Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Posted Sep 18, 2019 11:36 UTC (Wed) by niner (subscriber, #26151)In reply to: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF by rsidd
Parent article: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:24 UTC (Wed)
by pv (guest, #112619)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:32 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
[Link] (12 responses)
I dare say no one goes to conferences specifically to be hit on by anyone. Nevertheless romantic couplings can and do occur on occasion. As with all social gatherings, especially involving alcohol.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:52 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
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Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:58 UTC (Wed)
by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
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I'm not a woman and I have nothing whatsoever against good food etc., but if Richard Stallman handed me such a card at a conference I would feel extremely creeped out.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:09 UTC (Wed)
by pv (guest, #112619)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 15:19 UTC (Wed)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (8 responses)
I'd just like to add: other comments suggest RMS is autistic/aspie. Autistic people have difficulty intuiting social rules -- but for that reason, when the rules are explained to them, they follow the rules totally. RMS, when told those cards are inappropriate at a conference (and I'm very sure someone somewhere told him exactly why, in terms similar to what you said), hands them out across the road. That's not autism. That's entitlement. And worse.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 18:46 UTC (Wed)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
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Posted Sep 18, 2019 21:39 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (1 responses)
So you think someone can explain to Greta Thunberg the reasons for most people's inaction on climate change, and then she'll "follow along totally"? She won't. Her unusual actions are because she looks at what people are doing and it makes no sense to her, not because she's waiting for you to explain to her the normal way to behave.
I'm not commenting on whether Richard has this or any kind of syndrome. But I do know that you can't just tell him "stop being direct" or "don't ask women on dates" and expect your words to change him.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 3:12 UTC (Thu)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
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That is a good reason to isolate him.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 21:05 UTC (Thu)
by HenrikH (subscriber, #31152)
[Link] (1 responses)
For things where he has no interest or haven't made up his mind you can tell him that "the rules for Y is X" and then he will follow those rules just like you wrote but this does not work if he already have invented an internal rule by himself or if the rule requires him to break something else that he likes to do or not to do.
So e.g he very much likes to play games and watch Youtube videos, there is no rule in the world that I could create that he would follow that in any way would prohibit him from playing games or watching videos when he wants to. Aka I cannot create a new rule that says that for every 10 videos you have to go outside for 10 minutes, even implying something like that would just make him mad.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 14:58 UTC (Fri)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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As an actual aspie the rules I make up are very much modifiable, but I don't do so just because people say so. The replacements need to satisfy the internal need that led to the creation of the original rules, and those needs may well not be needs I understand. It was a very long time -- decades -- before I figured out the stuff I mention in this comment, but the needs and even many of the same coping mechanisms were present from about the age of five, and if you'd tried to take them away I would have been epically unhappy and quite unable to explain why. Autistics have very poor visibility into our own internal states. Equally, he'd probably be able to express this himself in a few decades. But this is my guess! :)
Of course, part of that need is for control of a chaotic world, and rules qua rules provide that control in and of themselves, as long as they are not rules imposed from outside: i.e. it is quite possible that a rule your son made up would be acceptable to him where *exactly the same rule* would not be acceptable coming from anyone else, because a key part of it was that the rule was not externally imposed!
> So e.g he very much likes to play games and watch Youtube videos, there is no rule in the world that I could create that he would follow that in any way would prohibit him from playing games or watching videos when he wants to. Aka I cannot create a new rule that says that for every 10 videos you have to go outside for 10 minutes, even implying something like that would just make him mad.
And there's a good reason for that. If this stuff serves the same purpose as reading and hacking does for me -- and I very much suspect it does, it feels exactly the same and I use gameplaying for the same purpose sometimes -- this is not *optional* or even exactly fun: it's an essential cooldown method, a way to shut out the chaotic outside world and restrict sensory input to something you control completely (even a youtube video -- you have control of pause and rewind, so it's a controlled sensory feed: and computer games are something you can redo without real-world consequences until you get it right, which might take *far* longer than for anyone else), until the chaos of your far-too-intense emotions recedes back to something no longer overwhelming. Ripping yourself out of that every ten videos or every half hour or whatever and hurling yourself back into the uncontrolled, glaring, noisy outside would feel very much like... well, I don't know what the world is like to people without sensory filtration problems. Being torn out of a classical music concert every half hour and having your head shut in a tin can that is repeatedly hammered by maddened giants, perhaps?
You might find he's happier if you suggest alternating with something else with similarly self-controlled content and sensory input. Reading? Music? I'm not sure: I am after all 40+ and thus out of touch with what the young do these days! But not other people and not outside and not uncontrolled input. :)
Posted Sep 26, 2019 20:24 UTC (Thu)
by rodgerd (guest, #58896)
[Link] (1 responses)
An ironic defence, given rms is a long-standing proponent of eugenics who agues allowing the disabled to live is a form of cruelty and likens the disabled to pets.
Posted Sep 26, 2019 20:56 UTC (Thu)
by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844)
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Posted Sep 29, 2019 12:01 UTC (Sun)
by immibis (subscriber, #105511)
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Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:47 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (8 responses)
Pleasure is one of those loaded words; it's fine as a noun, but as a verb it distinctly implies a sexual component; I can please you or entertain you or relax with you in a non-sexual fashion, but to pleasure you carries the implication that sexual activity is involved.
As a result, when used as a noun in a context where it's not immediately obvious that another meaning is intended, it carries sexual connotations that are undesireable. Calling it a "leisure card" instead would have avoided those connotations.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:52 UTC (Wed)
by niner (subscriber, #26151)
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Posted Sep 20, 2019 6:06 UTC (Fri)
by gmaxwell (guest, #30048)
[Link] (6 responses)
Humor is subjective, but IMO "Pleasure card" is a pretty funny turn on "Business card", too bad it can be interpreted in more serious way.
FWIW, I've witnessed RMS giving out his pleasure card. He was a perfect gentleman and I can only imagine that it was significantly less awkward than how many socially awkward geeks would indicate an interest in continued personal communication.
As a third party I thought it was a clever, non-confrontational, respectful way to navigate a situation that might have otherwise not been the best match for his skills.
Posted Sep 20, 2019 7:42 UTC (Fri)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
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I don't doubt that there's zero malice to it, and that RMS does his best to be a gentleman and not make it awkward for the people he targets, but I can also see that, because of the relative numbers of women and men in software, the Petrie multiplier results in his actions being seen as much worse by his targets than he intends, simply because they get hit on far more often than is at first obvious.
And I am also quite willing to believe that, had RMS understood how it would be perceived, he'd have done something different and even less likely to be misunderstood. It's just that, given his role, 20/20 hindsight, informed by a 2019 understanding of the shifts in social norms, would have had him step back from the figurehead role in about 2000 or so, leave him in the FSF as an "emeritus director" or similar, and let someone who's better at the social side take over the image of the FSF, while RMS continues to produce the great thinking exemplified in The Right to Read. That way, when his unusual behaviour crosses over from "better than expected" (as it would have been in the 1980s) to "not acceptable" (as it is now), the Free Software movement he set in motion would not have been tarnished by his personal quirks.
My fear is that Free Software and RMS are now too generally linked in the general population of people who are aware of these things at all. And thus, what could have been a great thing, is going to die out with RMS and his generation of developers; at least Open Source was able to jettison ESR when he became a liability to the perception of Open Source.
Posted Sep 24, 2019 22:09 UTC (Tue)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Sep 24, 2019 22:15 UTC (Tue)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Sep 25, 2019 0:42 UTC (Wed)
by mgb (guest, #3226)
[Link] (1 responses)
In Ye Olde Days border agents always used to ask "Business or Pleasure?".
Nowadays you may instead be asked to specify one of dozens of subcategories on an electronic form:
If you travel only between states within a single block such as Schengen/EU or USA you may not have encountered this.
Posted Sep 26, 2019 13:52 UTC (Thu)
by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389)
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Posted Sep 26, 2019 23:24 UTC (Thu)
by nilsmeyer (guest, #122604)
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Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:54 UTC (Wed)
by programcounter (guest, #134486)
[Link] (7 responses)
It is a wordplay on "Business card" and the stereotypical way movies and TV show immigration officers asking why people are entering a given country. In films, a character just gets into the immigration officer's booth and gives the passport while the officer asks "Business or pleasure?"; then the character answers, get the passport stamped and moves forward. Just a few seconds of screen time to show the character arriving at some new country without holding the plot unnecessarily.
Neither text on the card nor the pun seems offensive in any way,
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:27 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (6 responses)
FWIW, I've never been asked "business or pleasure?" on arrival to any country (spread across 4 continents, so a reasonable sampling of nations), including the USA; I've always been asked "business or leisure?", which is what's asked of me on the entry paperwork for countries I'm visiting, too.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:34 UTC (Wed)
by programcounter (guest, #134486)
[Link] (5 responses)
I was asked a few times (mostly in non-english sepaking countries) out of a lot of travels, so it seems to be a very rare thing. But the stereotype from the question being used in movies remains.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:46 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (4 responses)
The movies I've seen it in are also ones like the Bond movies, in which young women mostly exist to be attractive to men. That's not exactly helping the case that this is inclusive - it's something from films in which men are competent and women are pretty things for men to play with.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 21:56 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (3 responses)
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=US&q=%22...
(And frankly, I think it says a lot about your case if you rely on connecting Richard to James Bond!)
Posted Sep 18, 2019 21:59 UTC (Wed)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link] (2 responses)
I know it's far more common - however, every single context I've seen it used in includes the connotation that, in this context, women exist to service men's pleasure.
And quite frankly, I think it says a lot about your case that you're determined to defend every little oddity of RMS's as "not actually a weirdness" against people telling you that, in the general context of daily life, he's missed a significant nuance.
Note that I'm not claiming that RMS is a monster in any way, shape or form - I'm just claiming that for this joke of his, he's missed a lot of social nuance. That doesn't make him evil - it makes him bad at social nuance.
Posted Sep 18, 2019 22:26 UTC (Wed)
by coriordan (guest, #7544)
[Link] (1 responses)
I don't mean to lump those things together, I'm just noting that he has multiple unusual features which are related to not being able to judge what other people are thinking or will think.
> he's missed a significant nuance
Of course he did! And he always will. He's blind to those nuances, always has been. You can't just tell him about the nuance and expect him to start noticing it.
Posted Sep 19, 2019 7:44 UTC (Thu)
by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
[Link]
So here's the thing - he picked up on what's mere strangeness and what's unacceptable behaviour back in the 1970s and 1980s when he was in his 20s and 30s. This is normal - most people get stuck to some degree on "what the world was like when I was young" as they get older. However, social norms, especially on the differential treatment of men and women, have changed in the last 20 years to a considerable degree (so 2000 to 2020 period).
The trouble is that RMS has remained the figurehead for the FSF, while no longer picking up on the modern difference between strange and unacceptable. That's an issue for the FSF - ideally, and with 20/20 hindsight (i.e. no blame attaches here, I don't have the context for why this didn't happen), he'd have found a new FSF director in the early 2000s to take on the figurehead role (speaking for the FSF, putting out press releases, going to conferences on behalf of the FSF etc), and been able to move to an "emeritus" role, where he can do the prophecy part of his role, but is no longer the face of the FSF.
And it's the prophecy part of his role that he's good at, and that really plays to his strengths; take a course, extrapolate it, remove the bits that are implausible, and say "if we do not fix things, this is the bad place we end up in". Had he moved across to just doing that in the early 2000s, this would be a non-issue; he'd still be weird by social standards, but he would not also be the FSF's face to the world.
I'm going to proactively assume this is an honest question and not a troll, and without even beginning to unpile everything here, start off by pointing out that women don't bloody go to conferences to be hit on by nerds.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Mostly, because I wasn't sure those cards were specifically geared towards women.
In hindsight the tone of my previous comment was more confrontational than I intended, so I want to start by apologizing for that.Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
I'll assume that you mean well, and will try to respond in kind. This is a topic both pretty important and pretty touchy, but I will try my best not to get carried away into an unfriendly manner of speech.
Firstly: some people, regardless of gender, are not comfortable being hit on by strangers and it's their utmost right. If you allow people to bumble around making others uncomfortable, those others will not be coming back even though they're not the ones at fault here. This is a major mechanism through which women, specifically, can feel repelled from events dominated by men with underdeveloped social skills. (Which is not remotely limited to FOSS events, sadly.)
Secondly: if someone lacks the social awareness to recognize the specific contexts where romantic approaches are acceptable, that's okay; but they remain responsible for their actions all the same. If someone can't judge whether a specific context is appropriate, then it's on them to refrain entirely for the duration of that context. And when told explicitly that a specific context is broadly inappropriate, like RMS was, working around the letter of the rule is a major red flag: it shows that he both values his right to seek "pleasure" above the comfort of others, and demonstrates willful disregard for feedback that his actions have negative side-effects for other people. That alone probably should have gotten RMS banned from those events, to be honest.
Thirdly: even in an appropriate context, romance is something that develops as a chemistry between the individualities of two (or more) people. Handing out to strangers cards mass-printed before you even met them signals that you don't care about their individuality, and they're just an interchangeable target to you. And some people will be fine with that, for sure, but others will perceive it as extremely gross. If you lack a way of telling which kind of person you're dealing with, but still go ahead with the card, it implies that you are fine making an interchangeable target out of them by default with no thought and/or care toward their feelings about it. That's a creepy behavior.
Fourthly: let's not disregard the added context that the approach in question comes from someone who does not care enough about the comfort of others to do them the courtesy of personal hygiene.
What all of the above adds up to is: despite it not being the intention, RMS's cards signal that he does not think of the recipients as fellow humans beings, but only as potential objects of (his) pleasure. That's deeply not okay.
Ultimately, and more broadly, failure to understand how your behaviors make others uncomfortable is not an excuse for those behaviors. The fact RMS got away with it for decades is the elephant-in-the-room problem here.
Wow, that's one of the most instructive responses I've ever seen on LWN.
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/nonimmigrant/N...
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF