This is what he said:

"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 word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing... 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…"

Not politically clever to say, but hardly an endorsement of sexual assault.

Not an endorsement of sexual assault, but definitely an attempt to downplay the crime. According to https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jef..., Minsky was 73-years-old at the time and the victim 17 and the assault occurred at Epstein's private island. Minsky must have known that, at the very least, she was pressured to have sex with him.

Stallman has autism. I don't think he really understands the intricacies of social boundaries, situations, and limits.

Stallman said he isn't autistic.[1] The people with autism I know abhor what Epstein did as much as anyone else. And they're pretty angry about unqualified neurotypicals diagnosing anyone they want to let off the hook.

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/2551458/asperger-s-oxy...

> The people with autism I know abhor what Epstein did as much as anyone else

So did Stallman.

> Stallman said he isn't autistic

His justification is basically that has no trouble with rhythms so he self-diagnosed himself as not having asperger's.

I would suggest reading this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535390 and more specifically this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26538554

> So did Stallman.

They don't see it that way.

> His justification is basically that has no trouble with rhythms so he self-diagnosed himself as not having asperger's.

Stallman said he didn't have most of the characteristics of Asperger's. Rhythm was just an example.

> I would suggest reading this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26535390 and more specifically this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26538554

BAP doesn't change the issue of unqualified people diagnosing someone they don't know. Or using it as an excuse.

I think we can see that in hindsight that Epstein was the common denominator in all these controversies and had he not existed Stallman and Minsky will still just be normal nerds with strong opinions on software unrelated to any sex controversy.

They're guilty of association not of doing anything wrong. It doesn't concern me that Stallman said stupid/insensitive things. He has a history of that.

> Are you saying that jerking off in front of people is OK or borderline?

I have no idea how you went from OP's message to this. Can you explain?

This is a good example of how pro-cancelers operate. Directly misquote the OP (as you pointed out) and put some distasteful stuff in the vicinity of mentioning the target, so people will unconsciously associate him with that.

> Are you saying that

Does anything intellectually honest ever come after this start of phrase?

I don't understand what OP is saying here

> We went from "he grabbed me by the pussy" and "he jerked off in front of me" to .... "he once hit on me and I had to reject him".

we went from <obviously bad thing> and <2nd obviously bad thing> to <normal thing, irrelevant to rms>. Why even add the 2nd one? Only way it would make sense if it's a slippery slope: we went from <obviously bad thing> and <less bad thing> to <normal thing>

I agree in part but I'm pretty sure he was pressured to resign.