describing a "sex trafficking victim" as "entirely willing", and hence not a victim of "sexual assault". This is wrong on so many levels.
- captaincurrie 6y ago
  What do these plethora of women define as sexual harassment? Is it rape? Or is it maybe a big,fat,ugly nerd not getting the hint right away and making someone uncomfortable. WAHHHHHH
- belorn 6y ago
  Do you mean to say that a "plethora of women" was exactly one alleged claim by one woman that RMS had said he would kill himself unless she went out with him on a date? If it is true then that was bad, and I am sure that gave him a reputation that on a campus likely burned like a wild fire (it sure would do that on my university if anyone said something like that), but what is an appropriate reaction be now several decades later? The second thing the appendix listed was a mattress in his office whose primary user were most likely RMS himself since he kind of had a reputation of living in the university.
  - orra 6y ago
    > The second thing the appendix listed was a mattress in his office whose primary user were most likely RMS himself since he kind of had a reputation of living in the university. Living in an office doesn't excuse having topless people on a mattress in your office.
    - belorn 6y ago
      The claim that his office was some playboy mansion harem goes counter to the extremely desperate concept of using suicide in order to get a date. The 80's was a different time, but not that different. Unless the "topless people" were RMS himself sleeping on it, I have a hard time believing it. In theory I can imagine (but I doubt it) a warm summer where a team of emacs collaborators were all living and sleeping in the university office room, but I strongly doubt the implication sex went on there.
- lamp987 6y ago
  I'd prefer if there was plethora of evidence.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    Testimony is evidence.
    - shock 6y ago
      Testimony happens in a court of law not on Twitter. Show us the testimony.
      - pseudalopex 6y ago
        Legal testimony happens in a court of law. Testimony can happen anywhere. Religious testimony for instance. Or testimonial advertising.
        shock 6y ago
        To which kind of testimony were you referring in your GP comment?
        pseudalopex 6y ago
        "firsthand authentication of a fact" or "open acknowledgment".[1] [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/testimony https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/testimony
        effingwewt 6y ago
        Lol, thus you are saying testifying in church is 'evidence'. Gotta love the mental gymnastics on HN sometimes.
        pseudalopex 6y ago
        Anecdotal evidence is evidence. Maybe you're thinking of proof.
mplewis 6y ago
You don't sound very liberal to me.
- gaspmore 6y ago
  Because you have to love cancel culture to be a liberal...?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    No, because you have to be a right-wing partisan to believe that “cancel culture” is somehow a thing (and even then, it's not clear how even they can believe that the exact same things that they described as both novel and distinctly leftist, despite being practiced by all sides for most of human history, including by the people complaining about it, from about the 1980 to the late 2010s under the label “political correctness” are now novel and uniquely leftist under the label “cancel culture”.)
    - salawat 6y ago
      No, you don't, you need a modest dose of pattern recognition ability to recognize the fundamental pattern behind cancel culture. It's the same thing, different day, and always worth standing in opposition of no matter where you are on the political spectrum, or where the victim stands in relation to you.
      - threatofrain 6y ago
        I see cancel culture as used by the political party who likely does not recognize banning abortion clinics by law through an entire state as cancellation. The stakes aren’t a matter of Twitter hates you. Your boss firing you doesn’t mean your doctor is banned from giving you an abortion. Or when TX sought to enforce a ban on gay sex in 2003, I really doubt the GOP sees that as cancellation. It’s a kind of failure to see the forest, even while pretending to have such moral clarity. The stakes aren’t a matter of Reddit hates you. When a Christian refuses to bake a cake, sign a marriage certificate, or when they fight for the right to fire gay people, etc., the activity is not cancellation but spiritual observation. And does one not remember that during the Bush presidential candidacy a major get out to vote issue for Christian conservatives was a US constitutional ban on gay marriage? Of course this is not cancellation. It was a Constitutional exercise. These are points of pride for the GOP. This is what it means to energize the base.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> As a very liberal person, I have to say that I am disgusted by cancel culture. Are you using the non-American and leftist American definition of “liberal” (center-to-center-right capitalist) or the American center-right-to-right definition of “liberal” (anything left of the center-right) when you say “very liberal”? > when I read Stallman's actual comments last year, I thought that it was very clear that he was only defending his friend, who was dead and couldn't defend himself. A lot of the comments and actions at issue, including the separate general endorsement of “voluntary” child sex, had nothing to do with Minsky.
- yellowapple 6y ago
  > Are you using the non-American and leftist American definition of “liberal” (center-to-center-right capitalist) or the American center-right-to-right definition of “liberal” (anything left of the center-right) when you say “very liberal”? Not sure if it matters, since in both cases it's applicable: 1. From a true liberal (moderate capitalist) standpoint, RMS has every right to his views, and the FSF has every right to associate with RMS. If Mozilla doesn't like it, they can pound sand. 2. From a leftist perspective, RMS is pretty unambiguously leftist and libertarian (as is the FSF), whereas Mozilla is a for-profit corporation. Siding with Mozilla against RMS and the FSF is pretty hard to reconcile with being a leftist; yeah, there's plenty of room for nuanced opinion (no matter what extremists want to believe), but considering the interested parties it's pretty easy to interpret this whole controversy as a bunch of capitalists and their sympathizers making McCarthy proud in their demonization of socialists. > including the separate general endorsement of “voluntary” child sex Which he publicly recanted.
  - tssva 6y ago
    @Mozilla is the twitter account of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and not the for profit Mozilla Corporation.
  - sofixa 6y ago
    > RMS is pretty unambiguously leftist and libertarian FYI libertarians nowadays, especially in the US, are basically anarcho-capitalists, and considered right on the political spectrum. > Left-libertarian[14][15][16][17][18] ideologies include anarchist schools of thought, alongside many other anti-paternalist and New Left schools of thought centered around economic egalitarianism as well as geolibertarianism, green politics, market-oriented left-libertarianism and the Steiner–Vallentyne school.[14][17][19][20][21] In the mid-20th century, right-libertarian[15][18][22][23] proponents of anarcho-capitalism and minarchism co-opted[8][24] the term libertarian to advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights such as in land, infrastructure and natural resources.[25] The latter is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States,[23] where it advocates civil liberties,[26] natural law,[27] free-market capitalism[28][29] and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism RMS himself is very anti-libertarians in their US form ( right-libertarian in the Wiki article): https://stallman.org/glossary.html#anti https://stallman.org/glossary.html#anti
throw0101a 6y ago
> People should lose their jobs over things like sexual or any type of harassment but when I read Stallman's actual comments last year, I thought that it was very clear that he was only defending his friend, who was dead and couldn't defend himself. RMS seems to have a long history: > The stories of thirty years of MIT women alumni. * https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88 https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... Also: * https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix The 2019 comments appear to just the latest in a long string of incidents that people are no longer willing to tolerate.
- claudiawerner 6y ago
  For the other side of the issue, please also see: https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.github.io/issues/1338 https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.git... and the open letter in support of RMS more generally: https://rms-support-letter.github.io https://rms-support-letter.github.io and, quoting the former president of the ACLU and civil rights activist Nadine Strossen on the Stallman matter: https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jrm4 6y ago
As an also very liberal person, I'm mostly in favor of what we're calling "cancel culture," the broad weight of it \ I 100% believe to be a movement in the right direction. That being said, there are people who are going too far, and this feels very much like that. I don't think people trying to oust RMS much appreciate the sheer weight of what they are up against, and that uphill fights like this are going to bring in "extremists" and just plain weirdos. You're (at least at times) fighting literally the richest and most powerful people in the world, and only a tiny number of people even much understand what the whole thing is about, much less are on your side. I'm a black person in tech, I'm well aware of both what it's like to have to deal with boorish powerful people, but I'm also close enough to older folks who've also been in real serious underdog type fights to understand that - you don't always get your choice of co-fighters when you're in the minority -- at the risk of being dramatic, it's darn near war.
lil1729 6y ago
Same here Mark. Thanks for putting these words so nicely. I have also stopped using commercial social network like Twitter. People do not even know that their brains are being manipulated. And people who had nothing to do with Free Software and have not even read or written anything about Free Software are making slanderous comments about FSF and the movement in general. Pretty disgusting and I don't know where the west society is heading to. I am glad I don't live in the west. But left liberals are taking similar paths in this country too, so I guess it is not too long before we catch up with the rest of the world. May be this is the easiest thing people can do? What are some alternatives to Firefox on GNU/Linux?
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  Very much agree wit that sentiment to stop using social media, but you are not going to escape 'manipulation' or political views from that. I find your remark on 'where society is heading to' very odd. You say you don't live in the west so might not have a full picture, but overall I wouldn't see any negative trend. Some things are sometimes taken to an extreme, but I would prefer excess caution around sexual harassment over, say, a culture which treats women as sub-human, as less than men, or as the property of men, as is sadly still the case in far too many countries.
ip34162 6y ago
// People should lose their jobs over things like sexual or any type of harassment // It's not just the Minsky issue that makes people don't want RMS to be in power. It's also a pattern of sexual harassment towards women, since long back, in conferences and MIT. They can be found online, idk whether there is an article that details everything. I think most just want him not to be in a position of power. Just copying another comment from a flagged HN post below: Here's some readings on why many don't want RMS in a leadership position. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20994216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20994216 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26545420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26545420 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535789 [5] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/ https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr... . . Some well-regarded papers on sexism in CS, which are still relevant. [1] Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists (Ellen Spertus, 1991) https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040 [2] How to Encourage Women in Linux (Val Henson, 2002) https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ [3] What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You (Kathryn S. McKinley, 2018) https://www.sigarch.org/what-happens-to-us-does-not-happen-to-most-of-you/ https://www.sigarch.org/what-happens-to-us-does-not-happen-t... [4] Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2001) https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-Press/dp/0262632691 https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-P... [5] The Elephant in the Valley (by Michele Madansky and Trae Vassallo, 2015) https://www.elephantinthevalley.com/ https://www.elephantinthevalley.com/

orra 6y ago

A plethora of women have come forward, with their stories of sexual harassment and manipulation by RMS. (See links in other posts; e.g. the first link in the open letter's appendix.) This isn't just about him describing a "sex trafficking victim" as "entirely willing", and hence not a victim of "sexual assault". This is wrong on so many levels.

captaincurrie 6y ago
What do these plethora of women define as sexual harassment? Is it rape? Or is it maybe a big,fat,ugly nerd not getting the hint right away and making someone uncomfortable. WAHHHHHH
belorn 6y ago
Do you mean to say that a "plethora of women" was exactly one alleged claim by one woman that RMS had said he would kill himself unless she went out with him on a date? If it is true then that was bad, and I am sure that gave him a reputation that on a campus likely burned like a wild fire (it sure would do that on my university if anyone said something like that), but what is an appropriate reaction be now several decades later? The second thing the appendix listed was a mattress in his office whose primary user were most likely RMS himself since he kind of had a reputation of living in the university.
- orra 6y ago
  > The second thing the appendix listed was a mattress in his office whose primary user were most likely RMS himself since he kind of had a reputation of living in the university. Living in an office doesn't excuse having topless people on a mattress in your office.
  - belorn 6y ago
    The claim that his office was some playboy mansion harem goes counter to the extremely desperate concept of using suicide in order to get a date. The 80's was a different time, but not that different. Unless the "topless people" were RMS himself sleeping on it, I have a hard time believing it. In theory I can imagine (but I doubt it) a warm summer where a team of emacs collaborators were all living and sleeping in the university office room, but I strongly doubt the implication sex went on there.
lamp987 6y ago
I'd prefer if there was plethora of evidence.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  Testimony is evidence.
  - shock 6y ago
    Testimony happens in a court of law not on Twitter. Show us the testimony.
    - pseudalopex 6y ago
      Legal testimony happens in a court of law. Testimony can happen anywhere. Religious testimony for instance. Or testimonial advertising.
      - shock 6y ago
        To which kind of testimony were you referring in your GP comment?
        pseudalopex 6y ago
        "firsthand authentication of a fact" or "open acknowledgment".[1] [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/testimony https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/testimony
      - effingwewt 6y ago
        Lol, thus you are saying testifying in church is 'evidence'. Gotta love the mental gymnastics on HN sometimes.
        pseudalopex 6y ago
        Anecdotal evidence is evidence. Maybe you're thinking of proof.

mplewis 6y ago

You don't sound very liberal to me.

gaspmore 6y ago
Because you have to love cancel culture to be a liberal...?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  No, because you have to be a right-wing partisan to believe that “cancel culture” is somehow a thing (and even then, it's not clear how even they can believe that the exact same things that they described as both novel and distinctly leftist, despite being practiced by all sides for most of human history, including by the people complaining about it, from about the 1980 to the late 2010s under the label “political correctness” are now novel and uniquely leftist under the label “cancel culture”.)
  - salawat 6y ago
    No, you don't, you need a modest dose of pattern recognition ability to recognize the fundamental pattern behind cancel culture. It's the same thing, different day, and always worth standing in opposition of no matter where you are on the political spectrum, or where the victim stands in relation to you.
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      I see cancel culture as used by the political party who likely does not recognize banning abortion clinics by law through an entire state as cancellation. The stakes aren’t a matter of Twitter hates you. Your boss firing you doesn’t mean your doctor is banned from giving you an abortion. Or when TX sought to enforce a ban on gay sex in 2003, I really doubt the GOP sees that as cancellation. It’s a kind of failure to see the forest, even while pretending to have such moral clarity. The stakes aren’t a matter of Reddit hates you. When a Christian refuses to bake a cake, sign a marriage certificate, or when they fight for the right to fire gay people, etc., the activity is not cancellation but spiritual observation. And does one not remember that during the Bush presidential candidacy a major get out to vote issue for Christian conservatives was a US constitutional ban on gay marriage? Of course this is not cancellation. It was a Constitutional exercise. These are points of pride for the GOP. This is what it means to energize the base.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> As a very liberal person, I have to say that I am disgusted by cancel culture. Are you using the non-American and leftist American definition of “liberal” (center-to-center-right capitalist) or the American center-right-to-right definition of “liberal” (anything left of the center-right) when you say “very liberal”? > when I read Stallman's actual comments last year, I thought that it was very clear that he was only defending his friend, who was dead and couldn't defend himself. A lot of the comments and actions at issue, including the separate general endorsement of “voluntary” child sex, had nothing to do with Minsky.

yellowapple 6y ago
> Are you using the non-American and leftist American definition of “liberal” (center-to-center-right capitalist) or the American center-right-to-right definition of “liberal” (anything left of the center-right) when you say “very liberal”? Not sure if it matters, since in both cases it's applicable: 1. From a true liberal (moderate capitalist) standpoint, RMS has every right to his views, and the FSF has every right to associate with RMS. If Mozilla doesn't like it, they can pound sand. 2. From a leftist perspective, RMS is pretty unambiguously leftist and libertarian (as is the FSF), whereas Mozilla is a for-profit corporation. Siding with Mozilla against RMS and the FSF is pretty hard to reconcile with being a leftist; yeah, there's plenty of room for nuanced opinion (no matter what extremists want to believe), but considering the interested parties it's pretty easy to interpret this whole controversy as a bunch of capitalists and their sympathizers making McCarthy proud in their demonization of socialists. > including the separate general endorsement of “voluntary” child sex Which he publicly recanted.
- tssva 6y ago
  @Mozilla is the twitter account of the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and not the for profit Mozilla Corporation.
- sofixa 6y ago
  > RMS is pretty unambiguously leftist and libertarian FYI libertarians nowadays, especially in the US, are basically anarcho-capitalists, and considered right on the political spectrum. > Left-libertarian[14][15][16][17][18] ideologies include anarchist schools of thought, alongside many other anti-paternalist and New Left schools of thought centered around economic egalitarianism as well as geolibertarianism, green politics, market-oriented left-libertarianism and the Steiner–Vallentyne school.[14][17][19][20][21] In the mid-20th century, right-libertarian[15][18][22][23] proponents of anarcho-capitalism and minarchism co-opted[8][24] the term libertarian to advocate laissez-faire capitalism and strong private property rights such as in land, infrastructure and natural resources.[25] The latter is the dominant form of libertarianism in the United States,[23] where it advocates civil liberties,[26] natural law,[27] free-market capitalism[28][29] and a major reversal of the modern welfare state.[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism RMS himself is very anti-libertarians in their US form ( right-libertarian in the Wiki article): https://stallman.org/glossary.html#anti https://stallman.org/glossary.html#anti

throw0101a 6y ago

> People should lose their jobs over things like sexual or any type of harassment but when I read Stallman's actual comments last year, I thought that it was very clear that he was only defending his friend, who was dead and couldn't defend himself. RMS seems to have a long history: > The stories of thirty years of MIT women alumni. * https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88 https://selamjie.medium.com/remove-richard-stallman-appendix... Also: * https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix https://rms-open-letter.github.io/appendix The 2019 comments appear to just the latest in a long string of incidents that people are no longer willing to tolerate.

claudiawerner 6y ago
For the other side of the issue, please also see: https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.github.io/issues/1338 https://github.com/rms-support-letter/rms-support-letter.git... and the open letter in support of RMS more generally: https://rms-support-letter.github.io https://rms-support-letter.github.io and, quoting the former president of the ACLU and civil rights activist Nadine Strossen on the Stallman matter: https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jrm4 6y ago

As an also very liberal person, I'm mostly in favor of what we're calling "cancel culture," the broad weight of it \ I 100% believe to be a movement in the right direction. That being said, there are people who are going too far, and this feels very much like that. I don't think people trying to oust RMS much appreciate the sheer weight of what they are up against, and that uphill fights like this are going to bring in "extremists" and just plain weirdos. You're (at least at times) fighting literally the richest and most powerful people in the world, and only a tiny number of people even much understand what the whole thing is about, much less are on your side. I'm a black person in tech, I'm well aware of both what it's like to have to deal with boorish powerful people, but I'm also close enough to older folks who've also been in real serious underdog type fights to understand that - you don't always get your choice of co-fighters when you're in the minority -- at the risk of being dramatic, it's darn near war.

lil1729 6y ago

Same here Mark. Thanks for putting these words so nicely. I have also stopped using commercial social network like Twitter. People do not even know that their brains are being manipulated. And people who had nothing to do with Free Software and have not even read or written anything about Free Software are making slanderous comments about FSF and the movement in general. Pretty disgusting and I don't know where the west society is heading to. I am glad I don't live in the west. But left liberals are taking similar paths in this country too, so I guess it is not too long before we catch up with the rest of the world. May be this is the easiest thing people can do? What are some alternatives to Firefox on GNU/Linux?

estaseuropano 6y ago
Very much agree wit that sentiment to stop using social media, but you are not going to escape 'manipulation' or political views from that. I find your remark on 'where society is heading to' very odd. You say you don't live in the west so might not have a full picture, but overall I wouldn't see any negative trend. Some things are sometimes taken to an extreme, but I would prefer excess caution around sexual harassment over, say, a culture which treats women as sub-human, as less than men, or as the property of men, as is sadly still the case in far too many countries.

ip34162 6y ago

// People should lose their jobs over things like sexual or any type of harassment // It's not just the Minsky issue that makes people don't want RMS to be in power. It's also a pattern of sexual harassment towards women, since long back, in conferences and MIT. They can be found online, idk whether there is an article that details everything. I think most just want him not to be in a position of power. Just copying another comment from a flagged HN post below: Here's some readings on why many don't want RMS in a leadership position. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20994216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20994216 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26545420 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26545420 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535789 [5] https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/ https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-pr... . . Some well-regarded papers on sexism in CS, which are still relevant. [1] Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists (Ellen Spertus, 1991) https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040 [2] How to Encourage Women in Linux (Val Henson, 2002) https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/ [3] What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You (Kathryn S. McKinley, 2018) https://www.sigarch.org/what-happens-to-us-does-not-happen-to-most-of-you/ https://www.sigarch.org/what-happens-to-us-does-not-happen-t... [4] Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2001) https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-Press/dp/0262632691 https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-P... [5] The Elephant in the Valley (by Michele Madansky and Trae Vassallo, 2015) https://www.elephantinthevalley.com/ https://www.elephantinthevalley.com/