For fucks sake, this is not even an accusation to Minsky.
Take a minute to appreciate the fact that Minsky is being called a Rapist because somebody said that some person told another person to have sex with him. And he turned her down.
Instead, he said Minsky "probably" slept with the woman and then argued that this should not be considered sexual assault, even though at the very least it would have been statutory rape.
It's a bad look no matter how you spin it, and seems to indicate a kind of misogyny and treatment of women as sex objects. It seems to place him firmly in the toxic patriarchy which is no longer considered acceptable.
I saw a comment along the lines that Stallman is still living in the 1970s in that respect. That's a problem for a public figurehead today, unless of course they're a right-wing conservative.
So I believe the problem comes down to these two very different situations sharing the same name. Maybe they don't carry the same punishment, I'm not sure, but I definitely don't agree with calling both of these situations the same name, especially when that name includes the word rape. There's a gravity there that I believe the situation with the 20 and 17 year old doesn't carry, but the situation with the 20 and 13 year old does.
Or, there is this quote:
“All I know she said about Minsky is that Epstein directed her to have sex with Minsky. That does not say whether Minsky knew that she was being coerced. it does not report what each said and did during their sexual encounter. We can imagine various scenarios.”
Or this one:
“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”
With all due respect to your argument, this is not a case of a 20 year old and a 17 year old. This is a case of a 73 year old esteemed researcher at an institution with undergraduate students having sex with a 17 year old in a country that defines such an age difference as statutory rape.
Stallman’s idea about how it’s absurd to define rape according to age or country is offensive in every way imaginable. Sovereign nations are allowed to set and enforce their own laws. Other sovereign nations are allowed to choose whether to extradite their citizens back to those nations to face their justice system. But the act of entering a country is an agreement that you will respect its sovereignty and its laws. If you argue against that, you’re effectively arguing against the entire basis of international law and international relations. That would be an interesting argument, but let’s talk about mineral rights instead of child sexual abuse.
As for age, countries around the world recognize that children cannot be expected to provide informed consent to engage in sexual activity. They argue that by statute, some children are not capable of consenting to sexual activity. These countries have tried to come up with policy to deal with how absolute differences in age don’t necessarily account for differences in maturity. Some countries will not enforce statutory rape laws if the age difference is slight. Other countries enforce their own laws differently to account for different situations. This is a case of a 56 year age difference involving a pedophile, an eminent researcher and a victim of child trafficking.
All of that aside, the fact is that a victim chose to come forward and make herself available to be deposed. During this deposition, the victim said that she was coerced into having sex with Minsky.
Minsky is dead. Why not believe the victim? What do we gain from pedantic arguments about the nature of international law and sexual abuse?
* Edited because my first version was poorly written and almost incomprehensible.
Here's a list of the age of consent by nation worldwide: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/age-of-consent-by...
So tell us, which value is the "real" age of consent and what the moral reasoning is that makes it and no other value the correct one?
Or here is another one. A 73 year old had sex with someone 56 years younger than him. This 73 year old is an educator at one of the top Universities in the world yet he still chose to engage without absolutely ensuring that she consented. The moral path is to look around, realize there is something seriously wrong with Epstein and his harem (Stallman’s word) and stay the hell away.
> The reference reports the claim that Minsky had sex with one of Epstein’s harem. ... Let’s presume that was true (I see no reason to disbelieve it).
never, in the hundreds of pages of depositions.
Instead of talking about MIT that took money from Epstein, we're talking about Stallman that never did.
The motte is relatively easy to defend... Richard isn't the most charming guy and comes off as a creep, so he shouldn't be a leader. But it's not the most persuasive argument.
The bailey is hard to defend... the various misinterpretations of Richard's email. Despite these interpretations being wrong, they're emotionally persuasive. If someone uses logic against them, the antagonist can always retreat to the motte.
Is it fair? (And consider that I'm looking solely at the motte part; disregarding entirely this most recent event): Well, for most definitions of fair, it is not. Nevertheless, I don't think MIT, GNU, FSF, or any other entity should suffer significant damage just to chase the ideal of someone with RMS's peculiar ways gets to do the job of being an advocate of their organization.
It boils down to this: Is it acceptable to fire someone from a job based on something they are not really responsible for?
I think if the job description itself, prior to you taking it, makes clear that: Yes, you will be fired then – that it is fine.
The vast majority of clearly public facing jobs work like this. If you're the CEO and you do something rather upsetting, but not illegal, in a private setting that leaks out and which has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the company or on your ability to perform your job there... you still get fired: The board weighs the value of your presence in your C-level role vs. the next best candidate vs. the damage done to 'the brand' by leaving you there, and a swift decision is made.
It's hard to draw lines in the sand on this. Both the public-ness of your role as well as the severity of how upset the public is about the unrelated thing need to be taken into account.
Imagine some sales rep at a company has a sextape leaked from years ago. Is it fair to fire them? Probably not.
Imagine that same sales rep has a penis tattoo'd on their forehead. Is it fair to fire them? Probably yeah, and the reason is not really: "They will do a bad job at sales itself". The reason is: "Most of your job is selling the product, put a small part of it is simply reflecting on the company. And with that tattoo you're doing such an incredibly bad job at that last part, we dont even want to know how well you will be doing at the first: You're out".
My point is, for RMS? I estimate that he is on the 'his firing his justified' side of the line for virtually anybody's sense of fairness.
The job the description would pertain to didn't exist before he created it by filling it.
I don't think any of the more palatable audience-friendly "FOSS" luminaries are going to decline being flown business-class, and then ask for the price difference to be donated.
Open source opinion maker is a solid career path now, and will attract the sort of people interested in making careers.
rms has shown through example to be incorruptable. That's the only requirement, but it's hard to find. All the rest is nice-to-have.
You can see it if you assume that some (even most) of the people judging weren't part of the community at the time and might just have learned of it.
Yes, it doesn't make a lot of sense that his previous unacceptable behavior has been tolerated. Pressure on him, should have been so much earlier.
You don't have to trust the media. RMS himself confirms that he was wrong in the past, at least regarding child abuse.
"I hosted rms many years ago in the 90’s, what was supposed to be hosting your hero for a ~3 day thing became a ~2 month nightmare."
Did Miguel ask him to leave? Or did he just sit around passive-aggressively for 3 whole months? Also, rms called Miguel "a traitor to the Free Software community" at some point, and now with the whole MIT business, he gets in with the twitter defamation league spouting off his grievances. That's pretty much beyond cowardly and into despicable territory.
Jillian's story is pretty much the entire problem in a nutshell:
"an older female colleague recommended at a whisper that I lock myself in my office."
"She later told me it was because he gets touchy"
"Over the years, I heard all sorts of things of this nature, and warned women who might not be in the know"
Maybe this older female colleague was told the same things at some point? Why is every single allegation hearsay from twitter?
"instructing them on how to properly make tea"
Yes, rms can be very particular about minor things. If you did not know even this, why are you writing about "things about rms others should know"?
Also, again EFF connections. Do they even want to pretend to be useful anymore, outside of cluelessly abusing people on twitter for kicks?
People are literally celebrating a "long overdue" injustice because they don't like the man, so "he had it coming". I don't know how can anyone not find this unsetting.
I never said otherwise. If you look at my comment history you will see that I am against the injustice against RMS.
I certainly agree with you.
This type of rumor mongering is hurtful and should be opposed.
Exactly, he's innocent until proven guilty, like everybody else.
You're implying that "I heard from someone that heard it from someone else, that heard it from their dad, that read it on a mailing list, 20 years ago, that he did, therefore ho did"
seems does not qualify as evidence
> circles that interacted with RMS
Like Thomas Lord?
I think there is only mud, not based on any real issue with what Stallman said or did.
> does not automatically follow that it was the wrong thing to do.
It does.
FSF main goal was freedom and protecting fundamental liberties of each individual
Stallman main contribution to FSF was the GPL, a legal framework, FSF main contribution was pro bono legal support defending free software in court.
So, yeah, if FSF cannot defend its founder, most popular and most honorable member, it becomes basically useless, it follows it was the wrong thing to do.
Their reputation was based on trust, trust has been broken.
Two, https://medium.com/@thomas.bushnell/a-reflection-on-the-depa...
> Minsky is also dead, and there’s plenty of time to discuss at leisure whatever questions there may be about his culpability.
"Bushnell [..] is employed by Google LLC. He is a member of Saint Mark's Episcopal Church."
With all due respect to his employment and religious beliefs, that is not the sort of person to provide a better understanding of Stallman, in general or psychologically.
No? FTA:
> But I’ll give you a personal take. By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer.
The straw that broke the camel's back could be the wrong metaphor. Maybe it's more like the dam burst.
[1] https://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_January_2...
Also note that it is a difference between an empirical claim and a moral claim. While empirical claim that some action almost always leads to negative outcome to others could be used as an argument for that action being immoral, it is still perfectly valid to attack the supporting empirical claim, while not attacking the moral claim.
There are Stallman's statements defending non-coercive sex with children, but they are older:
https://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html#28%20June%20...
At least there is this one from 14th September, also on his site:
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...
" Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."
Citation needed. He expressed the same opinion in 2013 that he did in 2006 and 2003:
https://stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_January_2...
https://stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20June%20...
https://stallman.org/archives/2003-may-aug.html#28%20June%20...
But even if he hadn't changed his opinion there would be nothing wrong with that imo.
The stuff I did find was only tangentially related and not indicative of any changes in position, eg
https://stallman.org/archives/2016-jul-oct.html#16_September...
https://stallman.org/archives/2016-jul-oct.html#12_September...
https://stallman.org/archives/2016-jul-oct.html#15_July_2016...
> It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished. But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, 'whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,' and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.
(1) Which is yet to be proven, btw. We shouldn't take destroying a man's reputation so lightly. But well, what do I know. The mob must enjoy its victories, even when they're really defeats.
In human nature it's extremely common to tolerate things too long and then bail out when something minuscule happens later.
Not ideal but easy to understand.
I don't see "human nature" as an acceptable excuse for anything at all.
It may be a straw, but it's a very heavy straw, placed at just the right location
> If Stallman's past behavior was unacceptable, then he should have been fired for that.
Indeed!
The fact that he wasn't fired for his past behaviour doesn't necessarily mean that his past behaviour was acceptable.
Not firing him for his past behaviour may just have been an error of judgement.
If I get away with (say) stealing once, that shouldn't mean I now have carte blanche to steal anything without consequence.
He was! He was fired for all that, and for this most recent incident as well. He wasn't fired for a single incident alone, but for a series of incidents, of which this was the most recent.
The fact is, the reporting around the event that actually did get him fired was beyond awful and disingenuous. By throwing up your hands and saying "yeah maybe those articles were a crock of lies, but that's fine because he actually did do some shitty stuff before too" you're contributing to an environment in which it's that much harder to distinguish honest reporting from fabricated character assassination.
I think this [0] comment from Reddit does a good job refuting the "straw that broke the camel's back" argument:
"""
Amazing how much damage dishonest media coverage can do, even though it's both trivial to prove their misquotes false and we now have an witness further supporting Stallman's original argument. Summary of events:
In a recently unsealed deposition a woman testified that, at the age of 17, Epstein told her to have sex with Marvin Minsky. Minsky was a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab and pioneer in A.I. who died in 2016. Stallman argued on a mailing list (in response to a statement from a protest organizer accusing Minsky of sexual assault) that, while he condemned Epstein, Minsky likely did not know she was being coerced:
> 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.
Someone wrote a Medium blogpost called "Remove Richard Stallman" quoting the argument. Media outlets like Vice and The Daily Beast then lied and misquoted Stallman as saying that the woman was "entirely willing" (rather than pretending to be) and as "defending Epstein". Note the deposition doesn't say she had sex with Minsky, only that Epstein told her to do so. Since then physicist Greg Benford, who was present at the time, has stated that she propositioned Minsky and he turned her down:
> I know; I was there. Minsky turned her down. Told me about it. She saw us talking and didn’t approach me.
This seems like a complete validation of the distinction Stallman was making. If what Minsky knew doesn't matter, if there's no difference between "Minsky sexually assaulted a woman" and "Epstein told a 17-year-old to have sex with Minsky without his knowledge or consent", then why did he turn her down? We're supposed to consider a dead man a rapist for sex he didn't have because of something Epstein did without his knowledge, possibly even in a failed attempt to create blackmail material against him?
Despite this, Stallman has now been pressured to resign not just from MIT but from the Free Software Foundation that he founded. Despite (and sometimes because of) his eccentricities, I think Stallman was a very valuable voice in free-software, particularly as someone whose dedication to it as an ideal helped counterbalance corporate influence and the like. But if some journalists decide he should be out and are willing to tell lies about it, then apparently that's enough for him to be pushed out.
"""
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/d59efr/computer...