Parabola wrote:why did you and moral hazard go to bat for richard “I am sceptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children" stallman on the first page? your complaint about maher is that she's too corporate, too ~newspeak~, but when she rightfully speaks off the cuff to insult a pedophilia activist, now suddenly you demand she be more buttoned up, more corporate
This post of yours requires some unpacking, but as for the first point, is it possible they just weren't
aware of what Stallman had said at that point? I didn't know about it myself until it came up here, and it hadn't really been picked up in the media, either - it was mostly all happening on Twitter, and you know how some people hate Twitter. (Justifiably, I might add.)
That said, I don't think Mr. Vigilant
et al view Katherine Maher the way you think they do, which is to say that you may be conflating "user of hipster newspeak" with "corporate," rather erroneously. And I don't think anyone here has really made the argument that she's
too corporate. We've certainly made the argument that the WMF is much more of a traditional corporation (both in terms of its goals/agenda and its organizational setup) than it is a "charity," but that's not the same thing.
I do think you're right (assuming this is what you're saying) to point out that those of us who are a bit older than average may be applying older standards of "professionalism" to Maher's behavior that are now (arguably) unwarranted. Personally I don't think it's good that many people these days seem to have random thoughts and reactions pop into their heads and immediately post them on social media within 30 seconds or so, whether or not it's a good idea career-wise to post them. These are the times in which we live, but at the same time, there may also be an implication there that "corporate" people (at least in tech companies) are getting a lot
less "buttoned-up" than they've been in the past.
Finally, I wouldn't call Stallman an "activist" in that context - his main issues (aside from free software) are government surveillance, climate change, and US electoral reform, all of which he's pretty much right about, I might add. It's highly unfortunate (at least for him) that he had to also believe this thing about the definition of "consent" when applied to post-pubescent underage kids, and even more unfortunate that he couldn't keep it to himself for his own sake, but of course that just reinforces what I just wrote in the previous paragraph. So... I
could be wrong, and I don't want to defend the indefensible either, but I suspect it was more of an ephemeral bad thought on his part than something he's ever actually been committed to.
