yeah exactly! he’s a walking pr nightmare, and according to a friend who saw him try to interrupt a talk at europe’s largest hacker con, he’s completely unaware of other people. i don’t think he’s lacking in empathy, i think his empathy is targeted. combined with his extreme adherence to his ideology he’s definitely autistic-coded (well, that and his rider). based on that i also have a hard time calling him a bad person, but if i don’t open with “he’s a creep” people tend to ignore the rest of the post because i must obviously be an apologist.

i think it’s good that he was made to leave the fsf, because that organisation badly needs a shake-up. but the backlash that make him come back took the wrong lessons from the protest. you need ideologues, but you also need pr. we need stallman’s ideas because i’ve not seen anyone else in the movement formulate them so absolutely, but we don’t need stallman the person in public.