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Why Richard Stallman Was Right All Along
jrepin sends this excerpt from an opinion piece at OSNews:
"Late last year, president Obama signed a law that makes it possible to indefinitely detain terrorist suspects without any form of trial or due process. Peaceful protesters in Occupy movements all over the world have been labelled as terrorists by the authorities. Initiatives like SOPA promote diligent monitoring of communication channels. Thirty years ago, when Richard Stallman launched the GNU project, and during the three decades that followed, his sometimes extreme views and peculiar antics were ridiculed and disregarded as paranoia — but here we are, 2012, and his once paranoid what-ifs have become reality."
Perhaps not the best spokesperson to get behind.
It is funny that you complain the article is logically flawed when you make an argument from authority and complain about the messenger instead of the message.
... leads to the concentration of wealth and power which naturally leads to dictatorship.
I have yet to see a nation or government take the official stance that Occupy are terrorists. Squatters, freedom-of-speech-abusers, illegal encampments, yes, but not terrorists.
While I decry the NDAA and SOPA as much as anyone, I'll not buy into the Occupy claims of victimization and persecution when they squatted for TWO MONTHS before the police were sent in to clear them out. You have a right to protest, to share your ideas, and to educate the public. You do NOT have the right to squat in public spaces until the world does things your way, or we'd still have grey-haired hippies camped out all across the nation demanding that you "free the weed."
I certainly won't buy any paranoid claims that they're going to be locked up as terrorists.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Here let me quote RMS on voluntary pedophilia:
Dutch pedophiles have formed a political party to campaign for legalization.
I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
He's sceptical of the argument against it but he didn't say it should be legal. My understanding is his judgement is reserved and he wants clarification of why it should be illegal.
It's almost as if you are spreading misinformation about him.
He doesn't (didn't?) like Guantanamo either, it's still there. He didn't like retroactive immunity for the telcos for snooping either, it's still law.
You need to look at his actions, not his well spoken words.
If the law is bad in his opinion, it's his duty to veto it. If he signs it he agrees. No ifs, no buts no maybes.
You need to look at his actions, not his well spoken words.
I agree, but let's keep in mind that legislation is written by Congress, not the President. It seems to me that Congress needs to be held responsible for writing and passing the objectionable parts of the NDAA at least as much as the President is responsible for signing it.
If the law is bad in his opinion, it's his duty to veto it.
Agreed again, but note that the bill passed the Senate 86-13 and it passed the House 283-136, both of which are over the 2/3rds threshold for overriding a Presidential veto. Therefore a veto would not have been likely to prevent the bill from becoming law; it would simply have given Republicans a fresh club to beat the President with ("vetoed critical funding for Our Troops", "soft on terrorism", yada yada). Given that, I think Obama decided to cut his losses.
Hardly a profile in courage, I agree, but then again there is a point at which taking a principled stand starts to look an awful lot like cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
It's his claim that we shouldn't listen to Stallman because Stallman is a nut-job. It's a sort of reverse argument from authority, where he claims that the other side is so insane, you should listen to him (he's comparatively authoritative). Stallman's general utter lunacy isn't a legitimate test of the validity of any specific argument he makes.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Well if it didn't matter then why didn't he take a stand and stick by his guns? I mean if the outcome is the same either way...
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
He's right. But, it showed poor judgement to say as much. The beer swilling, football watching masses don't get nuance. That "as long as" qualifies as nuance for that crowd. Now he's tarred as a pedophile sympathizer for life, at least on the idiot side of the house.
Discretion is the better part of valor.
I want to love RMS but he makes it really hard to do so.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It's very very very little more complicated. He issued a statement specifically stating that he didn't like it, but then signed it in anyway. If no one stands up to "the f**ked up federal legislature", then it'll just continue to get worse.
I mean, yay, he says stuff I agree with (for the most part), but if he's not going to act on that, then it doesn't mean shit. I'm not sure if it's better or worse that he's not even trying to hide the fact that he's not doing what he says. He might as well be fully supporting it because that's the end result - he'll be out of there in 1-5 years, and the decisions he's making will stick around long after that.
The problem here isn't that some software isn't free as in dollar cost, or even that it isn't free as in "I have the source code." Either of those -- or both at the same time -- can be malware.
The actual problem (here in the US) is that our government has vastly exceeded its constitutionally assigned authority. Either we fix that, or the problem remains. The constitution sets the absolute limits of legitimate authority, and the 4th amendment is very clear that the government is not authorized to obtain the warrant required to poke into our papers, our domiciles, our person, or our effects unless they (1) have probable cause, (2) supported by oath or affirmation, (3) describing the place to be searched, and (4) describing the person(s) or thing(s) to be seized.
We, the citizens, are responsible for this mess: We have repeatedly let the government step out of line, violating the constitution, accepting virtually any excuse the government handed out like credulous idiots.
We have a chance to throw a monkey wrench in this and at least promote a national dialog on the subject by voting for Ron Paul this time around. Regardless of if you agree with his specific policies, he offers us one critical thing that is more valuable than anything else any other candidate brings to the table: He respects, honors, and will obey the constitution. That means he'll serve as a roadblock against further unconstitutional legislation (which we are obviously in dire need of), limiting what gets through to those bills that can muster enough cross-aisle support to override a presidential veto.
Free software isn't going to save us. Only by putting in place a properly constituted and obedient government can we be saved. And that's going to be a much more difficult road, perhaps an impossible one, if we don't step up to the plate and do something now.
The pundits are right about one thing: time has truly run out. If you read these most recent bills, they are stunning in their overreach, blatant violations of the oaths sworn to uphold and defend the constitution by the lawmakers and any other public official who has supported these bills. This time it isn't just the felons, the people on the various government lists, foreigners, and people who want to fly who are going to get screwed.
This time, it's you. What are you going to do about it?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For crying out loud, the guy thinks possession of child pornography should be legal.
And why shouldn't it be legal? It's possession of an image of a criminal act. The criminal is the one engaged in pedophilia. The victim is in the photograph.
Possession of a photograph? There's no victim in the possession of child pornography. There is no crime.
No, it's not about Stallman, the messenger. It's about why the messenger was right. It's about the message, and how that message's prediction has been shown accurate.
Stallman hasn't been "paranoid about everything". He has been scared of the abuse of people by closed software, and his fears now are being proven justified.
His other views, even on child pornography, are irrelevant to that. Because we're not interested in Stallman; we're interested in what he said that was (and is) right. Because he was among the first to say it, was right about it despite widespread ridicule and even condemnation, and what he's right about is important.
--
make install -not war
Lies and damn lies:
Richard Stallman also thinks necrophilia // As an Atheist, all he said is "After I'm dead, I don't care what happens to my body, research is my first choice, but necrophilia would be a close second". He also jokes about how he enjoys rhinophytonecrophilia (nasal sex with dead plants, AKA: Smelling flowers).
and "voluntary pedophilia" [stallman.org] should be legal, including possession of child pornography. //He's talking about all the cases when somebody goes to jail for fucking a willing 14-15-16-17 years old girl/boy. I wouldn't sleep with someone that young, but if somebody else wants to, and they both consent to it, then let them fuck in peace. He didn't actually support "pedophilia". When he talked about Child Pornography, he didn't support it, he opposed legislation that used the "think of the children" excuse to control the internet.
He doesn't visit web sites [lwn.net]--instead, he sends email to a daemon that wgets the page and emails it back to him. //Most of the time he's on an airplane or some remote location and has no direct internet connection, also, he's old fashioned. He makes the most of his time, using just about every pause he gets to answer email. He gets his mail in daily batches, and it seemed useful to him to get websites he wants to look at in those same batches. Everything without even leaving emacs. Who cares? How does this relate to his political opinions?
Perhaps most infamously, he eats toe jam in public [youtube.com]. //Who gives a fuck? Why do we care about this stuff regarding public figures? Let them fuck, eat and fart as much as they want, we should care about their performance in their actual field of expertise and nothing more.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
If an attractive lady(teacher, babysitter, whatever) approached me when I was 12 and asked me to have sex with her, and videotape it, I would have said, "fuck yeah" - especially if she plied me with a little booze.
Had it been legal, and not required me to undergo degrading medical and psychological examinations, not forcing me to testify in a stressful and humiliating trial, and not forever attaching a stigma of victimhood to me, it would to this day have been one of the fondest days of my life. Where were all those naughty teachers when I was in high school?!
I spent my entire 12th year alive trying to acquire HUSTLER magazines(before the internet was feasible for kids like me), and would have given my left nut for the opportunity to be "victimized" by an older woman.
And idea is something that can be tested, abstracted, projected, compared and conditionally analyzed. regardless of whether an institutionalized 13 year old with down syndrome said it, or a 31 year old prodigal savant with tenure wrote a thesis around it. As far as the basis of a philosophy, that's what philosophy is! You start with a scalable logically constructed concept on which to construct an overall basic logic, and then expound upon into all relatable fields. Stallman believes that anyone capable of making an informed an intelligent decision that does nothing to harm or limit the rights of others should be allowed to do so. This philosophy is the core of the point in the /. introduction of the article.
Wallstreet, for example, has been able to expand its investment opportunities based solely on the short-term expansion of opportunities for others while obfuscating the information for an informed decision, all of which has been made legal due to the commercial nature of the US election process. Much of Occupy Wallstreet is about removing the obfuscation and overall ability to hide or control information, and getting rid of the ability to use the profits from those practices to maintain the legitimacy of that process.
The reason ideas are important, ignoring the love of empiricity that found the Enlightenment that found the United States, is because Ideas Stand Alone. They can be objectively and critically reviewed. If you do that with a human being, having all information available, human beings almost always can be made to look like ignorant and twisted individuals. Everyone has a level of undesirable traits at some point in their lives, and if condensed together, almost anyone could be made to look less than the ideal human being.
However, an idea can be shared by anyone, even entirely abstract computer models, and be tested for validity in someway, or otherwise scaled or planned for when the ability comes about. Take the Other Worlds Hypothesis popular in the Enlightenment, we now possess the Drake equation to allow us to theorize the probability of contact long before we might actually visit one.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
You raise an important point. There are two perspectives here and unfortunately, both of them are correct. Stallman's perspective is that computers are so critical that it's unacceptable that users should be prevented from managing their hardware and software 100%. As you note, however, few users are capable of managing their *ware 100%. It follows, however, that unless the user is 100% responsible for managing their *ware, there's no assurance that the responsibility they've delegated isn't being abused.
One can make the same argument about a number of things. My area of interest is food security. Unless one farms and cooks all of one's own food, one must delegate some of one's food security to others - either in the form of grocery stores, restaurants, or a personal chef, to name a few. How many people could really take 100% responsibility of their own food security? Very few, if you ask me. This is the nature of an interdependent society. Specialists develop expertise in narrow fields and then trade services. It's a cornerstone principle of industrialization and technological advancement. Perhaps Stallman IS correct but here is the tradeoff that must be considered then: If we must retain greater responsibility of our computers - possibly up to 100% control - what expertise or efficiency should we sacrifice instead so that everybody can have that level of responsibility?
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea