Month: September 2019

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, the corruption at the core of the latest Ukraine scandal is real. Unless crack-addicted loser sons of U.S. senators getting offered plum spots on the board of a foreign oil and gas company is more commonplace than I’ve been led to believe, there’s a place that’s soft for digging here. As an attack on Biden it’d probably be fruitful, outside of the irony of Donald fucking Trump making an accusation of nepotism. But that wasn’t enough. Instead of using this fiasco as a straightforward attack on a Presidential opponent, he actually thought pushing the Ukrainians on it was the kind of thing a head of state can do without consequences. This mob idea that “not saying the thing directly while implicitly communicating it anyway” gives one plausible deniability is as stupid as it is cynically optimistic.

It has been clear for months to everyone but Pelosi that the strategy, “Let Trump get away with open corruption and hope he eventually just goes away” wasn’t putting the party in an advantageous position. The optics of protecting the children of the politically powerful from scrutiny are awful. It makes the entire undertaking of impeachment look like a tantrum thrown by the branch in opposition of America’s political oligarchy. Nevertheless, it looks like that’s gonna be the double-edged sword the Democrats wield as they ride into battle now. This is gonna be the latest in a line of exhausting shitshows that’s continued unbroken since election night 2016. It could also give Trump, whose health is visibly failing and for whom questions of fitness for office and emerging signs of dementia are becoming more frequent, an out, if he weren’t such a toxic narcissist that he’d never, ever go willingly from something he believes he earned.

If you’re still on a social media outlet that’s gonna expose you to the churning, nonstop idiocy of it all, for the love of God, get off of it.

edit: Oh, for the love of Jesus.

Richard Stallman, longtime free and open source software (FOSS) advocate, has resigned from the Free Software Foundation and MIT following remarks on Jeffrey Epstein and AI expert Marvin Minsky. Good riddance. At the very least he’s an unpleasant, rigid ideologue with petty hangups, with a side of That Roommate from your early twenties who never grew out of it. Stallman has a history of insensitivity toward social issues, frequently hiding from blowback by diving into semantic games, and there are repeated instances of casual sexism played off as “jokes.”

In the ensuing fallout more information has emerged. This Medium post alleges that he was skeevy as hell even thirty years ago in its second section – a grown man threatening to kill himself if an undergrad won’t go on a date with him is not a person I want leading anything. But even suspending that I’d argue the state of Stallman’s reputation outside a cult of braying weirdos trying too late to circle the wagons around him is not bound to any single factor. His downfall has been in the making for years.

There’s the rider fiasco from 2011, outing him as an exacting prima donna. There’s Stallman on video eating something from the bottom of his foot during a speaking engagement. There’s the pedophilia stance he offered a soggy, belated apology for in the past few days. There’s his brittle intolerance for just about anything that could conceivably rub him the wrong way. And ultimately there’s the impression that he’s been enabled to live in a filthy little bubble for decades, heedless of the effects of his words, his appearance, or his inability to compromise in any way on the community he’s vociferously insisted on representing.

I don’t know what Stallman will do at this point, and don’t particularly care. “Genius” can’t be defended when the bearer of that honor is also responsible for alienating and discouraging countless others. While I hope the FOSS community moves past him, his removal from power is going to create drama… Let’s just hope things continue moving in the right direction going forward.