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?