Site in Support of Richard Stallman Reminds People of the FSF's and Stallman's Support of Women
A COUPLE of new updates have emerged in my feed/news reader (there is an RSS feed for this):
The first, quoting the late Thomas Lord, says:
One remarkable thing about the FSF at that time, when we worked out of dinky spare offices on the campus of MIT, was the degree of participation by women. In the tiny society that was then the FSF, women were more prominent than I had seen in Silicon Valley, or acadamia prior.The general culture of inclusiveness and tolerance that RMS fostered meant that, at least when I was there alongside Bushnell, that social circle in and around the organization was feminized and all the stronger for it.
In the closet-sized "office" Bushnell, McGrath, and I shared for a time we did have some spider plants as part of a running silly joke. They did not actually scare RMS away OF COURSE and he usually had helpful criticism and advice of our efforts, from my point of view.
https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/1174433656024092672
https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/1174433656946905088
https://twitter.com/thomas_lord/status/1174433658901389312
Whole thread archived
Lord and I used to speak online. He is sorely missed.
In the past we witnessed pressure being applied to remove pages in support of Dr. Stallman, so it is important to reproduce here what we can.
The second update says: "A letter to Selam Jie Gano in response to her (in)famous blog post." It links here and in turn to this blog post from 2019. To quote:
Dear Selam. You may not be aware of what you have done and obviously you are in complete denial but you just made the world a worse place empowering the dark alt-right forces you supposedly fight against.Richard Stallman is the last person in this world that this system is designed to serve. Among other things, he is a principled antiracist, a long-standing environmental activist, an ardour anti-imperialist, an advocate of LGBT rights, a formidable foe of greedy multinationals AND the initiator of the Free Software Movement.
Yes he is also a loser with women but never in his life was he a rapist or a molester and never he supported rapists or sexism.
As about his controversial sexual opinions which he has changed during his lifetime, these are in accordance with what Wilhelm Reich had proposed. (That controversial guy who triggered the sexual revolution of the 60s empowering the women’s movement)
Because of his principled and non negotiable activism, Richard has powerful enemies all-over the economic and political establishment and because of your unfounded and misinformed attack this establishment took now the chance to oust him from official positions. You were the useful idiot needed to trigger a disgusting backlash against one of the most historical figures of our era and this is how History will record you.
Because of you, the worst kind of misogynists are now feeling justified and empowered to spread antifeminist venom and hatred all over the internet claiming that having reached the point where even Stallman (The notorious autistic arch-leftist)is not immune from losing his professional position for a rather innocent email announcement then no one is safe.
You did this. Your ignorance about his ideas and his philosophy is not an excuse especially when you double down your attack against him even after taking the time to know more about his contributions in fighting against this oppressive, exploitative and unjust system.
Maybe it’s not too late to read “The Lifelong Activist” by Hillary Retting a personal friend of Stallman and start being a really positive person about social change. Being an unwilling puppet of greedy multinationals who desperately wanted the downfall of Stallman and an objective ally (despite your intentions) of far right mysogynists is not the best you can do.
You are young and certainly you can be better than this.
Written by Greg Batmarx, half a decade later it remains relevant. We already discussed the Selam "conflict of interest" way back then. No need to revisit the topic. We've since then seen that the real pervert in MIT was Bill Gates, not Dr. Stallman. Here's proof. Guess who the media and the courts are protecting... even in 2024. They call this phenomenon “Bill Chill”. █