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i saw someone on /g/ insist that a handful of honorary doctorates equate to a real one, as if JK Rowling's 7 doctorates should earn her almost as much esteem as a real doctorate. except in this context of course they were arguing that RMS's 12 should have additive credibility somehow.

it was the most obvious case of appeal to bandwagon that one could imagine; it was such clearly horse shit-eating apologist logic; i loved it.

maybe you're special and above all that stupid shit, but the people in these threads defending stallman are 90% retards trying to scrape together credibility and prop up the bogus practice of honorary degrees against all reason.

and, as an aside, this is why it's healthy to take shots at your own camp when idiots show up making specious arguments that agree with you - because if they're allowed to persist then the whole camp gets weaker as they parrot that specious argument. my loyalty is to the free software movement, and i'm happy to cast out RMS if he's stopped being beneficial and has only become a liability to the cause. at this point i would argue that he has done more harm than good for FSF in the past 15 years:
- GPLv3 drove a wedge in the open source community that was neither necessary nor helpful (copyleft in general has alienated industry developers who might have otherwise been allowed to dabble with open source licenses except that now legal is worried about what they call "viral licensing" terms - a bogeyman made real by GPLv3)
- RMS has been a lightning rod of controversy involving outbursts, meltdowns, and inappropriate comments; his public perception has been more negative than positive by a wide margin.
- the general perception about honorary degrees is that they're not real, and even somewhat arrogant people know not to call themselves "doctor" because of it; it's self-aggrandizing on a shaky platform. and yet, RMS happily uses the title like he earned it the way PhDs have earned it.