Yeah, Stallman is a hard one to judge. On one hand he´s an ultra-principled free software activist with strong views about things. He has been fighting for software freedom for decades and never compromises on his principles. I´m 95% sure he has some form of autism and is, from what I heard, quite a pain to deal with. I think that the media backlash he got was totally unjustified and people took his comments wildly out of context, something that´s quite easy to do with someone who is as literal and outspoken as him. As far as I´m concerned he´s entitled to holding controversial views - such is the nature of free thought. Provided no laws are broken, of course.

So, no, I don´t think he should be removed for his views and the surrounding controversy. However, I can absolutely imagine that he´s a pain to work and communicate with in daily life. I think that it is fair that the people who work with him frequently have a right to decide whether he´s unwelcoming and whether he´s a good figurehead for the FSF. I´ll copy some stuff from the support letter:

An Unlikely Icon

“Stallman… is a hard man to like. He is driven, often impatient. His anger can flare at friend as easily as foe. He is uncompromising and persistent; patient in both.”

• Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law Professor, democracy activist

I have had 3 lunches, 1 free software event, and 1 long car ride with Richard Stallman and can vouch for Lessig’s view. In that span of time he managed to confront and berate me countless times. He is by far the most disagreeable person I’ve ever met.

Richard Stallman has an often extreme bristliness about him and an intense propensity for confrontation, which can repel many. However, it is this same uncompromising nature that has led to his firm adherence to his principles. Even when his ideas were ridiculed, even when faced with piles of cash to be made in proprietary software, Stallman stayed on the side of software freedom. He has been preaching software freedom since nearly the origin of software and he adheres strictly to his own moral code. That is what has earned the respect and trust of so many concerned about digital liberties.

Once Stallman comes to a logical conclusion on an issue, he sticks by his views, does not matter the outside pressures. This could be his stance on neckties - symbols of corporate subservience, he won’t wear them. Or his stance on pronouns - "they” is always plural though he champions and frequently uses singular gender-neutral pronouns. Or his controversial views on age of consent laws, the term “First Nation,” prostitution, and other incredibly sensitive topics. Stallman will not, cannot keep a view - however unpopular - to himself.

The paradox of Stallman is that while his pointedness and stubbornness leads many to dismiss him as a jerk, his stubbornness and confrontations are actually rooted in his life-long obsession with morality. Though you may disagree, there is ample reason to believe he has come to hold his views from a concerted, rigorous, good-faith effort to be a voice for good in the world.

Ironically, given the smears against him, one of Stallman's core tenets seems to be consent! He has dedicated decades to arguing for free software, which protects computer users from nonconsensual activities being done on their machines (amongst other things). There is plenty of evidence that Stallman consistently applies his values of consent and freedom to romance and other relations. I find the claims that he is an “abuser” and “predator” online particularly misguided.

Oh man, I'm a bit ashamed of myself that throughout our entire discussion I hadn't once thought of the replication crisis in contemporary science. I had a course that covered that last semester quite thoroughly, including p-value-hacking to get statistically significant results. Well, so much for my university education.

Thank you for reminding me of it, you are absolutely correct that many research findings nowadays cannot be replicated when reproduced! If anything, it makes the need for a truly independently funded scientific agency more imperative. The publish-or-perish mentality nowadays is absolutely destructive for scientific integrity and makes researchers susceptible to publishing inherently biased findings.

Anyway, regarding your claim that I make an appeal to authority: although I agree with you in principle that:

Claim B is true, because Authority A says so

is a logical fallacy, some subjects (including medical science and pharmacy) are expert topics that require multiple years of dedicated study to get a good grasp of. It is idiotic to think that any layman can make the same informed judgements that a researcher can. The best we have is peers of said researcher checking the validity of their methods before and after publication. Hence peer-review (but as you pointed out, replication crisis throws that in the dirt)

Plato himself pointed that out when he asked someone if they'd rather vote on how a ship is steered or let the helmsman handle it.

Closely related is the argument from ignorance: because you don't understand how something works, doesn't mean that it is false. Or in this case, because a layman (including myself, I'm in the field of AI and CS, not biology) doesn't completely understand how mRNA vaccines work, doesn't mean that they're therefore dangerous.

I concur that the U.S. government has pulled some shady shit the last century and has a poor track record. So I certainly understand your skepticism regarding your government. I'm from Europe (in the case you hadn't figured that out) and I really feel that the average European citizen has a different relation to the average European government than the average U.S. citizen has to the U.S. government, if that makes sense. Generally speaking, social democracy, liberalism and christian centrism are the prevailing ideologies here and this is reflected in our government policies. Most European countries have a reasonable welfare state and collective labor's rights. To many of us, this government is not a big baddie that must be kept to a minimum, but instead ought to occasionally intervene to protect the weaker in society. European response to the coronacrisis has been largely economically Keynesian. So yeah, different relationship dynamic. Our media landscape is generally diverse and broad with relatively little polarisation. Some media outlets have a slight bias in columnists and opinions but overall I cannot think of a concrete example where two news agencies report stuff in seriously different ways, unlike the CNN/Fox situation. Perhaps that makes us a bit naive and trusting but it does appear to work well for us thus far.

And about Snowden: if I recall correctly his revelations were mostly about the intelligence agencies overstepping their legal authority and getting cooperation from the upper echelons of the tech giants. I don't think that is wholly applicable in this discussion about the reliability of government in general. But I could be wrong here.

Many of the examples that are in that meme stem from a time when regulation was minimal and the scientific community relatively small. To get a new product approved in the EU nowadays, a company has to navigate a labyrinth of red tape before it hits the market.

I applaud your skepticism, the internet is frequently full of shit after all. I agree to an extent that most stuff on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt, but some trust in our democratic governments and census bureaus is warranted, I think. Society requires some trust in order to function. The CDC estimates the amount of U.S. deaths at 532,355. I'm sure that there's some degree of error in these statistics, but it should certainly be accurate enough to give an indication to what the order of magnitude of deaths is.

It's the same matter regarding the claims of election fraud in the U.S. The vast majority of people in various branches of the U.S. federal and state governments, legislature and independent observers have come to the same conclusion that there is no evidence of large-scale fraud. The problem with conspiracy theories in most cases is the staggering amount of people who would have to be "in" on the conspiracy. And most importantly: everyone would have to keep their mouth shut. A blanket statement such as "the mainstream media lies and cannot be trusted" implies that over dozens of independent rivaling news organisations somehow collaborate to keep information hidden - all while all people in said organisations keep silent without any dissent whatsoever.

In this specific instance, however, the primary source that the article's author mentions is this 8-hour livestream from the FDA which is summarized in this FDA report. In this document, the various known and potential risks of the Modena vaccine are assessed critically. Paragraph 8.3 and 8.4 describe these in particular.

On what basis can these sources not be trusted?

I completely agree with you that it remains to be seen what, if any, long term effects the vaccines will have. I certainly understand your reservation in this regard. So that's a fair argument.

I trust the judgement of the various medical agencies when they say that the benefits outweigh the risks, I'll send you a message when I grow an additional toe :)

Not from the UK so can't comment on that.

Call me naive but where I come from the authorities traditionally have the interest of the public at heart. Sure, I might not like all of their methods: the lockdown sucks, mismanagement happens and wrong decisions are made from time to time. But if you, like me, share the opinion that a vaccine really is the only way out of this mess (because natural herd immunity isn't really taking off), then of course you want to encourage people to get one by using social media and influencers. It's a good strategic move. I absolutely don't think that critical news should be censored, on the contrary that's imperative for a healthy discussion. On the flip side, much of that "critical news" is unscientific populist fearmongering that does not contribute at all to an end to the situation. I certainly understand that it can be frustrating (for politicians and authorities) to see this impair genuine effort to fight the virus.

"They're selling it too hard, so something must be wrong."

Man, I really wonder what kind of reason they could possibly have for wanting people to get vaccinated. It's not like 2.7 million people have died because of covid-19.

https://coronavirus.medium.com/what-to-know-about-serious-adverse-effects-and-deaths-in-the-moderna-vaccine-data-1031aa7f2582

This information was included in a briefing document published by the FDA ahead of Thursday’s meeting. As in Pfizer’s trial data, which showed that six people had died but that none of those deaths were related to the vaccine, the Moderna data also included some deaths. Thirteen people in Moderna’s 30,000-person trial died as of December 3. Seven of those people were in the placebo group and didn’t receive the vaccine, and six were in the group of people who got the vaccine. None of the deaths were deemed related to the vaccine treatment.

It’s worth noting, for context, that the deaths of over 307,000 Americans have been attributed, definitively, to Covid-19.

Same. It is rather interesting to read how many people on the internet consider themselves to be experts on virology and pharmacy and believe that they are more knowledgeable on matters of science than the experts in the global academic community. There's been a metric fuckton of peer-reviewed research, both theoretical and practical on the various vaccines and the vast majority consider them to be safe. Only incident I've heard of recently was a small minority of people getting trombosis from the AstraZenic vaccine, but that's already being disputed.

Installing Synapse with docker and a TLS reverse proxy is a relative breeze. Like almost all server software, it requires some setup and general LInux knowledge. I haven't personally noted a lot of performance issues, but I concur that choosing Python (they even started with version 2) was a bad design choice. Good for prototyping but definitely not suitable for large-scale production usage. Hopefully Dendrite will reach feature parity soon. Moreover, they're doing some serious work on the p2p end and a working client exists already (https://p2p.riot.im).

I don't think Element has a bad UI, but there's definitely some room for improvement. Am not a fan of their use of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I would have preferred a Rust GTK/Qt client but I understand that at this point in the project stage it's important to support the widest variety of platforms to serve the largest possible userbase. Performance and optimisation can always come later.

Salve, serve, moriturus es.

That's a classic

Have an upvote, I like respectful comments such as yours. Disclaimer: am not from the US, can't comment on the finer details of US policy and internal politics.

I agree with you in principle that nobody should be forced to be vaccinated against their will - right to bodily integrity and all that. Having that said, in my country, even during waves of peak corona infections, the percentage of people with natural immunity is in the one-digit. Plus, apparently there is no scientific consensus about how long natural antibodies remain active. There have been many counts of people having been infected a year ago and being re-infected now. So, by all estimates, relying purely on natural immunity would be a very, very slow process. Rapid vaccination is really the only way for the lockdown(s) to end and life to be restored to normal without incurring significant casualties in risk-groups. Yes, for normal people the fatality rate is quite low. But I've also spoken to a number of perfectly healthy people who became extraordinary ill for weeks due to corona. So, it's not definitely not a black death, but to say that "it's just a flu" is also not entirely correct.

I'm no fan of Big Pharma but all their work on the covid-vaccines have been under a huge magnifying glass. I have a lot of confidence in the medical and scientific agencies of my country and I trust them if their professional opinion is that the long-term risks of the approved vaccines are negligible. Another point of concern in my country is that due to anti-vaxxers, the regular vaccination rate has dropped to 92-something%, down from around 98% ten years ago. Due to this, diseases such as the measles have popped up again in certain neighborhoods. And I'm very upset about people concretely endangering the wider public through this because of some vague unscientific notion that the government wants to insert nanoprobes made by the Gates Foundation.

Anyway, I digress. Point is that people should be encouraged to get vaccinated, and one of the ways to do that is to loosen restrictions for those who have become certifiably immune.

I don't think Reddit is broken by design, something which is apparent from the existence of [RAMBLE] (which uses basically the same general structure). I think the main issue is the general commercialization of the internet and the existence of the attention economy. Good article.

Yeah. It's not ideal from a perspective of equality and solidarity but what other option is there? I guess the choice is either nobody having freedom or the restrictions being loosened up for those who become immune to the virus and contribute to group immunity.

Have you tried element.io and Matrix? Been using it for years now and I'm very happy with it. Clients for all kinds of platforms and bridges to all kinds of networks exist.