Fair enough then. The first one is very clear cut.
For the latter, men can get told that too. Some management theories almost elevate the worker above the manager and a belief that clearly asking people to do things is "aggressive" can apply regardless of gender.
For the avoidance of doubt I have no idea who the protesters were, what colour they are and don't really care.
I agree with him that students shouldn't be occupying university buildings and disrupting the business of the university unopposed by administrators. That's clearly nonsense even though it's now common. I agree with him the most likely explanation for this absurd behaviour is administrators being afraid of accusations of racism, as that seems to be a common thread in all these incidents, and students knowing they can get away with anything if they are seen as an "oppressed minority". Whether they are actually oppressed or not is a separate issue.
The rest of his post is a general commentary on modern identity politics. He draws analogies between modern western white men and Jews in Germany/Russia. He observes that one of the justifications used to oppress Jews was their (huge) over-representation in various lucrative/powerful fields like finance, and that this led to accusations of a (non-existent) global "Jewish conspiracy" that was keeping out non-Jews. In the eyes of the anti-semites this justified a range of oppressive measures like keeping Jews out of jobs and, of course, much worse. Sergey Brin's father was a victim of this in the Soviet Union and that's one reason why his family fled to America.
The parallels between these sort of anti-semitic beliefs and modern identity politics are very clear. Frankly they should be drawn more often. We see the modern left arguing that it's OK to deny white men from jobs, educational opportunities and even to bias the justice system against them because they are over-represented in lucrative/powerful jobs like finance, politics and tech. This is justified by reference to a non-existent conspiracy of the "patriarchy", or sometimes just an assumption that if white men dominate a field it must be because of discrimination, thus "positive discrimination" against them is morally OK.
We know where this kind of thinking leads. Povey is a remarkably brave man to point this out to delusional students and administrators who apparently can't or won't learn from the mistakes of history.
Having read the whole thing I don't see what makes him an asshole.
He feels he got fired due to allegations of things he didn't do, because he is (a) white and (b) a man and (c) not apologising for that. And of course, now his enemies are getting him fired from as many jobs as they can.
This is why I just ignore claims of people being on the spectrum. It comes across as just an insult deployed against people for ideological reasons. The guy stood up to student "protests" that were disrupting the university, a problem that seems endemic these days, and of course got fired because university administrators seem to be as extremist as the student population. The guy got angry and wrote a public explanation. Given the history of such firings in academia I'm sure he's correct.
Nothing about that is indicative of a developmental or mental disorder, which is - let us recall - what Asperger's and autism are. After all, by this standard Martin Luther King and many others who made sacrifices for their beliefs would have been considered deeply autistic.
"Could you please" is pretty universally considered basic politeness. I wouldn't consider it to be especially soft. "Do it now" is really an escalation to be used only if someone is somehow not understanding that they're being given a direct order.
But then I'm British and apparently we're odd like that :)
As for being seen to be acting like a man - seen that way by who, unforgiveable according to who, and do they actually matter?
I can't say I've heard someone complaining their female manager was acting like a man, or saying they wish their manager would be more feminine. I hear people quite often wishing their managers would be more decisive though.
Middle management is often desperately trying to justify their job by creating purposeful confusion. I swear he's trying to trip me up looking for reasons to put marks on my record.
No conspiracy needed. Many people simply do not think about things in sufficient depth to achieve even basic levels of rationality or consistency. They literally just say whatever springs to mind, all the time, acting on something close to instinct. These people end up being wrong about things continuously, but it doesn't matter because the people around them are the same and often don't even notice.
People like that react very badly to anyone pointing out that they've made an unambiguous mistake. They aren't used to it and tend to get upset, they may claim it's offensive, get territorial, or try to turn the blame around as you saw there.
A very modern defence is to claim that the person who pointed out the mistake is "on the spectrum" i.e. has severe social skills deficiencies. No actual evidence of medical problems is required.
We can see this in the article text itself.
People with Asperger’s syndrome, the term still commonly used for one of the most well-known forms of autism spectrum disorder, bring serious advantages to the financial markets: extreme focus, a facility with numbers, a willingness to consider unpopular opinions, a strong sense of logic, and an intense belief in fairness and justice.
This is a key paragraph because all the qualities cited here are usually understood to be desirable and strongly linked with success. Although this person is describing market traders, you could simply replace "the financial markets" with "tech firms" and it'd still be consistent.
It took me quite a few years to really understand this, but huge numbers of people in the workplace (especially outside the tech industry) cannot focus, are afraid of numbers, conflate having an unpopular opinion with being wrong, aren't interested in / don't value logic and don't care at all about fairness or justice in the sense meant here i.e. treating people consistently.
And what happens?
But, like other autistic employees, they often feel alienated from their managers, colleagues, and clients. Sometimes they simply get fired.
Well yeah. That's not a mental disorder. That's how anyone focused, logical and consistent feels when surrounded by people who aren't!
The tech world tends to attract a lot of accusations of people being weird/anti-social etc (first time I heard of it in relation to finance). But as the years go by I become more and more convinced it's not really a problem with people in tech. It's really the expected outcome of combining extreme demand for very concrete skills (so the rare people who are genuinely weird behaviour are worth tolerating) with programming machines that require correctness, to the extent that everyone routinely peer reviews each other's work. Go look at how many industries have equivalents to rigorous code review culture, and you'll see it's not many. Even in science it's anonymous strangers reviewing your paper, not your own reports.
That sounds utterly trivial - why was Sal/Sally so upset by an attempt to be polite by not using a short form/pet name. That must happen to her all the time in formal settings.
As for "voicing concerns with current practices", what were those concerns and practices? Technical?
RMS seems to deny the role we free software people play in the demographics of our communities.
You're making a major assumption that any such role is played. There's no reason to think that is the case. The free software community is in many ways highly diverse, as measured by things like the countries they come from, their ages, their life experiences. It is dominated by men because women generally don't volunteer to write any kind of software at all. If there was really a widespread problem with GNU maintainers excluding legions of open source devoted women, we'd see open source projects crop up that consist entirely of women and a general separation of the community. That doesn't happen because women simply don't turn up to start with. That's not the fault of men anymore than the dominance of women in primary school teaching is the fault of women.
I've heard very similar stories from people in the card industry before. I don't think it's made up, unfortunately. Card readers from China are systematically untrustworthy.
For the latter, men can get told that too. Some management theories almost elevate the worker above the manager and a belief that clearly asking people to do things is "aggressive" can apply regardless of gender.