Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 18, 2019 12:54 UTC (Wed) by programcounter (guest, #134486)
In reply to: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF by niner
Parent article: Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

> Can you please tell me what's wrong with this "pleasure card" thing? May be a language or cultural barrier, but I don't see what's so offending about it.

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,

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

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.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 18, 2019 13:34 UTC (Wed) by programcounter (guest, #134486) [Link] (5 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.

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.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

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.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 18, 2019 21:56 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (3 responses)

"business or pleasure?" is the far more common expression. Google it:

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!)

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

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.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

Posted Sep 18, 2019 22:26 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, there's weirdness. He's certainly unusual. He's a mix of super powers and weaknesses. Thanks to the former, we have GNU/Linux and tonnes of free software, fewer software patents, copyleft, etc. Due to the latter, we have stories of him dancing alone in restaurants, jokes that most people think are lame, and women being asked on dates by a man they're not attracted to (and who they think should have known this without asking).

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.

Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF

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.