Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Because no one else is doing it--not even the media.
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Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Post by Strelnikov » Tue Sep 17, 2019 6:14 am

....over remarks about some of Jeffery Epstein's younger victims, i.e., that they "seemed willing" to go along.

Link from Vice magazine, which I am not wild about, but they've been following this story.

Quotes:

Famed free software advocate and computer scientist Richard Stallman has resigned from MIT, according to an email he published online. The resignation comes after Stallman made comments about victims of child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, including that the victims went along with the abuse willingly.

"I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT," Stallman wrote in the email, referring to MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations."

***

He's also quitting the presidency of the Free Software Foundation.

Will Jimbo pour a small amount of a Jolt Cola on the sidewalk for "my unnamed homie"?
Will Stallman finally get "a haircut and a fuckin' shave, ya hippie" as the ghost of his stevedore uncle demands nightly?
Has James Alexander eaten himself out of wearing pants that lack a drawstring?
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Sep 17, 2019 8:01 pm

My comments from email:
If you knew anything about Stallman, none of this would be surprising. He's a "nerd hero" partly because he's an extreme manchild nerd. Which includes his long-standing tendency to perv on young women without the usual social relations filter. His rather extreme views on pedophilia, necrophilia etc. are well known, not to mention his poor personal hygiene and often-bizarre public behaviour. (None of which was mentioned in his Wikipedia bio, until this Epstein mess happened. Remember that Ed interviewed Stallman for the Wikipedia book, and found him to be "a bit annoying" to put it delicately.)

BTW the open-source world is shitting themselves about this story, including squabbles in the Wikimedia orbit. He was one of their biggest supporters and gave many speeches at WMF meetings. Stallman's article was very closely watched to keep it as positive as possible and it was already under partial edit protection. The history of the article's talkpage is full of people pointing out something outrageous Stallman said -- followed quickly by some dweeb screaming "NO ORIGINAL RESEARCH" and "RELIABLE SOURCES" and other excuses to keep it out.

See the Wiki shitrain fall:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Rich ... ng_Epstein

Open source extremists and hackerdom love RMS because he's one of them. A fat, smelly, slobby, uncouth, vulgar, sexually extreme dork. And it figures that VICE, one of the crassest "news outlets" in the world, would break this story. Sometimes the only antidote to crassness is more crassness. Disgusting.

And here is the Slashdot treatment, replete with some "men's rights" spluttering from the nerd peanut gallery:
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/09/1 ... s-from-mit
Some unintentionally (?) hilarious comments in there.....
Good summary from reddit [reddit.com] (since Vice is not a credible source):
Point and shame. That's how you destroy careers and the standards of excellence that makes a nation. No evidence required, don't bother reading the deposition, the personal is the political, ad hominem attacks from beginning to end for defending someone (Minsky) that wasn't accused of anything.
With metoo backfiring so that men don't trust being alone in an office with a woman, feminism is looking a lot like a hate movement with the way they throw accusations of sex crime around in order to get their hit of indignation to maintain their moral superiority. Guilt by association, career destroyed, court of opinion adjourned.
Considering what RMS contributed not only to freedom but economic wealth you can see these people don't care who they destroy and it doesn't matter if you are innocent of all charges once your reputation is destroyed. Getting even isn't equality.
That's why this shaming of men must end.
If they piss off men long enough, they're going to hit back with real patriarchy.
I mean just look at MGTOW... Instead of just being careful when choosing a mate, as they should have been taught to be anyway, they're just going in the opposite extreme. A considerable pool of men deciding to be bachelors is neither good for those men psychologically, nor is it good for the species.

There is a point buried in there, that the present "shaming culture" will have negative consequences. But that tends to be diluted in the rage over women shaming men (on Twitter!), and "poor RMS" being publicly harassed for saying crazy things. He's said craziness before, and kept his job....

Never, EVER try to claim that Slashdot is a "socially progressive community". Or even an "open minded community". It is not.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Sep 17, 2019 8:16 pm

About Twitter being used in the "shaming culture"
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/20 ... -wokeness/

This was also on the front page of Slashdot today. "The Internet Relies on People Working for Free"
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/09/1 ... g-for-free
Open-source code was the focus, but you could easily insert "Wikipedia" all over it and it would still apply.

And remember, without free software and open standards, there would probably be no Internet at all. We would have only proprietary networks that don't talk to each other, like the 1980s online communities: Compuserve, the Source, Prodigy etc. Corporations automatically try to lock down networks and exclude outside ideas. It's more than ironic that Wikipedia, constantly pushed on us as "free and open", actually isn't in some cases. Try putting some of Stallman's old blog rants in his WP article.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Sep 17, 2019 8:51 pm

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/201 ... s-on-rape/

Free software pioneer has history of controversial comments about underage sex.

Which you CANNOT READ ABOUT ON WIKIPEDIA.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Sep 17, 2019 9:03 pm

because lol, here's the card he sometimes gave to women he wanted to have sex with:
stallman-card.jpg
stallman-card.jpg (16.28 KiB) Viewed 3468 times

Subtle!

And if that's not "funny" enough, search for the #stallman tag on Twitter. Where the twits are piling on all at once, after watching RMS say and do outrageous things for 20+ years. Hypocrites.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Post by ericbarbour » Tue Sep 17, 2019 9:55 pm

Almost forgot: A few days ago, danah boyd received an award from the EFF. (Open-sourcies and MITers love to give each other little useless awards.)

This is the speech she gave.
https://onezero.medium.com/facing-the-g ... e434e10630
I was at the MIT Media Lab from 1999 to 2002. At the incoming student orientation dinner, an older faculty member sat down next to me. He looked at me and asked if love existed. I raised my eyebrow as he talked about how love was a mirage, but that sex and pleasure were real. That was my introduction to Marvin Minsky and to my new institutional home.

From the book wiki, it's outdated but will give you some idea of her hypocritical social circle:
"The WP article about the Berkman Center for Internet & Society is hopelessly out of date and semi-useless, but it does have a list of "fellows":"

"John Perry Barlow (EFF co-founder, classic crackpot libertarian)
"danah boyd (went to MIT and Berkeley, apparently friends with Elonka Dunin)
"John Clippinger (well-known business consultant [1])
"Tamar Frankel (Boston U law professor, helped set up ICANN)
"Benjamin Mako Hill (longtime Wikipedian)
"Rebecca MacKinnon (another Harvard grad, became a member of the WMF board of advisors in 2007, her Wikipedia bio was edited by Sue Gardner and by Mackinnon herself, also see Jennifer Powell)
"James F. Moore (Harvard law prof, very left-wing, used to work for Democratic politician Howard Dean, Wikipedia bio was created substantially by two SPAs)
"Doc Searls (major open-source software evangelist, involved in the "Cluetrain Manifesto")
"Wendy Seltzer ("sits on the board of directors of the EFF-controlled Tor Project, and of the World Wide Web Foundation. A former At-large Liaison to the ICANN board of directors" and used to work for the EFF)
"Peter Suber (Harvard "open access" fan; and on the WMF Board of Advisors)
"Jimmy Wales :P
"David Weinberger (amazingly similar to Moore above, also worked for Howard Dean, involved in the "Cluetrain Manifesto", and yes he edited his own Wikipedia bio[2])
"Dave Winer (major open-source evangelist, good friend of Searls, involved in the "Cluetrain Manifesto"; his bio was edited by Aaron Swartz and by Erik Moeller)
"Mayo Fuster Morell (Spanish social scientist, does studies of Wikipedia, longtime Wikipedian [3]....."At the Berkman Center, she is part of the Cooperation group overseen by Yochai Benkler.")
"Ethan Zuckerman (director of MIT Center for Civic Media, EFF advisor, and on the WMF Board of Advisors)"

Please, don't ask me about Elonka. I've got a long tirade. Just suffice it to say, she was one of the worst "Wikipedians" I've ever seen. And she got away with it.

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Post by ericbarbour » Thu Sep 19, 2019 2:36 am

Steven Levy, a card-carrying "digerati" and one of the smuggest assholes I've ever seen in the journalism biz, covers the RMS mess for WIRED--and does his usual backpedaling-when-politically-necessary routine.

https://www.wired.com/story/richard-sta ... less-nerd/

Maybe Levy realizes that the angry feminists will come for him next?

Plus the autism-spectrum business is a major part of the Hacker News thread--one of the longest I've ever seen there. RMS has plenty of supporters there but also plenty of determined critics. Result: unreadable.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20990583

And if that's not "funny" enough (?), browse thru the Metafilter thread. Not only do they splutter about Stallman in their usual impotent and useless logrolling style....."yeah, well I'm more angry than you are! Upvote me!!" They also try to drag the subject off-topic, and piss'n'moan about Eric Raymond. They REALLY hate Raymond, because he's not only a nerdy jerk, but a right-wing jerk. I still don't know what it is about Metafilter's resident crew that annoys me so much, because I tend to agree with them on political and social issues. It must be their amazing lack of self-knowledge and tendency to brigade in order to tear people down. And having purged anyone who doesn't agree with them, the result is an echo chamber of impotent leftist rage. I think many of them are not much different from RMS: incapable of knowing and criticizing themselves.

https://www.metafilter.com/183159/Odiou ... -criticism

Ed O'Connor, Wikipedia's first programmer (and fired by Jimbo long ago), posted an item on his blog in 2005 about RMS's total lack of empathy. Linked in the Metafilter thread. Funny how there's all this evidence of RMS abusing people over the last 20-30 years, yet he continued to run the FSF and work at MIT as if he was a "made man". As if the software world was a Mafia. Maybe it is?

https://web.archive.org/web/20070507123 ... 005/04/rms

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Re: Wikipedia-adjacent: Stallman resigns from MIT.....

Post by Abd » Tue Sep 24, 2019 1:59 pm

ericbarbour wrote:https://www.wired.com/story/richard-stallman-and-the-fall-of-the-clueless-nerd/
Worth reading. Levy pushes a few yellow journalistic tropes, but they do not entirely overwhelm the story. Appearances count in this world. Years ago, as recently as ten years ago, arguments about age of consent were possible -- and the world was and still is in flux on the topic. An argument for lowering the age of consent is not "pedophilic," unless it extends into the pre-pubescent realm and even then it can be a libertarian argument, not a promotion of a paraphilia.

To be clear, I'm not taking a position on the proper age of consent and think the whole mess is about asking questions that completely miss the point. Under common law and religious law, there was no minimum age. Sex outside of marriage was prohibited and sanctioned, and marriage required parental consent. Further, in Islamic law, even with a declared marriage, sex was prohibited before menarche. In other words, what mattered was the condition of the person, not age.

But that is a minor part of the article. The best part was his citation of danah boyd. Brilliant, authentic, clear, and Levy's summary of her speech was shallow and inaccurate.
Last week MIT graduate danah boyd, accepting a well-deserved award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, unloaded on her alma mater, ...

No, she opened up and was simply clear about reality, and she confronts, not just MIT, not just Stallman, but all of us. Without exception. It's a challenge to take responsibility, which is the only action that transforms, not blame, not defense, not excuses, not counterattack. We are responsible for the state of the planet. If not us, who, then? Aliens?

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