Good point. I read the entire email thread and find the consequences entirely predictable, acceptable and proportionate to his actions.

People: go read his email and make up your own mind about whether the punishment is proportionate to the crime.(And take a few minutes to be appalled at the quality of the arguments for that particular witch hunt.)

The man is known for not keeping his mouth shut when he sees something that bothers him. While I may not like his politics I agree that he should speak his mind.

&quot;Waded in&quot; is exactly the right phrase. RMS is neither a legal expert nor a moral philosopher. Commenting on the definition of assault and the nature of consent is outside his field of expertise and he should have just replied with a curt &quot;I will not be attending&quot;.My personal takeaway is that it&#x27;s important to understand the limitations of your own knowledge before succumbing to the urge to comment on something.

Thank you!I had to scroll really deep in this page to understand some context. Because the link of this page goes just to say &quot;Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, resigned as president and from its board of directors.&quot;The discussion on this page expresses many personal opinions, many interpretations and a very small amount of facts.I personally had to go somewhere else to understand what happened [1] (in German only), yes it is a strong opinion, but at least with references to back the claims up.For me Richard Stallman is a hero. Through his work he made me discover a lot about IT and his life showed me that there are still people that are fighting for their cause without compromise and personal corruption and are ready to give a lot for the society. I never did and never will do as much as he did for society - and therefore I am thankful that there are people like him to be inspired.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.fefe.de&#x2F;?ts=a37ef6b6" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.fefe.de&#x2F;?ts=a37ef6b6</a>

It&#x27;s pretty incredible reading the comments on that bit, and noticing how the battle lines are drawn almost perfectly along gender (with a few male defectors, but no female)

Context: RMS waded into the MIT Epstein scandal<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...</a>&gt; I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it
is absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation.

Please keep it civil. Otherwise any good points you make could be obscured by your tone.

Do you spend a lot of time at work having your vulnerability to rape talked about by your boss?

&gt;Again, this mailing list has undergraduate students on it. It is likely some of them are “18 years old or 17”.What a horribly asinine point. If you’re an undergraduate student and unable to deal with uncomfortable opinions, you are too immature to be a university student. The further infantilization of college students, and worse, college staff, never ceases to amaze me.

That second one was an off the deep end rant.1. It totally ignores the fact that it&#x27;s possible to be highly respectable for some things and not for other things. Stallman has always been a jerk, but he&#x27;s also always been trying to fight the good fight. Washington had slaves, that doesn&#x27;t mean we should hate him.2. You don&#x27;t get to call out people for indicating that men are better at some things, and then point out that women are better at some things. Either you&#x27;re allowed to believe in differences based on sex or you aren&#x27;t.I&#x27;ve never been a big fan of Stallman because I think he&#x27;s a little to far into the realm of zealot. However, he is good for society as a whole because, in general, he&#x27;s fighting for the right things. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s right to condemn him, throw the baby out with the bath water, because he&#x27;s an idiot about some things.

There is a mailing list thread that was copied and sent to VICE.Note, the headline and article body of this post contain lies to make the story more clickable, but if you scroll to the bottom there is a widget that contains the 20 page mailing list thread. The other participants’ names besides RMS were redacted. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;9ke3ke&#x2F;famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;9ke3ke&#x2F;famed-computer-sci...</a>

Page 7 of this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;6405929-09132019142056-0001.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;6405929-091320191420...</a>

Is there an original source anywhere? Was this a private mailing list thread? I’d just like to see the content on its own not surrounded by a medium blog or vice commentary.

More information on‒what I guess‒is the relevant backstory (RMS making reprehensible statements related to the Epstein scandal) can be found (among other places) in this blog post [1] by Matthew Garrett (original source referenced in the post is [2]).[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjg59.dreamwidth.org&#x2F;52587.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mjg59.dreamwidth.org&#x2F;52587.html</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...</a>

Did he resign from MIT? If so, he won&#x27;t be sleeping well- he actually lived in his office (it was also his residence)

I think there was more social pressure for him to resign from FSF, and more institutional pressure for him to resign from MIT&#x2F;CSAIL. The institutional pressure probably wasn&#x27;t as painful, but was more forceful. I think he&#x27;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&#x2F;CSAIL it became clear he wasn&#x27;t going to win, and he decided to get it over with. Perhaps he&#x27;ll be sleeping better tonight.

GNOME, I knew it. Happy to use xfce only. GNOME is dangerous cancer.

Not unexpected, but I&#x27;m surprised it happened so soon after he resigned from MIT&#x2F;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&#x27;t step down.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.halon.org.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;gnome-foundation-relationship-gnu-fsf&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.halon.org.uk&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;gnome-foundation-relations...</a>

I believe it. I mean, he&#x27;s the same guy who picked something off his foot and ate it[0]. He clearly doesn&#x27;t understand or care about behaving in a socially acceptable way.[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=67KtxG_0DVo#t=1m58s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=67KtxG_0DVo#t=1m58s</a>

Note that &quot;nutjob&quot; and &quot;mental health issues&quot; are name-calling and I suspect against the HN guidelines e.g. see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=by%3Adang%20name-calling&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a>

you know, i saw Stallman at a conference once and the nice people at FSF were also there. FSF as a whole is doing important work and liked the talks they gave and how they were talking about some of the issues ivolved.Stallman on the other side came across as a nutjob. And it wasn’t because of his principles (which if you think about it are great and something to actually aspire to - at least in connection to software) but because of his behavior. Being antisocial or making a claim without paying attention to the social context or the setting the way he managed to do leads me to believe that he may have some sort of mental health issues. again: all respect for his work and principles when it comes to software dissolved by anti-social behavior.

This is a good step.Stallman has been a liability as a figurehead for a long time, and software freedom deserves better standard-bearers.I saw Stallman once at a public lecture. He was incredibly rude, but is seemingly oblivious to how obnoxious he is being (he struck me as somebody heavily on the spectrum).I hate to think how many people have written off the cause of software freedom as a joke because of his conduct.People around him ought to be telling him in stronger terms that his views and general manner are unacceptable.

When there is significant new information in a major ongoing story, standard practice is to have a new thread about the latest development, and let the earlier thread fall off the front page.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=&quot;significant%20new%20information&quot;&amp;sort=byDate&amp;type=comment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;qu...</a>

It&#x27;s good context, but that one was focused on his MIT resignation, &amp; predates his resignation from the FSF.

The previous thread was <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20989696" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20989696</a>.

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?

Stallman wrote:
&quot;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.&quot;Here&#x27;s the Vice headline (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;9ke3ke&#x2F;famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;9ke3ke&#x2F;famed-computer-sci...</a>):
Famed Computer Scientist Richard Stallman Described Epstein Victims As &#x27;Entirely Willing&#x27;
(HN discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20965319" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20965319</a> )New York Post (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;mit-scientist-says-epstein-victim-virginia-giuffre-was-entirely-willing-report&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;mit-scientist-says-epstein-vic...</a>): &quot;MIT scientist says Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre was ‘entirely willing’: report&quot;Fox News (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foxnews.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;mit-professor-jeffrey-epstein-associate-entirely-willing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.foxnews.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;mit-professor-jeffrey-epstein-ass...</a>): &quot;MIT scientist defended Jeffrey Epstein associate in leaked emails, claimed victims were ‘entirely willing’&quot;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&#x27;t. That&#x27;s not okay.

I mean, let&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;m aware of that does not follow this criterion; even manslaughter requires negligence (although I&#x27;m not making a point about that).

I&#x27;d say the big difference is that the press is accusing him of defending Epstein when in fact he&#x27;s defending Minsky. Of course people may think that&#x27;s still problematic, but that&#x27;s not what the headlines are accusing him of doing.

Mens rea (&quot;guilty mind&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;s moral culpability.With all that in mind, I&#x27;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&#x2F;or underage. I can&#x27;t abide the notion that a old man would have mistaken the invitations of an uneducated young girl as genuine attraction.

What is the counter argument for what Stallman wrote? I&#x27;ve seen that the &quot;press is going too hard on him&quot;, but, honestly, I think they were justified. What is the &quot;big difference&quot; to you? If someone, personally, said to me that that someone be absolved of a crime, because the other, coerced, party was &quot;willing&quot; at that moment, I&#x27;d seriously question their morals.

On the same tabloid that blatantly lies on the headline of another article about the same issue?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;9ke3ke&#x2F;famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;9ke3ke&#x2F;famed-computer-sci...</a>

Direct link to the document:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;6405929-09132019142056-0001.html?embed=true&amp;responsive=false&amp;sidebar=false" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.documentcloud.org&#x2F;documents&#x2F;6405929-091320191420...</a>

The full thread is public, so folks can read it for themselves: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;ne8b47&#x2F;two-researchers-resign-in-protest-over-mit-media-labs-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;ne8b47&#x2F;two-researchers-re...</a>Scroll down to the inline doc reader widget. Background: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec210794" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...</a>

The claim &quot;he defended Epstein and says his victims were willing&quot;, as for example the Vice article writes, is not substantially close to the truth. It is false absolutely.

He&#x27;d have a very hard time winning. In many jurisdictions there is a &quot;substantial truth&quot; doctrine: if a statement gives an impression that&#x27;s substantially close to the truth, it&#x27;s considered OK, even if technically false. Once you add in how many people typically react to this sort of thing...<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dmlp.org&#x2F;legal-guide&#x2F;substantial-truth" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dmlp.org&#x2F;legal-guide&#x2F;substantial-truth</a>

Before jumping to criticize Stallman, be aware: there is a big difference between what today&#x27;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.

I&#x27;ve always heard the person who brings a company to a turning point might not be the one to make the turn. Maybe it&#x27;s the same for movements. Open source went a long way with his poor behavior, but now it&#x27;s likely to become a liability as open source spreads further into a world of collapsed context and diverse experiences.

I knew he no longer works on GCC and many other projects but I thought he still contributed to emacs. Looking at the recent commits on GitHub, it appears I was wrong about that.Did he have mainly a supervisory role at the FSF or was he just giving talks lately and no longer actively contributing?

&gt; and will RMS stop working on emacs and other software?Has he still been contributing code? My impression was always that he wrote the first versions of emacs,gcc,... many years ago, and many other people have taken over in the intervening decades. I&#x27;m quite confident he isn&#x27;t working on gcc anymore.

A good comparison by another poster today here between RMS’ statements on the mailing list and the lies the news media published about them <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20990426" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20990426</a>I wonder what this means for the influence of the FSF in general. And will RMS stop working on emacs and other software?

Yeah, his comments were absolutely disgusting. People here are acting like the media is railroading him. No, he was quite literally defending child rape.

In my original post, &#x27;making mistakes&#x27; was put before &#x27;out of context&#x27;, the Internet doesn&#x27;t allow anyone to have a 2nd chance of doing anything. Once you are branded as something, it will stuck with you forever, erasing any previous achievement or contribution you have done. And I don&#x27;t like that.

it&#x27;s not out of context. you can read his own posts.

No one bats an eye about Brendan Eich because he did nothing wrong

The internet _does_ forget though. Brendan Eich was forced out of Mozilla, a project he co-founded, and now nobody seems to bat an eye at him being at Brave.

The Internet doesn&#x27;t forget, so everyone can be branded mysogynist&#x2F;mysandry&#x2F;pedophile&#x2F;etc.. just by making mistakes or having taken quotes out of context. People have limited attention and the media profits on showing the ugliness of others. This is not how it should be but I don&#x27;t know how to fix that...

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?

Oh good, another dog whistle to look out for.

&quot;C-x C-c&quot; should become a new rallying cry for valuing technological ability over political beliefs.

C-x C-c.Thank you for bringing the FSF into the world, Richard.Whatever comes out of this and whatever comes next, your philosophy on software freedom has influenced us in innumerable ways.

For what it&#x27;s worth he retracted that statement. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stallman.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stallman.org&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2019-jul-oct.html#14_Septe...</a>

No one is asking you to support his statement. No one agrees with someone else on every issue. I don&#x27;t agree with him either.The important thing is to agree on the issue at hand: software.

Forget about the content of the statements for a moment.Imagine a person expresses skepticism of an idea you consider &quot;settled.&quot; Do you:1. demand the person be let go from his&#x2F;her current position2. provide evidence that counters the skepticismIf the correct response is (1), then you yourself are at risk of a Stallman exit. Every one of us holds at least one point of skepticism that one or more groups will be deeply offended by.The liberal idea, under assault form all shades of the political spectrum, depends on (2) being the correct response.

It is rather hard to support his statement of his &quot;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&#x27;t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.&quot;

&gt; Demanding the same standard of evidence we demand in court and science to disrupt human power structures helps those with power retain it and use it against those who have less power.Okay sure, but you&#x27;re talking about loosening a standard for accuracy of conviction... This means that you can decrease failures to convict truly guilty people—but in equal proportion you will also increase convictions of innocent people.This does not sound like a well thought out strategy.

Demanding the same standard of evidence we demand in court and science to disrupt human power structures helps those with power retain it and use it against those who have less power.Also what he said is fully public, so I don&#x27;t understand what you, or he, is objecting to.

There are subtleties about what constitutes a minor. The age of consent varies from 12 to 21 depending on the country [0]. That appears to include variation even in the US.On the one hand, the law is very clear because there needs to be a clear line in the sand to decide if people get sent to jail or not. On the other hand, there are clearly open cultural questions about what we should get angry about. Pick any standard you like, and the majority of the world currently disagrees.In my country of Australia we seem to be using 16. So in Australia maybe there was no crime at all. I dunno, I havn&#x27;t looked in to this sort of law very deeply.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Age_of_consent" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Age_of_consent</a>

Wow, wait. I get what your point is, but minors will continue doing it, and it is only with adults who they can’t consent with. Obviously minors can consent in some contexts, otherwise it would be a huge mess morally and legally (if two 14 year olds have sex, do they both go to jail because neither can consent? Also see the mess we’ve got into with kids sexting each other).Let’s not criminalize kids being kids because of some strict morality code.

A &#x27;minor&#x27; is a societal construct that varies over cultures and time. In Biblical Jewish cultures this was set at puberty ~ year 12. In some modern Islamic cultures its may be ~ year 9. In japan it used to be 13.Minors cannot consent because society has removed that right from them.Now I suspect we may agree on the general outcome of these rules, but I do find these &#x27;religious&#x27; arguments distasteful, regardless from which camp they get issued.

I get what you&#x27;re saying, but minors can and do legally consent under various close-in-age laws, and the age of consent is usually lower than the age of legal majority anyway. I certainly don&#x27;t agree with Stallman&#x27;s comments, but the law is subtle.

Ok. I am not sure that I should be writing this response...but with the madness prevalent in the world today, I don’t care anymore that this is on some random online nook..because I want to heard.To say that minors cannot consent is absolutely horrifying to me. I would have felt ‘raped’ of my free agency to choose if I had been told as a minor that I ‘cannot consent’.I was a minor. I consented. I was a sexual being just as I was a human being. Minors have to do non sexual adult things ALL the time. I still see adults well into their 40s and 50s who are immature compared to me when I was a minor. So age is a non-factor.While I DO acknowledge that child sexual abuse occurs as does trafficking and that paedophiles exist out there, when my thoughts and actions and consent when I was a minor is ERASED and my decisions deemed irrelevant, I don’t know how to feel about it.Reactions in the exact order of how I felt when I read ‘Minors cannot consent’ : Confusion. Anger. Understanding. Annoyance. Anger.Some minors do adult non sexual things and make adult non sexual decisions all the time..sometimes because they don’t have a choice. Why is it that when it comes to sexual consent, the same minor does not have any agency?I am trying to understand. It is difficult for me to accept that I am a non-being as a minor.Please don’t start a flame war. I really want to understand why this is so and communicate as to why the blanket ‘minors cant consent’ is disempowering and has not really made the world a better safer place.I also want to know what is a better and more effective solution to child sexual abuse(or any kind of sexual abuse) to replace ‘minors cannot consent’.

Since the prefrontal cortex doesn&#x27;t finish developing until the age of 25, do you think that we should change our definition of what a minor is?

I&#x27;m sorry, did you read his blog post? It was disgusting. He was trying to argue the subtleties of child rape. There are no subtleties. Minor&#x27;s cannot consent.

Was he though? It seems to me that all that Stallman said was lets please figure out exactly what Minsky did.

The line of Stallman apologists over the years is almost as long as Epstein’s.

That&#x27;s taking what he said way out of context.

&gt;Regardless of what low regard the man might be held as a person, he&#x27;s being persecuted for having expressing ideas, demanding proof of claims, advocating for objective standards, and asking questions. These are all hallmarks of scientific inquiry.Defending the rape of trafficked children is not a &quot;hallmark of scientific inquiry&quot;.

But I&#x27;m not so sure if we are better off.That precedent creates a stigma when discussing such topics. Let&#x27;s say that you don&#x27;t quite understand a particular viewpoint (doesn&#x27;t have to be this - another good topic is racism &amp; discrimination). Where do you go to learn more about the topic? Especially when you&#x27;re aspiring to be a leader, this stigma incentivizes holding on to half-baked ideas that you simply can&#x27;t discuss with anyone. That, in turn, creates a culture of double-speak.So, in other words, good first-order effects, but bad second-order effects.

He’s being forced to resign from an advocacy organization for being a shithead who defends child rape. It sets the precedent that you can’t defend reprehensible acts and still be considered a community leader. We are all better off for it.

For what it&#x27;s worth, those are also hallmarks of crankery. A creationist will happily express ideas, ask questions, and demand proof of claims until the Second Coming. An anti-vaxxer will argue for more research and more caution and advocate for what they themselves regard as objective standards before letting their children be vaccinated - and all the time be effectively telling people that it&#x27;s better to be dead than autistic. Supporting them for their apparent scientific interests is merely supporting their message. A homeopath has an entire field of professional associations, licensing, and regulation to point to.What determines whether you&#x27;re advocating for scientific inquiry is whether you&#x27;re arguing in good faith for positions that are in genuine need of inquiry, not whether you have the trappings of scientific research.

&quot; I am sad that debate on this topic essentially can&#x27;t happen.&quot;It could happen if your point about power and consent was taken as a given (at least in the context of this topic).

&gt;That said, I think Stallman&#x27;s position really is fundamentally wrong and problematic.So you have the default opinion anyone in our society will have. I&#x27;m interested in what the heretic has to say why we are wrong.However with what has happened to Stallman I doubt I ever will. A shame because something has gone hugely wrong when half of all children are thinking of suicide.

He seems to have expressed a couple distinct arguments:1. It isn&#x27;t pedophilia if the person is sexually mature. Pedophilia is sex with prepubescent children.2. He draws a distinction between statutory rape (can&#x27;t legally say yes according to the law, but otherwise willing and sexually mature) and forcible rape (when someone says no). He made a point about how statutory rape wouldn&#x27;t be considered rape if it happened in a different location (e.g. Italy) or if the person&#x27;s birthday were slightly adjusted.I agree with you that in the Epstein case you have a situation with a dramatic power imbalance. Stallman seems to consider Epstein a serial rapist (possibly for that fact?). He seems to be more pushing back on the pedophilia accusations.Also - there seems to be a thread lost. It really looks like Epstein was a US Intelligence Officer filming powerful people having sex with young women (including foreign officials) to obtain leverage on them for the United States. This whole aspect of the conversation seems to have melted away in the various other controversies.

To defend Minsky and Prince Andrew, there’s no evidence they knew she was underage. She also appeared in a photo with Andrew and Ghisline Maxwell. Perhaps he knew she was underage but for a member of royalty to fly to a private island and have underage sex with 8+ girls at once is a serious allegation which is what she claimed. Maybe it’s true but at least one of the accused by her (the famous lawyer involved) has claimed to have evidence that she is lying — or more precisely, exaggerating her story.My ex-girlfriend dated Prince Andrew (she was in her late 20s). I’ve been around some of these people in South Florida and LA. A lot of allegedly good people will ignore red flags but people openly targeting underage girls seems to be isolated to only one or two principals.Of course, all of this is wrong —- even this concept of pleasure parties where young (over 18) girls are brought to billionaire parties often by younger guys. Turning regular girls into “sugar babies” or prostitutes is a major problem.

I also disagree with his opinion on this topic. Strongly.But is it reasonable for someone to be essentially fired for having an incorrect opinion?

Did he resign because of these comments &#x2F; opinions? Or you are commenting on his opinions[edit] seems the resignation is due to the comments and I’m living under a rock

&gt; Legally, sex with underaged people is rape regardless of consentYes and no. With a 17 year old, in some jurisdictions, it&#x27;s rape in such and such degree, but in other jurisdictions, it&#x27;s a separate crime, and in other jurisdictions it&#x27;s not a crime at all. I think the stronger argument is that it&#x27;s illegal&#x2F;immoral, rather than getting stuck on a single word.

&gt; a situation where simple &quot;free choice&quot; is made a mockery of.I&#x27;m not so sure. &quot;Free choice&quot; today as defined by those on the left is &quot;free to make choices independent of constraints imposed by personal capacity or personal resources&quot;, whereas it has historically been interpreted as &quot;free to make choices independent of constraints imposed by other humans&quot;.The problem with the former definition of free choice is that it requires encroaching on the latter definition of free choice.If you have two people that are equally poor, both are equal in terms of having free choice under both definitions.If one of those people becomes wealthy, they continue to be equal under the latter definition of free choice, but are unequal under the former definition even though nothing has changed in the circumstances of the one that became neither richer nor poorer than he was previously.

&gt; Legally, sex with underaged people is rape regardless of consent.Yes, but how do you understand the wide age variations for &quot;consent&quot; worldwide?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ages_of_consent_in_Asia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Ages_of_consent_in_Asia</a>

&gt; Legally, sex with underaged people is rape regardless of consent.There are many jurisdictions where this is not the case.

I too, am a fan of Stallman&#x27;s accomplishments and I am sad that debate on this topic essentially can&#x27;t happen.That said, I think Stallman&#x27;s position really is fundamentally wrong and problematic.Legally, sex with underaged people is rape regardless of consent. Morally, that stance really is justified in the most common circumstance - when the non-underaged person has more power and experience than the underaged person. In the case under discussion, you have that in spades, double spades.The sad thing is that individuals interested in freedom, who make serious contributions to some things called free, don&#x27;t notice that the massive imbalances of wealth today have produced a situation where simple &quot;free choice&quot; is made a mockery of.And yeah, the thing about inquisition atmosphere, imo, is that it doesn&#x27;t reveal the rot behind all the &quot;mere&quot; abuse of power.

&gt; In its most literal form I don&#x27;t know if I would say I disagreed with the core of what StallmanYou qualify this, but that is basically the core of what Stallman supporters are looking at.Saying something that is literally true, in an industry which is known to be stuffed with some very literal minded people, should not be grounds for anyone resigning. It should be grounds for doing nothing, apologising or clarifying depending on what was said.It is risky to punish people for what they did not literally say. Particularly if they are the sort of person who is well known for striving to be literally correct.

In its most literal form I don&#x27;t know if I would say I disagreed with the core of what Stallman was saying in the email (that &quot;sexual assault&quot; should perhaps be revised in its usage), but Stallman was tone-deaf at best to have pontificated on such a comparatively minor (and highly arguable) matter when he did and where he did. Worse, with what he wrote, there is a reading of the email where the subtext is that Stallman was trying to mitigate Minsky&#x27;s culpability. I won&#x27;t comment on whether I think that was indeed what he was trying to do, but it&#x27;s not a good look, regardless of whether that is indeed what he was trying to do.Many people will acknowledge the value of Stallman&#x27;s stubborn, iconoclastic opinions. I&#x27;d count myself among them, and it&#x27;s a little sad to see Stallman go from his pulpits. But on the other hand, I&#x27;m relieved: it might be in Stallman&#x27;s constitution to be at all times a rational reasoning machine, impervious to emotion and sentiment, but this is not how most people are, and on many occasions Stallman has shown that he either doesn&#x27;t understand or doesn&#x27;t care about this. There are times when one should refrain from saying something that is merely correct because of the symbolic meaning it would have, or the emotional responses it would elicit.

&gt; ... Supposing as you do that society currently holds the wrong opinion on &quot;does sex with minors constitute sexual assault?&quot;, the right answer is unlikely to be hashed out on a MIT list for CS activities.I expressed no opinion either way on that topic. I don&#x27;t even consider the topic relevant to my position, which is that once we agree that merely asking some questions will result in harsh punishments, we&#x27;re hosed as a society.Today, it&#x27;s the question you hate that gets punished. Tomorrow it will be the question you hold most dear.

It&#x27;s crazy to see people taking this stance on a public forum for tech companies. He&#x27;s talking about Minsky just like you&#x27;re talking about Stallman. What makes this the correct venue for you but not that for him?

1. His post was not an out of context rant on an unrelated school mailing list. He was criticizing the words used by MIT students in connection with a protest at MIT, and that mentioned his ex-colleague. The MIT students posted this in the first instance, and it was a direct response to them. It seems to me like an appropriate forum.2. Stallman&#x27;s argument was simply to call a spade a spade, and not a defense of Epstein or Minsky. If you told 10 people (each unaware of any of the facts alleged) that Minsky sexually assaulted a girl, and then asked them to describe what they imagine occurred after hearing he sexually assaulted some, many might assume he violently assaulted someone. The degree of differences in guesses that you might receive makes the word functionally prone to tarnishing someone with a reputation for a different crime than the one they committed.Stallman therefore asked for the incident to be described in unambiguous terms; for example, that Minsky had sex with a sex trafficked 17-year old 50 years his junior on Epstein&#x27;s island. That does not mean he defends that scenario -- you can still view it as reprehensible, and condemn it, but at least you are not engaging in &quot;accusation inflation&quot;, where you are condemning someone for a potentially worse crime than they committed.3. I agree that Stallman is unnoticed outside this sphere, but this is part of a continued trend of threatening people&#x27;s reputations and livelihoods for stating an opinion. I created a throwaway for the first time ever simply for this comment (which I think is relatively benign), so yes, I think this trend will continue to lead to self-censorship.

&gt;but Stallman&#x27;s behavior quite likely has held back the FSF for some time. He&#x27;s an ideologue, not a leader.On this last point, We have to agree to disagree. His firm and unwavering stance on many issues is a flag planted in the sand - &quot;This is how things should be&quot; (whether or not its practical). It is a point of reference which countless engineers, designer, entrepreneurs in tech (including in big companies in FAANG, etc.) have been influenced by (whether or not they were able to live upto his ideal) when building their systems and companies.Everyday, living in the dystopian nightmare that the modern world (both real and virtual) is becoming, oftentimes enabled by OSS, &#x27;Stallman was right&#x27; is something that keeps coming back. Its not just a glib meme.

Er, sorry, no. A public mailing list is not the correct venue for this discussion. Supposing as you do that society currently holds the wrong opinion on &quot;does sex with minors constitute sexual assault?&quot;, the right answer is unlikely to be hashed out on a MIT list for CS activities.You also lend Stallman more weight than he deserves. His resignation will go unnoticed by all outside of our specific tech sphere and certainly will not &quot;set a precedent that will absolutely lead to self-censorship&quot; (???).Should we cheer his resignation? It&#x27;s undoubtedly a sad moment for him and his supporters, but Stallman&#x27;s behavior quite likely has held back the FSF for some time. He&#x27;s an ideologue, not a leader.

His point, as far as I can tell, is that in different countries legally define rape in different ways, but that shouldn&#x27;t change what we find morally wrong.To extend on what I think he is saying, he thinks it should be possible to say a thing was morally wrong regardless of which country it happened in.If we&#x27;re discussing if we think a person did something morally wrong, I&#x27;d rather talk about why we think that rather than pointing out there is a law against it (especially when the laws are different in different places).

Here&#x27;s a direct quote from one of his recent emails:&gt; “I think it is morally absurd to define “rape” in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”Is this really a topic that &quot;requires the disinfecting power of sunshine&quot;? Do we really think we&#x27;ve gotten the topic of statutory rape so wrong that we need to rethink it from first principles?

&gt; We pretty conclusively decided that race based chattel slavery was wrong a while ago. But why? Can we keep expressing ideas and demanding proof of these claims?Obviously yes? How else would we know that we are right?

I&#x27;m pretty sure it&#x27;s called &quot;Sea-lioning&quot; from this comic strip: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wondermark.com&#x2F;1k62&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wondermark.com&#x2F;1k62&#x2F;</a>

&gt; We pretty conclusively decided that race based chattel slavery was wrong a while ago.Unfortunate that you should use this example since slavery was finally abolished precisely because people kept &quot;asking questions&quot; contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist about why slaves did not enjoy the same rights as other humans.Never has then been a clearer demonstration of why the &quot;stop asking questions&quot; stance advocated by progressives is intellectually bankrupt.

Absolutely, yes, definitively, unquestionably.Why?Because the abolition of slavery is one of the greatest achievements of our civilization.New generations of humans are constantly being born, and until we teach them, they don&#x27;t know why this is. They don&#x27;t know why slavery was such a black mark on our history. They don&#x27;t understand what it does not just to the people involved, but to a society. They don&#x27;t know why it proliferated so easily (and this is still very relevant today; when our society turns a blind eye to illegal immigrant labor, it&#x27;s an echo of the same economics that made slavery easy for past generations to accept).You should be able to sit down with a 9th grader and explain to them, this is what slavery was, this is how common it was for most of history. This is why it was so tempting and these are the benefits people reaped from it. But this is how we realized that the costs outweighed the benefits, and how we created a better world at a great cost to many people.Crucially, it&#x27;s important to explain to someone how slavery would be bad for them and their community, even if they themselves were not a slave.It&#x27;s important to teach all of this to the new humans we raise. &quot;It was bad, end of story&quot; is not enough. The best way for them to learn is to reason through the arguments on both sides, explore the history, see how we got to where we are, and draw their own conclusions. Because you can&#x27;t force a belief on someone. They need to get there themselves.If you ban the discussion they are going to reach their beliefs without guidance. And the isolated, the lonely, the angry will end up with some very dark beliefs. It&#x27;s happening now as a direct response to censorship culture.I completely understand that slavery is a difficult and very personal topic for a lot of people. These are hard conversations to have. But for the sake of future generations we need to have them. Beliefs are stronger when they&#x27;re justified. They are strongest when they are challenged, defended, and the challenges are defeated. We should never stop doing that.

To stop questioning something is to turn it into a religious belief. Then there&#x27;s no way to know how valid it is.

&quot;Asking questions&quot; that deny people&#x27;s humanity over and over isn&#x27;t exactly a positive intellectual exercise.We pretty conclusively decided that race based chattel slavery was wrong a while ago. But why? Can we keep expressing ideas and demanding proof of these claims? Can we do it forever? Can we do it while holding positions of power at institutions that are attended by black students?

He picked a stupid hill to die one. Everyone who picks that hill to die on just dies.

I want to agree with you in some aspects of this, but the history of this topic has been so severely lopsided that the current cleansing was due and is helping. As a man, I can only imagine the shit women put up with on a daily basis.

He&#x27;s being pushed out for decades of being creepy, and especially so to women. At some point you have to say &quot;enough&quot;, and that point is always going to look somewhat arbitrary. It&#x27;s too bad MIT had to wait so very long to do this.

It’s actually terrifying this is the top voted comment.

How is it offensive to make sure we are precise in using different words to denote two different things?

The it’s-not-pedophilia-it’s-hebephilia take is so atrociously offensive, pointless, and tone deaf it’s almost beyond belief.

&gt; This incident doesn&#x27;t change anything since much more chilling precedents have been set so many times beforeYour not wrong, but in this case he is 2 degrees of separation away from someone that we know was guilty. It feels like the witch hunting has moved onto those who are guilty by association.&gt; RMS&#x27;s position is way too extreme here, 99.9% of people would probably find it despicable.Quite a lot of us live in a world where what Minsky did would not be considered statutory rape, so presumably they wouldn&#x27;t find it despicable (if we ignore potential sex trafficking): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Age_of_consent#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Age_of_Consent_-_Global.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Age_of_consent#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Age...</a>

&gt; It sets a precedent that will absolutely lead to self-censorship on a topic that really requires the disinfecting power of sunshine.This incident doesn&#x27;t change anything since much more chilling precedents have been set so many times before. RMS&#x27;s position is way too extreme here, 99.9% of people would probably find it despicable. Meanwhile, lives (including at least one Nobel laureate&#x27;s) have been destroyed for contentious, merely politically incorrect statements (or less). The ship has long sailed, RMS just didn&#x27;t get the memo, maybe due to the peculiar way he uses the Internet.

Bypassing for now the merits (or not) of his arguments, which will certainly get a deep philosophical treatment on a site where long comment threads are impossible to navigate and are really only active for a day or less anyway...RMS&#x27;s de facto role in the FSF has been spokesperson and public figure. This isn&#x27;t the first time he&#x27;s put his foot in his mouth [1][2][3] (figuratively or literally, according to some accounts). That&#x27;s simply not a role to which he is suited, and that at least should be an argument most can agree with, if reluctantly.We all make allowances for bad behavior from our favorite people, as long as that bad behavior isn&#x27;t too repugnant or doesn&#x27;t undermine the role we appreciate them for.In RMS&#x27;s case, at the very least his behavior keeps distracting people from the issues that the FSF was formed to address.Let RMS return to roles for which he is better suited, and like Eric S Raymond&#x27;s frequent bouts of insanity, we can all go back to appreciating that at least he manages to stay out of the news cycle.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tech.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;1227229&#x2F;richard-stallmans-dissenting-view-of-steve-jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tech.slashdot.org&#x2F;story&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;10&#x2F;1227229&#x2F;richard-sta...</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datamation.com&#x2F;osrc&#x2F;article.php&#x2F;3830651&#x2F;Richard-Stallman-Leadership-and-Sexism.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.datamation.com&#x2F;osrc&#x2F;article.php&#x2F;3830651&#x2F;Richard-...</a>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-appendix-a-a7e41e784f88" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@selamie&#x2F;remove-richard-stallman-appendix...</a>

It&#x27;s also unjust to say that he was accused of assaulting one of Epstein&#x27;s victims, when the only accusations are from people who inferred from &quot;she was sent to Minsky&#x27;s room&quot; that &quot;he said yes&quot;.

&gt; he&#x27;s being persecuted for having expressing ideas, demanding proof of claims, advocating for objective standards, and asking questions.&gt; The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky: “deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims [2])” The injustice is in the word “assaulting”.Saying that sexual assault isn&#x27;t assault is scientific inquiry?

This is a terrible response IMO. We should take responsibility for what we say and be sensitive but we should let things like our career prospects affect our freedom of speech. That’s a chilling effect.

It&#x27;s funny seeing all the Stallman apologists coming out of the woodwork trying to justify what he said and decry this as a form of censorship. As if having more people dumping their opinions on every subject is a good thing. Sometimes it really is better just to shut up. Otherwise if you&#x27;re going to air out your thoughts on touchy subjects, be ready to find yourself up against others who disagree in a profound way. Now he can make his career in social political issues instead of technological ones.&quot;So much depends on your reputation. Guard it with your life.&quot;

Thinking about how your actions affect your coworkers and customers isn’t some giant imposition, my dude. It’s a minimum baseline of professional competence. Any barista in the country knows better than to act like that in a professional setting.

I’m gay. Brendan Eich ACTIVELY supported an institution attempting to keep me from being equal. So yeah, if you have the wrong political views, like ones that consider some people unequal, you absolutely deserve to be shitcanned. I’m sorry if I have a hard time feeling bad for people like that. I hope we find and weed out every last bigot, because people like me have fought too long and too hard to still be subjected to this crap. We don’t deserve it. Nobody deserves it.

It&#x27;s 2019. Social justice and &quot;cancel culture&quot; are intrinsic values to open source now, at least as much as sharing code and collaboration.The situation with Brendan Eich shows that if you have the wrong political views, you are not considered fit to serve as the leader of any open-source organization or project. especially not one with corporate backing. It&#x27;s too much of a risk of PR disaster.So be careful. Coraline Ada Ehmke and Sage Sharp are watching you. They will find and expose your crimes.Linus is probably next.

RSM did not say 1 or 2. There are other people in that thread besides him... all names have been redacted except his.He did say 3.He did say 4, but (perhaps I misunderstand?) you seem to have colored it. Epstein as a coercer remains a factor; the assertion is that this cannot be morally on Minsky if one assumes he didn&#x27;t know about it.4.2 He also argues that, morally speaking, rape is rape, and not-rape is not-rape, irrespective of location and whether a girl was 17 or 18. This is also not part of his primary argument; it was a response to someone else (a student, I&#x27;ve heard?) bringing these exact legal details to the table.5. The thing is, depending on whether you say that &quot;Minsky is accused of assaulting one of Epstein&#x27;s victims&quot;, and &quot;Minsky is accused of having sex with a 17-year old victim of Epstein&#x27;s sex trafficking&quot;, or even some other title besides, people are going to have different reactions. Some people might have the same reaction to both, but other people might envision something different when presented with the former title, than when presented with the latter. RMS argues for a more specific title, arguing that the original is prone to accusation inflation.&gt; How far must our credulity stretch to believe that Minsky foresaw most of modern AI, only to fall for &quot;hot willing 17-year-olds in your area&quot;?Well, I imagine the figurative advertisement was probably more like &quot;hot willing 18-year-olds in your area&quot;, possibly coupled with an exchange of money.I&#x27;m not saying you don&#x27;t have any points. I can follow most of your reasoning. But maybe you might adjust your 1-5, then re-evaluate your position from there? Is it possible that you don&#x27;t arrive at an identical conclusion?

I&#x27;m not cheering. I would much rather live in a universe where Stallman didn&#x27;t &quot;I&#x27;m just saying&quot; himself out of his own organisation. I don&#x27;t even like him that much, but I think he represented an important voice in software. It&#x27;s not good that he&#x27;s out, but I think it is right.I am dumbfounded anew every time I see a smart and analytical person twist themselves around to the point that they become too smart to believe in analysis. Saying Stallman was persecuted for &quot;expressing ideas&quot; is about as sophisticated as &quot;my program crashed because the electrons were in the wrong place&quot;. You wouldn&#x27;t be satisfied with an understanding that shallow in any other circumstance.Meaning. Words have it. Questions have it. Ideas have it. &quot;Etsy for houseplants&quot; is an idea, as is &quot;figuring out your home address from information available online and breaking in to your house tonight while you&#x27;re sleeping&quot;. Why is one of them creepier than the other? I can&#x27;t believe I&#x27;m being persecuted for just having ideas!The meaning of Stallman&#x27;s argument is that he doesn&#x27;t think Minsky did anything wrong. Why doesn&#x27;t he think Minsky did anything wrong? Probably because he was a friend, a good guy, a peer, who knows. Because of these entirely scientific feelings, he makes a series of arguments:1. She only said she was directed to have sex with Minsky, not that she actually did2. Even if she did say she had sex with Minsky, she may have been confused and answering the wrong question3. Even if she did actually have sex with Minsky, she probably made it appear consensual4. Even if she was not legally capable of consent, that is not morally equivalent to rape5. Thus, it is &quot;injustice&quot; and &quot;wrong&quot; to say Minsky is accused of sexual assaultIs this your science? Is this the altar of rationality you&#x27;re worried will be torn down by the rabid inquisitors of the new dark age? Because to me it sounds a lot more like The Dragon in My Garage. How far must our credulity stretch to believe that Minsky foresaw most of modern AI, only to fall for &quot;hot willing 17-year-olds in your area&quot;?And how does a man like Stallman look at open source and see politics, look at dynamic linking and see politics, look at javascript and see politics – and look at science and see nothing but science? Like you, I do not believe Stallman is malicious. I believe he is naive. That is a fine quality in a revolutionary, but not in a leader.

he&#x27;s being persecuted for having expressing ideas, demanding proof of claims, advocating for objective standards, and asking questions.I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s quite that simple. Most likely, the real issue is he failed to know when to shut up about a sensitive topic after being basically told to shut up.A crux of the issue is that men expect to be deferred to. They expect to have privilege and rights. They expect their views to be respected. They expect to have a right to express themselves.And women generally cannot expect the same. Which is a foundation stone of what gets called &quot;rape culture.&quot;There are a lot of subtleties here and I&#x27;m sympathetic to some of Stallman&#x27;s points, but I suspect the thing that people are bristling at is that his failure to shut up is a failure to genuinely respect the feelings and boundaries of women.This is the real problem women face in life. This is the essence of the disregard that culminates in sexual harassment and rape.Without that baseline fundamental respect, women have no choice but to quibble about bullshit details like legal age. Because it&#x27;s all we&#x27;ve got to say &quot;He shouldn&#x27;t have done that to me&quot; in a world that seems hell-bent on utterly ignoring baseline respect for women, especially when trying to demand it from a powerful and wealthy man.Good luck with that sister. The exceptions are very few and far between.

I concur with your thinking on this. I&#x27;m no fan of Stallman, and I think both the FSF and CSAIL are probably better of without him ghosting around, but the way in which this happened is deeply problematic. Stallman&#x27;s opinion in this case was clearly a bit out of whack, but the tone and style of the message was completely on point for his character. And therein lies the problem here, I&#x27;m fairly sure Stallman&#x27;s points could have been formulated in a way that would not have provoked such a visceral reaction. Stallman tends to be unable to empathize with his interlocutors (or at least unable to express such empathy in writing), turns everything that happens into a case study in moral philosophy, and is a bit terse and snippy in his emails. All that makes him not a pleasant debater for sure, but are we as a society really willing to take somebody&#x27;s livelihood because of their poor rhetoric style?The next thing that happened was that the news picked it up, but got most of the details wrong, taking the problematic statement out of context, mischaracterizing his relationship with MIT, mischaracterizing what he did exactly, etc and as a result whipping up an angry mob demanding his firing.Now, of course many people have wanted Stallman gone for all sorts of reasons of his general unpleasantness for many years, so this seems to have been as much a convenient excuse to rally those efforts as anything else. Nevertheless, one must ask at what cost - the blade of public outrage is sharp and hard to control. At no point at no point in this process was their any room for fact finding or reasoned debate among the people aggrieved and affected by this.We&#x27;ve let Stallman spam csail-related for many years to the point that it was a common joke for it to be called stallman-related in the lab (&quot;Where&#x27;d you find your aparment?&quot; &quot;Oh, I posted on stallman-related - I half expected to get a moral lecture from him about the immorality of private ownership of real estate, but looks like he was busy&quot;). Was it a mistake to let that happen so long on a list that everybody at CSAIL is automatically subscribed to, especially the new incoming students? Probably. Because of aforementioned rhetoric challenges his emails are not the best first impression of the lab community. I think banning Stallman from csail-related could have been a perfectly proportionate response here (as well as making him take down that stupid door tag). This all-or-nothing witch hunt, deeply concerns me.

I&#x27;ve seen some online cheering Stallman&#x27;s resignation from MIT. I suspect they&#x27;ll also be cheering about this resignation as well.But this is nothing to cheer about.Regardless of what low regard the man might be held as a person, he&#x27;s being persecuted for having expressing ideas, demanding proof of claims, advocating for objective standards, and asking questions. These are all hallmarks of scientific inquiry.It sets a precedent that will absolutely lead to self-censorship on a topic that really requires the disinfecting power of sunshine.This strengthens the power of those who have no use for scientific inquiry and are more interested in inquisition.

&quot;When the forest is chopped down,the chips fly&quot;--Joseph Stalin

Mirror, since the site is having problems: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;h48kp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;h48kp</a>

For the uninitiated, what happened with Guido van Rossum?

Or maybe, as with Guido van Rossum (in an unrelated context), he&#x27;s had a bellyful of our contemporary variations on the French Revolution.

At his level, &quot;fired&quot; and &quot;resigned&quot; are often synonyms.

Knowing how stubborn and aloof Richard tends to be, it is a huge surprise that this has happened at all, let alone so quickly. I can only imagine there was an immense amount of pressure from the board, partner projects, and sponsors.

I have no doubt there will be one of these incidents where the mob mentality that is out for blood leads to catastrophic consequences. I have a hunch that perhaps then people will approach these situations with at least a bit of caution. The guy messed up, but it does not change his contributions. When is his punishment going to be seemed sufficient?

Sorry, I was shocked and was reading around and forgot which article was linked at the top. I read this one:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedailybeast.com&#x2F;richard-stallman-famed-mit-computer-scientist-who-defended-jeffrey-epstein-resigns" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thedailybeast.com&#x2F;richard-stallman-famed-mit-com...</a>

In they were in Massachusetts, Minsky might have asked, &quot;Are you here willingly, and how old are you?&quot; And he could have received the reply, &quot;Absolutely, I&#x27;m having the time of my life with Jeffrey and all the famous people he introduces me to, and I&#x27;m 16.&quot;And the sex might then have seemed consensual and legal to Minsky, because even now in 2019, the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16.

From reading his comments isn’t he defending someone named Minsk who had sex with a 17 year old and didn’t know she was being coerced into it by Epstein?It seems to be a bit of a far fetched theory to me that this guy would meet a 17 year old through Epstein and not really be aware of what Epstein was doing, but it doesn’t really seem to be a defense of sexual trafficking, pedophilia or rape.That being said this is from my reading of the above thread so maybe I’m not getting the full picture here.

This is very sad that the leader of the FSF took such actions. We benefited from his insights and advocacy on software, but the defense of Epstein, who essentially had a child abuse production line and defense of pedophilia is not something I can support and it is proper that someone new takes over.Stallman&#x27;s views were a variety of American libertarianism. While there are a few good points within that tradition regarding personal freedom, it&#x27;s kind of sad that he carried some of the other baggage with his obsession with age of consent laws.

&quot;Accountability&quot; for an awkward statement? You&#x27;ll have to excuse me if I don&#x27;t think someone deserves a public flogging for poor phrasing and awful timing.When you&#x27;re talking about organizations that are CRITICAL to software freedom, I&#x27;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&#x27;t be compromised? It&#x27;s another thing to worry about.

accountability == forfiture of your life&#x27;s legacy? That&#x27;s an alarming line of thinking.

Forgiving someone doesn&#x27;t mean letting them keep positions of power or avoid accountability.

I thought Minsky committed statutory rape, not child molestation, or am I behind on things that happened?

Sure there is. How about: &quot;the deposition never actually accuses Minsky of having sex with anyone in the first place&quot;? Or how about, &quot;Greg Benford says (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pjmedia.com&#x2F;instapundit&#x2F;339725&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pjmedia.com&#x2F;instapundit&#x2F;339725&#x2F;</a>) he was personally present at the incident and witnessed there was no sex&quot;? Wow, who knew it was so easy to defend &#x27;a child molester&#x27; for whom there&#x27;s &#x27;no way to defend&#x27; them.

Minsky was a child molester. There&#x27;s no way to defend that.

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&#x27;s nothing stopping him creating an independent non-profit to tackle these issues philosophically. There&#x27;s no need anymore to be the gatekeepers of the actual code. It should be free, after all.So that&#x27;s where I&#x27;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.).

&gt; He&#x27;s been a good steward of the FSFHowso? He&#x27;s held back gcc development repeatedly. He regularly forbids the emacs developers and maintainers to use their own judgement. Glibc as well.Independent of the current issue, this should have happened a long time ago.

&gt;yet the majority of people who are sticking up for him here seem to be anonymous conspiracy theorists.Wonder why!

If it was just a one-off thing isolated from other recent events, you might be correct. But due to Epstein&#x27;s association with MIT and his other history of controversial statements and actions with FSF, they couldn&#x27;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.

RMS was defending Minsky, awkwardly. As someone who has a history of social awkwardness, he should be forgiven for this. He&#x27;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&#x27;s too similar to how Tor was seized, and how Linus was almost dethroned. There&#x27;s something nasty afoot, and I don&#x27;t like it one bit.

My goodness, Stallman just got cancelled. I think it&#x27;s absolutely fair to criticize statements he&#x27;s made (I absolutely disagree with his statements on pedophilia), but not to pressure him out of the work to which he&#x27;s devoted his life. Kicked out of MIT and the FSF? That&#x27;s gotta be rough for the guy.Always nice to see a few angry people on the &#x27;net with out-sized voices manage to bring down an icon of computer science. No one should have his life ruined by a kangaroo trial in the court of public opinion. People don&#x27;t make good decisions when they try to react and &quot;do something&quot;; it would make more sense to let things die down a little and get the facts on what actually happened. Then make a decision on how best to go forward.

This was the kind of gray area people dealt with on their own and cannot IMO be regulated by law (because it&#x27;s just barely possible to define). There are limits though but today it&#x27;s becoming too binary and myopic. Weird era.

And more importantly, this latest controversy was not an isolated incident. It builds on a long history of questionable behaviour

What did he write? I&#x27;m out of the loop on this.EDIT: I think this covers it all? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;ne8b47&#x2F;two-researchers-resign-in-protest-over-mit-media-labs-ties-to-jeffrey-epstein" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;ne8b47&#x2F;two-researchers-re...</a>

If he wrote that, he&#x27;d likely still have a job. But that&#x27;s not what he wrote. He took it too far.

The fact that those are very different things was the entire point of the post you replied to.Conflating &quot;slap on the ass&quot; with &quot;sex slavery&quot; is bad.Conflating &quot;sex with an apparently legal, willing partner who later turned out to have not been either legal or willing&quot; with &quot;coercing a child to have sex with you&quot; is bad.

Wild that you would conflate a slap on the ass in a nightclub with an underage girl in basically sex slavery being pimped to a 70 year old. And then going to court over it despite all the danger and pain that exposed her to. Do you think those might be very different things?!

I think it is unfair to hound him over his latest statement about sexual assault. He is absolutely right that the term sexual assault includes actions that are so different that it can be used to unfairly destroy people&#x27;s reputation. And if you are going to call someone a monster, it is better to more precisely define what type of sexual assault he did.I myself was sexually assaulted some time ago. I was in an ordinary nightclub, I went to the mens room, and on walking out of the mens room some a-hole decided to slap my ass on the way out. I gave him a dirty look, maybe I should have had him kicked out of the club, but I don&#x27;t think it was necessary to have him fired from his job or ruin his career.

Nobody’s burning him at the stake or putting him in jail. He can go on living a perfectly good life. What he can no longer do is act in a leadership role in the community and corrupt that community with his crap.

Unfortunate witch hunt against an innocent, if strange, man. I could go on but people don&#x27;t want to hear anything other than the hateful things that they believe.

Evil is fundamentally a lack of empathy and I see no empathy from this man. He’s not a cackling crazy
Hitler figure, but he seems to have a difficult time figuring out just what the problem is with having sex with children and with child slaves, and chooses to dedicate a great deal of mental energy defending the more powerful people in this scenario.

What about his less recent quotes?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&#x27;t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing.By my book, it&#x27;s okay to call that evil.

He is many things, and shouldn&#x27;t have been in a leadership position for a long time, but he is definitely not evil.I have a hard time even imagining how you reach the conclusion that he might be evil. Even the worst out of context headlines on his recent quotes just put him in the &quot;gross&quot; category.I say this, and I&#x27;m very glad he stepped down. I&#x27;ve argued for years that he should have stepped down a long time ago.

I’m allowed to criticize him after reading what he actually wrote, right? Because I did and came away from it with the conclusion that he’s evil and shouldn’t be anywhere near anything resembling a leadership position.

I&#x27;m making a subtler point: the good he did for this country was inescapably intertwined with his ownership of slaves.One view you can take, which seems defensible, is that he grew to agree with the anti-slavery view late in life, yet as a calculated measure to hold the country together when half the economy was dependent on slavery, did nothing about it, and also was too weak to give up his own station in life which was similarly dependent on slavery. Yet he freed his slaves in his will, both for their own sake and in the (ultimately vain) hope that he would inspire others to do the same.The other view is that he never actually believed it, or he would have made freeing human beings a political priority. He was embarrassed into freeing his slaves after Martha&#x27;s death, but he fundamentally thought that it was more important for himself and Martha to live their last years in comfort than for his slaves to live in freedom, and that the negative peace of the new country holding together was preferable to the positive peace of meaningful liberty. And that therefore the &quot;good&quot; he did for this country was to set us up for the Civil War and for many more decades of viewing certain people as not fully deserving of human rights.And relevantly to RMS and the free software movement - if Washington hadn&#x27;t been there, if instead William Cushing or Gouverneur Morris had been in a similar role, what would they have done? Or even if Washington were still there but he did not use his leadership position to say, &quot;I don&#x27;t like slavery, but we have to keep it for now,&quot; what could Cushing or Morris have accomplished? Washington presided over the convention where Morris made his ultimately ineffective argument.Washington wasn&#x27;t the only founding father, nor the only skilled military leader among the revolutionary forces. In a world without him, would the US still have won and would it have been better set up to fight slavery? (Would the revolutionary forces have allowed black soldiers in earlier, and moreover had more morale among the black soldiers, thereby leading to an earlier victory?) If such a scenario is plausible, then the good he did didn&#x27;t outweigh his wrongs.

You&#x27;re speaking as if love and hate should cancel out, like weights balancing. But having a love&#x2F;hate understanding of a person is extremely common. If I were teaching a person who could not understand both (such as a young child) I would start with only the good things about Washington, because that&#x27;s more accurate if you absolutely had to choose. But, we&#x27;re all adults here.

I&#x27;m saying the amount of good he did for this country far outweighs his wrongs.I&#x27;m just certain sure his slaves felt the same way. Especially Ona Judge.

I&#x27;m not saying that Washington thought he was right to have slaves. He was wrong to have slaves and it reflects poorly on him that he did. Rather, I&#x27;m saying the amount of good he did for this country far outweighs his wrongs.

We detached this subthread from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20990760" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20990760</a>.

&gt; Washington had slaves, that doesn&#x27;t mean we should hate him.Counterpoint: yes it does.Judging Washington by the standards of his time and his peers, slavery was abhorrent. Take the case of Quock Walker, who sued for his freedom in 1781, for instance. The chief justice of Massachusetts (and later Washington&#x27;s own nominee for chief justice of the US) wrote:&gt; As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle [...] nowhere is it expressly enacted or established. It has been a usage -- a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the European nations, and the regulations of British government respecting the then Colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth. But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of Liberty, with which Heaven (without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses-features) has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our Constitution of Government [...] sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal [...] and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature [...]As recorded by Washington&#x27;s contemporary James Madison, Washington&#x27;s contemporary Gouverneur Morris denounced the three-fifths compromise during the 1787 constitutional convention:&gt; He never would concur in upholding domestic slavery. It was a nefarious institution. It was the curse of heaven on the States where it prevailed. Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich &amp; noble cultivation marks the prosperity &amp; happiness of the people, with the misery &amp; poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Va. Maryd. &amp; the other States having slaves. [...] Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them Citizens and let them vote. [...] The admission of slaves into the Representation when fairly explained comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and S. C. who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections &amp; damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Govt. instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the Citizen of Pa. or N. Jersey who views with a laudable horror, so nefarious a practice.We should not so facilely dismiss the difficult challenge that Washington is seen as the father of this nation and yet owned slaves. Other founding fathers understood that the American norm of liberty was clearly incompatible with holding slavery in anything other than contempt. Other founding fathers called his behavior &quot;repugnant&quot; and &quot;nefarious&quot; - why should we shy away from criticizing him? It seems far more sensible to me to worry that Washington (along with many others) led our nation into believing a compromised, twisted view of liberty and the natural rights of man, with lasting consequences for the country which hardly ended in the Civil War.

&gt; is not merely a mistake with words.Yes. Yes, it is. Are we talking about the same story? We’re talking about something Richard Stallman said. That is his offense and the reason for him being kicked out of FSF and MIT.Since you dodged the whole point of my comment by reiterating that Stallman said something offensive, I’ll restate my point clearly as a question: In your opinion, can someone be forgiven for saying something wrong? and how do they seek that forgiveness other than apologizing and admitting they were wrong?I’m sure like everyone you’ve said horrible shit over your lifetime, whether in public or private, whether strangers or family. If we brought out those people hurt by your words over your lifetime, wouldn’t you want to be forgiven? Don’t hold other people to a different standard than you hold yourself.

Constructing a situation in which Marvin Minsky somehow was blameless for his relationship with a known pedophile and child sex trafficker and situations directly resulting from that relationship, then projecting the reactions of other people through that situation, is not merely a mistake with words. Coupled with his at-best-real-gross chinstroking about minors, consent, and statutory rape in the past, it demonstrates a pattern. And it&#x27;s a pattern that, obviously, made enough people uncomfortable as to want to not associate with him--as is their right.MIT doesn&#x27;t have to give Richard Stallman a do-nothing job. The FSF doesn&#x27;t have to give Richard Stallman a (nearly) do-nothing job. Everybody makes mistakes, sure. You make up for those mistakes by doing good and doing right and if Stallman wants redemption, literally nobody is stopping him from going after it. They&#x27;re just not bankrolling it. There&#x27;s a difference here.

People have to have a path to redemption. Stallman apologized and admitted he was wrong. Why is it not acceptable to make a mistake with words? Isn&#x27;t it impractical to expect everyone to never say something they regret? These are words we&#x27;re talking about. It&#x27;s not like Stallman raped a child.Kicking him out of FSF and MIT seems quite excessive for somebody saying something and then apologizing for it. Whether they are Stallman, a student, or anyone really.Do the people involved at FSF and MIT hold themselves to the same standard they&#x27;re holding Stallman to? We&#x27;ll surely find out because humans tend to say a lot of stupid shit over the course of their lifetime.

When you&#x27;ve made statements about &quot;voluntary pedophilia&quot; in the past, and you decide to voluntarily wade into the Epstein scandal, that&#x27;s probably better termed character suicide.

This.And on top of all that, he quite literally voluntarily resigned, it&#x27;s in the title.

Cancel culture, or as most adults like to refer to it, consequences.

I don&#x27;t agree with many things RMS says, but I am not a fan of this cancel culture where character assassinations are orchestrated routinely.

Really?You&#x27;re going to make a moral comparison between a minor traffic violation (not even a primary offense!) and having sex with a coerced child?

&gt; If Minsky did something bad, say he did something bad. But don&#x27;t launder your outrage through some country&#x27;s laws.It&#x27;s hard for anyone to do that because virtually everything on this is speculation. The whole thing about Minsky stems from a single sentence in a recently unsealed enormous deposition ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;_cryptome_&#x2F;status&#x2F;1159946492871938048" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;_cryptome_&#x2F;status&#x2F;1159946492871938048</a> ) where one of Epstein&#x27;s victims included Minsky in a list of people that epstein&#x27;s assistant directed her to have sex with. She wasn&#x27;t asked if sex actually happened with Minsky, and didn&#x27;t claim it did, she was asked about the dates and couldn&#x27;t recall.A witness who claims to be present reported Minsky turning her down and complaining about the advance, additionally on the date that conference was held-- in 2002, Epstein&#x27;s victim was 18. ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pjmedia.com&#x2F;instapundit&#x2F;339725&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pjmedia.com&#x2F;instapundit&#x2F;339725&#x2F;</a> )But since there are essentially no facts, not even concrete allegations-- people seem to feel free to make up their own version of events which are exactly as awful or harmless as they want them to be..... God save you if your imagination comes out different from the angry mob&#x27;s and you dare share it with others.Because Minksky has been dead for a few years there doesn&#x27;t seem to be much interest in actually setting the facts straight, but there seems to be a lot of interest in using it as an excuse to be abusive to fellow humans.

&gt;Stallman quibbled over the definition of rape.Hell yes he did. Wouldn&#x27;t you? If I made my own country where &quot;rape&quot; was defined as &quot;sex without first doing twenty jumping jacks,&quot; wouldn&#x27;t you &quot;quibble&quot;?&gt;everyone admits knowingly slept with an woman of an age in a jurisdiction where that constituted rape.So what? I drove 37 in a 35 today, who cares? You can&#x27;t outsource your morality to the legal system like that.If Minsky did something bad, say he did something bad. But don&#x27;t launder your outrage through the VI&#x27;s laws.

You know what, dude? I really, really hope it is just an allegation. I want desperately for it not to be the case that Minsky got sucked into Epstein&#x27;s shitty web. But the deposition we&#x27;ve seen so far is just that: the only one we&#x27;ve seen so far.That said, and this is key, none of this is about whether or not Minsky did anything. Assuming he did, it isn&#x27;t even about whether it was with a minor, or a woman of legal age. It&#x27;s about Stallman having decided that was a prudent moment and subject about which to &quot;Well actually...&quot; at the world. The whole point is Stallman&#x27;s behavior, not Minsky&#x27;s.In all seriousness: what the actual fuck does Richard Stallman&#x27;s opinion on what does or doesn&#x27;t constitute rape matter? Why would he think that was a point that needed his quibbling? Maybe that&#x27;s the judgement under question.

&gt; the place Stallman screwed up was in trying to quibble over terms in defense of a man who we have reason to believe had sex with an woman of an age in a jurisdiction where that might have constituted rape.This is where you jump to conclusions and become a part of this charade. All we have are unsubstantiated allegations that do not even say definitively that sex took place. And just based on that, your and the mob&#x27;s conclusion is &quot;we have reason to believe&quot; ?I agree with Stallman and everyone else who is extremely skeptical and advises caution. Alas, the mob is out for blood.

I don‘t think it was ‚a man‘ but a close fellow scientist who is dead and can‘t stand up for himself. Which is one reason RMS did not stay away from this fire and one making him speak his own mind - ignoring the other hats he was wearing (but using a lecturing voice). On the one hand it makes it harder to condemn. On the other it is a failure that can‘t be tolerated by high profile figureheads.

I find the volume of the noise being made over whether or not the &quot;entirely willing&quot; bit was quoted out of context by the media for sensationalist purposes — which it 100% was — quite curious. To me, the place Stallman screwed up was in trying to quibble over terms in defense of a man who we have reason to believe had sex with an woman of an age in a jurisdiction where that might have constituted rape.Because that&#x27;s what it&#x27;s about: he said, &quot;But is it really?&quot; — literally, in fact — about something which, for legal purposes, his opinion is irrelevant. To wit:&gt; Does it really? I think it is morally absurd to define &quot;rape&quot; in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.Stallman said that. He went there. He quibbled over whether something constituted rape, as if the Virgin Islands cares one whit what rms thinks of their laws. That&#x27;s where he screwed up, and people in the thread said so at the time, too. So people now can try to make this shit-show about his being quoted out of context about &quot;entirely willing&quot; — which, again, it was — as much as they want, but that just won&#x27;t make it so.This is entirely about Stallman having quibbled over rape, not whether he was selectively quoted in the course of quibbling over rape.EDIT: Phrasing

Same thought, this article is superbly written. Thank you for the reference!

That entire article is absolutely hypocritical given how discourse is controlled on this site.

&quot;What you can&#x27;t say&quot; by Paul Graham is eerily relevant today<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;say.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;say.html</a>

Well, I&#x27;m now going to be following Stallman without the FSF around. His (admittedly) iconoclastic views are important, and I appreciate what he says about technology and privacy.  His legal views are questionable, yes, but I don&#x27;t accept the idea that he should be removed from the FSF.

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.

I think what is perceived by a community as right or wrong changes as the composition of the community changes...I mean Trump doesn&#x27;t self-censor because he reflects the values of his broader base and his base eats up whatever he says....RMS&#x27; 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&#x27;s broader development community....which means he needed to adapt or step down.
-- The Dark knight quote - &quot;You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become a villain&quot; seems apt in this scenario.

Phpbb forums didn&#x27;t go away because of self censorship, they were simply replaced with bigger sites like Reddit. If you&#x27;re trying to create a community around a niche topic, a subreddit is substantially easier to create than deploying and maintaining a forum.

I&#x27;m hesitant to post anything, anywhere, just because I don&#x27;t want to offend anyone by expressing an earnest opinion.I think the trend&#x27;s moving more quickly towards self-censorship than anyone realizes. How can we even quantify that? Those who censor just disappear?What stands out for me is the obvious monoculture we&#x27;re developing.I miss custom PHPBB boards for every little interest and opinion.

I think without heavy proponents for free software, we would be in a worse place, especially technologically. Never met a software developer that wasn&#x27;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.&gt; wouldn&#x27;t settle for a simple apologyTo whom? To those that endorsed questionable business relations that drew attention in the first place that still are in leading positions at the MIT?&gt; need in leadership also changesVisionaries and thought leaders can probably have a positive influence. I doubt we will get a adequate replacement. There also is no strong leader&#x2F;mentor that can make you magically smart. He would need to inspire you to learn yourself which I would argue Stallman did pretty well.&quot;Controversies&quot; are seldom intellectually engaging and if you look at the core of his statements, the subject and reactions become quite ridiculous.

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 FSF is a Ideological organization, how can you say &quot; they didn&#x27;t need an ideologue&quot; when that is EXACTLY what they needFSF entire purpose is to push for the adoption of Free Software licensing (in opposition to Both &quot;Open Source&quot; and Commercial licensing)

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&#x27;t for that, they might have gotten by with a simple apology, but that wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t lose enough talent that they become irrelevant.

You can say anything you like in North Korea too. The government might not agree with you and that&#x27;s fine.

If it was as simple as a disagreement, that would be fine. But it&#x27;s not just simple disagreements anymore. It is costing people their livelihoods and futures because they&#x27;re not toeing the ever shifting line.

Nope... people will not agree and call you out, drumming up outrage until you resign or get kicked out.From what I’ve read about the Cultural Revolution and Jaquereies, what’s going on looks pretty much the same mob pattern.

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).

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.

Bollocks. Like Ricky Gervais said the other day actually you can say anything you like. People might not agree with you and that&#x27;s fine.

It&#x27;s an interesting dynamic. I would agree that on the whole, you&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;wrong opinions&quot; 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.)

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 &#x27;within bounds&#x27;.  Every cry of how we&#x27;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 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. &quot;Predating social media by decades&quot;, you should appreciate how online communication was before the status-gamers got here and reasserted their tribalistic bullshit.

You&#x27;re conflating two very different environments. Mass media of yesterday was the establishment broadcasting carefully considered things. Social media today is individuals chatting to other individuals in a manner that can incidentally be seen by everyone. People using say, hackernews, aren&#x27;t modelling this interaction as if they are on the stage being broadcasted to the world, they are modelling it as if they were talking to someone at a pub.

&gt; it&#x27;s rather interesting how all the information technology (social media, etc...) is slowly moving our culture towards increasing self-censorship.It&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x2F;lesbian&#x2F;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&#x27;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.

You are twisting what Stallman said.-He argued that rape is no the same as having sex with a minor. He is right, that&#x27;s not the definition of rape.-A minor is not necessarily a child. You can be a minor and the next day be 18 in a porno movie.-Never did Stallman said it was ok, He just raised the question whether Minsky knew She was being coerced by Epstein. Clearly not the same.

&gt;&gt; information wants to be free&gt; Whomever said that was probably thinking of facts, of knowledge, s&#x2F;he was probably not thinking of having opinions about pedophiles.John Stuart Mill is probably rolling over in his grave from this conversation: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;On_Liberty#Of_the_liberty_of_thought_and_discussion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;On_Liberty#Of_the_liberty_of_t...</a>Edit: Particularly relevant to the topic of self-censorship: &quot;unmeasured vituperation, enforced on the side of prevailing opinion, deters people from expressing contrary opinion, and from listening to those who express them.&quot;

This has nothing to do with technology.If you start expressing opinions about how sex with a sex-trafficked child should be legal, won&#x27;t your friends and family raise some questions about your character?Unless we&#x27;re talking of morally flexible individuals. And at least parents should raise an eyebrow, since we have this natural reaction to protect our children.&gt; information wants to be freeWhomever said that was probably thinking of facts, of knowledge, s&#x2F;he was probably not thinking of having opinions about pedophiles.EDIT: don&#x27;t get me wrong, I think there&#x27;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&#x27;t have been consensual, in which case age becomes relevant, as that teenager isn&#x27;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&#x27;t be a jerk, as technology won&#x27;t save you from that.

it&#x27;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 &quot;opaque&quot; (so to speak) towards the public (even it this is happening due to overload).does anyone remember &quot;information wants to be free&quot;? I don&#x27;t think anybody says that anymore, but I remember reading that a bunch on slashdot in the early 00s

Richard M. Stallman resigns