It is endlessly frustrating that companies have universally decided that they won’t let people say “no” to stuff, ever. There are no longer options to reject stupid-ass new “features”, only postponement until next time you open the app/website/program. They’ll continue pestering you for the rest of your life. I realize that my frustration may be a little over-zealous, but we deal with these interfaces dozens of times per day and this is user hostile behavior. There isn’t really an option to just use another service or program, since the entire technology landscape has been commandeered by a few major corporations, and they all enact the same shitty things as a group.
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.)