Ok, let’s say he’s right only when he talks about software.
That should do it. I hope.
Comment on Google's shocking developer decree struggles to justify the urgent threat to F-Droid
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 11 hours agoI sometimes like to read his political posts:
www.stallman.org/archives/2025-jul-oct.html
And honestly? I mostly agree with them? Like this:
ABC ordered to pay Antoinette Lattouf another $150,000 for unlawful termination over Gaza Instagram post.
But a company faced with enormous threats wielded by fascist officials who demand that certain views be suppressed will treat such penalties as the normal cost of sucking up.
The [Israeli] army says that HAMAS is using apartment buildings for “surveillance”, and has bombed some of those buildings to destroy them. Based on this logic, the army might bomb every tall building in Gaza City with the large bombs that the US is providing
He has some questionable beliefs as well, though for unusual reasons. He accepts non-binary people but refuses to use they/them pronouns because he doesn’t like the ambiguity of singular/plural pronouns. So he has invented the neopronouns per/pers to refer to singular non-binary persons. I genuinely think no other person on this planet could hold this opinion.
Ok, let’s say he’s right only when he talks about software.
That should do it. I hope.
I genuinely think no other person on this planet could hold this opinion.
Eh, I’m pretty close to this opinion.
A family member came out as non-binary, and I don’t like to use they/them (for the same reason as Stallman), but I also think creating my own pronouns is more offensive, so I just use their first name, unless I can’t easily avoid it (like this sentence). I’m not trying to be offensive, I just don’t like they/them as angular pronouns. I also don’t like “you” as both singular and plural, but I’m also not ready to use “y’all”, so I refer to second person groups without the pronoun (if feasible).
On a related note, I also think gender is a social construct and not actually “real.” Sex exists because it’s a biological thing, but it shouldn’t be directly tied to your role in society. To change my mind, I need empirical evidence that there’s some unique difference between men and women (brain wave patterns?) that aligns groups of non-binary people or aligns trans people with people of the opposite sex. I personally don’t think this exists, and gender fluidity is more a symptom of a culture that isn’t well equipped to handle people who don’t nicely fit into a bucket. I think gender is a useful metaphor for what’s going on, and I absolutely support people fighting for using it to get the recognition they need, but I don’t think it’s an actual, scientifically proven thing.
The only real difference is that I use first names to refer to non-binary people’s first names more frequently than to binary people. I hope that doesn’t offend anyone, I just really don’t like using the same pronoun for both singular and plural.
Singular they is over 600 years old by the way:
https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/?tl=true
As a trans person, my gender dysphoria is not something caused entirely by social gender roles. Medical transition has greatly alleviated the majority of it. Anecdotally, within the first week of hormone therapy, my dysphoria improved dramatically while only being out of the closet to 2 people outside of my therapist and the medical professionals who prescribed my hormones. It has continued to improve, although I’m still waiting for the surgery that will resolve the remaining things that hormones can’t fix.
Also, there are studies around brain structure differences between men and women, and transgender people tended to have brain structures in line with their gender, not their assigned sex at birth:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_gender_incongruence#Brain_structure
Perhaps you should believe people when they tell you who they are, and get past your discomfort drawing arbitrary lines in grammar regarding pronouns, when singular they predates the fall of the Byzantine Empire by 75 years.
I criticized singular they/them for increasing language ambiguity and suggested replacing it with something new like xe/xer multiple times. The reply is usually a shitstorm and downvote tornado. I’ve given up on that front.
Probably because singular “they” predates singular “you” grammatically. Should we go back to using thou and thee instead of the singular you as well?
primrosepathspeedrun@anarchist.nexus 11 hours ago
Okay that’s all cool or cool-and-stubbornly-autistic. But he has some other opinions that are not, about consent and age.
So the blanket ‘fuck yeah, stallman!’ Doesn’t really fly anymore.
yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de 11 hours ago
Hasn’t he admitted to changing his opinion after learning about the effects on children? I’m not in the loop about this.
But yeah, you definitely shouldn’t treat his words as gospel. A lot of questionable-at-best stuff in there.