RMS will never be removed from the FSF

Posted Jul 2, 2024 18:17 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
In reply to: RMS will never be removed from the FSF by Wol
Parent article: Free Software Foundation adds three board members

As much as I want to stay out of this, there's something I think rather important that the "other side" site conspicuously omits. Stallman carefully defines childhood as up to 12 or 13 years of age. (And by "defines", I mean "his website still says this today"). This is relevant because his later "change of mind" carefully ONLY applies to "children".

I'm not going to reply further to this, because if anyone wants to argue that a 12- or 13-year old child can possibly consent to sexual activity with an actual adult, and that this is the "logical, non-political" position... I don't know what I could possibly say.

RMS will never be removed from the FSF

Posted Jul 2, 2024 21:16 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

And all I'm going to comment about that, is that that is approximately the age at which pre-pubescents who are too young / not interested in sex turn into adolescents who are mad about it / want to try it. To treat people on both sides of that line as the same is just plain stupid.

Note also that the ages you have picked are almost exactly the age at which Western civilisations start deeming young people capable of consenting to sex. Britain and America - at 16 and 21 (some states, at least) respectively, are at the higher end of the range.

In other words, the ages you have picked are crossover between "protect the children" and "protect adolescents from themselves / predators" and the latter is very much a political hot potato - to say nothing of the fact that young adolescents are quite capable of being predators themselves.

Cheers,
Wol

RMS will never be removed from the FSF

Posted Jul 2, 2024 21:23 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

...and this "hot potato" is far off-topic for LWN. Plus this whole thing has been discussed at great length in the past, I really don't think we need to repeat it all. Please, let's stop here.

RMS will never be removed from the FSF

Posted Jul 3, 2024 9:20 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I was thinking "Should I let myself get drawn in here?"

But. Something I've noticed seems to be happening more recently - we are getting more new comments in reply to old articles. And if you're reading in "Unread comments" mode, you have no clue what date these articles are.

Given the recent changes made to collapsing comments and all that stuff, is there any chance of the following:

Putting the article date at the top of the thread with the title so we know it's an old article?
Making all articles over three months (picked at random) old moderated?

And a little "nice to have" I've noticed that is nothing to do with the above - when reading in "unread comments plus parent" mode, sometimes there is a reply to the parent's parent as well, which then gets formatted as a completely different thread. I haven't a clue how much work it would be but would it be possible to select all the comments that are going to be displayed, then thread them, so in this case they would all appear to be coming off the "parent's parent" for better context?

Cheers,
Wol

Off-topic for LWN

Posted Jul 2, 2024 21:25 UTC (Tue) by daroc (editor, #160859) [Link]

I think this is probably not the place to have this discussion. I was debating saying as much a few comments ago, and we're now well past that point. Let's stop here.