Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cacti | Hacker News Reader

Do you really need a PR person to know that suggesting underage sex is OK is a risky topic of conversation? Like, come on. This isn’t a subtle mine field here, it’s not rocket science, and any adult, particularly someone as nominally smart as RMS, should be aware that suggesting 14 year old girls (particularly ones with a non-zero probability of being _trafficked_!!) engaging in sex with 60 year old men is a risky freaking topic.

I don’t approve of the current political climate (re: freedom of speech) but RMS is a grown man and he should know better. Not going to lose sleep over this one.

View on HN

> Do you really need a PR person to know that suggesting underage sex is OK is a risky topic of conversation?

This comment is infuriatingly wrong.

Stallman did nothing of the sort. Stallman's "crime" was having the audacity of pointing out that the technical definition of the crime matching the accusations was statutory rape. That's it.

And now he's out of a job.

The problem is that RMS didn't state it like you did. He's a victim of his own pedantry. A victim of his own indiscretions. He didn't need to opine about such hateful acts. No job and no reputation.

Well he didn't _need_ to voice his opinion on copyright and proprietary software either.

But I am glad he did.

Look I agree what he did was dumb, but he is free to voice an opinion on anything he likes. We don't have to agree with it but we don't have to turn it into a witch hunt either..

yes, and the FSF should be free to fire him as well. him being fired isn’t a witch hunt.

cut the crap dude. this guy has been either defending or trivializing young girls having sex with older men, or whatever you want to call 12, 14 year old girls having sex with 50, 60 year old men, for 20 years now. he is specifically saying on record that he isn’t convinced it’s a big deal, among numerous other comments. 20 years.

this guy isn’t being hounded out of his job over one slip of the tongue, one mistake. he has been making these comments for a long time, and it finally caught up to him.

this is entirely a problem of his own making.

> cut the crap dude. this guy has been either defending or trivializing young girls having sex with older men

Stop with the bullshit already. Stallman himself stated that the accusations (being offered sex by a 17yo girl) amount to statutory rape. In what twisted mind does this come even close to match your entirely made up story?

Stick to the facts instead of resorting to use your imagination to fabricate any support for your self-righteous witch-hunt.

The problem is trying to minimize human trafficking or suggesting that it's ok as long as the victim appears to be willing.

Selling sex is o.k., so what if Minsky didn't realize that she wasn't willing, how was he supposed to know. She was 17, and surrounded by money, not exactly what you consider a child sex slave chained to a bed in a developing country. Sex for money is o.k.

splitting hairs on what is and what is not pedophilia, and suggesting that girls who were likely trafficked or groomed by older men for sex, yet might have been entirely willing participants, is exactly what he said, and it’s just as bad and boneheaded of a statement as about any others you can make on this subjects.

and he SHOULD lose his job. he isn’t some grunt programmer, he is the senior representative of the FSF and the FSF deserves to have people on its board that aren’t going to embroil them in such boneheaded and unnecessary distractions, and they deserve someone on their board who shows better judgement than this.

and unlike some people here I am not about to split hairs about whether a 14 year old girl that is being groomed for prostitution is or is not capable of giving consent, and i’m not about to engage in semantic quibbles about what the right _word_ is to describe someone who engages in these things.

some you are completely missing the forest for the trees here.

> splitting hairs on what is and what is not pedophilia

An accusation of someone having sex with a 17yo does not correspond to pedophilia anywhere in the world.

> and suggesting that girls (...) might have been entirely willing participants, is exactly what he said

He said that if all girls were willing participants then the accusation of having consentual sex with a 17yo girl corresponds to statutory rape.

Stick to the facts.

Sticking to the facts is exactly the problem here, everyone gets so wrapped up in their moral outrage and presumed superiority that they aren’t looking at what this guy actually said.

I think a lot of people are forgetting that the guy has 20 years of public comments like this. You can pedantically pick apart this single statement as much as you want, defend him because this statement has been twisted, and argue that it’s therefore a witch hunt, but... this didn’t exactly come out of left field here.

This is a problem entirely of his own making, stretching out over decades.

> I think a lot of people are forgetting that the guy has 20 years of public comments like this.

The honest reaction to being forced to recognize that the absurd accusations being thrown at Stallman are absurd, entirely made up, and without any link to what he actually said is not to try desperately to move the goal post.

Stick to the facts.

Your view on the matter is the exact reason why we need more RMS around.

Are you suggesting that underage sex is not ok?

Because many people I know were having sex before coming to age.

He never suggested though that an old man having sex with a 14 years old girl was an ok thing.

People who wanted to read it, read it from his words, but he never said it.

So we have a bigger problem here: one cannot be pedantically correct or people will act as an angry mob on them and get away with it.

> He never suggested though that an old man having sex with a 14 years old girl was an ok thing.

> People who wanted to read it, read it from his words, but he never said it.

Sure he did. His words were not written in vacuum, he wrote them in a discussion thread about Epstein.

It's not like someone took his words from a scholarly discussion of sexual development and put them misleadingly in the sex trafficking context.

RMS proudly(!) did that. As he likes to raise trouble. Remember when he told a new parent not to mention his newborn, and everybody else on the list told him he's an asshole?

> He never suggested though that an old man having sex with a 14 years old girl was an ok thing.

Yes he did: "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children." *

Stallman has a history of abusive behavior and opinions going back decades. This most recent email thread was just the final culminating incident. You can't argue in good faith while ignoring everything that he previously did and said.

* https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...

He didn't suggest underage sex was OK.

His crime was being pedantic about the definition of rape around people who can't even differentiate rape from underage sex, which are probably the same people that are interpreting it as Him defending underage sex.

Yes he did: "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children." *

Stallman was driven out because of decades of abusive behavior and opinions. The most recent incident was just the final straw. Ignoring that historical context is rather disingenuous.

* https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun...

His comment begins with "I am skeptical".

Do we consider skepticism to be abusive now?

Anyway, he subsquently said that he changed his mind on that point, after discussions with other people about it. You ought to include that if you're going to try to represent the man's history.

In case you haven't noticed, we are talking about what He said in the recent emails, not in 2006.

We're discussing his resignation and the pressure that was surely brought to bear on him to do so. Which almost certainly is related to his history of pro-pedophilia comments, not just the most recent ones.

But at the same time the other side is arguing that the tactics used to this end involve misquoting and lying about what he said.

In the end it is two groups of people having two correlated (but different) conversations.

Many (not all, but many) of RMS "defenders" here would completely agree if not for this backhanded tactics, as some are only asking for proper representation of facts.

The fact that a lot of "takedown" pieces continue to lie means that they force together two groups of people that do not necessarily agree.

She was a child. And trafficked.

Minsky committed rape.

If sex without consent is rape, and minors can't meaningfully consent to having sex with an adult, then having sex with a minor is kinda rape.

His comment about 17 vs. 18 years old shows that he's detached from reality. The law has to draw the line somewhere, it's necessarily arbitrary to some extent. It's still okay to discuss such nuances, but then don't be snarky. Context matters too. What point was he trying to make here and why?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com