this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
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I totally disagree with Stallman's views and personally I do find them pretty worrying.
But I also disagree with the concept that employers should be the executive of the court of public opinion.
We have real courts and real police, we don't need to invent a secondary one where people lose their jobs due to shitstorms.
If you think he did something illegal, report him to the police or sue him. If not, then this is freedom of speech. Even though he uses the freedom to voice a pretty crappy opinion.
I mean, if everyone who said something that lots of people disagree with, I guess we would all be unemployed now.
I disagree. Things you say have consequences. The things you say actively reflect on your employer and future employers. You can try to deny it all you want but that's the fact. I for one look poorly on the FSF for reinstating Stallman and I don't think the FSF is a body of decision-makers that are capable of making the right choice. That's kind of a major part of the FSF.
why?
Imagine a interview where employer tries to know every aspect of your personality and ideas, before hiring you.
Seems quite impossible.
For a celebrity like Stallman seems easy. But imagine checking the background of a random candidate just to see if she posted something bad years ago. And rejecting her application because of a post defendig the wrong ideas.
I agree we already have courts and police. If he did something illegal, there's a course of action there.
Doesn't the phrase "wrong ideas" worry you a bit? I don't agree with everything Stallman says, but I think he has a right to say it, just the same as others have the right to say they don't like it and think he's a horrible pig or whatever. This is, of course, very different from acting on beliefs like his, which could certainly end up being harmful.
But when we as a society get to the point where we say an idea is wrong, it provokes the individual to act on the idea rather than talk about it. That's why freedom of speech is so important. Let the idea air and argue with it in a civilised way, and these things will sort themselves out.
You're right.
I used the phrase "wrong ideas" precisely to evoke that sentiment. Stallman's ideas may be "wrong" for us, for good reasons. But that doesn't make them objectively wrong. And he doesn't seem to cross any legal boundary using his blog to defend some ideas we don't like.
And neither should we mix the work of FSF with Stallman's weird blog posts.