Simon Phipps' photo of Richard Stallman at the European Parliament; This image was originally posted to Flickr | Licence: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Summary: The misuse of labels with clinically-charged insinuations is strongly being discouraged not only by those trying to control language but also clinicians (it's considered unfair and professionally unethical to give a medical assessment of people whom you never actually assessed, especially if the goal is to slander them with words like "dyslexia", "dementia" and "autism")

"He'd rather not use a microwave if it uses code he doesn't have (seriously)." — Simon Phipps (@webmink) October 25, 2009

He responded to Brian Aker (MySQL) regarding Richard Stallman (rms), based on adjacent tweets (many about rms that day and see the video at the bottom). Twitter lacked proper threading at the time, so finding context takes some work (but is still remotely feasible).

The above statement may seem fair. But that's just half the tweet. Then it became nasty.

"Twitter lacked proper threading at the time, so finding context takes some work (but is still remotely feasible).""And no, Aspergers prevents one empathizing," Phipps continued (we took screenshots; it wasn't the only time he used "Aspergers" as an insult). The historical significance of this may require familiarising oneself with Aspergers and Nazi eugenics/euthanasia programs (there's a strong connection between them; Nature published "The truth about Hans Asperger’s Nazi collusion"), estimated to have eliminated about 300,000 humans for being regarded as mentally weak (even before the Holocaust).

Nature explains this photograph as follows: "A ward in the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, in the 1940s. Courtesy of the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance."

Based on leaks, Phipps was also working behind the scenes with FSFE to undermine/undercut the FSF and as figosdev put it: "In 2009 that was probably meant to make rms look unreasonable, but in 2020 with Internet-enabled refrigerators and people hacking cameras in baby monitors, he was "unreasonable" by virtue of being ahead of his time (again).

"I used to be a happy amazon customer, who said (thinking of "the right to read") that the ultimate evil for DRM would be to put it in books. I'm still boycotting amazon, more than 10 years later."

That's figosdev.

He then said that "perhaps someone from OSI [alluding to Phipps] would like to call Kaitlyn Tiffany "autistic" for writing this 2018 article. Oh, nope -- because she gets the title on the money, and then writes an article that ignores her own warning."

"Aker's disdain of rms might be the subject of a later (and separate) post."The first article is "Amazon’s smart microwave is how it’ll get Alexa into every home" and the latter "Amazon’s Alexa-enabled microwave".

"That would be a good thing to have a the source code to," figosdev said, "though really the whole concept is flawed, and hardware switches (along with not enabling Internet on your microware) would be better. but that's an example of Roy being right."

Aker's disdain of rms might be the subject of a later (and separate) post. Here's what happened at the time Aker wrote a lot of malicious tweets, poking fun at rms (yes, this is him in the audience trying to trick rms). Same day as above... ⬆