From what I can tell, Dave Winer is not a foolish person, but this piece defending his take on Richard Stallman's recent remarks makes very little sense.

Please note that what follows is not meant to defend or praise Steve Jobs, or to attack Richard Stallman, or to imply Dave Winer is a bad person. It's directed purely at Winer's poor logic.

Winer wishes to defend his claim that Stallman was being "both appropriate and respectful" toward Steve Jobs. He assures us that he knows what "respect" means:

If you read my web writing going back to the beginning, you'll see the concept of Respect in a lot of the pieces. I really worked this one through.

First, appeal to authority is weakest when one uses oneself as the authority. Just make your case and let readers judge for themselves how well you worked it through. Second, he immediately follows by telling us:

Respect means you respond to who the person really is, or what the object really is, not what you imagine it is.

That is not at all what respect means. The quality Winer describes is freedom from illusion. You can imagine incorrect things about a person and direct your respect at that misguided impression. It's still respect. I suspect what Winer means to talk about is freedom from pretense, because he argues that

when Stallman says that Jobs made computers that put users in a tightly controlled box ("jail made cool"), he is being respectful. It's very true!

No. Stallman is being honest. He sincerely means what he says. However, he says it in the form of a backhanded compliment. To defend the "compliment" part as respectful while ignoring the "backhanded" part is a gross sin of omission.

Now for Winer's other word, "appropriate":

([Stallman] also sees a man who died, and responded to that too. It helps you feel the humanity of Stallman, he has this much in common with Jobs, he too will die.) Stallman is telling you about Stallman through Steve's life. Perfect. Totally appropriate (the other word) because that's exactly what we all do, whether we admit it or not.

Setting aside the absurdity of this reading of Stallman's words as some sort of poignant reminder that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin — setting that aside — factual correctness does not make a statement appropriate any more than it makes it respectful. Stallman does address the sad fact of death, and I think it is fair to remind people of this. But he does not do so in an appropriate way.

The key part of respect is consideration for the dignity and feelings of other people. The key part of appropriateness is consideration of social norms. These qualities are related to honesty and factual correctness but to confuse them as being the same is at best badly mistaken.

There's a joke that goes: "I'm not saying so-and-so's mother was a whore; I'm just pointing out she had money and I never saw her at night." I defy Winer to imagine this factual statement applied to any deceased person and find it respectful or appropriate in any sense other than admiration for the mother's entrepreneurial spirit.