In Defense of Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen
Photo source: Professor Conrad Johnson
Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.
In Defense of Richard Stallman’s Post on Health Class.
Richard Stallman has faced a mob, which are Microsoft boosters (go figure), who go around with a malicious whisper campaign insinuating things for which they have no evidence.
To make up for their lack of evidence (which led to many people asking to un-sign the defamation mob’s “letter”, hosted on Microsoft GitHub, and for several times as many people to sign a letter supporting his return to the FSF), they behave in a sort of “insane” way to go about “bringing people to their side”, through shutting down logical arguments and reasoning.
This can sort of be boiled down to the saying, “When the rules support you, pound the rules. When the facts support you, pound the facts. When the facts and the rules do not support you, pound the table.”
Well, there has been a lot of table pounding about Richard Stallman by this Microsoft-booster group, and now that it’s not cool to continue their morbidly obscene attacks (which are baseless) on a 70 year old man whose hair has fallen out due to cancer treatments, they’ve moved on to Eben Moglen.
One of the trolls even compared Moglen to Hans Reiser, which is ridiculous.
Whatever Eben Moglen has or has not done, I think it’s safe to say he’s no Hans Reiser, but the mere fact that they have to go there, shows you that this is desperate table pounding.
The sources of this table pounding are the same as the ones who attacked a 70 year old cancer victim. The sources are very questionable and suspicious.
One of the sources implements malicious software designed to stop your computer from running your choice of programs.
Another is some Internet troll who “has a lot of time” (almost always online and causing trouble) who is also a homophobe, xenophobe, and a racist which attacked me and my spouse, saying directly to me (in a much more obscene way than I will go into here) that gay people are disgusting and that they knew what I did with “that filthy immigrant” in my bedroom.
This individual also overheard that my pet cat needs her thyroid pills in the Techrights IRC channel, so they told me to, “Just give them to her rectally like all of the other degenerate things you probably do with that poor animal.”
None of these people are fit for a civilized world. They want to accuse Richard Stallman of being gross?
I’ve talked to Richard Stallman before and he was always nice to me. He certainly never said anything like this to me!
But then, what do you expect from the troll mob? I say, with complete sarcasm, that the “nicest” thing they do is….. promote Hamas on their public Mastodon walls.
(At least two of them run their own so they don’t get banned for promoting terrorism and other freaky shit that wouldn’t fly on most servers.)
Although, the second troll I mentioned is probably more of a result of the decline of the economy and overall morals in North America than anything else.
People who have been badly failed by the system (such as fitting in so badly with society that they have basically been excluded from all of it and have nothing but free time) tend to develop a lot of extreme and highly unusual persistently false beliefs and delusions.
They lash out irrationally at others. It’s a result of social rot.
You end up in this sort of “death spiral of mental decay”, where they radicalize others. Then you end up with a society that rots even further as people have to come into contact with this radioactive waste.
Who is listening to what these people are selling about Stallman and Moglen?
Certainly none of them has done anything for the Free Software Community, and if they lived 1,000 years and reformed themselves today, neither one would ever do as much for Free Software as Richard Stallman or Eben Moglen, and I just think that we need to consider that.
As I said in my last post, I’ve suffered a lot of actual abuse and malice, as a gay man, in my own country, throughout the last 40 years or so.
I didn’t get past that so that some people who are out collecting scalps for Microsoft can resort to what they are calling me and my spouse on the Internet. We have logs.
As to Stallman, I’ve said that some of his personal opinions and humor are a little out there, but a lot of it also has a lot of rational basis in reality.
The public schools in America in the 90s, the government, and my parents were all so racist and homophobic that probably the only thing similar I’ve encountered in my life is this anti-Stallman troll mob.
It is, of course, no secret that Microsoft has a Nazi Problem.
I blogged extensively about one particularly outrageous individual named Joseph Cantrell. Microsoft ignored all the red flags and hired him and he ended up attempting to murder a co-worker.
They also had a vicious child sex predator named Peter Bright “covering them” at Ars Technica. He’s in prison for 144 months now.
Microsoft has no shortage of toxic individuals in their orbit.
In fact, the latest ones are positively mild compared to Peter Bright and Joseph Cantrell.
After Peter Bright and Joseph Cantrell, can we really put anything past Microsoft?
Using their real identity, at least one of the current trolls pretends to be courteous and polite. Nice shark. Pretty shark…
The other one can’t even pretend to be nice.
The one that pretends to be nice uses the other one (“Release the kraken!”), and distances himself from what the other one does so that when it’s something really sick, he don’t have to accept the blowback.
Anyway, these are two of the “anti-Stallman” camp. Nice folks, huh?
In defense of RMS’s statements about Health class.
In the 90s, I learned more from Internet pornography about being gay than I did from Health class or my parents. Parents generally don’t know anything about being gay, except maybe some homophobe shit they picked up in the 60s when the Indiana Klan was still the government.
Indiana repealed the sodomy law not long after Canada, as had several US states. Illinois started in 1962.
Both States were “progressive for the time”, but that doesn’t mean that the issue was a slam dunk in the legislatures. For many years, rabid homophobes had control of large portions of the State of Indiana, at the county and local levels, and these governments are where most education policy is drafted and passed. Even in the early 2000s, I recall reading a former Indiana legislator’s blog. He said he was in the legislature in 1976 and the vote was a bad one because it “unleashed Sodom and Gomorrah”.
The State and federal governments set some standards on American schools, but they mostly just pass out money. So whatever the local school board does, tends to be what the children actually learn.
So I learned nothing about being gay at school, except that “most Blacks and gay people ended up with AIDS”. Big surprise.
That statement came from the American government.
A government so horrible that it almost never even says its sorry while any of its victims are still alive.
(Not limited to compulsory sterilization eugenics laws, Japanese Internment, the Syphilis Experiments, and they are still finding new ways to victimize Native Americans and violate its lopsided 1800s treaties. Teaching an entire generation, my generation, that gay people are molesters who end up with AIDS. You want these people in charge of “What is disinformation on the Web?” Wow.)
I wouldn’t say that Internet pornography has harmed me.
Maybe it harmed me because it took 2-3 minutes for a JPEG to finish coming in, and there was an opportunity cost there, that it was an inefficient use of my time because dial-up modems were so slow.
It is not the ideal source of sexual education. I wish that someone in school had gone over all the basics with me. Where else was I going to get sex ed from?
Waiting for them to pull the TV cart around again? (Read that post or wait for explanation.)
The government that wants to control everything has never proven that it can be trusted to actually do that.
When it was my only source of information, how did the American government handle the issue of gay and Black people on Health class?
It told us they all die of AIDS, of course.
Who wants to stand in line to trust these people with the Internet? Not me.
Richard Stallman is one of the few people who has stood up and challenged them.
I don’t blame Richard Stallman at all for saying Health class should be more comprehensive.
I don’t even think his comment on this should have raised an eyebrow.
Whatever American parents and the American government is teaching them now is worse than teaching teenagers how to be careful during sex.
According to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there is an explosion of almost every type of Sexually Transmitted Disease going on right now, and every time the standards of public education resort to an even bigger silly season, it gets worse.
The CDC also says 54% of this burden lands on people 15-24 years old. Why should 54% of the STD burden fall on an age group so small because parents are such prudes they think that showing how to use a condom will “encourage them to have sex”?
They’ll figure it out on their own. I did. But 54% of the STD burden is on them because the Health classes don’t cover the dangers and mitigations.
Obviously the rush to kill Health class, bury the Internet under censorship, and hide the condoms isn’t working.
The way I understand it, we’re to the point now where the teacher in the Health class can be arrested for putting a condom on a banana in front of a group of 10th graders.
Believe me, society is suffering worse under these “moral crusaders” than it was under the “Wild West” Internet, and the era of the American government hauling the TV cart into the Health classroom to watch a movie about a Black woman who doesn’t know who the father is, dying of AIDS and giving it to her baby.
(Yes, that most certainly was horrible. It never should have been allowed to happen. But it did happen, and in a government classroom, no less.)
Because at least then the teacher could mention condoms without being arrested.
The attack on porn, on its surface, seems innocent enough, doesn’t it?
In my opinion, they’re doing this to censor LGBT people out of existence.
They just can’t say that. They don’t even need to say that.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself. I don’t feel like society is improving.
Trying to stamp out legal porn, just shows this very clinical and homophobic outlook on things.
Nobody is really worried about it other than it might be “gay porn” or something. The only thing fascists care about is to prevent anyone from seeing what’s beyond the walls they build.
It’s yet another way for them to shove us back into the closet. Through its crimes against humanity and ongoing unethical behavior, the American government hasn’t proven that we can trust it to handle anything, much less the flow of information.
While I wish I could say it’s all the result of Republican “Don’t Say Gay” laws, it isn’t. The problem is spreading and becoming bipartisan.
I do thank Richard Stallman for having to stand up to the abuse he’s gotten for saying something that shouldn’t even be controversial.
Why does Microsoft have boosters that attack Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen?
I think that it stands to benefit by getting rid of people who care about Software Freedom. It considers those people to be a thorn in their side. They think they can take total control of our computing easier without them.
But there are some problems within Microsoft that makes this all fall apart if you consider it carefully.
Check out what Microsoft Bing was handing to sick perverts until 2019.
Someone should be in prison alright. Microsoft executives. Where are the courts? Where are the fines? Where is the government?
Why has Microsoft been allowed to harbor and benefit from self-avowed Nazis (Cantrell), pedophiles (Bright), and to use sick assholes coming to Bing for child abuse material to say it got “ad impressions”, all without the scrutiny it deserves from the media and the US Attorney’s office?
Why do they, instead, get to project what they are onto good and decent people using Internet trolls?
I don’t know about anyone else, but I think we’ve entertained their trolling long enough.
I challenge Microsoft to take a public stance on this.
To name who was responsible for the “problems” with Bing and fire them, and to condemn the trolls that they benefit from publicly, and to make it clear if this sort of behavior is welcome or backed by Microsoft, instead of continuing to remain silent while it is happening.
The way I see it, they have explaining to do and I eagerly await their statement on these issues. █