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.
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.