On Wed, Apr 7, 2021, 10:21 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk, <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

| From: Russell Reiter via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | | I stumbled across this. I think it's concise and well written. Cuts through | the fud pretty well. | | https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Stallman

I don't know exactly what you are referring to as "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

Fear that Stallman has no moral centre of self abounds on this list and elsewhere. Uncertantity that the real evidence may not absolutely validate his ouster. Doubt must be reasonable. I mean when someone on this list asks me to tell them I am a white racisist so they can send me to /dev/null over an offhand remark I made about the issue. I can say without a doubt, I know there is something terribly wrong. Not with me, or the list. I would place that statement, which was directed to me, at the heart of the ethical source of the controversy. This comes from my personal expierence of this kind of hate on this list. I have a couple of mantras which I use to overcome such adversity. One such mantra is; If you give sharp tools to blunt minds, chaos is the only expected result. Remember not everyone on this list is an elite kernel hacker, as some others hold themselves out to be. Some of us are just users trying to keep linux working on our desktop. Sometimes against all odds, or so it seems.

The article seems to be mostly limited to non-controversial and positive things. It seems to be written very sympathetically. That's probably appropriate.

I wouldn't necessatily say sympathetically. I would say journalism's ethical cannons were well preserved in the telling. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards

I certainly object to "One of the last of the “hackers,” computer programmers who strongly believed in freely modifying and sharing computer code,". That's nonsense unless qualified somehow.

It is an opinion, perhaps nonsensical but only an opinion.

The covering of the Epstein / Minsky issue is very superficial and consequently probably not misleading. I've avoided studying the underlying story so I cannot say much.

It has NO coverage of the other controversial issues.

Well the controversy is steeped in ongoing virtue signaling and emotional values related to universities, engineers, carreers and associated career retardation and advancement; not my balliwick. Personally on this list, I just hack away using linux and furthering my understanding of the tools that come with it. The other contraversial issues stem from the vanity press of the interweb. I got my kickstart recognising digital vanities on bbs, then by reading usenet posts, so I fend off the trolls as best I can. .

So, no, I don't think that this cuts through the FUD. I don't know that all the controversy is FUD.---

True, not repeating the fud doesnt cut through it. However, it can serve to stem a rising tide when viewed in the proper context. Call it more of a dignifed telling from someone who is not one of Stallmans friends talking about him, or someone who has just met him casually relating one hearsay or another. When the wagons are circled around a business friend it is often a career limiting move to remain friendly to that person. This is the sad fact of politics of administration at University's and any of the the other corporations which enable them. Especially those state actors in the US and perhaps other jurisdictions as well. When I am personally attacked on this list for proffering my opinion and I am offered the choice to vacate the list or /dev/null. I always choose /dev/null Heck I've even sent procmail rules to the haters on this list, to make it easier for them to avoid abusing me for my having my own opinion on what is and is not linux topicality and the proper framing of referential objects. But thats just me, others might not have such thick skins and silently leave. However I fully believe that perception is not reality; in my own case fending off the trolls or Richard Stallmans issues with the totum of his current troubles, whatever they may finally turn out to be. Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org

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Russell

“Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young, marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim aftherward.” F. P. Dunne

Stewart is absolutely correct. Making this online reference far from a suitable means of clearing up anything regarding rMS as a person. Kare On Wed, 7 Apr 2021, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:

On Wed, 7 Apr 2021 at 10:21, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

...

The article seems to be mostly limited to non-controversial and positive things. It seems to be written very sympathetically. That's probably appropriate.

Britannica doesn't really rank as a quality reference work. It was more concerned with selling sets door-to-door than what was in it. Sure, they'd sometimes pay well-known people to write high profile articles, but the fact-checking wasn't always there. For decades in the mid twentieth century, for example, they'd happily print whatever the Soviet news agency would feed them with no reference checks. I believe that Brittanica even gave Lysenkoism¹ a non-critical entry for a while.

cheers, Stewart

---- ¹: Lysenkoism — a political movement against scientific (Mendelian) genetics and farming methods that was supported by Stalin and promoted by Trofim Lysenko, director of genetics at the Academy of Sciences in the USSR. Scientists who disagreed with Lysenko faced exile and many were executed. Lysenko's theories set back food production in Soviet-aligned countries for decades, and may have contributed to the famines in China from 1959–61.