Comment by Cacti | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cacti | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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