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For the umpteen-thousandth time, Stallman was right, LOL.
The commenter overstated the situation
Yeah, by a whole fucking lot.
So did the people making the initial accusations, which twisted RMS’s words past the breaking point of credibility.
For the record — since almost nobody seems to have bothered to read what he actually said, instead preferring to blindly believe the character assassins’ secondhand interpretation — the only thing RMS did “wrong” was failing to conform to the societal assumption that the teenager involved had zero agency just because she was young and should instead be treated exactly the same as if she were a small child. He didn’t even claim she did have agency; he just refused to discount the possibility out of hand.
In other words, he got cancelled for being too respectful and feminist toward her (along with using careful logic and not jumping to conclusions unsupported by facts just because the topic was taboo).
I mean, this is a guy who was inventing neopronouns before it was cool. He’s literally the most egalitarian-minded person I can think of, and is about as far from a male chauvinist as you can get!
Frankly, the whole situation reeks of wanting to weaken the Free Software Foundation and bend it towards corporate interests by discrediting the most prominent copyleft and users’ rights hard-liner. But I can’t prove that, so I’ll stop short of actually claiming it.
(I also won’t claim that the speed at which people were willing to believe the accusations at face value was due to their latent ableism and lack of understanding towards autistic people. Although RMS certainly acts autistic IMO, to my knowledge he’s never claimed to have been diagnosed with that condition.)
So what “other option” do I have to stop my kid’s ClassDojo app from badgering me to “upgrade” to “plus?”
Keep in mind that it’s the public school system that chose to use ClassDojo, not me.
And that’s only one out of about half a dozen shitty third-party services with shitty ToSs that the school system has tried to push on me in the last week!
Free Software is the only solution to this in the long run.
- Stacklands - a “city building survival strategy card game”
- Moncage - a game where you match objects from different scenes viewed from the faces of a cube in order to progress by changing perspectives.
- Tiny Topia - a city building game, except it’s a toy city, you can stack buildings on top of each other, and it sometimes involves having to balance your city on an object so it doesn’t tip over.
- Superliminal - a first-person puzzle game where “perception is reality” (e.g. things change size when you move them around based on how large they look from your perspective).
I haven’t actually played any of these. I found out about them watching Real Civil Engineer on Youtube, who plays a lot of building and simulation games but also plays weird stuff perhaps more often than the average gaming youtuber.
One man’s “battery drain” is another man’s “built-in UPS.”