RMS has called himself "borderline autistic". His socially clueless black and white thinking makes it look like he is far in the spectrum. RMS is anal about meanings of terms and their use. That's not working well in the current climate where words carry perceived intent. I find myself agreeing with RMS with most of the terminology and its use in this case. Women who tell stories about him paint a picture of lonely socially incompetent man who makes super creepy attempts to connect opposite sex.
I have worked in jobs where there have been very strange creepy people, both women and men. Some are angry and tense. Some are odd and talk restless or slightly disturbing stuff that make everyone uncomfortable. But if they do their work well they can stay. Others give them some room. It's called tolerance.
If RMS was just random superhacker doing his thing. I would defend him. His boss should find a position for him where he can contribute and other people should feel free to feel uncomfortable and avoid him.
But RMS is de facto leader and public figure in movement that is also political. He does not deserve the same level of consideration as normal HR headache would. Even if everything against him would be completely unjust, there is no requirement for just treatment for top leaders. They can be sacked for any reason whatsoever.
Well, he started the movement and got it very far, with the dominant OS using his foundation's license. Despite his limitations. There is no one in the movement who should have the authority to sack him.
This is ridiculous in a culture that elected and continues to support an accused rapist to its highest office. If the highest office in the nation (and many others) can have such a scumbag without him being forced to resign, how can we expect someone in Stallman's position to be perfect and PC with his speech so idiots don't misunderstand his direct style of speech? Such hypocrisy, such bullshit, this argument is.
>But RMS is de facto leader and public figure in movement that is also political
What does this mean ? He is a leader of an organisation related to software freedom (or more pedantically, the choice of licences used for software). How is it relevant ? All you are saying is, "Famous people can't talk like that".
* General principle that people in influential positions have less protections and should have more scrutiny than average John Doe. Celebrities and influential people have less legal privacy protections.
* People are free to speak as individuals, but they may not be free to speak while they have public position in the organization. Elected members of the organization like FSF don't have the same protections as employers have. They represent the organization even outside the work. Their public position gives them a platform where what they say goes trough bullhorn and private becomes public and reflects the organization. If something they say harms the organization they should go even if they are right.
If you are the leader for an organisation focused on advocacy (i.e. raising awareness and communicating), then your words become de facto the words of the organisation, even with comments not related to your organisations purpose.
If your leader appears to advocate pedophilia, then your organisation no longer becomes "that organisation that advocates for free software", but "that organisation run by a pedophile apologist".
He doesn't advocate pedophilia. Nothing has changed for years. Are you advocating it?
He has just been completely misrepresented by some popular media as supporting statutory rape, and you are fueling the fire.
It is pure bullshit - the journalists that write (or publications that publish) headlines that completely reverse meaning should be held accountable for their lies.
It is libel: make it appear Richard said she was willing when he definitely said she was coerced (within the exact same paragraph as the "quote"). Seems she was 18 too - any organisation publishing clearly slanderous headings designed for sensation and payment for eyeballs should be punished.
So the lesson is: Don't selflessly give your work away for nothing out of idealism lest it improve the world in some fashion all out of proportion to the budget involved because, if you do, we shall surely expect your head on a pike at some point for some wholly unrelated personal gaff.
Rather than, you know, finding some humane, compassionate approach to dealing with the personal shortcomings of someone who has done so very much for the world.
You write this like it's an insult, but with a dozen stuff and million dollar budget he's done more for the world than most of us could do with 1000 staff and a billion dollar budget.
it's rather interesting how all the information technology (social media, etc...) is slowly moving our culture towards increasing self-censorship. One has to have the right opinion or stay quiet.
Having the wrong opinion about certain topics is getting more expensive. Stay away from taboos or else... never mind the fact that what we regard as wrong changes across different societies over time.
Weirdly all the information technology is steering towards being more similar in our opinions and in what we can say without facing consequences.
Recently I started to thing about how in spite of having the ability to share, and change, and store information better and with more ease than ever, we seem to be going in the opposite direction. Instead of having more transparent institutions, everything is getting more "opaque" (so to speak) towards the public (even it this is happening due to overload).
does anyone remember "information wants to be free"? I don't think anybody says that anymore, but I remember reading that a bunch on slashdot in the early 00s
Self-censorship is a norm which always existed as a social behavior, even online. In a small geeky world of early days of Internet, when community of connected people was small and more homogeneous, it was easier to touch certain topics without receiving strong reactions, but it didn’t mean self-censorship did not exist. It just concerned different things and the worst that could happen was a ban on the forum or IRC channel. It’s still the case for unimportant people: no one cares what random Joe says online. Everyone expects that opinion leader conforms to the norms of society - hence all those crazy scientists are being ostracized for spreading nonsense outside their field of research.
Phpbb forums didn't go away because of self censorship, they were simply replaced with bigger sites like Reddit. If you're trying to create a community around a niche topic, a subreddit is substantially easier to create than deploying and maintaining a forum.
I was not aware that phpbb forums disappeared; I regularly read three of them that are all quite active. Yes, there are subreddit counterparts, but the reddit versions are mostly filled with crappy karma-seeking memes and wildly off-topic discussions.
The phpbb forums tend to be a lot more ruthless in self-moderation and probably a fair amount of gatekeeping too. But the content is significantly better than reddit, which I believe is a source of pride for many of the participants. I also get the impression that there is a growing sense of “coolness” using a crappy outdated UX. I predict the return and rise of the niche community sites will happen before its total disappearance.
I think what is perceived by a community as right or wrong changes as the composition of the community changes...I mean Trump doesn't self-censor because he reflects the values of his broader base and his base eats up whatever he says....RMS' hugs and kisses, free love, anything goes attitude might have been ok during the hippie era of the 70s and 80s during the formative years of his career but does not reflect the values and sensibilities of today's broader development community....which means he needed to adapt or step down. -- The Dark knight quote - "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain" seems apt in this scenario.
I just don't have 1-1s with anyone I manage. Don't want problems for having 1-1s with women, don't want discrimination accusations for having 1-1s with men. No one can accuse me of anything if everything happens in an open office with plenty of witnesses.
I think that it has next to nothing to do with technology. MIT was still reeling from the fall out with the Media Lab and Epstein. If it wasn't for that, they might have gotten by with a simple apology, but that wouldn't be enough at this point.
There is also a history of controversial stuff related to his time at the FSF which meant that probably wouldn't settle for a simple apology either (not that RMS seemed willing to give one).
As organisations change over time, what they need in leadership also changes. In this case, they didn't need an ideologue with a history of generating controversy, they needed someone who can keep the ship going forward so that the projects they are overseeing don't lose enough talent that they become irrelevant.
I think without heavy proponents for free software, we would be in a worse place, especially technologically. Never met a software developer that wasn't dependent on free software to learn about the fundamentals of programming and system design.
Calling him an ideologue in contrast to current pioneers in the software industry is a bit much, maybe he just had some hard principles.
> wouldn't settle for a simple apology
To whom? To those that endorsed questionable business relations that drew attention in the first place that still are in leading positions at the MIT?
> need in leadership also changes
Visionaries and thought leaders can probably have a positive influence. I doubt we will get a adequate replacement. There also is no strong leader/mentor that can make you magically smart. He would need to inspire you to learn yourself which I would argue Stallman did pretty well.
"Controversies" are seldom intellectually engaging and if you look at the core of his statements, the subject and reactions become quite ridiculous.
>Never met a software developer that wasn't dependent on free software to learn about the fundamentals of programming and system design.
You probably have been in a bubble all this time. I grew up in former Soviet Union without an internet connection with whatever software I was able to buy around the corner. It wasn't Linux and GCC, it was Windows 9x, Delphi, then MSVC, and so on.
I think the first time I've used (any) FOSS application was after 4 or 5 years of using computers. I had the fundamentals more or less covered by then.
He also sort of tried to apologize and ended up making it worse because he was obviously neither sorry nor interested in how to avoid doing the same thing in the future.
The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful take on the situation. If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. There are no Internet vigilantes hunting down dissenters. There are people trying to downplay sexual assault. As the internet and as the tech community, we absolutely have the right to condemn public figures when they say stuff like this. That’s what free speech actually means.
If you or I said what Stallman said, but to a coworker or to the boss, we would get fired - justifiably. This is not a new concept unique to the digital age, nor is it a concept that should be done away with. The popularity of your comment depresses me deeply.
Essentially Stallman takes issue with accusing Marvin Minsky of sexual assault because:
> The word "assaulting" presumes he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way.
And then Stallman goes on to point out there is no evidence to suggest that Minksy acted violently toward the victim, and may have been unaware that the victim had been coerced by Epstein.
Given that the definition of "assault" is "a physical attack", I can't really disagree with him from a purely semantic perspective. And I would agree that there are other terms terms such as "statutory rape" and "soliciting prostitution" that may better describe what Minsky is accused of.
Is it "shameful" for me to see some merit in his argument?
I didn't read RMS's "take" as in any way excusing what happened to Giuffre, but rather disputing whether it was accurate to accuse Marvin Minsky of "sexual assault", if from Minsky's perspective at the time nothing seemed wrong. (Sensationalist reporting and selective paraphrasing, like you've done here, has conflated the two issues.)
Suppose there's a boxer, "Joe", and he has a scheduled fight against a named opponent. It's set in a legitimate venue, is freely advertised as if the promoters have nothing to hide, includes a normal ref & audience, and then proceeds like any other boxing match, including the traditional cordialities between opponents before and after. To "Joe", nothing's wrong. But then, years later, it's discovered that the opposing boxer was coerced into fighting, perhaps with threats of violence or blackmail.
Is "Joe" now guilty of physical assault, for repeatedly punching the other boxer, even if to "Joe" at the time it seemed like a normal voluntary encounter, no seedier than any other boxing match?
Maybe RMS's take was dumb. Maybe my analogy is dumb! But it's not "shameful" to try to work out the reasonable characterizations, given Minksy's possible mental state, the law, or common-sense. It might even be possible, under formal legal definitions, for Giuffre to have been "assaulted" while at the same time Minsky's actions don't rise to the level of "assault".
> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career.
Sadly this is not true; it's been routine for all kinds of authority figures to blame the victim and excuse the perpetrator in cases of sexual assault and rape. Including police and judges.
The only way we've moved forward is the public making very clear that that is not acceptable, but this actually has a low hit rate. For every Stallman there is a Kavanagh, and a hundred rape apologists to back then up.
> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career.
I mean, given everything in the news these days, this is blatantly untrue. I suspect it wasn't ever quite that true before either. Maybe it should be but I don't think it's quite that easy.
> The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful take on the situation. [...] There are people trying to downplay sexual assault.
I'm hesitating to respond to this (self-censorship and all) but I'm not a public figure so I can risk being wrong, right? Right?!?
This isn't exactly what RMS was getting it and you're kinda missing the point in the same way RMS kinda missed the point. He didn't get why we use the term "sexual assault" as broadly (and reasonably so) as we do, and it doesn't sound like you get why he decided to argue the semantics of it.
His point was that he felt calling what Misnky had done "sexual assault" seemed to imply that Misky hadviolently attacked and raped her in a physically restraining sorta way instead of, to his best knowledge, in a "she was coerced by a third party without his knowledge" sort of way.
He missed the point that regardless of those details she was sexual assaulted. Further, he seems oblivious to the fact that splitting hairs defending his friend distracts from the real issue: that this isn't about any of them, it's about what happened to the victims. I think that take is fair enough but I agree making that case is bone headed. Not because he shouldn't speak his mind, but that it's just besides the point.
I think you're missing the fact that at all RMS was about was just clearing up the record of what Minsky did and didn't do. Not even that he was fully innocent. I agree it was in poor taste but I think if he was any less a public figure it would have been read more charitably with an awkward sigh instead.
> He missed the point that regardless of those details she was sexual assaulted. Further, he seems oblivious to the fact that splitting hairs defending his friend distracts from the real issue: that this isn't about any of them, it's about what happened to the victims. I think that take is fair enough but I agree making that case is bone headed. Not because he shouldn't speak his mind, but that it's just besides the point.
I don't know... to me it seems totally understandable (even somewhat admirable) that Stallman would stand up for a deceased friend/colleague and try to set the record straight.
I think it’s wrong to absolve Minsky of responsibility, though. He would have had to be pretty clueless to not at least wonder why all of these teenaged girls were hanging around Epstein’s place. Whether he knew doesn’t mean he did not still have sex with an underage girl. Claiming that he didn’t know she was underage seems shaky to me. At the very least he was taking advantage of a woman in the employ of Epstein who seduced/tried to seduce him. At the very least Minsky was involved in indirect, coerced sexual assault as the one having sex with her (if ended up doing so), even if Epstein is the mastermind. I think Minsky was smart enough to know what was happening. So that is why I disagree with RMS. I think calling it sexual assault done, perhaps unknowingly, by Minsky is an accurate description.
> I think it’s wrong to absolve Minsky of responsibility, though.
Stallman was not saying that Minsky should not be absolved of responsibility. He was just saying that the term "sexual assault" is inaccurate in that it implies violence.
> I think Minsky was smart enough to know what was happening.
That's a fairly large assumption. Minsky's name shows up twice in hundreds of pages of deposition. Once is in a statement by the victim when she is asked to name names:
> They instructed me to go to George Mitchell, Jean Luc Brunel, Bill Richardson, another prince that I don't know his name. A guy that owns a hotel, a really large hotel chain, I can't remember which hotel it was. Marvin Minsky.
And the only other reference (that I am aware of) is in reference to being on a private flight with a bunch of other people.
How are you able to infer so much from so litte information?
Great you might be right but are you sorry people got to hear your opinion AND Stallman's? Would it be a better world if only your thoughts were heard or would you not even be sharing them if not for his thoughts being shared?
You believe free speech actually means not being able to express an opinion on anything anywhere that someone else could be offended by or lose your ability to live/eat/get medicine you need to survive. This is what getting fired means to normal people lest you forget.
Having a a factually or morally incorrect viewpoint on a public happening isn't an assault on a victim. Its an opportunity to help that person learn better and even more importantly to help the many more who believe the same as the speaker but who wont speak up learn as well.
Silence dissent and you lose that opportunity and everyone is poorer for it.
I wouldn’t call “not actively espousing hateful or bigoted views” “self-censorship”. And if people are afraid to be hateful or creepy in public, I’d call that a win. You don’t get to proclaim the advantages of chattel slavery and be magically immune from everyone’s responses, and afterwards you can’t complain about self-censorship when you think twice about writing or saying something abhorrent.
I am afraid to be mis-interpreted as hateful or bigoted, and have to spend an inordinate amount of time/effort either choosing my words for my audience (which is really hard on the internet with such a broad audience) or correcting knee-jerk responses.
The general over-reaction and constant jousting at windmills seems like a net loss to me.
I've found that a net good thing at least for myself. I used to be the dude who would blurt out whatever popped into my head and not care too much how it would be received by my audience, and sometimes even relish the fact that it was badly received.
By self-censoring and thinking through what I'm about to say and thinking about my audience before I open my mouth I find not only are social interactions easier and more pleasant, but I actually get my points across more consistently and clearly. People are then also more open to listening and don't always automatically get defensive. So ironically applying self-censorship has made it easier to make the points I actually want to make.
The [-] button is actually a handy thread-collapser. The downvote button is a mirror image of the upvote button and only shows if you have several hundred karma.
The larger your audience, the more likely one of them will consider your views hateful or bigoted (regardless of what your views are).
Are there perhaps some views that you think are not quite hateful or bigoted, but aren't totally fine to state? Maybe, "err on the side of caution" type views?
I wonder what Zeno would think on moving your views from completely hateful to completely fine: first you must go halfway-hateful, then half of that, and so on. Perhaps one will never find a completely fine view to state!
Yeah, people should be afraid to be "creepy" in public. Bring back that good old high school dynamic where nerds knew their place. Next headline: RMS stuffed into gym locker. Right on!
Consider this then: People who are not allowed to speak their mind will simply be hateful and creepy in the privacy of their home. Wouldn't you rather know who exactly is hateful and creepy to avoid them entirely, rather than create a fake atmosphere of safety.
I think the idea is, let’s not revere or put in power people who do/say/espouse these kinds of views
Stallman is a legend, which means he has a great distance to fall. His point was lost in the fray. I wish he could’ve just kept it to a private conversation with a friend.
Obviously no child can consent to being pimped, for money or otherwise.
If it was as simple as a disagreement, that would be fine. But it's not just simple disagreements anymore. It is costing people their livelihoods and futures because they're not toeing the ever shifting line.
I think you managed to perfectly exemplify the point parent is making. Stallman never argued this, but in the frenzy of outrage his points are being misconstrued and he is villified to rationalize the punishment he has received.
By disagree you mean people might put pressure on your employer until you are fired in order to silence you and anyone who thinks about expressing such thoughts.
Gervais is hugely powerful because he has the money to survive being unpersoned. Not everyone is in his position. His comment is like Shaquille O’Neal saying you actually can walk around and punch anyone you like in the face, because nobody retaliates when he does it (just a hypothetical, of course Shaq wouldn’t do that).
I agree the internet is getting locked down, it'll end up like daytime tv if we're not careful. But I'm two clicks away from access to Nazi and extremist content right now. The internet still is the wild wild west version of a library, in terms of access to content, but now there's laws and archiving of everything typed and read applied on top of that too.
This Stallman case is edge-case fallout from a massive political movement. He could have probably discussed the age of consent in public pre-2013 and maybe get a few disgusted reactions but generally be fine. The political control of internet arguments is more obvious than ever, and the quest for advertising money.. but I'm fairly sure I can start and run a website/subreddit/blog for whatever niche idea and be left alone.
I hope my post didn't look like a defense of stallman, because it isn't meant to be. Yeah people don't remember right? The stories about him seem troubling.
> But I'm two clicks away from access to Nazi and extremist content right now
So? Don't make these clicks and you'd never see them.
> The political control of internet arguments is more obvious than ever, and the quest for advertising money
Advertising money has nothing to do with it - FSF doesn't need advertising money. They're just live in deathly fear of the woke Red Guards, as many before them (e.g. Mozilla) - and that fear may be very well justified.
> but I'm fairly sure I can start and run a website/subreddit/blog for whatever niche idea and be left alone.
Sure you can. If you can do without: hosting, DDoS protection, DNS, advertising, search engines, social media, payment processing, etc. All those have recently been engaged in deplatforming people for political considerations. But yes, you are free to lay your own cable infrastructure, set up your own data centers, build out your own internet, and there have you own website about whatever you want, completely free.
Just saying that the crazy content is still available so assessing the idea that speech is being limited and we are reaching a monoculture is testable against that yardstick. I'm not here to defend the quality or content of those extreme websites.
Advertising money has something to do with YouTube deplatforming people which is part of evaluating the idea that we are becoming a monoculture.
I think only the daily stormer is an example if you go anywhere you will be pulled down, including for. Controlling that stuff is the government's job, I would expect radical political sects to lose the fight to host a website. But if your idea is non political you're basically in the clear.
That’s why I mostly use pseudonymous channels these days, like this one. I treat everything I say with my real name like I’m publishing it on the front page of the New York Times and submitting three copies to the Library of Congress.
Many fewer of my current associates hear any real thoughts of mine compared to 20 years ago. I used to get into all kinds of arguments like Stallman’s, on public email lists, which thankfully haven’t surfaced online (yet).
Wait until the AIs get a little better at forensics. Might not be wise to post comments you wouldn't want to come back at you at a forum that doesn't let you delete them, pseudonymous - for now - or not.
Please read Richard's actual words again. Read them carefully --- and read his actual words, not just someone summarizing them or stitching fragments out of context. Richard said no such thing.
> P]rostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia ... should be legal as long as no one is coerced. They are illegal only because of prejudice and narrowmindedness.
Or do you believe someone planted it on his website and it went unnoticed for 16 years? How about this:
> 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.
Well, no? Surely the coercion bit is the important bit? It's a bit odd that he had to "learn" that sex could bring psychological harm to children, but he's basically saying that adults should not have sex with children.
Absolutely not. The entire point why paedophilia is considered an awful act is because a child is not mature enough to give consent for such action.
Since children (and I repeat, CHILDREN) are unable to give a proper consent, any sort of a sexual action with them is considered as rape.
> ...but he's basically saying that adults should not have sex with children.
No, he specifically disagrees with the age of consent:
> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
In case you're curious, age of consent is mostly 14 to 18 around the world (with some exceptions), and 16 to 18 in the US, depending on the state. He does not provide us with a number, but if you ask me, it's a really weird hill to die on.
Let's not forget that there was a time when children were taught sex in practical lessons with their parents and this was the norm and perfectly accepted and as such worked well.
It is quite possible that in our times and current society the same does not apply but let's keep in mind that our current society is sick and wrong in many ways, rotten to the core to the point it is self-destructive.
"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
> Let's not forget that there was a time when children were taught sex in practical lessons with their parents and this was the norm and perfectly accepted and as such worked well.
What on earth are you talking about? What you are describing is incest, which has never been the norm in most societies. Most societies have always considered it gravely wrong. (Which is not to say it didn’t ever happen, of course it sometimes did, but it was almost never considered the norm.)
So, as of May 2019, in the 34 states that have set a marriage age by statute, the lower minimum marriage age when all exceptions are taken into account, are:
2 states have a minimum age of 14: Alaska and North Carolina.
4 states have a minimum age of 15.
20 states have a minimum age of 16.
8 states have a minimum age of 17.
In Massachusetts the general marriage age is 18, but children may be married with judicial consent with no minimum age limit. In the absence of any statutory minimum age, one opinion is that the minimum common law marriageable age of 12 for girls and 14 for boys may still apply. Unlike many other states, in Massachusetts a child's marriage does not automatically emancipate the minor, or increase his or her legal rights beyond allowing the minor to consent to certain medical treatments.
> it's rather interesting how all the information technology (social media, etc...) is slowly moving our culture towards increasing self-censorship.
It's not. Take it from me, a guy who predates social media by decades.
If you go back and look at what Gary Hart dropped out of the 1988 presidential race for, and compare it to what Donald Trump said on social media before, during, and after being elected President, there's just no comparison.
Racial, misogynistic, derogatory, offensive sentiments you can easily find being published on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or most other social media platforms would not have passed muster in any mass-media channel or public conversation 30 or even 20 years ago.
On the positive side, social media has been a tremendous boon to marginalized communities like gay/lesbian/bisexual, transgender, heck, even furries. It has allowed like minds to find and support each other, and allowed the rest of us normies to see these communities for the constructive, positive forces so many of them are. I am convinced that social media aided in their growing public acceptance.
In fact, I'd say that social media has opened up the discourse so much that even the resignation of a powerful figure over controversial remarks about pedophilia--an outcome which would have been expected and commonplace for at least the past 70 years of U.S. society--are taken as somehow problematic.
In other words, things are so de-censored now that even the most anodyne and obvious objections to gross statements by powerful figures is taken as censorship. The Overton Window has moved way over to one side, but people still complain when they hit the edge of it.
The proper comparison is not what a politician could say 20 years ago, but rather what a well-known software figure could say on a mailing list. "Predating social media by decades", you should appreciate how online communication was before the status-gamers got here and reasserted their tribalistic bullshit.
I hate that the parent is being downvoted. It speaks to the poor quality of the community at HN. Parent is absolutely right: twenty or thirty years ago, you were driven from the public sphere for merely a fraction of what passes today as 'within bounds'. Every cry of how we're self-censoring and being chilled rings hollow with every tweet by the pussy-grabber-in-chief. Whining about the boundaries now is just a confession of how little history you know.
The boundaries have always depended on who you are. Most of us aren't billionaires with the office of the president of one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, the services of the strongest military on the planet, and millions of admirers to shield us.
This extremely perverse situation tells us a good bit about a lot of our fellow citizens but nothing about what the rest of us can get away with nor the constraints placed upon us.
If I said something that was misconstrued sufficiently enough for thousands of people to hear about it and hate me even wrongly I wouldn't be giving up my position at MIT I would probably end up homeless until lack of Asthma medication caused me to suffocate.
Part of that not having billions of dollars to fall back on thing.
>Parent is absolutely right: twenty or thirty years ago, you were driven from the public sphere for merely a fraction of what passes today as 'within bounds'.
That's because a single viewpoint controls "the public sphere" when all information gets to people through only a few channels controlled by a few people who all happen to be part of the same ethno-religious viewpoint. What you are seeing is a democratization of the flow of information
It's an interesting dynamic. I would agree that on the whole, you're probably correct that there is less censorship in the society.
However, it seems that the political division is greater than ever. It is almost as if there are two Overton windows now, one for liberals and one for republicans (roughly).
The republican one shifted to much less self-censorship, while the liberal one shifted very slightly to more self-censorship.
And RMS seems to be caught in the liberal one. He has held his opinions for a long time, and nobody really cared that much.
He is also not a particularly powerful figure. If anything, FSF is weaker than it has been in the 90s. That's also an interesting change in dynamics, the shifting of both windows now affects powerful and powerless alike, where in the past, it was I believe considered less decent to have "wrong opinions" if you were powerful, and the wrong opinions of the powerless were tolerated much more. (Basically, the difference between elites and proletes, and agreement who is what, is now morphing into a difference between liberals and republicans.)
If you start expressing opinions about how sex with a sex-trafficked child should be legal, won't your friends and family raise some questions about your character?
Unless we're talking of morally flexible individuals. And at least parents should raise an eyebrow, since we have this natural reaction to protect our children.
> information wants to be free
Whomever said that was probably thinking of facts, of knowledge, s/he was probably not thinking of having opinions about pedophiles.
EDIT: don't get me wrong, I think there's a time and place to argue that consensual sex with teenagers might be ok and I think people should be free to make that argument, the problem in this case is that the sex couldn't have been consensual, in which case age becomes relevant, as that teenager isn't fully developed, therefore the harm done is amplified.
And also these opinions have been delivered by a very public figure, with a history of harassing women.
Words matter so the lesson here is don't be a jerk, as technology won't save you from that.
There is no evidence that he was a pedophile. In fact, many of the 'girls' he had relations with were by their own admission consensual and involved compensation.
He certainly broke the law in this country and his morals and character are in question, but what he did is (and has been throughout history) legal in much of the world and we can't act like US law is a surrogate for universal ethics/morals:
At some point we have to decide if girls/women have agency to decide their sexual activity. 25 year-olds can be coerced in asymmetric power relationships just like a 16 year-old. We already know about the double-standard of sex when drunk--if you are man, it's consensual, but if you are a woman, it's always rape.
And as an aside, I think that the use of 'sex trafficking' in this context does a disservice to the actual, bonafide victims of sex trafficking--people that are kidnapped, passports confiscated, literally enslaved. Now because the term has been co-opted by a self-righteous political agenda, we can't have personals on Craigslist.
I am absolutely floored by your comment. I sincerely hope that it is parody.
Jeffrey Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a prostitute and of procuring an underage girl for prostitution. He plead guilty and was convicted. How much more clear does this have to get? He is a pedophile. How could he not be? He straight up solicited children for sex and has had dozens of credible accusations by women stating that he sexually assaulted them while they were underage. In what planet does this kind of behavior count as okay, even if only a single accusation was true? He solicited a child for sex!
No matter what fucked up views of what is/isn’t pedophilia you have, surely you see how employing underage girls and encouraging them to have sex with adult guests is objectively bad and so justifiably illegal? I mean these are children. Them getting paid makes it no better. Would you be ok with your child being employed by an older man to have sex with rich friends of his? I wouldn’t. Am I just too “self-righteous” to see such employment as exploitive and inherently immoral/fucked up?
It doesn’t matter if it was consensual. It is statutory rape, and 16 year olds are not emotionally and mentally as developed as 22 year olds - no matter what you claim. Ask any 22-year-old woman if she is the same person emotionally/intellectually as when she was 16. How many would say yes? Not many.
If saying, “Hey, Epstein built a secret harem of underage girls and solicited them to adult men - regardless of the children’s consent to be solicited - is a bad thing” is considered a “self-righteous political agenda”, then I guess I’m a full-on self-righteous prick.
The fact that I’m arguing that systematic, coerced sex between rich adult men and underage girls is bad and condemnable and that a lot of people in this comment section would disagree with me makes me lose hope for this world. It should be obvious that statutory rape laws protect minors and are a good thing. But here we are. Something truly is rotten in the state of Denmark.
In the Massachusetts of MIT, Harvard, & Martha's Vineyard, the age of consent is 16.
So while coerced sex, or prostitution, remains illegal there no matter the age, mere consensual sex with a 16-17 year-old is NOT "statutory rape" in Massachusetts. Not in that "blue" state, nor the 30 other U.S. states with the same age-of-consent, nor in Canada. Sleazy for those much older, sure, but not the "statutory rape" you're claiming.
But at least one 14-year-old was involved in his case, which lead to his initial imprisonment in 2008. Doubtlessly many of the girls in his employ were 14 or 15. And remember, he wasn’t always in MA. He was a serial exploiter of underage girls, and acquiescence doesn’t mean consent if Epstein held power/influence over the teenage girls.
Convicted in the US of something that is not in crime in much of the world. You are conflating US law with ethics/morals.
You are also appealing to emotion by using 'children' and 'pedophile' in inaccurate ways. If you are going to strictly interpret 'statutory rape' as being morally reprehensible regardless of the circumstances, then I would ask that you stop using peodphile unless you can show me one of his victims that was pre-pubescent. I didn't define that word, it has a dictionary and wikipedia entry that you are welcome to read.
And regarding your claim about emotional and mental development, I would agree that it IS true what you say. However, there are plenty of people who've made it to older age who lack the maturity of their juniors (Stallman apparently being an example!). Age should NEVER be a surrogate marker of capacity... we define ages of legal consent arbitrarily, agreed? There are plenty of 22 year olds making bad decisions...
And the self-righteous political agenda was referring to this legislation:
Plenty of groups including the EFF think this went too far and the way that people throw around 'sex trafficking' and 'raping children' and 'pedophile' are emotional appeals that do a disservice to the actual victims of these crimes.
Of course all of these things are bad, but was Hugh Hefner a sex trafficker because he kept a well-paid harem of women at his mansion? If age is the only discriminator, then why is the US your moral compass when clearly age of consent differs throughout the world? What about Romeo and Juliet laws? States like Hawaii where age of consent is lower?.
> why is the US your moral compass when clearly the age of consent differs throughout the world?
Because the question is not “is it moral”, because the answer is obviously no to any decent person, regardless of age of consent. He used women to gift sex to his friends in an exploitive manner; find me an ethical theorist who supports that. You said yourself in the earlier post that his actions put “his morals/character...in question” and I agree. I also agree that his actions are illegal. As he was convicted and sentenced to a U.S. prison in 2008 and charged this last time and put into a federal jail, I’d say the U.S.’s laws are fairly relevant. No man-made law is identical to a divine law, this is true, but I think the man upstairs would be disgusted by nations allowing child marriages or ages of consent under or at 16. Hell, Satan probably feels uncomfortable, or the Flying Burrito, or just your conscience. But going from the sentiments on this thread, though, I’m sure you could start a group of like-minded people to campaign to lower the age of consent. I can think of a senatorial candidate or two who’d back you all up. The fact remains though, he committed a crime, and I’m sure a majority of Americans (the country in which he was prosecuted) would agree that he is morally reprehensible as well. But hey, it’s hard to decide on ethical question like: “should adults be allowed to sexually use children”. I’ll give you that one.
> was Hugh Hefner a sex trafficker
If he transported underage girls for purposes of sex to a private island, then yes. Oh wait, that’s what Epstein did. The women Hefner kept, as far as I know, were not underage, but if they were and if they were treated as products to be used and sold/gifted for sex, then yes, he would be, as is Epstein.
> You are also appealing to emotion by using ‘pedophile’
Pedophilia has formal and colloquial definitions. While yes, you are correct, many dictionaries do qualify with pre-pubescence, but one of the most popular online dictionaries, dictionary.com, states [1] ‘sexual desire in an adult for a child’. I would argue that the real, not formal usage of pedophile is not so restrictive on the question of puberty. Since English has no standard bodies and words’ meaning is determined by usage, I would consider my use of ‘pedophilia’ semantically correct. But hey, substitute every instance of ‘pedophilia’ with ‘Ephebophilia’ if you want; most Americans would still be disgusted by it under this name, too. Even wikipedia [2] says, though, that pedophilia is commonly used to refer to interest in teens past puberty, so I stand by my apparently loaded vocabulary (is teen-sex-connesieur better?) [1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/pedophilia [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephebophilia see bottom of paragraph 2
I believe the confusion is that you're using "pedophile" to mean "attracted to anyone below the age of consent" while pedophile originally means "attracted to prepubescent children". In that regard, you're most certainly not a pedophile if you're attracted to a 17 year old that has gone through puberty. That's also what RMS was referring to if I recall his email correctly.
But surely most 35-year olds would say that they changed much less drastically from 25 to 35 than 16 to 25. I mean would you say it’s ok to have sex with 12 year olds since they “never stop maturing” and who’s to pick a number? I think we can pick a number: don’t have sex with people who are barely out of middle school. It doesn’t need to be scientifically verified; it is simply common decency. It is frankly disappointing that in 2019 this is a controversial statement at all.
Edit: Particularly relevant to the topic of self-censorship: "unmeasured vituperation, enforced on the side of prevailing opinion, deters people from expressing contrary opinion, and from listening to those who express them."
What? 17-year-olds are still in high school. They probably just barely got a driver’s license. They can just barely see an R-rated movie without a guardian. They can’t even sign waivers to give themselves permission for field trips in my state. How on Earth is it fair to consider them adults and fit to give consent for sex with older men while employed for sex services?
I don't wanna touch the Stallman / Epstein story with a 10 foot (3.x meter?) pole, but I do believe that standards vary.
In Germany a 17yo cannot drive, CAN drink and can have (I'm old and it doesn't apply to me, so this might be only somewhat accurate) sex with other people (but cannot be a prostitute), might marry (needs parents approval I believe). Age of consent is 14 (but .. not for sex with adults as far as I'm aware).
I know that German law has nothing to do with this. But please stop and reflect for a second: The US allows 17yo to steer 2+ tons of steel at high velocities, Germany (as the one example I'm familiar with) lets them have consensual sex or drink beer. The same way you say 'How can they agree to sex' one might ask 'How can they be responsible enough to drive'.
It's cultural, not absolute. I understand the outrage, I am in no way defending Epstein, Stallman or anyone here - but please don't present your moral position/your upbringing as absolute truth. See it as something that you were raised to believe and that A LOT of people disagree with on this globe.
(It's obviously not helping the fact that the girls got paid, it's a completely disgusting, sad and shameful story with no recourse - but don't claim 17yo can't have sex with someone older, ... just because)
As somebody else wrote: “minor”. The word “child” has significantly different implications that deserve to be preserved. The examples you’re brining up are evidence of legislative incongruities more than arguments in support of equivalence.
> If you start expressing opinions about how sex with a sex-trafficked child should be legal
Good thing RMS never did that then.
And your comment is a good representative of the modern debate climate: People will exaggerate whatever their opponent said, and they will assume no good faith in their opponents what so ever. They will not consider an argument something to be learned from, but rather something to be "won".
Getting someone fired over having the "wrong" view is merely a bonus, but a bonus the SJW-crowd loves aiming for none the less.
No wonder we're all getting dumber, when merely trying to have a discussion can get you fired. Of course people will stop debating, and stop gaining insights from that debate.
In a civilized world, you would be able to sue someone for libel for making a statement of opinion, in the abstract, that might somehow be applied to you? And this is your response to a thread rooted in someone concerned about the need for self-censorship?
Have you actually tried talking to a lot of children about this topic?
(it would be funny if you did; it would also be equally funny if you didn't, and are surprised that children didn't express said argument, even though you didn't give them the chance)
Before jumping to criticize Stallman, be aware: there is a big difference between what today's round of headlines claim Stallman wrote, and what he actually wrote. Given the relatively clear-cut nature of the lies the press has told about him, I think he ought to be suing for libel.
What is the counter argument for what Stallman wrote? I've seen that the "press is going too hard on him", but, honestly, I think they were justified. What is the "big difference" to you? If someone, personally, said to me that that someone be absolved of a crime, because the other, coerced, party was "willing" at that moment, I'd seriously question their morals.
Stallman wrote: "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."
These headlines do not match what Stallman wrote. They wrote awful words, and put them in his mouth, in order to support a narrative in which he said something which he didn't. That's not okay.
Stallman conjured up a thought experiment where Minsky is innocent because the minor was "entirely willing." That was the defense Stallman decided, even if those aren't his exact words. His exact words aren't any better then whatever the media decided to run with, at the end of the day his intent was identical. The headline could have been "MIT scientist says you shouldn't get punished for raping minors as long as they present themselves as entirely willing." Do you believe I have gotten that wrong? And if not, can you argue why that is any better than what the media put out?
If Minsky could show up to court for his crimes and he said "Your honor, I didn't know she was 15", he would still go to jail.
He explicitly does not think she was willing. He thinks she was unwilling but was coerced to give the appearance of willingness and that the appearance of the two from Minskys point of view were the same.
This isn't a subtle difference. You think he said almost exactly the opposite of what he said
So Stallman's argument was that the most plausible scenario here is this: Minksy -- who at the time of these events had to at least have been in his sixties, not to mention, you know, married -- went over to Jeffrey Epstein's mansion, where Epstein presented a teenage girl to him for the purposes of having sex (the claim she makes is that she was ordered by Epstein to sleep with "powerful men"), and because the girl didn't explicitly say she had been ordered to do so, Minsky was fine with it all.
So, are we saying this is a particularly good defense? Because it doesn't sound like a great defense to me. It doesn't sound like any reasonably smart person -- which Minsky undoubtedly was -- would find themselves in this situation and not have a question or two about the ethics.
Let's agree that the reporting did, in fact, get Stallman's meaning wrong here. Let's even agree that isn't a subtle difference. Here's the thing: even the most generous reading of what Stallman wrote is still, at the end of the day, excusing Minsky's actions.
And at the end of the day, I think that's still a problem.
The thing is, this one statement is ... tolerable. A bit in poor taste as far as apologia goes.
But then to have a long track record of disagreeing with age of consent; semantic arguments about pedophilia; treating women with disrespect and general creepiness-- it eventually gets to be too much.
Any time you have to say this:
> 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.
After having said this:
> I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.
That is, once you've fucked up with pedo-apologia a few too many times, maybe it's time to be really, really careful in what you say in defense of a colleague's possibly questionable sexual actions.
How many disagreeable opinions do you personally allow someone to have before you believe it correct for people to try to coerce other people to stop doing business with them so you can silence them exactly?
Having sex with someone who is underage (in this case, 17, in a jurisdiction where the legal age is 18) is a strict-liability crime, meaning the prosecution doesn't have to prove that you knew. But be aware that, while Minsky is dead and unable to defend himself, there is apparently a witness who claims that Minsky is innocent--specifically, that Giuffre was directed to have sex with Minsky but Minsky turned her down. Since dead people can't have trials, we will probably never learn the facts of the matter.
We are conflating 'law' and 'morals/ethics' in these arguments. If you act with strict adherence to the law, I'm assuming you've never jaywalked, committed piracy, ran a red light, etc.
Oh, these are 'victimless crimes?' What about sex after having a couple drinks? Technically neither of you can consent under the law... a person has probably committed rape if their consensual partner had a 0.08 BAC.
I think that our lack of a legal word other than 'rape' to describe 'statutory rape' does a disservice to those women are victims of forcible, violent sex acts.
Although technically correct in many US jurisdictions, I think you would have a VERY hard time arguing that an 'adult' having consensual sex with a 17 year old being described as 'raping minors' is morally equivalent to the things that 'rape' is typically used to describe.
He does not really say Minsky was innocent - he insists that what Minsky did should not be called 'assault' because this term is misleading.
[Update] In another place he does argue that it is not evident that Minsky eventually did have sex with her - from the deposition it seems that she said she was directed to do it and then the lawyer asks where she went to do that and she answers that question, but it is quite probably that she misunderstood and answered the question 'where was she directed to go to do that', and there is a witness who says that Minsky turned her down. For me this is a fair argument.
That’s not his defense. Stallman never disputed the lack of consent of the minor. He’s saying the minor might have been coerced by Epstein to “present herself as entirely willing”, i.e. she _looked like_ she’s willing when she’s really not. Minsky would have no way of knowing.
You are making the same defense that you are claiming "that's not his defense." You both are making the same statement that "its ok, because he didn't know.", just in a very roundabout manner.
If Minsky were tried in US, he would be convicted. Ignorance is not a defense.
> If Minsky were tried in US, he would be convicted. Ignorance is not a defense.
This is correct, at least for many US states (22, according to Wikipedia’s article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability_(criminal) ) . You can meet someone under the age of consent in a bar, see them drinking alcohol, even have them show you their license and be fooled by a fake ID, and still be liable under the law to go to jail for statutory rape.
According to that Wikipedia article though, in some other U.S. states ignorance would be a defense. Whether that’s the case for the U.S. Virgin Islands isn’t clear.
I’m not saying it’s ok because he didn’t know. It’s certainly still rape, but I’d say the criminal in that case would be Epstein, not Minsky. If he sincerely thought she was a sex worker who’s over 18 and willing, why is he at fault? He might have done everything right and have gotten (what looked like) informed consent, for all we know.
You don’t have to agree with this idea (it’s not like we have any evidence after all), but I hope we can agree that it’s not entirely unreasonable.
>If Minsky were tried in US, he would be convicted. Ignorance is not a defense.
He would be convicted if he had sex with her. The evidence that he had sex with her is that she was sent to his room and he didn't report that to the authorities. That doesn't seem overwhelmingly persuasive.
The statement is NOT "it's ok because he didn't know". The statement is "he probably didn't know". If he did have sex with her, it's still not ok, regardless of whether he knew or not. And yes, he would still go to jail.
That is seriously fucked up. From that wikipedia article:
> a pharmacist supplied drugs to a patient who presented a forged doctor's prescription, but was convicted even though the House of Lords accepted that the pharmacist was blameless.
> a 15-year-old boy was convicted of statutory rape of a child under 13, a crime under Section 5 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003. The prosecution accepted the boy's claim that he had believed the 12-year-old girl to be 15, but he was nevertheless sentenced to 12 months' detention.
When I read this, I'm very happy to live in a more sane part of the world.
Whereas 15 is a more extreme example, the law is absurd if that is also the case for 17 and a half vs. 18. Obviously there is no way to know the difference, so is the actual intention of the law to simply prevent people under 30 from having intercourse?
Disclaimer: I am definitely not defending the whole sex dealership thing, I am just wondering about what a 19 or 20 year old college student is supposed to do to behave legally.
Edit: as a comparison, in Germany the age of consent is 14 afaik and there exist several additional laws to protect, e.g. 15 year olds from older people that have some kind of power over them (e.g., teachers).
As the parent poster pointed out, the ethical ground of the law, or how the case would be treated abroad would have no baring in court.
Regardless, I think Stallmam's mistake was to try to start a debate about Minsky's guilt and about statutory rape in the wrong place: a mailing list about Computer Science which includes both staff and students, especially given that he is not a random person, he is an authority figure when it comes to CS and at MIT.
The debates might be valid but the place, and time (given everything going on about the connections between Epstein and the MIT) are what is wrong here.
> The debates might be valid but the place, and time (given everything going on about the connections between Epstein and the MIT) are what is wrong here.
Yes. And it's such a Stallman thing to do, to have a valid debate regardless of circumstances (whether it was the time or the place to do it). He takes his principles to unheard-of extremes.... but at least, he is a principled man. I wish we had more people like him, TBH. It's one of the persons I don't always agree with, but I always found it very easy to respect his position.
Really this reminds me of a recent set of CNN opinion articles after the whole ridiculous Greenland thing. On video Trump referred to the comments by the Denmark PM as "nasty". CNN even has a headline "Trump calls Danish PM's response on Greenland 'nasty'".
Okay, but then they also ran a suite of opinion articles that said "Trump calls Denmark PM nasty" and then "Trumps Problem With Calling Women Nasty." I mean, look.. I get the thread and all that but that springboard article headline is just factually incorrect and then you have a whole analysis piece built off it. CNN has no way I'm aware of to report inaccuracies.
So much of news is just designed to get a rise out of people and EVERY site is guilty. It's particularly bad with opinion pieces which are, IMHO, tailored to specific demographics. News orgs hide behind the "opinion" label but really they just kill the whole orgs credibility. NYT keeps stepping in this; most recently with the Sunday Review piece on the new Kav book..
I'd say the big difference is that the press is accusing him of defending Epstein when in fact he's defending Minsky. Of course people may think that's still problematic, but that's not what the headlines are accusing him of doing.
I mean, let's put aside whether the person might have reasoned the other party was willing. This line of reasoning is ridiculous. If someone appears 100% willing to you, and there's absolutely nothing different from a genuinely willing person, why should you be at fault because somebody else put that person under duress, or because they were lying (under duress or otherwise).
If someone does a 100% legal thing according the information they know, and is not otherwise negligent, there is no crime they should be charged with. As it happens, in the US, statutory rape is the only one I'm aware of that does not follow this criterion; even manslaughter requires negligence (although I'm not making a point about that).
> somebody else put that person under duress, or because they were lying (under duress or otherwise)
It's like benefitting from any other kind of traffic, isn't it? If you benefit from a money laundering scheme or a fraud, you'd be charged with complicity, even if you took a lot of care into not inquiring about the provenance of the money. At least, that's how it's be judged in my country (France, and I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on that). I can't tell for other countries.
Even if the person who commited the crime had no knowledge that the other party was coerced? Why are they at fault because they were lied to and tricked into commiting a crime?
There are certain crimes for which intent doesn't matter, legally. This is one of them.
And likewise from a moral perspective: Minsky did harm her. Regardless of his knowledge of the situation at the time, I would expect him (were he still alive) to apologize and do whatever he could to try and heal the pain he caused.
However, I do also think it would reflect much differently on his character if he knew all the details of the situation he was in vs. if he did not. That, from what I've seen, is still unclear.
First, claiming ignorance isn't a strong defense. It wouldn't hold up in any court in America, so I have no reason to buy it as an argument.
However, if it did, to be fair, you would have to seriously consider if it is reasonable to assume that person was ignorant. For example, if you know your friend is a drug dealer and he asks you to "drop off a bag at another house", you would get the book thrown at you even if you didn't know they were drugs in the bag.
Having sex with a minor is a crime, regardless of coercion, because a minor is not capable of giving consent to sex with an adult, because of both cognitive differences and power imbalances.
If someone Minsky's age went out and started dating and having sex with high schoolers, he would go to jail. Period. Regardless of the exact social dynamics.
There's minor, and there's minor. Age of consent differs by state and country, quite a lot, everything from 14 y.o. to 21 y.o. plus special case exceptions by court.
Remember that before making absolute statements about mental powers.
By the way, coerced sex (sometimes rape, sometimes assault, sometimes pimping, in some places prostitution) is illegal among adults too. You can keep it extra illegal for minors.
Minority should not be an absolute but treated as a high bar. (The younger, the higher.)
Unfortunately legislatives are black and white in most countries, and people accede to it.
Mens rea ("guilty mind" aka criminal intent) is an important element for many crimes. People - generally - are inconsistent with regard to how much they think impact matters for a crime and how much they think intent matters. The law is also inconsistent, with itself, and with the opinions of the citizenry. In this case, US law (but not the laws of all countries) makes sex trafficking and statutory rape strict liability laws - only impact matters, not intent.
Stallman raised the question of Minsky's mens rea, suggesting that Minsky might not have had any criminal intent at all. To people who feel that mens rea should always be a criteria in criminal and moral judgement (such as myself), the existence or lack of existence of mens rea matters to Minsky's moral culpability.
With all that in mind, I'm dubious that Minsky could have been approached by a young woman and not had some degree of mens rea. At the very least, Minsky must have assumed the woman was a paid sex worker and recognized at least some possibility that she was trafficked and/or underage. I can't abide the notion that a old man would have mistaken the invitations of an uneducated young girl as genuine attraction.
>With all that in mind, I'm dubious that Minsky could have been approached by a young woman and not had some degree of mens rea. At the very least, Minsky must have assumed the woman was a paid sex worker and recognized at least some possibility that she was trafficked and/or underage. I can't abide the notion that a old man would have mistaken the invitations of an uneducated young girl as genuine attraction.
Lots of famous men of all ages are approached by groupies. Some accept their advances, some don't. I've never heard of any of them reporting the fact to the authorities.
To be precise Stallman argues that lack of mens rea at least should mean that it was not 'assault'.
In another place he also argues that it is not evident that Guiffre had sex with Minsky - she says she was directed to, but she does not say that she eventually did that, the lawyer did ask here where she went to do that and she answered this question but it is quite probable that she misunderstood the question (and instead answered the question where she was directed to do it) and there is a witness who says that Minsky turned her down. It is a fair argument for me.
He'd have a very hard time winning. In many jurisdictions there is a "substantial truth" doctrine: if a statement gives an impression that's substantially close to the truth, it's considered OK, even if technically false. Once you add in how many people typically react to this sort of thing...
I have no opinion on Stallman, he could very well be that awful person.
The twitter discussion[0] seemed to me to be very polarized and targeting rage with all the common traits of typical fake news/mass hysteria communication. Maybe it is just the way these things naturally come to daylight.
It is clear RMS was stunningly clueless to write anything about this, but surely we all know of similar engineers that would make a similar error? If everyone were held up to the same moral standard, we wouldn't have many people left in power! Just to be clear: I'm definitely not supporting hurting children (directly or indirectly) - I hope I'm not falling into the same tar pit.
I certainly respect RMS for what he created and his idealism (although last time I saw him talk he spent about half the time negatively pontificating about Linus and Linux, which seriously damaged his credibility IMHO).
It must be devastating to be on the receiving end of such ire.
Because RMS isn't just another socially awkward engineer. He is a leader and a part of a larger community and is therefore held to a higher standard. The reason for the higher standard is simple, leaders are entrusted with power and need to wield that power better than others. RMS has failed that test today.
> He is a leader and a part of a larger community and is therefore held to a higher standard.
I see plenty of political and tech leaders set extremely low moral standards. Why is RMS being used to set an example? Do you think RMS actually hurt any children?
His comments are tragically inept - but this seems to boil down to being targeted by breaking headlines such as the New York Post: "MIT scientist says Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was ‘entirely willing’".
I agree with you here. Stallman's comments on this topic are characteristically appalling, insensitive and pedantic, but I think the headlines printed about him are inaccurate and malicious. These publications have no stake in the matter of Stallman's status at MIT save to entice readers with the promise of scandal. I'm certainly not going to defend Stallman's character, but I think the retaliation against him is disproportionate. One can't help the feeling that when it comes to this kind of scandal there are plenty of bad actors willing to fan the flames for personal gain. I would definitely call into question the motivation of the authors of the articles on this event. Despite this, and despite the fact that I really dislike the modern use of the word 'problematic', I can't think of a better word to describe many of Stallman's statements and positions. For someone to be a community leader of any kind this kind of tone-deafness, even if only to politics, is unacceptable.
I wonder if any of what's been published about rms qualifies as libellous. His certainly seen serious damage to his reputation, and I think it's clear too that his words have been materially misrepresented.
I think the news (and many others) are misunderstanding what rms said (or they intentionally misrepresented his words).
The way I understand what rms said is that the victim would've acted ("presented herself") as willing to Minsky, while being coerced by Epstein. That does not imply she was actually willing in any way shape or form.
I think you're misunderstanding it too, based on your statement: "RMS doesn't seem to understand what willing means."
The way I see it, what rms did was (strategically) dumb and tactless, but not unethical at all.
It's funny how so many people try to split hairs regarding the exact wording, but even so: sleeping with an underage girl wouldn't have been fine, it would have been unethical, not to speak of illegal.
So RMS' defense of child abusers is stupid, harmful, malignant and yes, unethical.
It's a useful deflection from further examination of the slimy tentacles of Epstein's influence throughout tech and academia. Stallman is not terribly well-liked, and made the mistake of shooting off his mouth and grabbing onto the third rail hard with both hands at an inopportune time. He's a useful scapegoat to sacrifice up to Molloch.
Find a few women who've met RMS and ask them about their experience. For years I've been hearing stories from women about RMS that paint a pretty clear picture, and if you look on twitter, there's a number of threads about his abusive behavior towards women. One example: people kept plants around because he hates plants and that made it less likely he'd come around to harass them.
He's discussed his views on pedophilia for a very long time, and this was just the latest on that. It's finally the last straw that was able to bring enough attention on him for action to be taken. It should have been taken decades ago.
> He's discussed his views on pedophilia for a very long time, and this was just the latest on that
Yes, he has.
This is his view as of Friday[0]:
> 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.
Can you help me understand what's wrong with that view?
Maybe I'm missing something, but if I had made such a comment on a public platform and any of my previous employers learned of it, I could 100% expect to be terminated if it came to light. Whether his final philosophical view on the matter is morally correct or not is not the focus here. I can completely understand why a foundation would not want a man who apparently had to be talked into understanding why sex with a child is wrong to be its very visible leader.
You're talking about a role that has to inspire by example, someone responsible for advocating for your institution publicly, recruiting supporters, and so on. No one who has a history of making incredibly suspect comments about children and sex should expect to stay in such a role.
Incidents like this are NOT about setting up an ethics court and decide the morality or immorality of the person's views. They're about an organization waking up one morning and saying, You know what, we really would rather not have someone with a history of bizarre pro-pedophilic comments as our leader. For god's sake, how would you feel if your CEO had a personal web page with a history of arguing for lower age of consent laws? At a certain point people just don't want to come 'work for' such a person.
And really, who among us would be surprised to wake up and find "RMS indicted on child porn charges" on the front page news? People with normal views on child sex topics tend not to be the ones out there talking about 'ephebophilia' and "now I'm no psychiatrist, but here's my argument for why children actually CAN consent to sex with adults." I'm not saying I'm convinced he's a pedophile, or even that I believe him to maybe be one. It's just not a revelation that would shock me.
This wasn't a witch hunt. This should have happened a long time ago. He is a creep, and has been problematic for years. “He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it. Many female students avoided the corridor with his office for that reason…I was one of the course 6 undergrads who avoided that part of NE43 precisely for that reason. (the mattress was also known to have shirtless people lounging on it…)” — Bachelor’s in Computer Science, ‘99 All this and more https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...
> This wasn't a witch hunt. This should have happened a long time ago. He is a creep, and has been problematic for years. “He literally used to have a mattress on the floor of his office. He kept the door to his office open, to proudly showcase that mattress and all the implications that went with it. Many female students avoided the corridor with his office for that reason…I was one of the course 6 undergrads who avoided that part of NE43 precisely for that reason. (the mattress was also known to have shirtless people lounging on it…)”
Sorry, but you have to be explicit with your accusations. Call me naive, but if you say 'mattress and all the implications that went with it' in the context of hacker culture : the obvious implication is that he is a hacker, who likes to immerse himself in his work, pulls all-nighters. At worse it implies a lack of hygiene and a healthy separation between life and work. Okay a mattress might be taking to the concept a bit far but bean-bag culture is rooted in the earliest days of Xerox PARC, Microsoft, Apple (both Steve Jobs and Bill gates have talked about a lifestyle of sleeping in their office and not going home for days on end), Homebrew club, etc.
I read the medium article and its accompanying appendix, and imo, its scant on facts, and filled with weasel-wording, political posturing and self-obsession.
There is mention of a report of sexism in AI labs. But what are the facts of the report. Was Stallman implicated in this report? The article doesn't say so. It looks like the author ju just put it out there to make a association between RMS and sexism in the minds of the readers.
The only real factual account( by 'factual' account i mean explicit about the alleged details and facts of events) is the one where the management undergrad was hit on in the restaurant.
I think that targeting a "creepy" social misfit is one definition of a witch hunt.
We can mostly defend against men that give out creepy social cues. Guys that are not creepy are far harder to defend against or get justice against: a guy that knows how to present himself understands social signals (almost self defining) and they can often get away with a lot because of that.
Plenty of guys hit on young women (I saw a study that showed that men of any age say they want a 21 year old). Are we surprised to find out "teen" is a major keyword on porn sites? Many men with a social standing (or money) use that to their sexual advantage. Go to the pub and listen to some drunk bro's: there is a large number what a lot of men say is extremely disturbing. I think they are highly immoral; but the attitudes are common and we usually avoid the moral argument and simplify it with a legal argument (statutory rape laws which rightly protect our weak and vulnerable).
I don't doubt that RMS has been an arsehole, and his workplace, voluntary workplaces, friends, family and acquaintances should definitely make him accountable, and take action against arseholery.
However, what seems to be happening here is that Richard is getting publicly shamed and publicly tried and judged guilty for being creepy - no accountability required.
What’s truly remarkable is that you spent several paragraphs admitting that men tend to make offensive, sexist remarks and gestures, and then you use this to justify Stallman’s behavior. This is exactly why the tech industry NEEDS to do better.
>This is exactly why the tech industry NEEDS to do better.
By exchanging clearly visible markers against which action can be easily taken for unaccountable bullying and mob "justice" (which tends to unfairly advantage women in the same way you level your accusations)?
All you want is to give a different group the right to bully and oppress others rather than actually solving the problem. This isn't making things "better"; it's typically considered rather harmful, unless you're a sexist, racist, or both.
Calling Richard a creep is ad-hominum: judgement by social media.
I wasn't trying to say his behaviour is acceptable. It seems he needs to work on his social interactions (most of us need to work on that, and we should all fight for better).
The only reason for this brouhaha is that the media has attacked him. He wrote that she was coerced. The media has said he said she was willing.
Now plenty of words are being used to picture him as immoral.
What seems weird is that Richard comes across to me as idealistically moral, almost religiously moral: with the misfortune to have a popular wave crashing into his philosophical castle.
Homo is third declension masculine, hominum is plural genitive ("of men"). Here you need accusative, so ad hominem.
Case Singular Plural
Nominative homō hominēs
Genitive hominis hominum
Dative hominī hominibus
Accusative hominem hominēs
Ablative homine hominibus
Vocative homō hominēs
He slept in his office, and had ever since his house caught on fire, some years before I met him. I met him in 1984. When he moved his office to a rebuilt floor at tech square, he had a wall dividing the office into two halves. One half was his sleeping space, and the other, which was accessible from the hallway, was his working space.
He slept in his office, and had ever since his house caught on fire
Yeah. This is true.
He was intermittently homeless while developing the free software stuff. It was kind of homeless lite because he was a hacker and often slept at work.
He was unable to register to vote at one point because he listed his work address and described himself as a squatter. He got his right to vote when some interview in some national publication came out stating the same thing. At that point, the registrar of voters accepted his work address on his application.
> In the days of the PDP-1 only one person could use the machine, at the beginning at least. Several years later they wrote a timesharing system, and they added lots of hardware for it. But in the beginning you just had to sign up for some time. Now of course the professors and the students working on official projects would always come in during the day. So, the people who wanted to get lots of time would sign up for time at night when there were less competition, and this created the custom of hackers working at night. Even when there was timesharing it would still be easier to get time, you could get more cycles at night, because there were fewer users. So people who wanted to get lots of work done, would still come in at night. But by then it began to be something else because you weren't alone, there were a few other hackers there too, and so it became a social phenomenon. During the daytime if you came in, you could expect to find professors and students who didn't really love the machine, whereas if during the night you came in you would find hackers. Therefore hackers came in at night to be with their culture. And they developed other traditions such as getting Chinese food at three in the morning. And I remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from Chinatown. It was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, cause' that's such a calm time of day. It's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. It's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp, you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night.
> Another tradition that we began was that of having places to sleep at the lab. Ever since I first was there, there was always at least one bed at the lab. And I may have done a little bit more living at the lab than most people because every year of two for some reason or other I'd have no apartment and I would spend a few months living at the lab. And I've always found it very comfortable, as well as nice and cool in the summer. But it was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly can hacking, because you just don't want to stop. And then when you're completely exhausted, you climb over to the nearest soft horizontal surface. A very informal atmosphere.
You're going to have a hard time convincing anyone that women would have sex with RMS, let alone have sex with him on a mattress on the floor of his office. Jokes aside, this sounds downright unprofessional. I would have expected the institution to put this kind of behaviour in place.
considering according to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20991909 he apparently was homeless and lived out of his office for a while, yeah that's probably the definition of unprofessional.
Saying we wouldn't have anyone left in power of they were held up to this standard seems more damning to our current power structure than the moral standard at play here
1. If you are attacked by the media, you will lose in the court of public opinion (I expect we wouldn't know about this at all except for the egregiously misleading "news" headlines).
2. Never ever discuss toxic topics (particularly if you are either a little odd, or politically weak).
3. If you publically question anything about a witch hunt, you too will be branded as a witch.
4. Beware of getting poisoned by association (Epstein -> Minsky -> Stallman -> anyone defending RMS).
From what I can tell, the actual morals of RMS don't seem to be the actual issue here.
There is surely a modern Grimm parable in all of this.
As to #4, if you're actively defending particular people's views on sex with underage people, then yeah, people are going to view you negatively by association. The vast majority of people vehemently disagree with that view, and for the most part, people assume that if you defend the view, it's probably because you agree with it.
Your garden-variety human being with even the slightest social wherewithal would know better than to say some of Epstein’s victims were “entirely willing”.
This is not the fault of the media looking for witches to hunt. This is the result of a massively intelligent man deciding to spit into the political wind.
The whole point is that Richard said she was unwilling.
Here's the context "...plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein...".
Richard is talking about her being coerced -- to pretend that she was willing.
The witch hunt is taking the context (Richard presumes she was unwilling) and then twisting his words to make it appear that he said she was willing.
The moral dilemma is: is someone willing if they pretend to be willing? Let's guess she was paid to pretend to be willing (why else was she doing it?). Perhaps she was paid to be a honeypot (entrap someone by pretending to be interested in sex - it is at least plausible). I think we can all agree that the girl probably would prefer not to have to screw some random. Of course, any underage sex is breaking the law, and ignorance won't help you (in court or the media).
Richard's words could have been better, but the quotes in the public media (and you repeating the two key words) are clearly twisting his meaning 180 degrees.
> This is not the fault of the media looking for witches to hunt.
The media is at fault when it radically perverts meanings just to get eyeballs. Why pretend that there can only be one single canonical root cause?
> This is the result of a massively intelligent man deciding to spit into the political wind.
It seems obvious enough to me that Richard is definitely not "massively intelligent" when it comes to social nuance. We all have our strengths and weaknesses: many engineers cut themselves using their blunt EQ knives.
Not unexpected, but I'm surprised it happened so soon after he resigned from MIT/CSAIL.
Earlier today the director of the GNOME Foundation requested that RMS resign from the FSF, and said severing ties with the FSF could happen if he didn't step down.
I think there was more social pressure for him to resign from FSF, and more institutional pressure for him to resign from MIT/CSAIL. The institutional pressure probably wasn't as painful, but was more forceful. I think he'd probably been holding back the pressure he felt to get the FSF thing over with for a while, but hoping for the controversy to die down, but when he was forced (or practically forced) to resign from MIT/CSAIL it became clear he wasn't going to win, and he decided to get it over with. Perhaps he'll be sleeping better tonight.
What he said was stupid and disgusting. People sometimes over-estimate the amount of latitude the organization they work for will give them to do this.
The technology industry is taking baby-steps towards actual inclusivity and diversity of thought -- and not this dumbass "I want to be free to say stupid offensive shit with impunity" flavor of "inclusivity" that people around here seem to champion. That is a Good Thing and organizations like MIT and the FSF need to be very careful about whom they let represent them.
As far as I'm aware Stallman has neither been arrested nor has his website been torn down, so he's welcomed to continue to make whatever good and bad points he feels like and the rest of us are welcomed to judge him as we wish: smart, stupid, ignorable, or maybe even abhorrent to the point where maybe he shouldn't be representing a place like MIT. Or the FSF.
If your "inclusivity" stops at Stallman, it seriously lacks performance. You use the wrong word. What you desire is conformity.
edit: Additionally, because I think this isn't obvious here, Stallman opened up the knowledge about software to the whole world and put energy in keeping it that way. Anyone was able to profit from this.
He wants people to be treated in a uniform and equitable way, yes.
That doesn't mean people "have to conform", but that our treatment of people should not be diverse: it should be the same for everybody, and accomodating of their diversity within the bounds of acceptable behaviour.
RMS has been treated in the same way anybody else would be. He hasn't been given special treatment. We are therefore being consistent as a society in our treatment of him.
Right now, I can hear people already screaming about diversity of opinion, but they're missing the point: equality and diversity is not about a right for anybody to behave however they want, but for the treatment of those behaviours to be fair and equitable.
RMS has been treated fairly and equitably: he has not been arrested or imprisoned. MIT have behaved in a way consistent with any other employee, and FSF have been consistent with any other organisation trying to protect a public perception for a wider cause.
In this respect, he is not a brave contrarian warrior tackling an unjust society. He's a man who treats other people rudely and says things 95% of the population find unjustifably crude and offensive who has found himself at odds with clear and explicit employment law and codes of conduct.
> You use the wrong word. What you desire is conformity.
This seems to be a pretty common paradox.
The people who promote "diversity" (and sometimes even diversity of thought!), never accept anyone who wants to debate the nuances of that concept, nor how that may best be implemented.
Basically they demand conformity to the one "diverse" view and their definition of diversity. You're either with them or you're "part of the problem".
You'd think at some point they would notice how they come off ass utterly hypocritical.
There have also been numerous stories from those around him at MIT about inappropriate conduct with students and staff.
The flip side of diversity is inclusion and those actions ran counter to MIT's own policies on an inclusive workplace (if you want a legalistic justification for him needing to leave).
At the same time, though, diversity can't be a cover for actions that are harmful to the larger community. Many places in the world still have strict social pressures against other sexual orientations. Saying you want diversity and inclusion, but excluding gay people—that would be conformity. However, being around queer folks does not actively harm the workplace environment or social culture. However, asking new female students if they want to go out with you, or being grossly insensitive to the plight of sexual assault victims is harmful to a non-trivial portion of the lab.
I would argue that, while RMS is a rightfully accomplished activist and computer scientist, his removal at this point in time makes CSAIL a more inclusive place. Those who might stay away because they're worried about his reputation or hurtful insensitivity—say, young female students, often underrepresented in science—may be more willing to work there.
Freedom of speech means that people are free to defend what other people find morally objectionable. The idea that the "leaders" should be morally pure is understandable, but ultimately very elitist.
The situation with Chomsky is not equivalent to this. Chomsky did not want Faurisson prosecuted by French law for his views. Chomsky did not himself express the bad views.
Stallman here was the one expressing the bad views, so he is Faurisson not Chomsky.
freedom of speech merely means the government can't act against you. it doesn't bind any other entity from responding freely: in fact their response is also freedom of speech
RMS was defending Minsky, awkwardly. As someone who has a history of social awkwardness, he should be forgiven for this. He's been a good steward of the FSF, which has doing important work in the service of free (read: non-backdoored) hardware lately. I know there are good people still at the FSF, but I can only hope they are as incorruptible and dogged as RMS.
The way this attack came suddenly out of the depths makes me suspect something coordinated. It's too similar to how Tor was seized, and how Linus was almost dethroned. There's something nasty afoot, and I don't like it one bit.
Yeah all he really wanted was a platform to disseminate his ideas. The open source community has been a great place for that to happen, and I hope the legacy of his ideas related to freedom of information, etc. get the honored legacy that they deserve.
But now that he has an audience there's nothing stopping him creating an independent non-profit to tackle these issues philosophically. There's no need anymore to be the gatekeepers of the actual code. It should be free, after all.
So that's where I'm putting my money: Stallman announces a new organization to philosophize freely, not involved directly with code, and the FSF becomes more elastic on certain topics (integrating with other toolchains, etc.).
"Accountability" for an awkward statement? You'll have to excuse me if I don't think someone deserves a public flogging for poor phrasing and awful timing.
When you're talking about organizations that are CRITICAL to software freedom, I'd much rather have an incorruptible but thoroughly awkward ideologue in charge than an unknown quantity. Who comes next? Will they compromise on things that shouldn't be compromised? It's another thing to worry about.
Sometimes yes. Leaders are always accountable, but not always responsible for outcomes, RMS was responsible for his actions, now he must be held accountable.
Why not leave that to the justice system instead of an angry mob? Why should people be held accountable by a mob? That's a horrible state that I had thought civilization had finally climbed out of, but it's back again with internet mobs and people being fired as punishment for failing to correctly adhere to the mob's arbitrary preferences. If you really think he did something wrong, then try to get the law changed so future people won't repeat the same offense.
He didn't break the law, nor did he do something worthy of judicial punishment, but that does not mean that he can not or should not be held to account. RMS lost a leadership position, that's all.
And Let's be clear, that is lawful is not necessarily moral, that which is moral is not necessarily lawful.
If it was just a one-off thing isolated from other recent events, you might be correct. But due to Epstein's association with MIT and his other history of controversial statements and actions with FSF, they couldn't just let him make an apology and hide out for awhile.
The fact that this is a more friendly forum than the general public, and yet the majority of people who are sticking up for him here seem to be anonymous conspiracy theorists and people who want to advocate lowering the age of consent, seems to be pretty damning in itself for his prospects.
A history of bad behavior isn’t a reason to excuse bad behavior: it is a reason not to excuse bad behavior because the person has had many chances to change that behavior and decided not to.
And he didn't "Have his wang cut" - He sincerely apologized, he chose to step away from the kernel for a period to work on.. well not being such an asshole.. and now he's back being a good community steward. Which seems like a fine outcome?
The pendulum has swung from "we give powerful, highly skilled, or accomplished people a carte blanche license to be total assholes" to a mentality where we're willing to ostracize people for certain types of assholery.
Has it swung too far? Perhaps. I have a rule: "society always over-corrects."
Should it swing back? No. Some moderation might be in order, but I'm not interested in going back to the time of "but Michael Jackson was so talented!"
(I'm not comparing Stallman to Michael Jackson, just using the latter as an example of a mentality.)
I don't personally have a dog in this fight, but I do get the sense that perhaps this was not an isolated incident but more of the straw that broke the camel's back.
Sure there is. How about: "the deposition never actually accuses Minsky of having sex with anyone in the first place"? Or how about, "Greg Benford says (https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339725/) he was personally present at the incident and witnessed there was no sex"? Wow, who knew it was so easy to defend 'a child molester' for whom there's 'no way to defend' them.
1. The deposition that's been made public doesn't allege sex with anyone as it was in a lawsuit against Maxwell for trafficking activities. That's outside its scope.
2. I don't find Benford credible.
3. Minsky kept taking Epstein's money and holding conferences on Epstein's island for over a full decade after the events Giuffre and Benford describe took place. Is there any benign explanation for that?
The benign explanation is that he didn't know Epstein was a monster (few outside the DA's office did until 2018) and that he accepted funding for AI research.
Literally any Google search of the man's name would show that he's a fucking monster. It was never a secret, much less after he was convicted of trafficking an underage prostitute in 2008. Nobody can plead ignorance of his crimes. Everyone who took money from him, traveled with him (and his young 'friends'), is absolutely guilty by association of his continued crimes.
Excuse me? There is precisely zero evidence suggesting that MM did anything whatsoever wrong, or, in fact, had sex with an underage woman. There is an accusation by a different woman who calls the woman claiming to have had sex with MM a 'liar' in court testimony.
Anybody who has spent time around RMS knows there are problematic behaviours in almost every interaction. This is not just about this one incident, but this one incident where he defends "voluntary pedophilia" was obviously the last straw.
I've met him a few times, put him up on my sofa once. I'd say almost every 15-30 minutes in his presence I would stop myself from saying "that's not an appropriate way to behave" or "please don't say that in that way, you're being rude", for fear of insulting him. Perhaps if more people had done that rather than being in awe and reverence (and there are many people who treat him that way), or just looking for a quiet life (my excuse), we wouldn't be here now.
It is clear to me that he has very low EQ or at least empathy for other people. I have spoken to others who have interacted with him who have suggested he might be on the autistic spectrum, and whilst I am not qualified to make a diagnosis, should such a diagnosis be made it would not surprise me.
At the weekend whilst this was blowing up I suggested he needed help. I think he is genuinely completely unaware why any of these statements would cause others to question his values. Freedom of speech is not a right to be a jerk, and he is unaware that he is seen as a jerk by a lot of people because of the many things he has said and done over many years.
It seems there are many people here who likewise are blind-sided as to why suggesting an underage girl would be entirely willing to have sex with an adult and presented herself willingly would be nothing more than a 'controversial opinion'. There are also people who think this is the only thing he's done that has caused problems - it's not.
I think there are deeper issues at play here, and he would benefit from counselling or therapy of some sort. Most people could even without his behaviour, so I'm definitely going to suggest it would be useful in his case. At a minimum it would help him navigate having a huge chunk of his life disappear over the last 24 hours.
I wish him well, but like almost every ex-colleague of his I've spoken to or who has been outspoken on social media about this: the FSF and MIT/CSAIL will now be a better place to be for others, and I hope that RMS gets the help he has needed for a long time.
I wish him well, but I also know that a large number of people will breathe a sigh of relief now that they can go about their work and studies without having to navigate him.
> an underage girl would be entirely willing to have sex with an adult and presented herself willingly would be nothing more than a 'controversial opinion'.
But this is not what he said. He clearly states coerced. I think the outrage should come only after a correct reading comprehension.
> It seems there are many people here who likewise are blind-sided as to why suggesting an underage girl would be entirely willing to have sex with an adult and presented herself willingly would be nothing more than a 'controversial opinion'.
As what he said is literally presented, it is a possible interpretation of the facts: that Minsky may not have known she was coerced because of Epstein's instructions. How much of Minsky's culpability this erases if Minsky did indeed have sex with her (which is disputed itself) is open to debate.
Buuuuuuut, that's a pretty nuanced point to make. It needs to be made more carefully and respectfully to not just descend into rape apologia. Epstein's (and maybe Minsky's) victims are still alive and have feelings. And we want to create a better culture.
And if you're the guy who has already gone on record for not knowing why "voluntary pedophilia" is OK--- maybe you're not the guy to make this point. Because, after all, there's plenty of evidence that you're not so good at it, and your history taints it all.
From your description and other things I'm reading here, I somewhat expect him to commit suicide.
His work life is over, and he doesn't seem the type to be able to transition to anything else.
He'll write a letter saying: "I've done everything I intended, and can do nothing further."
RMS: If you are reading this: I highly suggest you throw yourself into a major programming project. Something you've been trying to finish for years, but never had time.
But he's a freethinker, and freethinkers necessarily exist outside the mainstream. So, despite not liking him, I also don't like this turn of events.
It does seem arbitrary to me that the same sexual encounter is classified as rape in Arizona and not rape in Virginia. I suppose we have to draw that line somewhere arbitrary. But I wonder if it was a mistake to classify what is called "statutory rape" as "rape" at all. We can make it illegal without calling it rape.
That said, to me, this doesn't seem like a hill worth dying on. But then Stallman is not known for being picky about hills. People like him (or loathe him) because he's principled, and therefore no hill is too small.
He can continue to be a freethinker all his life, which is his right. What isn't though, is having unconditional support from two powerful industry organizations. They can choose their own values, same as him.
> That said, to me, this doesn't seem like a hill worth dying on
I don't think he saw it as a hill worth dying on, just a random hill he happened to be shot on. It's part of a random scattering of thoughts he makes public.
Either way, I'm cancelling my FSF donations for caving into this witch hunt. It's long demise will be helmed by people that stand for nothing less they offend someone.
It's the problem now, but specifically this tendency of Stallman is why the FSF exists at all, and why there was a compiler and a complete, freely available Unix userspace already available for Linus to bundle with his kernel, and voila, free Unix.
It's also the reason we have an Open Source movement, that being the watered down and more corporately palatable version of Stallman's idealistic vision.
Yes, he's totally uncompromising, has no sense of pragmatic tradeoffs or weighing one thing against another or deciding what is a good hill to die on. That's not the way I think is best to live my life, and it's probably best that most people don't live theirs that way either. Still, there should be a place in the world for people like him to have the freedom to be able to create and run their own organization with their own ideals.
> Either way, I'm cancelling my FSF donations for caving into this witch hunt.
If the FSF experiences a drop in donations couldn't they interpret that as people trying to distance themselves with Stallman, and he's basically synonymous with the FSF?
The "turn of events" in this case is losing his job because he made the organisations associated with him look bad. And I think it's completely fair for them to kick him to the curb in this case. No one person too important to lose if they turn into a liability. And in this case, I think RMS was well past that point.
And what of all of the qualified developers who are excluded from the community by ignorant or bigoted people in positions of power? What of their technological ability?
You are talking about a brilliant man actually getting fired, vs some hypothetical what-if that hasn't been proven.
Why not go after actual occurrences of discrimination, rather than assuming anytime some speaks out in a non-PC manner, that it means they are also going to discriminate against others? This is arresting for murder before it happens. It's the canonical example of "thought crime".
I have worked in jobs where there have been very strange creepy people, both women and men. Some are angry and tense. Some are odd and talk restless or slightly disturbing stuff that make everyone uncomfortable. But if they do their work well they can stay. Others give them some room. It's called tolerance.
If RMS was just random superhacker doing his thing. I would defend him. His boss should find a position for him where he can contribute and other people should feel free to feel uncomfortable and avoid him.
But RMS is de facto leader and public figure in movement that is also political. He does not deserve the same level of consideration as normal HR headache would. Even if everything against him would be completely unjust, there is no requirement for just treatment for top leaders. They can be sacked for any reason whatsoever.
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