And Mr. President "infinite wisdom" still "grabs them by the pussy". This is totally schizophrenic even for a plural society.
One of the problems with Stallman is he doesn't realize that it's a normie's world and normies make all the rules.
The upshot of this is that his autistic well-actuallyism w.r.t. definition of terms (like "sexual assault") is at best annoying and at worst causes psychological harm to vulnerable individuals. What Stallman needs to do is read more Wittgenstein and understand how words are actually used by real humans. Their meanings are not DEFUN forms in some piece of Lisp code. A spoken word's meaning is the effect it has on those spoken to. Mainstream society considers any sexual activity by an adult on those under a certain age to be assault, therefore, "sexual assault" is an appropriate term to use for any such activity. Mainstream society considers copying a copyrighted work without permission to be a form of theft; therefore, "theft" is an appropriate term to use for copyright infringement. RMS insisting it is not theft does not change the fact that James Gosling feels very much stolen-from.
If "autistic well-actuallyism" is the only way to rebut entirely groundless accusations of sexual assault, then I guess society needs a great deal more autistic well-actuallyism, because widely-believed baseless accusations of serious crimes are very destructive to society; they were the major excuse for lynchings, for example. Rather than "autistic well-actuallyism" I usually use terms like "due process", "justice", and "rationality", but if you want to call those "autistic well-actuallyism", that's up to you.
It's also factually false to claim that mainstream society considers any sexual activity between an adult and a 17-year-old to be assault. While my wife did suffer social ostracism due to our relationship, almost nobody believes that she "assaulted" me. That is far from a mainstream belief. Are you saying you think she did?
I've already explained what happened in the Gosling case in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21252185, but I'll summarize again here. Gosling was just lying about what happened. After Stallman had been maintaining EMACS for five years, Gosling wrote a clone of it for Unix, incorporating code from some other people. He gave permission to one of those people, Fen Labalme, to redistribute his modified version of it. Stallman wanted a Unix Emacs, so he started working on Labalme's version of Gosling's clone, but had to replace most of it. When he published his version, Gosling had apparently changed his mind about the redistribution permission, so he threatened legal action. Stallman at first responded by protesting that Gosling had no right to attempt to retroactively revoke his permission (particularly when Gosling was profiting by selling his Emacs clone, including the contributions of Labalme and others, to Unipress), but after a short time, he replaced the remaining pieces of Gosling's code to eliminate the issue. This all happened within a few weeks in 1985. As far as I've been able to find out, the Unipress lawsuit Gosling referred to never happened.
Gosling doesn't, I guess, "feel very much stolen-from". He tried to make a buck by copying Stallman's work and sending legal threats to Stallman about it. This led to Stallman publicly vilifying him; that's why he hates Stallman. Most people wouldn't respond to hating somebody by lying about them to damage their reputation, but that's what Gosling did.
Although we were only intimate partners for seven years, the relationship was not in any way a matter of her taking advantage of me or abusing me. The relationship changed my life dramatically for the better, and I still love her, even though it has been some years since we last saw each other.
I thank God I lived in New Mexico, where the age of consent was low enough to protect her from legal risks in addition to the social ostracism she did suffer.
To state my position clearly, there is nothing wrong with sexual relationships between adults and older teenagers. It is not a result of pedophilia, nor is that situation inherently abusive. It does require special attention to issues of inequality of power stemming from economic and social differences, as well as the special difficulties faced by any relationship involving teenagers or people in their early twenties stemming from inexperience and higher levels of impulsivity.
Of course, the relationship that provoked this controversy had nothing of this egalitarian character. According to the account of Virginia Giuffre, the victim, she was enslaved by serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein, who preyed on teenagers precisely because of their economic and psychological vulnerability; he ordered her to have sex with a variety of men who were presumably unaware of her enslavement. Her obedient efforts at seducing Stallman’s friend Marvin Minsky included accompanying him on travel around the country, but she has not alleged that they actually had sex or that he knew of her enslavement. Physicist Gregory Benford testified to observing Minsky reject Giuffre’s advances.
Epstein may have had an additional motive for preying on teenagers: he maintained a large library of surreptitious video recordings of famous men having sex with enslaved underage women. There is evidence that Epstein was working for the US Intelligence Community; prosecutor Acosta accepted an unconscionable level of impunity as a result.
Stallman defending his dead friend Minsky from wholly unfounded allegations of “sexual assault” on the basis of the above facts is what provoked the current controversy.
I find it profoundly appalling to see people like Andy Wingo equating people like my beloved first wife to perpetrators of atrocities like Jeffrey Epstein, asserting that the most important fact about our relationship is that I, like Giuffre, was 17 years old when it began.