But look past that into what was happening.

Stallman was trying to defend Minsky who had sex with someone, a teenager, nearly 60 years younger than him on a billionaire's private island. There isn't an imaginable circumstance where what happened there was not, even in the best possible light, incredibly creepy.

His intellectual arguments were understandable in a way, but in the context of defending Minsky and in the venue they were wildly inappropriate and indefensible.

It doesn't matter how "great" you are or how socially awkward, any institution should fire you for doing something like that.

Comments here seem to mostly equate this situation to a Cancel Culture outcry over an isolated remark. That's not what happened here. rms has had decades of inexcusable behavior for any individual, much less someone affiliated with MIT and heading something as large as FSF. He had to answer for this eventually.

I sincerely appreciate his contributions to this world. But I also sincerely feel that we can't give people free passes for their behavior (see: courtesy cards at conferences) just because they've done well in other respects. We need to end the acceptance of Brilliant Jerks.

That seems reasonable and fair.

> I agree that we need to turn around acceptance of "brilliant jerks" but the Law of Unintended Consequence here in many cases seems way worse than the original problem we were trying to solve.

Which is... what exactly? You're appealing to a slippery slope but from my perspective we climbed UP said slope to get to holding RMS to account for years of bad behavior, and even now reprehensible folks are using awful excuses like, "They're just on the spectrum" as ammo in the "Yes but he's a powerful man" argument they've been winning for a long time.

But ultimately RMS's positon was one of political, not technical, leadership. With no more supporters, the FSF rejected him. Without the FSF, what purpose could he serve at his job?

That doesn't imply any institution of higher learning or software advocacy organization needs to grant him their imprimatur to do it.

Isn’t he basically a speaker and advocate nowadays? That career is unlikely to be very successful now that all major organizations dumped him and he has fake news headlines saying he defended Epstein following him everywhere (backed up by apparently two decades of known antisocial personal behavior).

He doesn’t exactly sound like the kind of person you’d hire to work as a normal developer nor would that comport with his strange ethics of refusing to use any non-Free software.

He could try to rebuild his career, but he is 66 so unlikely he will try.

We don’t need to worry about his entire life. That’s his job. We can say “this person clearly should not be leading an advocacy group” without figuring out a whole future career path for him.

They certainly _shouldn't_ be in a leadership position... (where that "inexcusable behavior" becomes a barrier to participation for various groups)

are you even thinking about what you're writing? it seems like you're just attacking for the sake of it.

you've spammed this conversation with your input... what, 20 different times?

I hate this morality police sweeping in saying that he simply can’t talk about this because it is forbidden, wrong, etc. The majority should not decide what is ok speech or thought, we should judge him by what he has actually done, and challenge his thoughts directly with reasoned argument rather than immediately dismiss and denounce anything that isn’t in the moral majority.

Freedom of association is just as important at freedom of speech.

All acts of pedophilia would be statutory rape, but not all statutory rape would be acts of pedophilia. If the minor isn't a pre-pubescent child, it really isn't pedophilia.

Is my dad a rapist?

All i'm seeing is people pointing out that statutes are different around the globe, and that it was rms' point that the variety of these rules is the exact reason not to refer to minsky's behavior (whatever it was) as "assault".

He was in two roles that were largely about PR and put him in positions of power over young women. I certainly am willing to condemn people to no longer holding positions of power they have demonstrated they will abuse, and if your job is as a figurehead a big part of that job is not being so gross people avoid the institution. He got fired because a significant part of his job was ensuring the fsf could raise funds and he was being bad at his job.

1st, you're assuming his relative power based on claims in an article by a young woman who didn't know about him, and still hasn't met him.

2nd, the least old of these claims was written 13 years ago.

3rd, for god's sake... he wasn't defending pedophilia. there's no reason to say that! why on earth do people keep repeating it? it's clearly inaccurate.

He made a choice to say some words and based on those words people felt they would be better off without him in their workplace. Seems fair to me, people have been fired for much less.

Suppose you're an employer. Would you want to hire a neo-Nazi who has visible swastika and Hitler tattoos? Would you put this guy in front of your customers? Probably not; your business wouldn't do too well. So when you decline to hire such a person, you're exercising your freedom of association, but also helping to condemn the neo-Nazi to homelessness and poverty. In some countries, he might be able to get some social assistance so he doesn't turn to crime, but it'll probably still be poverty-level.

Societies aren't just a bunch of people all doing and saying whatever the heck they want. There's consequences to your actions and your speech. If people like you more, you get better jobs and do better socially. If people don't like you, then you become an outcast. This can be good or bad: if the overall attitude is something awful, such as the idea that some people should be enslaved, then you get a society where lots of people are horribly oppressed. If the overall attitude however is that oppression is bad, then people who promote oppression (like neo-Nazis) are punished by being ostracized, and ideas like that are made unpopular and kept from spreading too much.

This Guardian article makes me think that he has been unfairly treated. Even though I think that he is completely wrong to assume that an elderly man could reasonably expect that a very young person is having sex with them for any reason other than either direct coercion (violence, mental-abuse/gaslighting) or the indirect violence of capitalism (need to support self or family [1]).

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/17/mit-scient...

I think it is quite clear that he was explicitly NOT claiming that the accusor was willing, but that she was coerced into appearing willing. I think it is quite clear that he also calls for more care and clarity in the language around this and the post on Medium gets it completely wrong, as does your last phrase.

1. This can include drug dependency, can also include the need to pay for "luxuries" like going to college: it's pretty much all the same to me -- these things are withheld due to force in our society. The picture is even clearer in the extreme case of "voluntary" sex work by people in developing countries.

There are a lot of similarly coerced situations in our capitalist societies. You want to eat? Go down the mine.

Thanks for putting it so succintly

I get that the concept of assumption of innocence is something long-forgotten on the Internet, but can we at least discern between correcting the language to ensure that mob accusations are accurate, and wholesale defense of a (presumed) act?

Is your problem with the person who had the sex, or the person defending them? The former I agree is a huge problem, the latter seems highly dangerous and I very much disagree with you. It would be impossible to get any sort of due process or fair trial if even defending you makes you toxic, unemployable, and evil. What if you are innocent? Imagine trying to find a lawyer...

What about me? I'm not defending RMS' behavior, but I could see how someone would think I was. Do I deserve to be able to work? Do my kids deserve a home and food on the table?

In whose mind does this comment even start to make any sense? Are people supposed to only point out facts that contradict what a righteous Twitter mob is inventing if they are in the presence of a judge?

This is because court procedures are complicated and idiosyncratic and most people would not be expected to have the skills to defend themselves. The state is trying to take away a person's freedom so part of the social contract is that it has an obligation to provide them with independent help to navigate the process.

As far as I'm aware, Minsky had no legal case to answer and Stallman was not his defence lawyer. So while Stallman certainly has the right to defend him, in doing so he was risking his own reputation in a way that a criminal defence advocate (even when their client is found guilty of the most heinous crime imaginable) does not.

Some people like Greg Benford claimed the sex didn't happen. I think that's a better way to go about it. Say you were present at the time and provide counter-claim.

Now, there doesn't seem to be proof either way.

Then why attack him now and try to force him out of the organisation that he founded over something people misunderstood? They could just call to fire him over actual abusive behaviour instead.

You're happy to benefit from the freedoms he fought for, the free GNU, built by GCC, and GPL licensed software that runs on your computer, your car, your phone, and your TV, and all the platforms you use on the internet (including this one). But you won't accept any Brilliant Jerks! I'm sure you'll put your money where your mouth is, and boycott all of these.

And while you're at it, why don't you list your numerous noteworthy accomplishments in life, and pinky-swear that you've never said anything in public that you regretted.

That's blowing it way out of proportion. You mention one remark 13 years ago, and refer to it as decades.

RMS points out that she did not ever say that she and Minksy had sex, although the prosecutor implied it, and there was a witness account that Minsky declined and warned someone else about what happened during the event. Pointing this out should not be a problem.

So please look past the media's witch hunt and into what's actually been said.

[1]https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929/091320191...

He didn't redefine the legal term, he just (tl;dr) said it sucks and we shouldn't use it (and instead should use something more specific).

That part of my comment was overly sarcastic. I have to apologize for that.

> He said that sexual assault is a poor term, for reasons of broadness and vagueness, and that we should avoid using such terms in order to avoid ambiguity.

I would say that the term is intentionally broad and vague precisely because violence is only one of many ways to force an unwilling participant and how it was done is mostly irrelevant to the end result.

> he just (tl;dr) said it sucks and we shouldn't use it (and instead should use something more specific).

As far as I can tell he never actually brought up a more specific term and just disagreed in a rather non constructive fashion against the use of both sexual assault and rape, even when someone explicitly referred to laws.

Doesn't matter if the accused event happened or not. Defending the hypothetical in that manner gets you fired.

However I can’t seem to find the original documents to verify that.

And reading too much about Giuffre, my god. The list of powerful people.

Epstein must of had blackmail on everyone.

Almost like a cartel leader in their nation, he made big philanthropic donations for good press and then kept many of the world’s richest and most powerful people under his thumb.

Why the hell the Media never puts up links to direct sources is what frustrates me the most. There's been some bad cases of this lately.

The analysis and statements in the articles were often ridiculous and had little connection to the original material (even the article publishing that material) other than exaggerating someone else's article in a perverse game of telephone.

Minksy DIDN'T had the sex.

What the court documents said is:

A woman, that at the time was 17, said Epstein told her to OFFER sex to Minsky.

And another person that was present, Greg Benford, said that Minsky refused the offer.

Nowhere was stated that sex happened.

Here for example https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/16/computer-scientist-richard...

It went from "defended Minsky", to "Victims Were ‘Entirely Willing’" to "defended Epstein".

> Stallman was trying to defend Minsky who had sex with someone

I think that he was just trying to be rational. But being rational against a lynching mob is not a good idea (and hasn't ever been in human history).

> but in the context of defending Minsky and in the venue they were wildly inappropriate and indefensible

Would you mind expanding on that? Say that someone claimed that Stalin drank the blood of his victims, would it be "inappropriate and indefensible" to try to debunk such a claim (and thus defend Stalin) in the process?

No one in a position to cause this outcome didn't read the original statements. Suggesting that this is all a big misunderstanding (or that this was an isolated incident of RMS's sexism, for that matter) is not only slanderous, but its profoundly disrespectful to all parties.

With what sentence?

> was suggesting that minors can consent to sex with adults

Legally in most places they can, legally in the place that this happened I think that they could not. Is there a problem with this statement?

> suggesting a young woman forced into sexual servitude by a monstrous sex slave merchant was "entirely willing."

Appeared entirely willing (to Minsky and to anyone else that Epstein invited in his island) != being entirely willing herself.

> RMS's sexism

Would you mind showing to me where is the sexism in anything that Stallman said regarding Epstein?

If you want to argue with someone about the definition of sexism, you should go argue with them and stop wasting my time.

Not sure what search engines have to do with the topic. I have read the two medium posts, the vice article, and the pdf.

> If you want to argue with someone about the definition of sexism

I am not doing that. You claimed that RMS was sexist in this incident. I am asking you what he said specifically to make you believe that.

> you should go argue with them and stop wasting my time

Why post in hackernews if you are not interested in discussion?

Stallman defends a 70 year old man having sex with a coerced child (using the same language he used to defend familial child sexual abuse or other forms of child sexual abuse) because Stallman is a sexist who has never bothered to learn about VAWG.

His "apology" just piles it on - he thinks the problem is not with what he said, but with other people's understanding. He still doesn't get the fact that people know exactly what he said, and they understood what he said.

Have a nice day.

Having read many of your post in threads on similar topics and having replied to a few, I'm sorry to say that I must agree with others that your post history pretty clearly doesn't.

But seriously, firstly dependenttypes pretends not to know "which sentence" we are talking about despite the fact that my post directly references that damning sentence. He then addresses that sentence, then moves on to an outrageous statement that in "most" places children can consent to sex with adults and that it just happens to be RMS was in a place where that's not true? Where does he get that from? A few nations allow for parental permission to override this state of affairs, but in general it's tough to find a nation without laws around child rape.

Then, dependenttypes draws a distinction (on the sentence that they claim wasn't clear from context), between a woman appearing to be willing vs being willing. But this once again centers the actions of the women and suggests Minsky has no responsibility to recognize things might not be right, as I suspect a rational person might in such circumstances. It centers the women's act of presenting herself as opposed to Minsky's responsibility to not rape kids.

Finally, dependenttypes suggests that typing "stallman sexism" in google doesn't show (for me in incognito at last) four articles in the top ten results full of explanations. Similar searches on twitter reveal firsthand accounts of both sexist and profoundly inappropriate behavior.

Upon reading this, it was pretty clear to me that:

0. This person isn't here to talk. They're here to Fisk posts aggressively.

1. This person tried to imply that it was only puritanical legal technicalities that prevented what appears to be a teenage sex slave from consenting is pretty outrageous. Generally, slaves don't have a choice and Epstein was a slaver.

2. This person has a definition of sexism that does not appear to be reasonable, OR they're so completely unwilling to even examine an opposing viewpoint that they can't read the wealth of other sources on this.

3. Given these things, the subsequent claim "I have read these things and found no evidence of sexism" strongly suggests someone who will simply refuse to adopt a reasonable definition or reasonable evidence of sexism as a matter of personal belief.

Note in his posts we don't hear some sort of positive refutation. Rather we hear a negative one: "this is fine what is your problem?" We don't hear, "that isn't sexism because..." we hear, "I don't see any evidence of sexism at all."

We're well past the point where any reasonable actor could come to such a conclusion. So I concluded this person is acting in bad faith. This doesn't mean "they disagree with me." This means, "they're not here to discuss the evidence or what people are saying but rather to refute it by any means necessary."

And looking more closely at their post history, I stand by this assessment.

I can't read your mind, sorry. By "that sentence" I presumed that you meant something that I said in my post.

> He

Nice assumption you got there.

> then addresses that sentence

I guess so. Without my knowledge at least, after all as you said your post "directly references that damning sentence".

> then moves on to an outrageous statement that in "most" places children can consent to sex with adults

I said minors, not children (except if you consider a 17 year old person to be a child). Anyway, see https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Age_of_Consent_-_Glo... for a "proof" of that "outrageous" statement.

> and that it just happens to be RMS was in a place where that's not true?

Not RMS, Minsky.

> A few nations allow for parental permission to override this state of affairs

A small minority, yes. In most countries to my knowledge you only need the consent of the teenager that is above the age of consent to have sex with them.

> but in general it's tough to find a nation without laws around child rape.

There wouldn't be any point to the age of consent laws if sex with a person under the allowed age wasn't considered at least as bad as statutory rape, so ofc the countries with age of consent laws also have laws around "child rape".

> But this once again centers the actions of the women

If this was the issue with what Stallman said then you should have been clear from the start, rather than attacking a misquoted version of what he said that's easier to criticize on issues that do not apply with his full quote. Anyway, Stallman used the "presented herself to him as entirely willing" in order to argue against the use of "sexual assault" that they accused Minsky of (which Stallman claims that implies force or violence on Minsky's part -- after all you do not need to use force or violence to have sex with someone who "presents themselves as entirely willing").

> Finally, dependenttypes suggests that typing "stallman sexism" in google doesn't show (for me in incognito at last) four articles in the top ten results full of explanations

I never suggested that. I asked about what sexist thing he said in this specific instance. I am not interested on being Stallman's personal defence guardian nor do I follow him blindly on everything that he has ever said.

> This person tried to imply that it was only puritanical legal technicalities that prevented what appears to be a teenage sex slave from consenting

I never tried to imply that. If you are unsure if I am trying to imply something you can just ask me.

> We don't hear, "that isn't sexism because..."

We don't hear "that isn't sexism because..." because I have no idea what you consider as sexist in this specific instance. If you decided to tell me what you consider as sexist I would gladly tell you why I consider or don't consider it as sexist.

And a quote from before:

> Suggesting that this is all a big misunderstanding ... is not only slanderous, but its profoundly disrespectful to all parties.

Since you misunderstood me multiple times during this conversation have you considered the possibility that you might have done the same (unintentionally ofc) with Stallman?

> And looking more closely at their post history, I stand by this assessment.

I would be interested in seeing what you consider as instances of malicious behaviour by me in other threads.

It's an interesting point given that there actually is a certain strain of Stalin's apologists that reply to any critique of their idol with "yeah, and he also drank blood and ate little children for breakfast".

The problem is defending a man accused of statutory rape by saying his accuser appeared willing. Everything else is irrelevant.

And it wasn't a situation where there was the slightest bit of ambiguity. 17 and 73. Billionare's private island.

Defending that situation - real or hypothetical - is very problematic. It gets you fired. There might be a very narrow context in which a discussion of that nature would be appropriate. Where it happened was a million miles from there.

How is that a problem exactly?

> 17 and 73

Would her being a 18 prostitute change anything in your eyes? Because I am pretty sure that most 17 year olds can easily be confused with 18 year olds and the reverse.

> Defending that situation - real or hypothetical - is very problematic. It gets you fired.

In our current "cancel culture" society, agree.

An 18 year old prostitute is extraordinarily likely to be in that situation as a result of a lifetime of abuse and desperation. Taking advantage of that for sexual pleasure, especially at the age of 73, makes you a terrible person.

An old man taking advantage of a young woman is the issue. One year and tiny permutations of the details which change the legal situation do not change the moral situation that in any similar situation, the old man is a indefensible scumbag.

It doesn't matter if it is a hypothetical or not, defending that old man by saying the victim would have presented herself as willing, is a big issue. Not a witch hunt, not mob rule.

And it seems that it applies to prostitution at other ages too.

But a lot of sex workers would challenge that.

Of course not.

Then, where is the line? If not 18, then, 25? 30? I get why it would be creepy from the perspective of the woman wanting to be with an old man, but why exactly is the man himself a creep?

IMO, all adults are attracted to the younger opposite sex. Men have a biological drive to be attracted to women who will give birth to healthy babies, survive the birth, and live long enough lives to ensure that child is supported.

I'm 30 now. I hope people never regard me as a creep for masterbating when I'm 60 to the teen section of PornHub.

Apart from a very few, every accomplished technologist have started using Twitter and their followers to attack others. This is nothing but the witch hunt from medieval times done differently.

I have interacted with RMS in Emacs developer list, he has a strong opinion and nothing more, nothing less. He is not trying to create a mob and nor is he starting an upraising. If you have an opinion, voice it and leave it. Yes, I agree RMS needed a PR to tread the land mine ridden modern life.

Overall, it is sad to see RMS and his work getting trivialized for totally unrelated reasons.

Is that unrelated, trivial behavior that should be ignored?

This isn't a witch hunt, what he did was wildly inappropriate and the number of people defending his behavior because he's quirky and did great things is a little disgusting.

As for 17, as someone in my 40's, I couldn't tell you the difference between someone who is 17, and someone who is 18, without them telling me or asking to look at their (hopefully non-forged) ID. If she lied (under coersion from Epstein), how could anyone have been able to tell?

But the coercion is very true, and hence my explicit callout. The question becomes did Minsky know that? Did he have any reason to suspect it?

Would they tell you?

I suggest you turn down any offers from billionaire convicted sex traffickers to go to their private island and meet young women then.

To be honest, you should probably turn down that sort of offer even if you're really good at telling how old people are.

For me, it would be too much like romancing my nieces, so I doubt I would take up the offer. In 30 years, who knows.

The crux of Stallman's argument is that in that case you would be unable to tell if the woman was lying because Epstein would have coerced her. You can't trust what she says.

However, where you and Stallman differ is that you're suggesting is that Minsky probably said yes and did sleep with the woman, and therefore broke the law.

And he shouldn't even be held morally wrong in this case either, if we assume that he did his due diligence and had what he viewed to be legal and consensual sex.

Rape is a crime that carries strict liability (under US law); ignorance is not a valid defence.

I don't know Minsky, I don't care about Minsky. All I'm really trying to do is re-inforce how and why Stallman's exploration is reasonable and rational. And, since it's brought up repeatedly in this exploration, why even the courts consider the spirit of the law alongside the letter of the law.

And Stallman being his usual amicable self he managed to do so in a way that a reaction was inevitable. If he wanted to do right by his friend he should have pointed out the flaws in the accusation, not to try to find some contorted way to argue that assuming it was true his friend should have walked without consequences.

Lessig falls into exactly the same trap, the fact that it is your friend who does something stupid or despicable does not make it any less so and in cases like that your friends would be better friends if they pointed this out to you. Preferably at a time that it would still make a difference.

Minsky may not be guilty of anything, and Stallman has shifted the debate over whether what he assumes Minsky has done should be legal or not (it shouldn't, let's be 100% clear on that) over whether or not it happened in the first place. And that is not helping at all.

I've stated elsewhere I wouldn't be interested, but (not speaking of the Epstein/Minsky debate for a moment) who am I to judge someone for their consensual activities?

I've seen this same argument like 4-5 times now in this thread.

I agree, being able to tell the difference between 17 and 18 is difficult, however a line must be drawn and it seems that 18 is that line.

If a girl is 18 years and 1 day old, vs a girl who is 17 and 364, is there a big difference? No, however that is where society has drawn this line.

If you use the argument 18 looks like 17, then eventually people may say 17 looks like 16, 16 looks like 15 etc and is a slippery slope.

Also chances are the girls in question were most likely sex trafficked (Modern day slave trade by another name).

It's quite rare that someone who did due dilligance and were criminally mislead to are charged for the crime.

The women in question (those in contact with Epstein) were, in no way, a representation of chattel slavery, which is (i presume) what you mean by "modern day slave trade". They were neither 'owned' nor 'inheritable', they were also (by all reports) paid. Slaves are not paid.

The phrase "Modern Day Slave Trade" as it refers to sex work denigrates those who were forced into slavery by men with guns, as well as the subset of women and men who chose to participate in the sex work economy willingly, whether full-time or on-the-side.

If morality is relative, only the legal framework is something that we can evaluate. Laws are crafted from the relative morality in that jurisdiction.

Ignoring those morals which are dependent on location, today's american applies the same set of morals against those on american soil as well as those on chinese soil.

They also apply those morals across time, such judgment on Ancient Greek behavior.

In the same fashion, we do not alter our moral judgement based on the jurisdiction the event takes place in. At least, we do not do so naturally, without additional effort. If this occurred in the open seas, would we hold our tongue? In a country where no such laws exist?

Legality is also hardly a strict mapping of morals to rules, with complete coverage of what we're trying to express -- if it were, there would be no need for judges; we could simply feed the evidence into an algorithm and spit out the result. And the arbitrary flip from legal to illegal, by virtue of a day, is hardly the concept we're trying to morally express through the law. But for practicality, a strict deadline was given.

Hell, what's your argument? That because morals are relative, there cannot be any discussion of it? Morality precedes the law; You don't make a moral judgement by referring to the law.

China is a great example where the morals are very different. Barring a few extra territorial laws (corruption, child prostitution for Americans), the jurisdictions are disjoint.

It is valid, and normal, to discuss morality of actions occurring in different places, without including the morality of that place itself; in this case, stallman isn’t talking about the remote island’s morals, but the morals of where he is and how it applies to events elsewhere

I've seen many patently stupid things coming from the US lately, but this is certainly the most idiotic US witch hunt I've ever witnessed in my life.

1. As long as women or men are adult deemed by society (for example: 18 years old), anything is fine, even if 18 year old woman paired with 74 year old man. Age of consent rule.

2. A man should not date a woman younger than his age / 2 + 7. So a 74 year old can only date the youngest woman with 44 years age. Creepiness rule.

3. A man should not date a woman younger than 25 year old because the brain is not fully formed until 25 years age. Unless the man is more or less 25 year old himself. So a 74 year old man can only date the youngest woman with 25 years age. Brain fully formed rule.

Of course there are edgy case rule. We call it Romeo-Juliet rule (no more than 4 years difference). 16 year old woman should not pair with 74 year old man but if the man is 18 year old, that should be fine.

If someone had told me that we'd be violating this ridiculous American "creepiness" rules of yours, I'd have missed out on a lot of fun.

https://xkcd.com/314/

Defending statutory rape, even hypothetically, will get you fired.

It's not a crucifixion.

IIRC Stallman did nothing of the sort. The only thing Stallman said was that the accusations correspond to statutory rape.

In fact how is Stallman supposed to have defended statutory rape if he was the one raising the accusation of statutory rape? Some random virtue signaler started making up accusations of sexual assault and Stallman chimed in stating that the description actually represented the crime of statutory rape. How is that passed off as a defense or apology?

So now you've crucified an innocent man, for offering a defense of his friend, who may also be innocent of what he's accused of, when what he's accused of may not even be criminal.

Really saving the world there.

"That the age of consent is 16 or less in most of Europe but 18 in some US states gives rise to some dissonance when discussions arise about the attractiveness and availability of 16- and 17-year-olds. 16 is actually common in the US (30 states out of 50), but not many seem to realize this- probably because it's 18 in California, where a lot of the US entertainment industry is based."

Tech industry is also based in California. This is a California morality issue not an American morality issue, there's no US wide agreement on what is an acceptable age of consent.

Maybe the other Americans are right on this one?

This does not sound impossible to me. Is the idea that say a 19 year old prostitute having sex with an 80 year old man so foreign to you?

Edit:

I'm not saying the work of a person can't be good if he did bad things.

I think it's important not to glorify people.

Free software is important for all of us, but so is a stand against sexsim or the likes.

I say yes and that it isn't even an opinion. If you disagree with me, you are helping defend such abhorrent behavior. You wouldn't do that, would you?

From the article:

"The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky: “deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims [2])” The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X. The accusation quoted is a clear example of inflation. The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein’s harem. (See https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef...) Let’s presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it). The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex. We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates. I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation. Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."

Why? Because such neutrality allowed the creation of a space where people could express anything to everyone at a cost that was practically free. If the creators had been more politically engaged - that never would have happened. It would have been locked down from the start.

Now - if you go looking for it - you'll find studies that observe what happens when human group sizes increase. More "punisher" type personalities emerge, applying greater social costs on expression in an attempt to enforce hegemony. I would cite - but feeling lazy.

In response to the ever increasing social costs imposed by such punishers - the ones who created the free for all in the first place, turn more desperately to their stated neutrality... largely as a means to avoid punishment.

The punisher types won't accept this - because they want to root out dissenters hiding in their neutrality... so begin punishing those who don't proactively state their right minded political stances in every space. They apply such punishment for example - by statements of "deep disgust"... as though this hyperbolic reaction is not hyperbole at all; as though the mere act of not engaging is the worst of moral failings.

I would be terrified of such people... I would be terrified of you - if it weren't for the aforementioned irony with which I opened. You just do it cause game theoretically you are predicted to do so - because of the system brought into being by exactly the sort of people you hate.

We deserve you.

Kinda like how the AI in the Matrix deserve the mathematical anomaly called Neo. They can't get rid of it. But they created it... This thing that wars against them, under the heroic illusion of its own agency and righteous purpose.

I have the feeling the state of mind wasn't really neutral in the past, so there wasn't a neutral time that created all this.

There was much more gate-keeping going on in the past. I think this cost us much more innovation and new technology.

My impression is as following:

I don't think we move from non-political to political and from "free for all" to "only the good are allowed".

We are moving from one political strucuture that prevented some kind of people to cobtribute to another.

I'm not sure if this will yield better results, but I certainly hope so.

Also, I think the good tech/ideas of the past shoudn't be thrown away, because if we throw them away the people who created them did bad stuff to other people, the victims did suffer in vain.

But we should strife for creating things in the future with less suffering.

As a kid, I loved Lord Byron's poetry. Later, disgusted at his personality, I stopped reading his works. Still later, now I realise that flawed human beings can create beautiful works. Such is life.

My interpretation:

You think people are criticizing Stallman because you think they misread his statement (She wanted it anyway)

I think people are criticizing Stallman because he believed Minsky was tricked (She didn't want but people made here act like it), which sounds dubious to me.

secondly, it's hilarious that it seems you are now assuming that I am claiming that "she wanted it". This just goes to show you are here for blood and not justice.

thirdly, what stallman said: The word ‘assaulting’ presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way,” Stallman wrote in the email, “but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex.” and to paraphrase "It seems probable that she presented herself as entirely willing and that minsky did not know she was underage"

lastly, as far as I can tell, in the deposition it's not clear that they did have sex, only that she went to the island for the purpose of having sex with minsky under orders from epstein, presumably as part of his blackmail/entrapment scheme

And I started thinking of the kids Michael had sharing his bed and realized that, until then, I had had sympathy for them only in an abstract. Now I think about those kids whenever one of his songs comes on, and you know, I no longer enjoy listening to it.

Oh the horrors if people growing up think that rape is reprehensible.

Not saying one view is better or worse than the other. Simply pointing out people choose to get involved at different levels...

I argue that art always happens in context and one context is who did it. Appreating art from someone who is clearly hurting others can't have done something so important to me to still enjoy it.

If a case is made which has some very rare and difficult scenario I'm not sure what I would do.

That would be problematic.

It is much easier for me to avoid art though.

Pretty much sums it up doesn't it.

Not sure why I would do that. Ghandi doesn't really affect s my life

I think theres a debate to be had over whether they should profit from those actions though.

Also keep in mind that Homosexuality was put in the same box as paedophilia and rape ( probably worse than rape). Social mores change, and are different from country to country. The girl involved was 17 as I understand it, which would be over the age of consent in my country.

My point is I could have consensual sex with a 17 year old, paint a picture and the GP would be happy to view it(?). You could have sex with a 17 year old, get arrested for paedophilia, paint a picture, and the GP would not be happy viewing it. Theres a legal line and a moral line both can change so its weird getting absolutist about it.

To be clear I wasn't aware of the sex trafficking element, I thought this was a question of statutory rape, which would seem to yield very different legal answers based on location.

Edit: 'Interestingly' I seemed to have circled around to making the same point RMS made. Except I'm not denying the rape, and I'm not a representative for another organisation.

This whole thread has gotten side tracked on statutory rape, when in reality the criminal charges hinge on sex trafficking with age only as a modifier.

Guess you avoid Caravaggio too, then.

At least on Wikipedia there it is stated that there is no proper source.

Also I try to. If it is very significant part of history I would try to be aware of it and still have a look.

I'm also very unsure about Alice in wonderland for the same reason.

But at least it's not someone still alive which would benefit from his/her art and being pedo right?

Do yo actively avoid using technology invented or heavily influenced by problematic people?

I don't have the same reservations about using the work of problematic people, so I don't typically check for that info.

Off the top of my head, an example might be accepting opiods to manage pain, despite the tons of damage pushing the drugs has caused Americans as a whole.

The want of keeping tech and politics appart is a political choice in itself.

Is it surprising? How many people here work for horrible companies, and justify it to themselves by simply following directions? In a similar discussion the other day, a user literally wrote that they would have to be paid substantially well to report wrong-doings their company is involved with so as not to interrupt their lifestyle.

Disgusting, yes.

There's nothing disgusting about this, assuming that the wrong-doings are really bad and this would all go public. Society does not treat whistleblowers well. They generally lose their livelihoods when they go public with what they know. So yes, they should be paid substantially well to report wrong-doings, because they're usually ending their careers when they do this. If society isn't willing to stop ruining their careers when they "do the right thing", then society has no standing to call them "disgusting" for not willingly sacrificing their lives for the sake of truth.

>then society has no standing to call them "disgusting" for not willingly sacrificing their lives for the sake of truth.

A tad over dramatic. We aren't talking about Snowden here; hundreds of HN users work for the major companies doing morally ambiguous things. They aren't going to be blacklisted for spilling the beans on Facebook. In fact, in this political climate they might even benefit greatly.

If you're willing to harm other people in order to avoid potential harm to yourself, it's disgusting, and no amount of "but what about me?" will convince me otherwise.

Do you also think every single person working at an oil company is a criminal too, or should quit or else be morally wrong in your view?

>hundreds of HN users work for the major companies doing morally ambiguous things.

Just about every company in America does morally ambiguous things.

Stallman:

> the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.

Selam G.

> [Stallman] says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”.

VICE:

> Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked.

New York Post:

> MIT scientist says Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was ‘entirely willing’

It could be true.

I'm not saying I agree with him or that I would have said the same things (I'm no Stallman, nobody cares about what I say anyway) but what he said was just the result of logical reasoning

For example if you look at the titles it's easy to dismiss RMS as someone who favours rapists, but in the article he's always quoted in full and the things he said are a bit different

For example quoting the VICE article

> RMS: “it is morally absurd to define ‘rape’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”

And he's not entirely wrong.

Rape in rape even in space at the age of 93.

And that's absurd.

Do we all agree on this?

for different reasons

- 17 years 364 days is any different from 18 years old 0 days?

- Stallman was talking (at the time) about consensual sex, not rape

- Stallman said he found absurd that rape was defined in terms of `minor details` not that rape does not exists. He's not wrong.

> still American moral and culture norms apply.

In USA people should be horrified by Facebook spying kids[1], not about what Stallman thinks

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/

I guess it’d make sense to base it on brain development.

I have no idea what the best windows would be to promote the greatest reduction in false positive rape cases.

The biggest thing we as a society really need is a culture where the raped feel more comfortable speaking up. It’d probably be a decent thing to fund testing the massive backlog of rape kits piling up at the nation’s police forces as well.

No solution will ever be perfect so you can only attempt to do the least harm and help the most people in these awful situations.

Improving sexual education across some of our more religiously oriented states would be a positive as well.

Hopefully we keep moving forward. And what would be really nice is if some of these awful people Epstein trafficked these girls to went to prison.

It’s high time the rich and powerful started being held accountable for their absolutely atrocious behavior, whether it’s selling enough oxycontin to hook huge swathes of the population on heroin (the Sacklers certainly seem to be getting a better treatment than your average crack dealer), raping underage sex slaves, or leaking hundreds of millions of Americans social security numbers the rich and powerful seem to laugh and shrug it off.

That’s gotta stop.

https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/other-autre/clp/faq.html

Rape is always illegal.

Sex is not.

> Just like drinking with 21 and 20.99 years is not the same, because

they're American.

We start at 18, no problems here, no mass shootings, no one selling out to older people to buy alcohol for them.

> So by applying your logic to that, 13 and 364 days would be OK too?

So by your logic 14 and 1 days is ok?

Or, as Stallman said, rape cannot be defined by minor things such as the place where it happened or the age when it happened?

> How do you feel about that, not entirely comfortable right?

Completely.

It's your country that allows older people have sex with baby girls, not mine.

> Because you're used mentally to 18 years being the line,

Don't assume we are all like you.

I'm mentally used to being normal at 15-16...

Because that's the age when people around me started, when I was their age.

> But all the laws are like that

Not even those about rape are all black and white.

Even statutory rape is usually treated differently if the minor is just around the age of consent or not.

> If 18 is the legal age, you just don't mess with minors, how complicated is that really?

That's exactly what Stallman did.

He never messed with minors.

What upset you so much?

- If person is 18 and sex is consensual it's not a rape. - If person is 17y 354 days old it doesn't matter what the minor person acted like, because law treats it as a non-consensual sex, so it's statutory rape.

> So by your logic 14 and 1 days is ok?

If both persons involved are living in Serbia it is OK. Unusual thing nowadays and to many here (me included) not seen as something morally positive, but some minorities have a different customs than mainstream Serbian culture, so it's fully legal. Most of Europe has the age of consent at 16, which in my own eyes makes more appropriate age than 14, but law is what matters.

> That's exactly what Stallman did. He never messed with minors.

No one said he did. But he, completely uncalled for, defended someone who did - who broke the law in a very obvious way - and he did it by trying to put the blame on a victim, although her being a minor makes her behavior completely irrelevant from the legal point of view. And that sucks.

That's why USA are the motherland of mass shootings then...

I'm 18 today, my girlfriend is one day younger than me, it's rape.

What a lovely country.

> If both persons involved are living in Serbia it is OK

But is it OK for you?

Because you implied that I was ok with it...

I'm curious now.

> No one said he did. But he, completely uncalled fo

Like he always did?

Did someone called him to invent the GPL?

> defended someone who did

But he did not.

That's utterly false.

> and he did it by trying to put the blame on a victim

He was arguing that it wasn't not pedophilia but statutory rape.

I don't know why you people love so much to put words in the mouth of RMS, he's perfectly capable of shooting himself in the foot.

It won't be the last time.

It still does not make him someone who argues in favour of rape.

Legal drafting always leads to absurdities. It is not possible to draft laws that don't; the practical need for unambiguous rules combined with complex reality means there are always edge cases.

Illustrating this general fact with the highly specific case of old rich men screwing young, powerless kids is going to cause other people to wonder about why it seems like you're only interested arguing about legal absurdities in this specific context. After all, you could illustrate your point with, say, the catch 22s inherent in the modern debt peonage systems in the US, or how pro-bono plaintiffs are regularly abused for not following rules they have no access to see, or a nearly endless parade of other examples.

Let's just say that if defending rich old men screwing young kids is apparently your hill to die on, a lot of folks are going to be less focused on your nuanced legal argumentation.

Agree, and that's exactly the kind of absurd RMS was talking about.

That's it, just that.

He can't concive that something is illogical.

Does he deserve the blame for it?

> let's just say that if defending rich old men screwing young kids is apparently your hill to die on

It never happened though.

That's the point: in court you could be charged for saying it.

If someone has a history of complaining about absurd legal results, it would not be surprising to hear them use this situation as an example while beating that drum. (It may be a tacky example to use, but that's a different question.)

On the other hand, if someone has a history of doing and saying things that other people take indicative of treating women as less than fully equal, and, having never before shown any interest in a particular legal argument, trots it out to defend (and yes, that exactly what it was) abhorrent behavior, people are going to take it differently.

> That's the point: in court you could be charged for saying it.

You lost me here. Do you mean to say someone could claim I libeled them? Well sure. In the US, people can sue over anything they like. But if that's what you meant, I still have no idea what "charges" you're talking about.

that's a big IF

and BTW Stallman notoriously complained about absurd legal result, that's his real life achievement: a legal framework for free software!

that's his bread and butter.

> if someone has a history of doing and saying things that other people take indicative of treating women as less than fully equal,

that's false premise

> You lost me here. Do you mean to say someone could claim I libeled them?

Yes.

Because "defending rich old men screwing young kids" never happened.

It's a fabricated lie.

My reasoning is: rape victims are victims regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, time and space.

But it's not Twitter crowd that decides if it is rape or not.

Well, it's not Richard Stallman who decides either, but he tried to do exactly that... and that's why people are pissed at him

He expressed an opinion as single individual person, he didn't ask for support or rioting against someone or something.

And he didn't ask for nobody to be fired in the first place.

> and that's why people are pissed at him

No, they are pissed because people suck.

They've been also pissed at Terry Davis, another troubled man (more troubled than RMS for sure), that didn't harm anybody in his life, except himself.

I tend to agree, and I suspect most people would, including Stallman.

    > the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing but that she was coerced into doing so?

Nor does RMS have an excuse for what he said and now we're finally seeing that the aloof misanthrope schtick only goes so far. Good riddance.

> Computer scientist Richard Stallmann, who defended Jeffrey Epstein...

> the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.

stop. stop and think about this. you’re telling me that some random person on the internet can sit there and claim, with a straight face, decades removed from the event, and completely unaware of what went down in that room, that “the most plausible scenario” is that she was willing? are you kidding me? how do you know? he wasn’t there. he doesn’t know this person. and why is this so plausible? on what actual basis here is he making this statement? oh, that’s right, nothing except his own prejudices.

he doesn’t know a damned thing about what happened in that room, and for him to jump to the conclusion that, well obviously, she wanted it, is freaking absurd.

he entirely deserves to get pilloried for this statement alone. he had no business jumping into this discussion, he has absolutely no basis on which to make his judgements except his high opinion of himself, and to go out of his way to engage in a public debate about such a highly sensitive subject when he knows jack squat about it shows an incredible lack of judgement.

the media didn’t do this to RMS, he did.

He claimed that she was unwilling, but was coerced by Epstein into pretending otherwise, and that Minsky was deceived.

That is also, technically speaking, the most plausible scenario. Epstine wouldn't have girls going up to people and reading a script like "I don't give consent, I hate you, you have to rape me now" without knowing anything about the prospect. There would have been an element of acting.

No, Stallman did not say that. Selam G and the media said he said it, but he did not say it. Not in spirit, not in words.

Also, he doesn't say that she wanted it, but that she might have lied about whether or not she was there willingly (possibly being coerced into lying).

Paraphrasing "The most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing": "I have a hard time imagining my late friend willingly raping someone."

Not that I think that, even in that scenario, Minsky would have displayed sound judgement by having sex with her (especially given Epstein's reputation and past conviction).

As we know, rms is a very dear person to most of the Computer Science and programmer community.

Through the years, he's said many shocking things. We've often disagreed with him. He's been extremely stubborn.

At some points it's been comical.

Yet we still see him as a technology treasure, and we should keep this in mind before judging him harshly based on a single e-mail.

rms is actually reacting logically here, yet also emotionally as he's wanting to protect his friend - the late Marvin Minsky. Seemingly by letting go of common sense, and sure enough this is just cause for harsh criticism.

But by simply removing a living legend from his position because he's not able to be politically correct, is far worse in my opinion. (I assume he was asked to leave).

This same lack of political correctness also happens to be one of his strengths. It built his character. It's not perfect.

I don't know what more to write at this point. It's ridiculous and turning into a witch hunt against someone we actually owe a great deal of gratitude.

That is what he was defending. The intellectual quibbles about this and that he was bringing up are irrelevant when faced with the above fact.

That isn't about political correctness, it isn't a "witch hunt". RMS did something incredibly inappropriate in an incredibly inappropriate place and was fired. He deserved it.

The thing about accusations is that being accused of something doesn't mean the thing happened. There is a pretty plausible line of evidence that Minsky kept his hands to himself when confronted by a 17 year old on a private island. It is an excellent time to try and defend a dead friend when such doubts are present.

And as a particularly important point - there are no charges so horrible that people shouldn't be defended against them. That is one of the best principles we have in the Western intellectual tradition. "He's defending someone from something serious" is not a respectable counter; you should rethink your arguments.

RMS has been a force that has driven people away for a long time. He may be good as a thinker and coder, but he is fucking awful at being in a leadership position.

The issue was him defending statutory rape by saying the victim would have seemed willing.

The cirumstances around that hypothetical (17, 73, billionare's island) solidify the problem.

It isn't intellectual disagreement. It's defending rape, real or imagined, by saying the victim seemed willing.

RMS also defended the view that declaring every sexual act of an adult with a 17 year old as statutory rape is morally questionable. That's a legitimate viewpoint that has been discussed extensively by lawmakers and legal scholars. Again, whether you like his opinion or not is not important. What's important is that it is ridiculous to insinuate in any way that discussing these matters is somehow morally reprehensible, especially when they concern accusations of a good friend who - for all you know and believe - is innocent.

You are being very dishonest in your posts by distorting the actual situation and what actually happened. I've personally met a guy who lost his job and all of his reputation for a similar matter - every single accusation was ruled out and disproved in court, even with direct video evidence contradicting the accuser's testimony, yet his life remains in shambles.

You can only hope that you will never become the victim of such a witch hunt yourself.

(1) They have committed statutory rape

(2) Their position is morally defensible, although a bit creepy for an old man.

He probably didn't know she was 17. Why on earth would Minsky be risking the law by sleeping with a 17 year old girl when he could just sleep with an 18 or 19 year old? Presumably Epstein had all sorts on tap. It is very likely he wasn't told she was 17 and quite likely that if asked she had been coerced into lying. Stallman has a point here.

And to top it off even if he is wrong it is not such a critical fact that he needs to resign over it. Even if I accept tomorrow that everything I typed today so far was wrong; this is still not an important enough point to resign over anything. It is a moral hypothetical. It is no relevant to my, or Stallman's, daily personal or professional life.

Finally, your use of the word "rape" is wrong anyway. Having sex with a minor isn't "rape", it's "statutory rape", and that's only in the US. US laws do not apply worldwide. The age of consent varies from place to place, and according to UK residents on this forum, it's only 15 or 16 there. So are you going to tell me that everyone in the UK that has sex with someone that young is a "rapist"? Sorry, no.

“Statutory rape” isn't usually the term in the law, it's a common-language hedge to indicate that it was (at the time the term was coined) literally rape under a particular set of criminal statutes, but not what some people consider “real” rape.

In some statutory schemes it is exactly rape still, in others it has different formal names (“unlawful sexual intercourse” [Penal Code 261.5] in California law, for instance.)

"Unlawful sexual intercourse" like in your California example is fine: that's a good way to word sexual activity that's illegal without conflating it with violence.

Generally, that meaning is sex without legal consent. Most state rape laws include sex with adults lacking capability for consent (due to intoxication, disability, etc.), even if they happen to carve out lack of legal capacity to consent due to age to a separate section of law, and do not require violence beyond the violence inherent in sex without consent, though they certainly include nonconsentual sex acheived through violence.

So, while it may or may not be carved out for organizational or other reasons in particular criminal codes, there is no reason that “statutory rape” does not fit conceptually within the space of “rape”. (The phrase “forcible rape” already exists for the subset you seem to want to limit “rape” to identify.)

Where I live (the UK), that is perfectly legal and I believe any man would jump at the chance to do the same with a willing 17 year old.

Your repetitive statements of fact in this thread look like nothing more than jealousy to me.

His statement was that we should use proper names for crimes.

If I were to accuse Epstein of genocide and you reply "That is not genocide, he was a sex-trafficking pedophile that used minors as blackmailing pawns and more" would that be a defense? It does not look like a defense to me.

But he was wrong about English usage and about legal usage of the word "assault".

When we're talking about a child who has been trafficked and coerced into sex it's weird to "well actually, is it really assault?" into the conversation, especially if that's based on his misunderstanding of what the word means.

And the effect of his interject was to defend Minsky. When hundreds of people misinterpret him the blame lies with his poor communication, not their lack of comprehension.

According to the quote I read of RMS (I did not read the original email fully) the salient part is his discussion where he claims that "sexual assault" as an expression (at least colloquially) implies the use of force/violence/aggression/intimidation/coercion/etc. by Minsky.

He claims that given the official report as true and taking the the claim of the victim as correct none of those (force/violence/aggression/intimidation/coercion/etc.) were likely.

This is independent on whether Minsky committed a crime or not. This is simply trying to properly understand what the accusations are. I honestly have no idea whether this would constitute rape/statutory rape/assault or any other crime, taking in goodwill what I have read it is likely that whatever happened (other witnesses claim to have seen Minsky decline the advances and the report does not claim any sexual encounter, "just" that Epstein instructed her to) Minsky did not use violence.

I actually believe I misrepresented RMS words here, as he truly only said that the violence implied by the word assault was unlikely.

(Also given that by other reports one of Epstein tactics was to lure guests into having sex with minors to blackmail them)

In this case the dataset would not be big enough to draw statistical conclusions, but this site (like most forums) slightly suffer from the duality of US-based and international, as it cannot be truly both at the same time.

I can see many reason to never implement something like a geographical indication of which countries upvoted/downvoted (especially as it would contradict the spirit of this site), but in contentious topics it would allow some useful insights.

For example, people will call it "rape" when it's someone underage no matter the circumstance. Having willful sex with someone underage vs. physical forcing them to have sex with you are two very different things. Yet in (most?) people's minds they just call it rape, under the context that someone underage can't properly consent. Ok, but physical forcing yourself on someone vs willingly are still different things. I don't know what to call them, but calling them the same thing is completely disingenuous to the crime.

I'm guessing this is what he was going after? Maybe because when we think of "assault" we generally think it's the physical act of assault, not an emotional or control one...

I have a soft spot for RMS like other people do but I don't want to donate to the FSF while he is talking this way as its president.

Maybe he is also a victim of his success. Free software has come so far in the past few decades that it's not as important as other social issues in computing at this point in time.

Is that a matter of diverse thinking?

If you think so, I'm interested to know your reasoning.

Imagining his (incorrect, head canon-fueled) pedanticism is “logical” is an insult to logic.

No one really needed media sensationalism to draw a pattern of behavior unbefitting the leadership of the FSF. That some random people overstated some aspects of his Epstein thoughts isn't really why this happened.

It's also a bit ironic you've decided to call it a witch hunt. Witch hunts happened when folks decided to start blaming women for everything without even a veneer of logic or civility. And here we are with a man, having possessed a long history of specific behaviors, being called to account for exactly those behaviors. It's ironic simply because the privileges RMS was exercising are so ingrained in your worldview that demanding he stop treating women like lesser beings is–to you, at least fundamentally irrational and unfair demand.

RMS had hundreds of other controversial opinions. Uttering them did not result in this. In fact, no single act of sexism got him here either. So suggesting that this is merely society punishing a misunderstood outsider on a whim is itself pretty uncalled for.

You can decide this is punishment and it might feel that way to RMS, but I think we can all agree sexism is a bad trait to have in the most senior leadership position of an organization founded around principles of liberty in expression and action. RMS was bad for that cause, and he couldn't keep his position on pure tenure and prestige anymore.

As we all know, real liberty is when one person has power over others who object to it.

I wouldn't want a person in my team voicing sexists opinions, I would want that person removed from the team. Let alone as a figurehead and leadership figure.

But this is presuming that Stallman's behavior was only personal in the first place. He has a history of poor behavior at MIT and in his roles for the FSF, which definitely bleeds into the professional.

That's a position with enormous rhetorical value to you. You can use that framing to turn a conversation about a man's actions over time into a philosophical question.

That way you can avoid any inconvenient particular facts.

The world needs everyone to speak about every topic. If we all self censor then only the extremists will be speaking.

actually stallman was one of the extremists and he wasn't happy if somebody with the middle ground spoke about free software/open source software.

That is a type of extremism that is very uncomfortable when it is used against something held personally important, but it is exactly the type of extremism that we want more of.

Organisers of extra-legal justice mobs are the sort of extremists we can generally do without.

Let's never forget that famous G.B. Shaw quotation, always appropriate in such situations. http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/692.html

I don't want to live in a world where everyone has to take great care all the time to fulfil the FotM expectations of certain noisy people who believe they're a majority.

It's a hard balancing act, on the one hand people need to be able to deal with facts and reality, even if it's offensive to them. On the other hand we don't want our speech to act as sand in the machinery of communication.

If he had cared about his political movement more than his dick we wouldn’t be here, but here we are.

There is a new religion forming among those who have largely rejected religions of the past and Stallman is guilty of blasphemy. If he only loses his job he will be far luckier than others who are guilty of similar blasphemy.

I think that's blasphemy to anyone with an once of reason and compassion in this world.

It is not zealotry of some new paranoid movement that drove RMS failure. It was reason and good judgement.

No, it is sufficient already to not blurt out controversial things at bat-shit-insanely-bad timings. Similar to how people would be mad at Einstein if he pulled a non-ironic "Yeah, but to be honest he wasn't THAT great" a friends funeral.

I don't like mobs and I lament the fact that one such important figure in computing has such difficulties making himself understood. But that does not mean that the world has a problem somehow. It just happens to be a world that is not fine-tuned to Stallman-communication and that values reducing sexism higher than technical accuracy. Some people don't work that way, some people get therapy to allign themselves, some withdraw from society, some manage to get by. Stallman happened to fall on the friction side of things this time.

Words have consequences, and while you are free to say whatever, others are free to react to it too. You don’t get a free pass for saying ridiculous things just because free speech | difficulties communicating | you’ve done great things or whatever.

I don’t want a world where everything is filtered but I do want people to think about the impact of what they say before they say it.

I also prefer weirdos to Pearl Clutchers. A segment of the world may want homogeneity, but I don’t. I don’t particularly like Stallman, but I also appreciate his weirdness.

I very much prefer this, too, so long as they show they know what they did wrong and are clear that they'll work to do better in the future.

No... he needed a PR manager desperately and I'm very surprised that the FSF or MIT never even considered nor assigned one to him. I know he's a grown man and is responsible for what he says, but he is, was, whatever, a figure to the CS community and as such should have had his public comments vetted more.

You think he would have cooperated? I can't imagine Stallman being happy with having a filter for the things he wants to say or being told to not say something.

Yeah... How happy do you think he is now??? I can guarantee he is sitting at home right now replaying the last week over in his head wishing he would have kept his mouth shut. What is next for this dude? He will NEVER be able to get a job ANYWHERE cause no one will want to be associated with him. I HIGHLY doubt he made enough money to just retire... So really... What's next for him?

Everyone thinks filters are control and evil, however, sometimes they are there for your protection.

You underestimate the level RMS operates at. Somebody who dedicates his life to an ideal is not going to cry about the occasional setback.

> He will NEVER be able to get a job ANYWHERE

You really underestimate RMS. There is a world beyond the US, that doesn't really care that much about PC culture. Roman Polanski never stopped working, and he actually did have sex with a minor.

“I’m always happy when I’m protesting.”

— Richard Stallman

I wonder if the terminus "public relations" should be renamed to "press relations", since I doubt milking the click money is representing public opinion anymore, just the most judgmental individuals instead.

PR messages by definition are as always devoid of significant meaning. I cannot really relate to people that crave more of this.

No, I think the suggestion was that he should have had a PR screen in front of him long ago to avoid the current situation.

He's been speaking on these topics for long enough to have heard thousands of people consoling him to stop.

Funny that you evoke misogyny at this point, given how RMS is primarily a godawful human being to women, the vast majority of which your comment is ignorant of, willfully or otherwise.

This has been his godawful personality and behaviour at MIT for decades. It hasn't gone unreported. It hasn't gone unnoticed. But few appear to have ever acted on it appropriately, and the appropriate action here is removing him from any and all communities where he can do damage. It's occurring years too late, but at least it's occurring. It's sad that it took his association with a worldwide pedophilia/human trafficking ring to accomplish this, given his decades of ghastly abuse of peers/colleagues/students.

Even more sad that after this association has been revealed, communities like this one are significantly in self-defense mode.

If your response to this story is to get defensive, or to use keywords like "free speech," you have questions you need to ask yourself. Very serious questions. Questions that I guarantee your various communities want answers to before you engage with them further.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/d59r46/richard...

https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/17/20870050/richard-stallman...

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929/091320191...

Very unfortunate RS decided to be pedantic here. While he never excused the behavior(AFAIR), it is a poor & insensitive time to argue legal minutiae, IMO. I am disappointed by his callousness. However, I am not ready to join the partially informed lynch mob.

I hope those who make policies in media & enforce the laws do not let side-shows & obfuscations get in the way of bringing every last monster who visited Epstein's island to justice.

PS: Google captcha to post on HN now? No thanks, henceforth.

This article explains the real events factually (letting for you to decide what you think is right or wrong) and without hyperbole: https://itsfoss.com/richard-stallman-controversy/?fbclid=IwA...

Everything good that came out of RMS is exactly because he didn't listen to those advising him to stay quiet.

This comment is infuriatingly wrong.

Stallman did nothing of the sort. Stallman's "crime" was having the audacity of pointing out that the technical definition of the crime matching the accusations was statutory rape. That's it.

And now he's out of a job.

But I am glad he did.

Look I agree what he did was dumb, but he is free to voice an opinion on anything he likes. We don't have to agree with it but we don't have to turn it into a witch hunt either..

this guy isn’t being hounded out of his job over one slip of the tongue, one mistake. he has been making these comments for a long time, and it finally caught up to him.

this is entirely a problem of his own making.

Stop with the bullshit already. Stallman himself stated that the accusations (being offered sex by a 17yo girl) amount to statutory rape. In what twisted mind does this come even close to match your entirely made up story?

Stick to the facts instead of resorting to use your imagination to fabricate any support for your self-righteous witch-hunt.

and he SHOULD lose his job. he isn’t some grunt programmer, he is the senior representative of the FSF and the FSF deserves to have people on its board that aren’t going to embroil them in such boneheaded and unnecessary distractions, and they deserve someone on their board who shows better judgement than this.

and unlike some people here I am not about to split hairs about whether a 14 year old girl that is being groomed for prostitution is or is not capable of giving consent, and i’m not about to engage in semantic quibbles about what the right _word_ is to describe someone who engages in these things.

some you are completely missing the forest for the trees here.

An accusation of someone having sex with a 17yo does not correspond to pedophilia anywhere in the world.

> and suggesting that girls (...) might have been entirely willing participants, is exactly what he said

He said that if all girls were willing participants then the accusation of having consentual sex with a 17yo girl corresponds to statutory rape.

Stick to the facts.

This is a problem entirely of his own making, stretching out over decades.

The honest reaction to being forced to recognize that the absurd accusations being thrown at Stallman are absurd, entirely made up, and without any link to what he actually said is not to try desperately to move the goal post.

Stick to the facts.

Are you suggesting that underage sex is not ok?

Because many people I know were having sex before coming to age.

He never suggested though that an old man having sex with a 14 years old girl was an ok thing.

People who wanted to read it, read it from his words, but he never said it.

So we have a bigger problem here: one cannot be pedantically correct or people will act as an angry mob on them and get away with it.

> People who wanted to read it, read it from his words, but he never said it.

Sure he did. His words were not written in vacuum, he wrote them in a discussion thread about Epstein.

It's not like someone took his words from a scholarly discussion of sexual development and put them misleadingly in the sex trafficking context.

RMS proudly(!) did that. As he likes to raise trouble. Remember when he told a new parent not to mention his newborn, and everybody else on the list told him he's an asshole?

Yes he did: "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children." *

Stallman has a history of abusive behavior and opinions going back decades. This most recent email thread was just the final culminating incident. You can't argue in good faith while ignoring everything that he previously did and said.

* https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...

So he never suggested it nor he supported it.

He just didn't care enough to think it was problematic.

I didn't care if young kids spent the night out drinking with friends, I though it was ok and they were just having fun.

Until my sister gave birth.

That's the problem of being pedantically correct, people think that rhetoric can change facts.

He also changed his mind, never raped anybody and never had sex with a minor.

So what's the problem?

That he was thinking it?

Are we at the thought police already?

Is it the STASI all over again?

His crime was being pedantic about the definition of rape around people who can't even differentiate rape from underage sex, which are probably the same people that are interpreting it as Him defending underage sex.

Stallman was driven out because of decades of abusive behavior and opinions. The most recent incident was just the final straw. Ignoring that historical context is rather disingenuous.

* https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...

Do we consider skepticism to be abusive now?

Anyway, he subsquently said that he changed his mind on that point, after discussions with other people about it. You ought to include that if you're going to try to represent the man's history.

In the end it is two groups of people having two correlated (but different) conversations.

Many (not all, but many) of RMS "defenders" here would completely agree if not for this backhanded tactics, as some are only asking for proper representation of facts.

The fact that a lot of "takedown" pieces continue to lie means that they force together two groups of people that do not necessarily agree.

Minsky committed rape.

His comment about 17 vs. 18 years old shows that he's detached from reality. The law has to draw the line somewhere, it's necessarily arbitrary to some extent. It's still okay to discuss such nuances, but then don't be snarky. Context matters too. What point was he trying to make here and why?