MIT gets outed as having numerous researchers who took money from and traveled with a convicted pedophile sex abuser, sex trafficker, and likely financial criminal, and Stallman writes an e-mail that sounds very much as if he's obliquely defending Epstein.
I imagine someone at MIT's communications office having a heart attack. "Oh fuck shut this idiot up NOW!" someone probably shouted.
This wasn't #metoo. This was Stallman embarrassing MIT and numerous powerful people.
I feel sort of sorry for Stallman because it's clear that he's "on the spectrum" or at least is the sort of person who thinks ultra-logically and doesn't understand the irrational power machinations of politics. He felt like he was writing something logical, and he was, but he stepped in a gigantic bear trap that would have been obvious to anyone with any social understanding.
Pro tip: if your institution is enmeshed in scandal, keep your mouth shut unless you are coordinating with your communications department or whomever is in charge of such things. If you do check, 99% of the time they will tell you to keep your mouth shut. If you do open your mouth, even with good intentions, polish up your CV first.
It amuses me that this entire 500+ post thread is about "cancel culture" when that's not what happened at all in this case.
Complete misinterpretation of what RMS has written about. He defended Minsky, not Epstein.
Hell CEOs can be fired for such things... unless they have Elon Musk or Steve Jobs levels of reality distortion fields and cult followings.
It's amazing what defenders of the Critical Theory / Twitter driven cancel culture will defend. Really, victim blaming an autistic person for not having social skills, literally one of the things affected most by their disorder? This is a new low to sink to for you lot.
What's next, you gonna blame an amputee for not running out of the way of a moving truck?
It's a shame that his words are being twisted once again after everything he went through.