Why am I unsurprised that Dave Winer is defending both Shane Gillis and Richard Stallman despite the former’s racist “comedy” and the latter’s Jeffrey Epstein apologia? Winer himself has this weird history where despite how much credit he’s gotten for his work, there’s always this ugly undercurrent where he suggests that he hasn’t gotten his due, and threaded throughout is a self-righteous sense that people who criticize him are being unfair and they should just be thankful for all he’s done, or at least keep quiet when he’s being some sort of a dick out of respect for the good he’s done. He believes, in other words, that there’s some set of allowances that accrue from doing good works that are meant to give you a free pass for the bad that you do. What I don’t get is that this attitude makes sense of his defense of Stallman (although, you know, not really, because rape apologist), but it hardly applies to Gillis, who just was out there making racist remarks on podcasts.
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The unsupported use case of Bix Frankonis’ disordered, surplus, mediocre midlife in St. Johns, Oregon.
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