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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island.

There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky.

The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other" they can because they're a fan of RMS is disturbing.

This isn't us vs. them.

This is a man who said something wildly inappropriate in an MIT forum and got fired. He deserved it. Defending him by pointing towards people who overreact to things is a bit terrible.

The firing was appropriate and reasonable, not a response to extremists, zealots, or some other kind of witch.

I welcome anyone to provide a counter-argument.

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How is it we value free speech, but there are certain discussions you just cannot have, even in a rational and measured way, without risking making yourself completely unemployable. You should be able to have a questionable viewpoint in a discussion, without worrying about the lynch mob ending your career.

The consequences here are out of line. You can be reprimanded to take your discussions to a non company venue, in a situation like this, but fired is over the top.

Stallman said “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.”

It's pretty clear with the age difference being what it is, this is exactly what statutory rape laws are for. But it is also incongruous that somehow if she was a year older it would be ok. It's also fucked up that if Minsky were 19, the consequences would be the same. Maybe there's a better law to be had here, but how would we ever know if you can't even have the discussion?

I'm appalled by how free speech is under attack lately by the outrage machine.

"How is it we value free speech, but there are certain discussions you just cannot have, even in a rational and measured way, without risking making yourself completely unemployable. You should be able to have a questionable viewpoint in a discussion, without worrying about the lynch mob ending your career."

I agree with this statement.

Stallman has been a problematic person for a long time. I'm no fan of his. If after a while the university had said, "Enough is enough, Richard, you need to shape up or get out." I would have understood that.

However, that's not what I think happened. What happened was he shared an opinion on a hot-button issue, pedantic and maybe gross, and unfortunately had that go viral and was so hounded out of his position.

If Stallman's position is wrong, we should be able to rationally come to that conclusion as a society. He should be allowed to be wrong. If his opinion is so problematic that it makes him a real liability for the university, his removal should come after a period of deliberation, not after a flash of public outrage.

I can understand arguments that Stallman's position is a questionable hill to die on regarding the Epstein revelations, that even choosing to weigh in on this makes it seem like his priorities are out of order. I can also understand the argument that the email list he was arguing on was the wrong location to voice his opinions and he was making students uncomfortable. I also understand the idea that he should have been corrected by the university, either for this event or for his past behavior.

But what I don't understand, is this idea that firing people in response to media shit-storms is somehow something to be applauded.

> If Stallman's position is wrong, we should be able to rationally come to that conclusion as a society. He should be allowed to be wrong.

I share this frustration, unfortunately with many HN discussions as well.

When someone states a position that the majority finds repugnant, IMHO the most productive (long-term) approach is this:

Step 1. Identify where the minority and majority views diverge in terms of logical justification. With majority-repugnant views, this may require going back to very basic assumptions. E.g., rape is morally wrong, it's appropriate public policy to prevent moral wrongs, etc.

Step 2. Starting from there, try to understand why the views diverge, and debate which side (if either) has better justification.

I think this approach fails at least half the times I try it, though. A few guesses why:

- During Step 1, people jump to the assumption that I'm advocating the majority-repugnant position, rather than working within this two-step process. Once my character / motives are impugned, reasoned discussion seems to end.

- Many people are unable to engage in logical debate regarding ethics. And in frustration, or to subconsciously avoid having to accept that gaps exist in their ability to logically debate some topics, they are unwilling to engage in proper debate.

- Something in my mannerism is off-putting, or I'm in a forum where few people are willing to engage in a debate lasting more than several minutes :(

This isn't a seminar, so this isn't the forum where one can help change minds or come to a conclusion logically. The best you can hope for is to plant seeds and expose people to perspectives they might not be aware of. I've read of some studies where people generally clam up when presented with contradicting information (which sucks). Who knows though, at the very least you will change one or two minds, which can help if not a little.

I've also observed this. It seems to me that politics (which I'll use as a reasonable proxy for controversial views) has increasingly become more like a sport than an exercise in civic responsibility. As I like data I think one way to measure this is split ticket results. In 2016 34 states had senatorial elections. Each and every state voted the exact same way for senate and the presidency. This is hardly surprising in today's world, but this hadn't happened in more than a century. [1]

The point of this is that as people start to integrate political views into themselves (as opposed to just a view - something that's subject to change as the evidence does) it makes debate difficult. In many ways we're becoming more akin to religious nations. You're unlikely to find a nice healthy debate about the value, worth, and viability of Islam in most Islamic Nations. It is because such values have been integrated into the individuals themselves instead of being kept at arm's length.

And as a tangent one thing I would add is that it obviously was not always this way. During the Islamic Golden Age Islamic nations were world leaders in learning, education, and the collection of wisdom. We still retain fragments of this time in our language today. For instance Algebra, from the title of Ilm al-jabr wa'l-muḳābala by al-Khwarizmi around 800AD. During this time of growth and learning all things were open to question, including Islam itself. And then along came a lovely man by the name of Al-Ghazali [2].

In response to religious skepticism, which Al-Ghazali was unable to effectively combat on direct logical grounds, he chose to develop a new philosophy. And in his new philosophy he preempted skepticism by suggesting that there were no natural laws at all. When a leaf catches fire it is not because it was exposed to a fire or because it reached a certain level of heat but because, and only because, God willed it happen at that exact moment. And so the study of 'natural laws' is nonsensical, as detailed in his work 'The Incoherence of the Philosophers.'

And that idea, enabling one to revoke all logic and criticism and simply adopt the dogma without question or concern, was met with resounding praise and endorsement. That was 900 years ago, but this ideology remains a key component of Islam to this day. At the same time this was happening a lust for learning was just starting to take off in Europe... Kind of interesting to imagine that we could be on another precipice of change when 200 years from now e.g. China has become the world leader in education and people ponder the decline of the anglosphere.

Or this could be little more than the regular waxing and waning of insanity that in 20 years, perhaps sooner, will feel as distant as parachute pants.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/17/is...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ghazali

"problematic person" eh...

He's clearly a freethinker, and we have all gotten a lot of advantages from his courage doing his thing and making his vision for FOSS a reality.

Now he's said his thoughts on this too... it's legitimate for him to do so and "problematic" everyone is in a huge panic to punish him in case the mob should get set on them.

We all have second-hand stories of how, when Stallman came to our cities (in my case Paris) for a conference, he acted like the worst fucking person on earth towards his volunteering hosts.

He was a terrible human being, and surely not very aware of how to treat other humans. He had no place in a research institution, or getting paid to pretend to be relevant on free software.

Good riddance, whatever reason we can find in his statements (yeah sure, I was 18 when my wife was 17, it wasn't rape, surely... but is that really the point people were making about his nice friend of Epstein ?).

People aren't for free speech, at all and anywhere: they are for people having the same opinion as them or follow an official line. He didn't do either, now he pays. For a genius like him, it should have been easy to understand you have to adapt if you want to lead, or you shut up if you see you can't lead.

I hope this isn't a minority opinion, but making people uncomfortable should not be a reason to take their livelihood from them. If they actively mistreat people and abuse their power to hurt people, that is different. Being socially awkward and insufferable might make you not want to associate with them, but to me that's not enough of a reason to take their life from them.

Yup. Friend hosted him locally & has nothing good to say about Stallman whatsoever.

He’s had decades to listen to people telling him that his behaviour was unacceptable. The fact that he hasn’t changed at all is on him.

> People aren't for free speech, at all and anywhere: they are for people having the same opinion as them or follow an official line.

This just isn't true. Sure I want every one to respect my opinion but I don't want them to be a slave to it. I mean think about it if every one thought the same life would be boring as fuck.

>We all have second-hand stories of how, when Stallman came to our cities (in my case Paris) for a conference, he acted like the worst fucking person on earth towards his volunteering hosts.

No we don't. Your vague unspecified second-hand stories aren't any kind of evidence or argument. Come with specifics or this is just slander.

Really? He was a "terrible human being" because he said something ignorant and was socially awkward / a bit rude in person?

I'm not defending what he said but this is a really backwards way to look at things. There are plenty of manipulative CEOs and public figures who are very careful with their speech while doing harm in their actions. Stallman turned down money for decades to do something good for the sake of public interest. There really aren't many people like that, in this industry or even on this site. It sucks he conflated his movement like this, but jumping to that conclusion based on something so shallow seems just as stupid.

It's also well-known that he would hit on any woman who moves. When conference organizers finally told him to stop coming up to women and asking them out, he started printing out "pleasure cards" with his contact information and an invitation to fuck on them and wordlessly handing them out to women instead.

In order to ward off his advances, women faculty at MIT have taken to taking advantage of his phobia of plants. They decorate their offices with as many plants as they can and have even taken to wearing plants just to keep him from hitting on them.

This is not and should never be acceptable behavior.

I think most people, especially in America, are very much for free speech. But inertia. And that inertia is especially pronounced when the mobs are going after somebody you don't agree with. Like the old poem goes:

- First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a socialist.

- Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a trade unionist.

- Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.

- Then they came for me— and there was no one left to speak for me.

That holds very true to this day in America. I really vehemently disagree with Stallman's views in many ways. So it's easy to not say anything, yet I do believe he has a right to say the things he does without getting depersoned. In any case I'd much rather the people that do abide his views do so publicly rather than in secret.

But beyond this, I think he chose a reasonable hill to die on. He undoubtedly knew his comments would spark a mob in the zeitgeist of today, but they really are about as tepid as you could get. He was saying it was a bad idea for terms, even if legally accurate, to be used in general speech when they mislead people as to the nature of a situation. If that's the new standard for moving from words to 'let's get rid of this guy', we may not even have a standard. And I think that's a point that will resonate for more and more people. Even if these people might be afraid to speak out for fear of becoming the mobs' next target, it helps bring about a positive change in society.

An analogy I love to consider is Lincoln. Did Lincoln end slavery and direct society accordingly or did society reach a point such that the creation of a Lincoln was, sooner or later, inevitable - even if by another name? And I think things like this bring us ever closer to creating our Lincoln because solving the problems of social media is not something that's going to be done in a clean fashion.

I'm sorry, no. Women at CSAIL cultivated plants in their office because they knew it would keep him out of their offices. He's a train wreck and has needed to go for a while.

> Stallman has been a problematic person for a long time. I'm no fan of his. If after a while the university had said, "Enough is enough, Richard, you need to shape up or get out." I would have understood that.

According to the Register, this is the position of both the SFC and GNOME

> On Monday, the Software Freedom Conservancy called for his resignation. "When considered with other reprehensible comments he has published over the years, these incidents form a pattern of behavior that is incompatible with the goals of the free software movement," the group said in a blog post. "We call for Stallman to step down from positions of leadership in our movement."

> So did the GNOME Foundation's executive director Neil McGovern, who said Stallman's Minksy defense email was "the straw that broke the camel’s back."

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/17/richard_stallman_in...

Unfortunately, that reads like them finding historical justifications so a mob-induced disassociation doesn't look like it's mob-induced. They had time anywhere between "over the years" and few days ago to pull the trigger. Or they could wait a few days and do it 'after careful consideration'. Whether they bowed to crowd pressure or just wanted to score virtue points, this diminishes their stance in my view.

I trust that you know GNOME has had beefs with Richard Stallman at least as far back as the way he treated Mono developers (not the Mono project, but individuals). And I recall that, coincidental with that, his "Saint Ignucius" routine delivered in 2009 at Gran Canaria had some gross sexist commentary in it, too, which Lefty Schlesinger--a member of the GNOME Advisory Board at the time--called him out on, too.

You're right that this isn't new, but at some point the camel's back breaks and the idea that it's so implausible that what he said happened to, y'know, really upset people when they read it and that they'd had enough--well, it's a pretty cheap charge on your part.

That's good to know.

It all goes to the conclusion "you don't need free speech, you have nothing to say, google will talk on your behalf".

> If after a while the university had said, "Enough is enough, Richard, you need to shape up or get out." I would have understood that.

TBH I wouldn't expect that if they did for it to be public knowledge. In fact I'd assume that has happened.

> What I don't understand, is this idea that firing people in response to media shit-storms is somehow something to be applauded.

1. RMS wasn't just some random guy in the foundation, he was supposed to be a leader which means he should be held to a higher standard. Firing someone who doesn't meet that standard means your organisation has integrity which is important and should be applauded.

2. The downsides for keeping him around, especially since RMS didn't seem to be all that apologetic, are also important. The goals of the FSF are not advanced by being pushed into this media storm.

If FSF didn't do something, they would have been forced to answer alot of questions in the media about how they actually feel about age of consent laws, whether they took any money from Epstein and/or Minsky, how they felt about Epstein and/or Minsky, etc., and would then have had to give a number of awkward statements about this mess. Then they would have also had to answer many of those same questions from their donors. And likely if the controversy gained traction, their largest donors may have then been forced to answer their own set of awkward questions from the media about this whole mess. Especially if those donors also had ties to MIT. At some point, many of them would have also reconsidered whether they wanted to donate money to FSF, which would also be bad for the organisation.

All of which is to say that it's not about free speech, it's about protecting the organisation.

Stallman hasn't been silenced in any way. Free speech does not mean you can say whatever you like without consequence from private institutions and citizens, only that you may say whatever you like without consequences from the government et al.

Your conflation that free speech is under attack is disappointing - That's not what is happening here.

This has been said before, but free speech is beyond just government censorship and has a wider definition. Regardless of that, the idea that someone's livelihood is under threat due to their speech can be just as coercive as threatening a fine or jail for their speech. The idea that government chilling is someone kinder than private chilling is wrong.

> This has been said before, but free speech is beyond just government censorship and has a wider definition.

This has also been said before, but free speech specifically includes the right of others to dissociate from you because of your speech, as a central aspect of their freedom of speech, and in fact such dissociation is a central part of the concept of the marketplace of ideas supported by free speech.

> the idea that someone's livelihood is under threat due to their speech can be just as coercive as threatening a fine or jail for their speech

Yes, the fact that our society doesn't provide a minimal non-market guarantee of livelihood makes free interaction coercive economically coercive for many people. The problem is not with free interaction, however.

My freedom of association trumps your freedom of speech.

If people don't want to associate with a person who says awful things, it's not a violation of their freedom of speech to disassociate with them.

But my freedom of speech should trump your freedom to spin up angry Internet mobs that proceed to turn my words into lies that they use to rip my life apart.

Time will come there will be regulations aiming to fix that, because slander laws apparently aren't enough. And then people will come out and talk about freedom of speech, but the only answer will be, "you had it, and you misused it, and almost ripped the society apart".

There has to be a give and take, otherwise this logic can justify many things we've decided is wrong. Things for example like firing someone trying to unionize or for being black or a woman. There is a difference between freedom of association for an individual and freedom of association between a company/organization and its employees or members and that is part of why.

If somebody doesn't want to associate with somebody I think that's of course 100% fine, even if in response to nothing more than what somebody said. But if somebody chooses not to associate with somebody because of an online mob [1] - that's not so okay. Granted some line does have to be drawn here. I think it's great that social media was able to 'touch' an 'untouchable' like Weinstein that would have been impossible without the protection of a mob. But now that we've unleashed the beast, it's starting to gnaw at anything it can find. And Stallman's far from an innocent, but he's being depersoned here for some relatively tepid comments.

[1] - This event was started by somebody sending a copy of a discussion on a private mailing list to a third party. This third party then took social media and shared it. It fell flat, except for a handful of 'Twitter activists'. They then started spamming it off to their followers and media outlet they could find. Some of the clickiest baitiest institutions took it up along with some completely unrelated Twitter personalities. It all spun what were relatively innocuous comments into limited context outrage bait and that then caught the outrage train spot on.

So, if something was violated I assume there will be a court case that will ultimately decide if this was the case?

If someone was raped, I assume there will be a court case that will ultimately decide if this was the case?

"Well, as it turns out, your Hollywood career promptly ended and you were blacklisted by every studio for saying, in the middle of the 50s Red Scare, that Karl Marx had some good ideas about the sociology of capital. But a court ruled that none of that treatment violated the First Amendment, therefore no one is allowed to be worried or have any negative emotion about what happened you, and hence no one's speech could have been chilled into silence by those events."

Extending free speech in that way infringes upon people's rights to free association.

Neither MIT or FSF should be required to continue to associate with RMS if his views are repugnant to their organizational core.

I will say it again. Stallman is not being silenced in any way

Whatever you say might not even be free from consequences from the government. Freedom of speech is a bit of a nebulous concept in that sense.

I don't think the distinction between government and private institutions is that meaningful though. When a constitution is preventing the government from infringing upon a right it's usually a good idea if that right is protected against other people as well. In fact freedom of speech is covered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which clearly wasn't intended to only protect people against their own governments.

Eh. You have a right to say what you want, but your employer has a right to not want to be associated with it...

What about the right to air a private conversation in front of general public for express purpose of forcing one's employer to disassociate from a person?

Consider this: were you to come to GP's office and show GP's boss a printout of them saying controversial things on HN, demanding GP's termination, GP would most likely keep their job and there would be a good chance you'd get kicked out by security. In order to get a company to fire someone, there needs to be a public mess, and those rarely happen organically. In this case, and other similar firings for wrongspeak that I can think of, a public storm was created intentionally.

Can't see it as anything else than a weaker, non-lethal form of swatting.

Does society have a right to not be associated with it? If every individual has that right, then a collection of those individuals working together retain that right if they so choose to do so.

If grouping up people does cause them to lose that right, perhaps that characteristics of rights kicks into effect when dealing with sufficiently large institutions, especially ones who have significant tie in with government far beyond some small mom and pop employer.

So let's have a new word for situation like this, describing the case when someone spins up an Internet drama around another person so that the resulting fallout ruins that person's life. There is still huge harm done, and it bypasses the court system.

"Cancel Culture" is the phrase I've heard used

Ah yes, the new term for "consequences"

Do you think that Stallman's life was ruined. I, and I guess lots of people, will still highly value his contributions. But at the same time I think his comments warranted moving on and passing the torch of leadership of the FSF. It is very different to work as a regular software engineer or individual contributor, than as the figurehead of a foundation. I wonder if he will still get invitations to be a speaker, and if he does, if he will be willing to do it, at least for a time.

I rather wonder the opposite. Not "what will become of Stallman, without the FSF", but "what will become of the FSF, without Stallman". Will the FSF still have the public forum it once had without Stallman using his public speaking and his standing in the free software community on their behalf? It is perfectly conceivable that Stallman will move on to bigger and better things and the FSF will sink into obscurity.

we already have a word for it - mob mentality. I am not saying that it's the right way to go about things, but it's certainly not a violation of free speech

> it bypasses the court system

That's why it's called the court of public opinion.

Actually it's about ethics in computer science email groups.

Lack of proportion is the problem for me. Mr.Stallman could be censured - but again the people went after his position/job for what are at the best mis-guided or flawed statements.

If Mr.Stallman were to be in Epstein's Island well that is whole level of any issue.

Committing Rape and Questioning the logic behind defining the "act" of rape are not the same.

A comment further up this chain explains that SFC and GNOME were tired of Stallman’s tendency to speak first and worry about bigger picture later.

Basically, looks like this situation was a long time coming.

Or, it was annoying but tolerable, until an opportunity presented itself to score virtue points while having past problematic behavior to use for plausible deniability.

Politics. He disregards politics and politicians and they eventually had enough weaponry to remove the threat his disregarding their political aims was to them. Nothing more.

The concept of “free speech” does not begin and end with the 1st amendment. There is also free speech as an instrumental value.

The instrumental interpretation of free speech is more limiting than the philosophical one.

Source: http://wordsideasandthings.blogspot.com/2012/03/instrumental...

Yes, and it is also broader than just the first amendment. Part of being able to maintain a free society is having cultural norms that do not require employers to fire someone just because they said something that others disagree with or find objectionable.

The first amendment is really of no use if expressing opinions outside the norm causes you to be fired by social convention. In that case, only being independently wealthy affords one any freedom.

In this case, even founding his own organization based on his own values did not protect him from being fired.

So if MIT were a state school, would you say free speech is under attack?

Certainly they would have less grounds for firing him, but there would likely be a court case challenge if they chose to do so.

But do you feel free speech is genuinely under attack in the one case, and genuinely not in another?

Does a person or institution have to be literally owned lock, stock and barrel by the public to act in a public capacity?

This is horribly incorrect. Freedom of Speech is a larger concept outside of how it is (and can even possibly be) codified in law. The US Bill of Rights is phrased in terms of a restriction on the government, because that's the only line that can be straightforwardly drawn within the framework of the Constitution.

An example of the concept being applied to quasi-public entities, with enough generality for the legal realm: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

I value free speech in that I value the government's inability to limit anyone's expression with only a few reasonable exceptions.

I don't take "free speech" to mean anyone can say anything without consequence. The government has a whole lot of power and it comes with limits like free speech.

That doesn't mean that people in my employ can say awful things and I should just ignore it.

Free speech doesn't extend to being protected from consequences for how you express yourself.

If you can't express yourself on certain topics, there's a chilling effect where people just don't talk about them and no further progress can be made. There are now plenty of topics like this including gender [edit: I should specify that it's fine to talk about gender, but only if you have certain permissible positions on the topic]. This list used to include other things like being pro gay rights, pro equality for races or gender - but at least you were able to have those conversations without fear of being lynched and society moved forward. You should be allowed to voice a viewpoint that's against the mainstream viewpoint without risk of making yourself unemployable.

It's atrocious that our academic institutions, which used to be a bulwark of free-speech are leading the charge here.

Stallman made questionable, but reasoned statements. He perhaps should not have made them in a work forum, but the consequences here are way out of proportion to the "crime".

You've been throwing a lot of stones here, but I'm sure you've held or expressed viewpoints just as questionable at some time in your life. I know I have. Should you now be denied the right to make a living if they come to light?

Stallman's controversial opinions stood for ages when they were hypothetical.

But at this moment in time, they've intersected with the real-world activities of organizations that he has considerable influence over. He seems to have prioritized theoretical point-making over the organizational necessity of addressing people's concerns.

Running things and debating things are two different activities, and for Stallman those things are currently in conflict. Maybe he's tempermentally incapable of dealing with conflicting imperatives; in any case he seems to have taken the absolute route to resignation.

I think this is a better argument than merely talking about the content of the speech. That said the question is whether the punishment matches the severity of the crime. There was no due process here so we'll never know for sure.

Do you really think that no one has suffered for having conversations pro gay rights, civil rights, gender equality, and all those other previously inadmissible topics? No, they spoke publicly, and paid the (unfortunate) consequences of the day ... but they carried on because it was the right thing to do.

What exactly is it that we're trying to "express ourselves" about here? what "progress" are we trying to make on old men having sex with young girls?

If there's change to be made, then someone is going to have to weather the cultural storm that speaking out about it brings in order to bring change. If it's not worth weathering that storm, then maybe it's not worth having that discussion in the first place.

Of course not, it's my position that there shouldn't be such serious consequences for having a dissenting opinion. Minority opinions are in fact the only way we make progress in science our society. Everything accepted now was once a fringe idea.

There is a real conversion to be had about our statutory rape laws. They're absurd in some aspects. That's beside the point.

I want everyone to understand the medium his comments were made in.

This was not just a "work forum", it was a mailing list containing thousands of people in the MIT computer science community, including professors, researchers, administrative assistants, graduate students, and hundreds of undergraduates.

This isn't just a matter of his comments being inappropriate, it's also about him arguing them in an effectively public forum.

But Stallman replied to an email advertising a gathering to protest MIT's handling of the Epstein scandal.

I have no idea if that sort of political email is common in the mailing list, but if it is appropriate to share/advocate the protest, surely it should also appropriate to discuss the topic?

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6405929-091320191420...

It's my understanding that a protest against Minsky was being advertised on the same mailing list. Was that an inappropriate medium for the protest to be advertised as well?

>He perhaps should not have made them in a work forum

Look, that's the reason he's gone. So you said it yourself. That was his decision.

You would think universities would be a little more lax than a Fortune 500 company when it comes to freedom of expression . They certainly have been in many other aspects. You can rail all you want against the oppressive patriarchy and talk about toxic masculinity, but to question the statutory rape laws (which are different in every country, so clearly there are different viewpoints on the subject) - that's unpardonable?

It's a pretty sad state of affairs. Warn him to take the discussion elsewhere and then wait for the outrage storm to blow over. People have such short attention spans in these social media days anyway.

> Stallman made questionable, but reasoned statements.

These problematic statements were made in the context of someone who has a long, long history of upsetting, angering and offending people with bad behaviour. People in CSAIL kept plants around them because Stallman hates plants and it functioned like garlic to a vampire.

Firing him may be disproportionate to the moment, but it's overdue given the history. The guy who fired him literally said "straw that broke the camel's back."

Interesting, that's different from why I value free speech. The idea is that dissent makes good societies stronger. When you fire a dissenter, even if they're a bad person, future dissenters (some of whom are good) realize that they have no principled protection. And that's true whether you're a government or a private firm.

it's unfortunate that you value free speech in a way that it isn't protected.

I bet libertarians could get leftists on board with protecting speech with from corporate interests as long as protections also cover unionization.

I'm a leftist and I've always been on board with protecting speech. Those who don't don't know the history of the left in the US, the red scare, where the phrase "fire in a crowded theater" comes from, etc.

Free speech is generally accepted to be in the service of “political dialogue”.

In so far as Stallman was discussing the law, he was genuinely engaging in political dialogue; in so far as he was speculating about Minsky or the situation in question he was not.

To say that we can exercise speech but must face the “consequences” is just begging the question — what “consequences” are compatible with a free society? If my boss says it would be a great thing if California secedes from the Union, and I say I doubt that would go well, we rely so much on other states for water, &c, &c ... I may definitely offend him. How acceptable is it that a person be fired in that situation?

There is more to free speech than what the law says about it. No one here as far as I can see argues that forcing RMS out is illegal. People argue for the principle that you should be able to express your views without fear of losing your livelihood. The problem is that there is no universally trusted authority on what is and what isn't acceptable speech. I find what RMS said to be less outrageous than what I regularly hear from politicians in recent presidential debates. Does it mean I should start firing employees expressing those views because of "consequences" or "freedom of association"? It would lead to a tribal world where you either walk the exact line of your institution/employer/group or you're out possibly with grave consequences for your financial and family situation.

In my country it's illegal to fire people for their political views even if the employer finds them immoral and incompatible with the culture they want to foster. It's part of legal and social framework to protect freedom of expression. Freedom of expression neither starts nor end with what The Constitution says about it.

Free speech while extremely important cannot be used as a blanket cover to say whatever you want and expect not to suffer consequences. I’m free to call my girlfriend stupid every day, but I should expect the consequence of soon being single.

There are clearly mob reactions to things, but there are also clearly inappropriate speech that should have consequences.

What he said here wasn’t in isolation as some idle musing. context matters. He wasn’t talking about the theoretical of a 19 year old. He was talking about this in context of Minsky being a 74 year old man with a 17 year old girl. Maybe he wasn’t aware of the impact of his words, but that shouldn’t get him a free pass.

> Free speech while extremely important cannot be used as a blanket cover to say whatever you want and expect not to suffer consequences.

That's what Joe McCarthy and the House Committee for Un-American Activities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism) said to leftists, union organizers, communists, and others in the 1950s. Is that the kind of company progressives prefer to keep, intellectually speaking?

Apparently the only difference between progressives and conservatives is which sacred cows that they're willing to mob you for for insulting. Fellow liberals, I beg of you, take heed; progressives are not our friends.

> You should be able to have a questionable viewpoint in a discussion, without worrying about the lynch mob ending your career.

First, "lynch mob" is inappropriate and irrelevant. Given Stallman's statements, in the forum in which they were made, many reasonable employers would have fired him, with or without some "lynch mob."

Second, Stallman didn't express his views in private conversation, but rather in a forum where those views would have made it very hard for colleagues to continue working with him. If I'm X and you tell me or to Y in private conversation, "X is an idiot" or something of the sort, then that's one thing. If you say so in a forum where others can read it, then you're showing public disrespect towards colleagues, which is a fireable offense.

Here's what he could have said instead: "Have we seen evidence that Minsky himself engaged in illegal activity?" That's it. It would have expressed his point just as well, and would not have shown disrespect toward colleagues.

You are giving the mob far too much credit. It is just the fall of the dice that made them come after Stallman for what he said this time and not another. Had he said "Have we seen evidence that Minsky himself engaged in illegal activity?" it would still have been a crapshoot. The quotes are so amazingly out of context that if they were in the same mood, Vice and friends would still have quoted this as "Stallman says rape not bad".

Media are trash. Cancel culture steamrolls everything, there is no way to avoid being their target other than complete submission. You can word what you say as carefully as you like, but if they perceive that you're a good target, it won't matter one bit.

It's not about what is said, this is simply a war.

Anyone who would talk about a mob is sure to place me among the pitchfork bearers, so I'm not surprised you'd think I'm giving us too much credit. Speaking for myself, I had nothing but positive feelings towards Stallman until today, and even today I gave him the benefit of the doubt until reading his actual emails. Even then I don't hate him; I just think he acted in a way that would be considered a justified cause for dismissal by many reasonable employers. I am also saddened to see that he appeals to science while having learned nothing about a subject he seems to speak so confidently about, while ignoring decades of scholarly work by those who've dedicated their lives to seriously studying the issue. I'm surprised to learn he's like that.

But I agree it's a war. It's a war that's been waged for centuries and even millennia between the hegemony and the margins, and it's a war we'll win, because we always have (well, it's complicated, but if you want to speak in those terms, that's fine by me).

Just as important as freedom of speech is freedom of association. If your speech is seen as extremely odious, other people have the right to cut ties with you. And if you're in a prominent officer position, the organization as a whole has a right to disassociate itself from you because of those views.

So is Stallman's speech in question here odious? At first glance, not really. But when you put it in context:

The entire brouhaha starts with a sexual predator whose actions are known to but ignored by associates because money (or equivalently, power). Stallman is defending an associate of his who is tainted by association with Epstein. In the kinder light, this defense is essentially pedantry (just rape, not sexual assault). In the harsher light, this defense is "there's nothing inherently wrong with the entire situation here."

In this situation, I think the harsher light is closer to RMS's intent. He has made statements in the past saying that he believes there is nothing inherently wrong with having sex with children (although he has now walked back those statements). In addition, he appears to have acquired a reputation as a sexual harasser among women at MIT over the past few decades.

With that context, it does look like Stallman shares a lot of attributes with "prominent people whose sexual harassment has been ignored because they're powerful people, and who is not sorry about it." And pushing him out of leadership positions because of those views is acceptable consequences in my opinion. More so because it appears to me that he doesn't appreciate how power differential may affect the ability of people to give consent, he is in a position of power, and he appears to desire consent that may be unwilling.

Completely agree with you and it makes me depressed that we are living on an age that we are giving up the imperfectness of humans in exchange for fake puritanism on a standard that cannot be achieved by anyone.

I bet everyone here has one opinion that can definitely and very quickly destroy their lives. Let people be wrong, let them speak, let them think ... We can then convince and converge into a common good. Cancelling the guy that gave his life for the cause is appalling and is showing how evil social media is.

... MIT fired him not Facebook - you are not required to have perfect opinions that everyone agrees with to survive in this world, you are just required to voice them appropriately and at the correct times, which Stallman did not. Stop pretending that Free Speech is something that applies to anything other than citizens having protection from governments

The problem is the witch hunting. Invariably the wrongthink gets "leaked" to the bottom-dweller clickbait outfits like Vice or Slate who then feed it into the court of public opinion. I agree that there are a great number of things I shouldn't say at work, but that also doesn't mean I'm okay with the threat of being very publicly outed if I do. To me it's very close to the "well if you have nothing to hide" argument.

> appropriately and at the correct times

Where and by whom is appropriateness and timeliness determined?

private institutions, and mostly at their whim and discretion

So if it was Berkeley (a state school), he should have not been fired?

Yes, this has already been addressed. He would have been more protected if it was a state school.

> But it is also incongruous that somehow if she was a year older it would be ok.

It probably wouldn't be okay. She was coerced and trafficked, and many laws exist to make having sex with those people illegal.

In some places it's illegal even if you don't know they were coerced or trafficked.

So what is the difference between this and the way Eich was treated for his donation to Prop 8?

I'm not saying I agree with Eich - far from it. Seeing as an awful lot of people on this very thread were outraged by his behaviour, it strikes me as being contrary to be more understanding towards RMS for what is arguably far more heinous simply because they admire him more. Both Gates and Jobs are/were relentlessly and repeatedly pilloried for their "immoral" approach to business and freedom, but to question what constitutes rape or a suggestion that paedophilia is harmless is forgiven readily, because the individual "likes" the perpetrator is abhorrent.

> Seeing as an awful lot of people on this very thread were outraged by [Eich's] behaviour

I can't speak for everyone, but while I strongly disagree with his (implicit) views on gay marriage (I even protested against Prop 8 leading up to it passing, though I unfortunately wasn't quite old enough to vote against it at the time), I also was - and still am - pretty harshly critical of him being pressured to resign from the organization he co-founded solely because of his political leanings. He was the right leader for Mozilla, despite his politics; while it's possible that maybe he was some raging egotist bringing down Mozilla and running counter to its mission, I've yet to see a whole lot of evidence for that.

Meanwhile, Stallman is well-documented to be abrasive, uncooperative, and egotistical even to the people who supported him, and while this specific incident was rather benign, I can understand it as a "straw that broke the camel's back" situation. His dogmatic views - while sometimes absolutely spot-on - were also often at the detriment of the free software movement (e.g. the hard stance against OpenBSD's "blobs", and the hard-line stances against non-FOSS programs on FOSS operating systems despite multiple GNU subprojects releasing supported builds for Windows).

Stallman, in other words, was to the FSF as Ballmer was to Microsoft in the sense of being both passionate about their organizations and also being the reasons why their organizations were hemorrhaging influence. Ballmer's departure allowed Microsoft to regain its footing, shake off some of its more toxic dogmas, and become actually decent(-ish; shoving ads down the throats of paying Windows users is pretty scummy, but other parts of Microsoft have actually started to be better members of the broader tech ecosystem). Hopefully Stallman's departure will have a similar effect for the FSF.

Source or STFU? When did he say "paedophilia is harmless"? You can't even have a conversation about paedophilia in reference to a 17 year old without seriously going off topic.

"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren’t voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."

https://stallman.org/archives/2006-mar-jun.html#05%20June%20...

Here is my conspiracy theory. It is completely hypothetical and unsourced and I really hope it is untrue, but any scenario should be considered.

Brendan Eich is a shill controlled by Google and US goverment agencies. The social media mob attack on him was actually a planned marketing campaign with aim to create an image of an independent, anti-establishment and alternative leader.

His actual goal is to create a "controlled opposition" for Google Chrome and a replacement for Tor Browser. Brave project is needed by Google in order to avoid antitrust charges from the EU when Chrome reaches ~90% market share. It will be still selling user data to Google and it will contain TOR backdoors known only to the US agencies (which will be easier to hide in proprietary browser).

Oh please. We use torproxy unmodified from upstream so the risk is fingerprinting — which is why we warn people looking for Tor-level network privacy on fear of life and limb to use Tor directly. Tor private windows in Brave are for users who should not have to find a trustworthy VPN to cope with untrusted wifi hotspots and the like.

The “selling user data” line betrays ignorance of how data is valued. Google doesn’t sell bulk data to advertisers, it gives API access to ad exchange operations that leak data but not the whole user profile, especially not the valuable correlations, brand loyalties, and shopping searches that run for weeks in case of cars or other major purchases.

Brave builds client only alternatives for anonymous donations and private ads that pay the user 70% of gross. We are making this verifiable on chain in the next stage of our BAT roadmap. If we defected and stole money or data, we would thus be caught and roasted into the ground by our lead users. This is by design.

Last thing: I am hardly an anti establishment leader. I am too busy running a startup, trying to get revenue to cross over based on flat and small/standard fees that leave the big fee to the user.

If you want to find controlled opposition, ask to see the terms of Google’s search deals with other browsers, especially the ones that have been slow and weak on tracking protection that is on by default. A Microsoft contact last year said he suspected those terms include proscription of tracking protection that is on by default, or at least that impairs Google search ads confirmation.

It's not a company. It's a university, for God sake. If no free speech there anymore, then where? In the kitchen, like in the USSR?

Now if he was a pedophile, he should be in jail. But he is not, he is exersizing free speech, no matter how disgusting it is, he is entitled to it. Should Nabokov have been made unemployable too for writing Lolita?

People keep saying he was "fired", but my understanding was he wasn't actually being "paid" to begin with. (Is that correct?)

Freedom is a two edged sword.

You are free to say what you like, but the rest of us are free to take actions in response to that so long as those actions don't violate your constitutional rights.

There's no constitutional right to a job or a board membership.

Consequences aren't out of line. Any person in any private company saying same stuff would be fired. Period. It is totally inappropriate and out of context.

> there are certain discussions you just cannot have

The way I look at this is through responsibility. It's like what we learned in Spiderman, "With great power, comes great responsibility."

So it's not that Stallman can't have this conversation anywhere. It's that when he has it so publicly, it makes people question whether he is wielding his power well.

Sometimes responsibility means not saying anything at all. Presumably, Stallman is at MIT for computer science and free software. Why is he speaking off topic to MIT students and alum? Presumably he could develop non-MIT relationships and have whatever crazy conversations he wanted.

More often, I think the responsibility is just to do a lot more work. If you're famous and you speak off the cuff on topics that you haven't researched, then your comments get a reach that's undeserved. It's a misapplication of your fame.

I thought that about PGs most recent luggage comments. This is something that had an answer that he could look up and share with people. Or if that's too hard, he could have gotten a thorough answer privately. Seeing him be so willfully and publicly ignorant made me question whether he deserved the power that comes with fame. Laziness like that is diminishing and eventually it gets to the point where people are so diminished that they should lose their jobs and/or positions of authority.

A point that I'm not seeing raised enough is that Stallman's current job is nowadays almost purely evangelisation and PR. He is a public figure.

In that context, fired is more than fair. His image being linked with pedophilia (on top of the other issues he has) makes him a really bad choice for the public face of a movement/foundation.

If he was, say, a lead engineer whose work was not tied to his image, we could have an argument - but that's quite clearly not the case.

The use of the word attack implies force. Clearly no one has been struck physically and there is no force involved. So the idea that free speech is somehow under attack must be misguided.

Don't be overly pedantic, verbal attacks are a thing.

They were mocking Stallman's penchant for pedantics

> without risking making yourself completely unemployable

Can you provide some examples of people who have been made "completely unemployable" by the twitter lynch mob?

Except it's not just about "free speech", it's about protecting the organisation's integrity which was already shot because of Epstein. Context matters, and in this case MIT couldn't afford to just let him off with a warning after already being hit for taking money from a sex trafficker. If RMS had thought about the big picture, he would have known better than to engage on the topic to begin with, especially in that forum.

The FSF is even worse because he's supposed to be in a position of leadership there and represents the organisation. And they shouldn't be put in a position where they have to decide whether to support some controversial statement about age of consent laws just because one of their leaders decided to stick up for one of his friends. It's just not worth it.

> How is it we value free speech, but there are certain discussions you just cannot have, even in a rational and measured way, without risking making yourself completely unemployable. You should be able to have a questionable viewpoint in a discussion, without worrying about the lynch mob ending your career.

Just ask James Damore and his memo on a certain ideological echo chamber. I read his document, and found his view point to be sadly misinformed; yet his right to speech wasn't protected. He was fired.

That was the moment I realized free speech isn't really a thing any more if it touched certain topics. Yes constitutionally we still do, but we can easily lose everything that matters to us even if we win the court battle.

Regarding the United States at least, there are topics that we, as a country, have decided are not up for debate in the workplace. That's a feature not a bug; we've had enough decades of, for example, observation of how covert and overt racism harms people it is directed against that we've made it the sort of thing that companies can be directly liable for if they allow it in their space.

There's a hundred years of history explaining why the balance point between freedom of speech and freedom from fear has been calibrated thusly.

Valuing free speech and valuing what others say are not one in the same.

The consequences here are not out of line, because this wasn't the first time that RMS made his views on statutory rape (he doesn't see the harm in it) clear.

The man has no understanding of the concept of consent, and why a child is unable to grant it. He can have whatever opinions he wants, but as a spokesperson for the FSF, he sure as shit shouldn't be broadcasting that one.

This isn't some rando who works for an organization being punished for airing their opinion. This is someone whose job is public speaking, speaking in a way that actively harms any organization he is associated with.

I generally don't see the hacker community jump to the defense of someone who has so colossally mucked up at his one job, but here we are, turning ourselves in knots in the defense of the right of a public speaker to remain employed when his speech is actively harming his employer.

It should also be noted, without the faintest shred of irony that the man consented to resign. I don't see why everyone is making such a big deal out of it...

>RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island.

Which until a few years ago was completely legal in for example Switzerland. As long of course as no one is coerced into anything. Playing the Advocatus Diaboli, why should i view this outcry as anything different then the Saudis stance on sex before marriage? Fundamentalist puritans being opposed to self determination shaming others into conformism? Its not like the US where you cant drink until you are 21, but get to join the army with 18, where sex ed is often reduced to abstinence only, where the government does its best to infringe into womens right to get abortions, where you can be prosecuted for sexting as a minor and lets not forgett where sex workers are almost across the country criminalized has any moral high ground on the topic what so ever.

But thats besides the point. First the MIT donation and now this stuff over 3 corners. How about we focus on what actually is the problem here? How many people from both parties had connections to not a brothel owner but someone involved in human trafficking and coercing minors into sexwork? How he got away with this this despite being brought infront of a judge for it? Or why they were on that island in the first place and why Eppstein apparently invited so many people. The word compromat comes to mind. But these politicians arent so easy targets, people like Stallman or the guy at MIT are. The mob wants blood and it doesnt seem to matter whos. I would recommend checking your moral compass if you are at threat of being sued for slander after the discussion here.

There isn't a situation where a 74 year old has sexual contact with a 17 year old on a billionaire's private island in which everyone is willing and happy with what is happening.

It is extremely doubtful that a young woman would find herself in that situation in any other way than a long path of abuse and desperation.

Taking advantage of that young woman is immoral.

That isn't some puritanical, anti-sex philosophy that hates fun.

That is empathy to the all too common situation of young vulnerable women being used for pleasure.

I dont necessarily disagree with your assessment, however i am sure someone could also tell you how sex before marriage has an absolutely horrible impact on the people involved or how your assessment would also be true for prostitution in general. You likely heard "the speech" before when it comes to abortions.

In the end its weighing off protecting people from a presumed risk against infringing on their self determination. The question is clear cut when it comes to kids as we as a society accepted that their self determination isnt that great and infringing on it is fine most of the time. They have to brush their teeth, they dont get to drink alcohol and they cant work in a brothel.

The question here is does the same rule for a 8 year old apply for a 17 year old. Most European societies see a huge difference when it comes to age and that the ways in which the self determination of a 17 year old can be restricted are a lot more limited. In the end infringing on someones self determination is just too grave of a violation to do it unless its absolutely necessary.

What is instead illegal is not the action of the person presumed to be needing protection but make sure that exploiting that person is illegal. The Switzerland example still had it illegal to encourage or coerce girls to work in a brothel, which in practice means there was no one willing to risk running such a brothel.

And again, this discussion misses the point. Its not why did Eppstein run a brothel on an island but how come he was able to engage in sex trafficking, coercing of minors and all of that under the nose of quite a lot of politicians.

You think there doesn't exist a single mentally healthy middle-class 17 year old girl who would have sex with an elderly man for a large sum of money? That only the poor disadvantaged girls solicit sugar daddies?

This idea is counter-intuitive to me. When I was 17 my religious convictions prevented me from having sex with anyone, but I imagine that without those beliefs I would have at least put _some_ dollar figure on the price for me having sex with a 74 year old woman, and I certainly didn't have any history of abuse or desperation.

The law has been set to prevent children from being taken advantage of by adults. Being capable of making the decision and being able to make the decision properly are two different things - the law is there to protect you even when you don't think you need it. At 17 I didn't think a lot of things were good for me. It would have been easy for someone to trick me into doing something I shouldn't - that benefits them way more than it does me. What you are suggesting is that we should be okay with this. The law, precedent, and public opinion all disagree with you.

> What you are suggesting is that we should be okay with this.

Anyone who can read my comment above can see clearly that you are putting words in my mouth.

> The law, precedent, and public opinion all disagree with you.

Except for all the places where law, precedent, and public opinion agree with an age of consent of 17?

The whole point is that there is not one single hard and fast rule that defines the boundaries of ethics in prostitution. So many of the comments here (including yours) portray a complicated situation as clearly black and white. Of course it doesn't help that in this particular case many folks are talking past each other because we're all intermingling various interrelated topics:

* Stallman's remarks and forced resignation

* The age of consent

* The specific case of Epstein's island

* Prostitution

I suspect that if we were to explicitly comment specifically on one point or the other that we'd all find we agree much more that we appear to.

Anytime sex with children comes up there are dozens of HN accounts who'll post mind-boggling shit. "But is abuse really that harmful?", "consensual paedophilia isn't so bad", "prostitution is the same as a burger flipping job but better paid", "well, okay, this child was kidnapped, drugged, and raped and then sold via small ads for further rape, and everyone involved knew that, but do we really want to stop those ads? Isn't that the start of a slippery slope?".

It's really fucking creepy.

There certainly do exist situations where that could happen. Epstein's island really isn't one though...

In Berlusconi's ~75yo case he was acquitted of having sex with a 17yo because the "fact is not a crime". Then he was accused of bribing witnesses 10 million €, so I guess we have to wait and see.

Definitely morally dubious, especially in his case. It's not clear if the girl did it for money, or was more or less nudged into this by her life circumstances.

>It's not clear if the girl did it for money, or was more or less nudged into this by her life circumstances.

I don't imagine there are any 17 year old girls having sex with 74 year old men who see a distinction between those two things.

"There isn't a situation where a 74 year old has sexual contact with a 17 year old on a billionaire's private island in which everyone is willing and happy with what is happening."

How about, if the old person would be mick jagger? I could imagine, he still has his charms to some. Also I have seen young attractive women aproaching old yoga gurus for example ..

But yeah, the old guy wasn't mick jagger, nor a yoga master and at best he did assume the girl was a 18+ old prostitue doing it willingly for money and power.

If you offered enough money I am sure a fair number of 17 year old would be happy to accept. I have seen girls auctioning off their virginity after all.

It is striking to see you say it, given the decades of immense cultural pressure to convince young Americans that of course you should be willing and happy to seek out sex with old billionaires -- it's fulfilling!

It's so hard to imagine the origins of the Playboy-era now. But it was dominant among the educated classes through the 80s or 90s. The change is mostly for the better. I suppose the pendulum will swing again some day, but likely not in my lifetime.

Women and men trade resources for sex all the time. Are you aware of engagement rings?

The only issue here is the age of the girl involved.

>As long of course as no one is coerced into anything

In what insane hypothetical does a 17 year old girl have consensual sex with a 74 year old man on a billionaire's island? At best it's prostitution, c'mon.

Yes and prostitution is a normal job like any other in my jurisdiction. Coercion isnt part of that. They pay taxes and get to sue if a client doesnt pay. I find the criminalization of sex workers as it is happening in the US extremely barbaric.

Yep, just a normal, level headed 17 year old girl looking to make a quick buck by sleeping with old, rich men. What 17 year old wouldn't love such a life?

I'm with you on prostitution in general, but Epstein was a sleazebag and we know exactly what sort of girls he was grooming. There is no moral avenue that leads to sex with a 17 year old prostitute.

Again, i am not disagreeing. I am making the argument that you can make an argument like Stallman did without deserving mob justice. Stallman broke with the strict morality code of his society and nothing more. That i might have the same opinion as the mob doesnt mean we should go around ignoring free speech and attacking anyone commiting the heresy of playing Advocatus Diaboli. Its not free speech if you only allow people saying what you like.

I am also not talking about justifications for Epstein, i mentioned how unrelated Stallman is to the real problem here namely Epstein and his visitors.

> There is no moral avenue that leads to sex with a 17 year old prostitute.

This is highly contestable

Let's not be completely idiotic and remember who we were at 17. Idiotic and acting before thinking, sure, but far from totally clueless.

There's something beyond slavery and prostitution, there's willing exploitation of the old guy for money, beyond the sexual service. If it was a young stud with an old lady, you'd think twice before saying the old lady is a dirty pervert, right :D

But that's never been the point: the point is you and me can debate to no end about bullshit like that with half information and no legal culture, but Stallman, as a member of faculty, has 0 legitimacy doing it on faculty mail.

> but Stallman, as a member of faculty, has 0 legitimacy doing it on faculty mail.

Are you saying that this kind of legal and cultural discussion should not take place in academia?

And there's nothing wrong with prostitution per se.

There is when children are forced into it due to circumstance, coersion, or force. This subject at hand has nothing to do with an adult making a conscious choice.

They're only considered children in some backwards places. Plus as far as I understand 17 is old enough to enlist in the army in the US? Please tell me how you think it's totally ok to send "children" off to war but prostitution now that's a line you won't cross!

More to the point of this thread: since I'm arguing that there's no effective difference between a 17yo and an 18yo prostitute (much like Stallman), should my professional life be ruined as well?

It's still legal in large parts of Europe. What I don't get is the US... where the age of consent is I think 16, but everyone's making a huge fuss about the fact that someone was 17.

Yes, it was rape and trafficking - that's terrible enough as it is, no need to make it look worse than it is. This is essentially diluting the most terrible crime of abusing young children.

The age of consent and the vagaries of how consent can be given varies between states. Some states set the age at 18, and can charge minors under the limit for statutory rape, some states have the age at 16 and allow marriage to children as young as 14 with parental permission...

I'll go ahead and say the quiet part loud. There is a changing definition of what is a child in the US. People generally under 24 are considered children, and I can recount a few people facing critique over dating people in their early twenties (<25) from dating men (mostly men) who are older. I've read an article that questions whether 16 year olds can be sexually active at all, that is, with teens their own age (other 16 yr olds), not with older people so nothing like pedophilia or an age difference at all. Another example is a thread I read on reddit questioning whether it was okay for a 17 year old musician making music with sexually explicit lyrics, presumably concerning sexual relations with others their own age.

A lot of the Epstein drama seems to be driven by two pieces, political connections to Trump and Clinton (so it touches "both" sides if you will) and the reaction of this changing definition of childhood to the exploitation of these teens at the hand of Epstein and the perspectives of people either older or from countries with different ideas of the propriety of the sexuality of teenagers. The changing range of who is a child is why what rms said so digusting, because it is considered in kind with say, rape of a toddler or a preteen in the popular mind as the social definitions are shifting.

The problem of course is this is very US centric, and there are of course people just living in different cultures and attitudes elsewhere. I have friends abroad were actually confused about the Epstein drama when they first read about it because to them, it was salacious but not as creepy as Americans think it is.

That's quite strange because I was under the impression that the US has a problem with teen pregnancies and the age at which sexual encounters first take place is going down.

I assume that's the whole point of the law in many US states and countries - it recognizes the biological reality that teens will have sex.

I've also seen that some EU countries allow teens to sext with each-other (boyfriend/girlfriend exception) without having them fall afoul of the otherwise clear laws against child pornography. This is unlike the US and also seems sensible.

The teen birth rate has been dropping, and things usually attributed to youthful indiscretion like drugs and alcohol just aren't as popular anymore. The entire Hollywood set of tropes popular in 00's teen movies aren't really true anymore.

My point is that social mores in the US are moving faster than current laws. I'm also not really sure whether teenage sexuality is a hard biological reality as, well, social pressures have an ability to change minds. Years ago, 13 year olds were expected to take up work on the farm. Today, 13 year olds are children most definitely. Perhaps there are limits to how much social conditions can condition individuals but at the very least, the whole changing definitions of childhood (or what was called "adolescence" for teens being pushed into the early 20's) is happening and whether it's conditioning or not.

> the age at which sexual encounters first take place is going down

That's about 20 years out of date. Teen pregnancies are less common than 20 years ago, and age of first sexual activity has been going up.

FYI: the age of consent in California is 18.

California != the United States, which I assume was the GP's point (and also one of Stallman's points): the age of consent varies between jurisdictions even within the United States, let alone outside of it, so trying to declare "sex with someone under the legal age" as inherently immoral would require clarifying which legal age in order for that declaration to be meaningful.

That is: it's hard to have a meaningful discussion about whether or not someone is old enough to give informed consent if there's no actually consistent definition of what "old enough" actually means.

I personally consider 20 to be that age (with some lenience for situations where both parties were/are underage at the start of the intimate relationship), but that's based more on the typical "half plus 7" rule than anything particularly concrete.

So laws don’t matter as long as in some other jurisdictions or time it’s not illegal?

You are free to disagree with the law as it’s written. You are even free to break the laws if you disagree strongly enough. But you should not expect to be free from the consequences.

Stallman is facing consequences that are not part of the law. This citation of different legal standards provides evidence that extra-legal action was inappropriate.

>But you should not expect to be free from the consequences.

No one does. its not about not prosecuting anyone for what happened on that Island. Its about Stallmans response to the allegations against someone else. Did you respond to the wrong comment by any chance?

> I welcome anyone to provide a counter-argument.

Here's a counter. You're ascribing intent to one's writing, and unless you have a special relationship with Mr. Stallman - you don't know anything.

Because of a radical, illiberal mob, Stallman's life's work has been taken from him.

Few years ago I had had a Junior engineer on my team begin telling me how he finds certain speech so intolerable that he feels he has the right to assault someone for saying it. This is the reasoning behind these kinds of mob justices.

So now I see a mob hurting yet another life, not because of real-world conduct, but because of speech. I see real-world destruction wrought because of speech.

What never occurred to this young man was that there exist people who find the suppression of speech to be what is truly intolerable in this world. That this form of group-think is truly destructive, that actions are of consequence, not speech.

Do pray the pendulum never swings in your direction.

As far as I understand, there's plenty of real-world horrible conduct he could have got fired for too, which has gone without consequence.

This isn't a one-time thing where he never did a bad thing in his life and now is suddenly attacked by a mob. He has been an awful person for a long, long time, and now he is suddenly facing actual consequences.

I'm willing to bet if I went through all your tweets, social media, and personal email, I could find SOMETHING that could have gotten you fired if it ever came to public attention. In fact, I'm sure that's true for just about anybody.

Really? Because I make a point of remembering that electronic communication has infinite distributibility and infinite duration. Do you not?

That's a straw man. of course it is.

What you won't find, however, is me harassing and making women uncomfortable in person for decades.

But my point is, I'm sure I can find something if I looked hard enough. Probably even worse as what Richard Stallman did isn't THAT bad.

RMS is an "awful person"? I would say that, he's a hero to a lot of people, including me. He might be "social unskilled", but an AWFUL person? I would say that is untrue in any common sense way.

Yes, actively awful. Hostile-working-environment awful. Women cultivating plants in their offices because they know he hates plants and won't creep on them awful.

> Women cultivating plants in their offices because they know he hates plants and won't creep on them awful.

This 100% doesn't make any SENSE, and I read it five times. Can you please clarify?

>Few years ago I had had a Junior engineer on my team begin telling me how he finds certain speech so intolerable that he feels he has the right to assault someone for saying it.

Most people feel this way. Not with nearly as much speech as your junior did, but there are certain forms of speech we are so against we have written exceptions into law and the Supreme Court even used concepts such as obscenity to empower these laws to ignore even the First Amendment.

Is it really surprising a generation or two later people are now seeking to have even more speech fall under such bans?

Divining intent isn’t the right threshold to judge speech. If it were then I can say whatever I want in whatever environment, because how would you prove my intent?

I yell fire in a crowded theatre, that’s ok it wasn’t my intent to cause panic.

Only because your words caused actionable harm. If you didn't intend to cause harm and there were no harmful consequences should you still be punished?

Should drunk driving be legal as long as you don't crash?

Drunk driving has a reasonably high likelihood of physical harm, as does yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre.

Posting opinions about current events on a message board is not likely to cause physical harm.

> I yell fire in a crowded theatre, that’s ok it wasn’t my intent to cause panic.

The "fire in a crowded theater" analogy was coined by justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Schenck v. United States.[1] Holmes used that analogy to send a Schenck to prison for protesting the draft in WWI.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

The idea that speech is not "real-world conduct" is, in my considered opinion, not just wrong, but actively corrosive to the fabric of our civilization. Ideas are powerful, speeches can incite revolutions, send millions to their deaths, or be used to fight tyranny and oppression.

Should we highly value the idea of free speech? I believe we should. But we should also recognize that there's no such thing as "just speech". What we say matters, particularly if, like Dr. Stallman in this case, we are public figures speaking in what (given the number and types of people involved) is a semi-public forum.

There are two well know aphorisms: "the pen is mightier than the sword" and "he who lives by the sword dies by the sword". But if one recalls the last is derived from a line in the Bible that says in whole: “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword."

Sometimes, we should put the pen back in its place, lest we kill or die by it in our hubris.

Intent is irrelevant ... only the impact. One must always be ready to reckon with the impact of their actions and speech, regardless of what their intent was.

> Intent is irrelevant ... only the impact.

Generally both are judged.

You can have the intent to commit murder, but if you bungle it and the person is still living (i.e., no impact), then you're still in trouble.

And conversely, this is why terms like "homicide" and "manslaughter" exist, because judgements in cases of one person killing another depend on specific circumstances and intent.

It feels like you two are trying to disagree with me, but are only bolstering my argument further. In the context of murder, regardless of what the murderer's intent was, the victim is still dead ... the impact remains unchanged, and the murderer must still reckon with their actions (even if their intent is taken into account in sentencing)

If the impact is a bunch of people misinterpreting and feeling upset, that’s not much impact.

If impact caused harm then that’s another story.

There are laws for libel, slander, harassment, threat. Let’s use those laws and prosecute people.

Who says harm hasn't been caused? I've never been to MIT, but there's plenty of stories floating around from alumni who suggest he may have contributed to a hostile environment that has likely made women feel unwelcome (for one example of harm caused).

It’s important to measure harm done and react when it is significant (or hopefully before it reaches that threshold).

Fortunately there are legal thresholds for workplace harassment that are designed to protect people. They aren’t perfect by a long stretch, but it’s one way to differentiate between harm and perceived harm.

No workplace should be a hostile environment and it’s messed up if women feel unwelcome. The challenge is in differentiating from harmful behaviors and behaviors that are interpreted as harmful. I have no idea how to do that and one of the reasons why I think HR is a really hard job.

But there’s lots of scenarios where someone may feel unwelcome that doesn’t result from any ill will or poor action on the part of another. For example, I had an employee who was really hurt because a staff member didn’t prebrief her on meetings she was invited to. She was really upset and it hurt her. She though her coworker was withholding information from her and wanted her to do poorly at work. Eventually I had to confront the other and the other was surprised and had no idea. The other wasn’t withholding info but my staffer was requesting to attend as an optional on the meeting at the last minute and the other agreed but didn’t spend any time describing the meeting. The other assumed my staffer would read the agenda and material and review the participants. The resolution was my staffer understanding no ill will.

There’s many situations where I get upset about something that is me interpreting things and not a flaw in others that should be changed. Hostile work environments need to have the actual problems addressed and the individual perceived problems resolved efficiently, I think.

The statements I see stand on their own.

Supposing intent behind them isn't necessary.

What they say is damning regardless of intent.

And the intent was pretty obvious.

Dude, Stallman has been spitting his bullshit to the world and we had no way to stop the vomit, coming out of universities. How many young people have wasted their youth following his ideas, reading his stuff, until they finally realized it was all shit.

So, yeah, now it's catching up to him, for something nobody in his right mind every does in a corporate environment: giving his opinion on the moral definition of rape. Fucking come on man, how can you defend this moron, who does that ?

You see yourself tomorrow, in charge of the education of students, writing around to your colleagues about what is or is not a rape, for all to record and copy paste to newspapers ? At least do it on skype and add a smiley...

>I welcome anyone to provide a counter-argument.

You're justifying the actions a lynch mob. Why does anyone need to provide a counter point? The onus is on you to explain why you think a mob taking justice into their own hands is okay. The only justification I can find is that he said something inappropriate. Who are you to decide what's appropriate? Are you the arbiter of morality for the entire world?

>This is a man who said something wildly inappropriate in an MIT forum and got fired. He deserved it. Defending him by pointing towards people who overreact to things is a bit terrible.

Completely missing the point of the outrage.

It's the chilling effect of people silencing views they don't like that really freaks people out, pisses them off and makes them mad. The actual views in play are irrelevant - the issue is that some person was uncomfortable at something some other person said, so they silenced the man's ability to say it. Not just that, they took away his vitality and ability to support himself. Anyone with any kind of functional critical reasoning facilities can instantly understand why this is scary.

It sets a precedent that completely removes the ability to have non mainstream opinions. If you think the wrong way, the progressive mob will make you seem unemployable. Because you had the audacity to say something "inappropriate," (oh also the mob determines what's appropriate and inappropriate on the fly).

> You're justifying the actions a lynch mob.

No I'm not. I also don't think the outcome had anything to do with the mob. There were plenty of people even before the mob knew anything, who took strong exception to what RMS was saying.

> Who are you to decide what's appropriate? Are you the arbiter of morality for the entire world?

I'm not. MIT decided what was appropriate for their organization and the moral behavior of its employee and associate.

I am making what I think is a pretty universal moral statement in that old men taking advantage of young women for sexual pleasure is very wrong.

> It sets a precedent that completely removes the ability to have non mainstream opinions.

These aren't just "non-mainstream opinions" he was defending actions which most western societies consider rape. This isn't some slippery slope where people can't say anything nonconformist, this is a situation where people don't want to be associated with you when you publicly defend taking advantage of vulnerable, abused young women.

RMS was pointing out inaccuracies in how a deceased colleague who was being accused of a heinous crime might simply have slept with a prostitute, if at all (which turns out probably wasn't the case).

> This is a man who said something wildly inappropriate in an MIT forum and got fired.

This is a man who said something mildly inappropriate in a forum, as is his wont.

> He deserved it.

A completely appropriate and reasonable verdict, no doubt. Doubts are for unreasonable people, of which one you are not.

> I welcome anyone to provide a counter-argument.

Somehow I doubt that.

> pointing out inaccuracies

But, he wasn't?

1. "Minsky has been accused of assault"

2. RMS: "you shouldn't call it assault - might give people the wrong idea"

3. "It would have been literally rape in the relevant territory, 'assault' is a fine word for it"

4. RMS: "ok, even if it's legally rape, it shouldn't morally be considered rape, so don't call it assault if it was 'just' statutory rape."

What inaccuracies did he point out? I see that he expressed his opinion that 'assault' is too strong a word for some cases of rape, but what inaccuracy was there in the original statement regarding the allegations about minsky?

Do you mind avoiding paraphrasing? It seems a lot of the confusion is stemming from the editorializing / paraphrasing done by the media outlets and throughout the ensuing discussions so it may be best to litigate the direct quotations to keep the discussion as fact based as possible

From the thread in question:

>When this email chain inevitably finds its way into the press, the seeming insensitivity of some will reflect poorly on the entire CSAIL community. Regardless of intent, this thread reads as "grasping at straws to defend our friends" around potential involvement with Epstein, and that isn't a reputation I would like attached to my CSAIL affiliation.

What do you think as an administrator if you see a comment like that about one of your prominent employees?

He resigned from the CSAIL too. https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#16_September...

Maybe Stallman should focus less on rape and sex, and more on writing software. We're still waiting for HURD...

Seriously, what is it with all those people discussing in corporate and public function their stupid opinion of the moral definition of rape. Let justice speak, and you, speak privately. For someone lauded as a genius of some sort, he could have maybe understood what you can say where.

> his friend who ... is accused

It's the accused that is the problem with this. He isn't defending the proven actions of a pervert, he is defending the memory of a dead friend, suggesting that his friend was incapable of the crime of which he is accused. If defending an accused friend is now itself punishable by excision from society, then the effect of an accusation alone becomes immediate isolation. The presumption of innocence, not only in court, but in public discourse, is a vital component of a genuinely free society. I will not support people who reject it.

There is absolutely no obligation to presume innocence in our personal opinions. We are all freely permitted to form our own opinions based on the facts of the situation.

There are good reasons that our legal systems favor the accused -- ones that I _fully_ support -- but it is an unreasonably high epistemic standard for us to operate under in our daily lives.

If I don't want to associate with someone because they're an asshole, I'm under no obligation to prove so beyond a reasonable doubt. My freedom of association is more fundamental.

That he was defending his dead friend isn't the issue.

He was defending statutory rape and taking advantage of vulnerable young women - it does not matter whether the actual event happened or not. RMS was defending rape in a very public forum and got fired.

RMS stood for a world where we have the right to know and modify the code that runs on our machines. A world where we have the freedom to access ideas and discuss them. He battled for decades to protect the freedom of you and me, and he asks nothing in return. He was such an unfailing bulwark against the forces that would deprive us of our rights that his name is practically synonymous with the free software movement.

He took a position in a discussion you disagree with, so you're OK with him being removed from his organizations and his name dragged through the mud. Your argument stands for a world where people deserve to be stripped of their position because they expressed an opinion you disagree with.

Even if you're completely 100% right, how do 'indefensible opinions' get challenged if they cannot be expressed? How do any of us learn or improve?

Has anyone taken a moment to think, what comes next now that he's gone? I hope for your sake and mine that the accomplishments of the GNU and FSF will be enough to keep us free.

He disagreed with the wording "assault" which he felt was ambiguous. He would almost certainly have been fine with the wording "had sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island". I'm sure a number of other wordings that call into question said girl's consent, the legal status of said girl on said private island with regards to sex, and so on would have been fine as well.

That is what “defending” means: he took objection to what Minsky allegedly did being accurately characterised as assault and a crime.

Plenty of criminals take objection to their crimes being described as crimes, but “men should be allowed to have sex with underaged girls” is a particularly self-serving and gross position for a man in a position of power over young women to take.

> That is what “defending” means: he took objection to what Minsky allegedly did being accurately characterised as assault and a crime.

That "and" is pretty disingenuous here, turning the sentence from accurate to grossly misleading. RMS took objection to the act being characterized as assault. Not as crime. And the truth is, it does matter what crime was committed, not only that a crime was (allegedly, as it turns out). It would matter to you if your deceased friend was accused posthumously that their record is at least kept accurate, if it isn't straight.

Yeah but see, nobody cares. Stallman is not well paid by his students, some of which female, to hold sexual assaut position in his MIT functions. He could, for example, let judges decide what the definition of rape should be, that's what we all pay taxes for after all.

He can hold an opinion about the moral definition of rape, sure, but why express it so widely in a corporate environment, it blows my mind.

Is a university a good place to discuss things?

You’re talking about a man who was pedantic about language his entire life.

It’s not the same as a rapist saying “it wasn’t rape, she didn’t say no” especially since he wasn’t the implicated party.

In fact I don’t see him not stating it’s not a crime or not morally bankrupt by itself either.

Assaulted does carry a particular connotation does it not? Assaulted meaning, in the biblical sense: attacked.

> You’re talking about a man who was pedantic about language his entire life.

Thank you for reminding us of this. The man was a noted stickler for language. In fact many ppl only know him via the GNU/Linux interject meme.

The age of consent in a large part of the world (including a large part of the US) is 16. In Europe it goes down to 14, with some protections from abuse over those with power over the teen (e.g. teachers).

Some(?) European countries do legally differentiate between children and teens and that seems reasonable bases on what we know about biological and developmental differences.

I also regrettably used "child sex abuse" inaccurately before when referring to Epstein. This reflects the legal status in the US I believe, but paints the wrong picture of actual children instead of teens being harmed. It pays to be accurate, because discussions around this topic are completely hysterical as it is.

To be fair, I don’t think he said it wasn’t a crime. He simply didn’t think it equated to the same moral depravity as sexual (physical) assault, hence why he thought it should have a different term to describe it.

Not defending it, but characterizing his words correctly in context.

for it to be accurate you have to look into the laws of a given jurisdiction. If you take EU 17 is age of consent in all countries but Vatican and Malta with a significant portion being significantly lower.

> If you take EU 17 is age of consent in all countries

There is no age of consent in France. (However there are aggravating thresholds if there was a crime: under 18 if committed by someone with authority over the victim, under 15 for other cases.)

Come on - if I accuse you of being 74 and having sex with a a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island - then nobody can defend you? Minsky is dead and he cannot defend himself, the girl said she was directed to have sex with him - but she did not say she eventually did it, she did answer a question about where she went to do that and she answered that which would imply that she had sex with him - but it is entirely possible that she meant the place where she was directed to do it, but eventually failed, there is a witness saying that he turned her down. These are the facts from the deposition and it is fair to point them out.

There is another aspect of his emails - he also wrote that she presented herself as willing and that was entirely misquoted as 'she was willing', which was unfair. Stallman's point was that it is a bit misleading to characterise the act as 'assault' if it was she who sought out Minsky and he was not aware of the fact that she was coerced by Epstein. This is a bit insensitive splitting hair - but the misquoting was really mean.

Err... anyone can defend him. The fact that RMS did defend him is prima facie evidence that he was able to defend him.

Now, most people would mount a defense along the lines of "I don't believe Minsky would have sex with trafficked girls". RMS, always with the innovative methods, decided "Maybe it's not so bad to have sex with trafficked underage girls".

But, like it or not, he was clearly capable of making that defense. So I don't know where "can't defend" is coming from.

I am not a native English speaker - should I use 'nobody is allowed to defend' instead? He was punished for defending his friend and the parent post justifies that:

"RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island.

There is not a defense for what RMS was writing or how he was trying to defend Minsky. ... The firing was appropriate and reasonable, not a response to extremists, zealots, or some other kind of witch."

As if it was enough to defend someone accused of some crime to be guilty as well. This is clearly absurd - so I am trying to get the author to explain what he really meant.

BTW: sorry if I was snappy; those modal verbs are often difficult for native English speakers also.

RMS is not guilty of a crime, I don't think anyone is saying that.

RMS can (could) make his defense, nobody stopped him, sreened or censored the posts, his opinions are legal.

RMS can't (couldn't) make some of the statements he made and keep his prominent positions.

The issue at hand is not that he was defending his deceased friend. Indeed I think it is very possible that the actual situation was that Minsky was there and declined the sexual advances. That is a story which is out there, I'm not here to judge if it's true or not.

It was the way RMS was defending. Those specific statements are things you "can't" do and - qualifying here - keep a prominent public position, especially when you are making them in a prominent forum in that institution.

RMS shouldn't be charged with a crime, but he did make a whole lot of people not want to work with or be associated with him.

OK - the whole flamewar shows that indeed the mailing list was probably not a good way of defending Minsky. It was not effective and it generated a lot of chaos. But then the question is what would be the appropriate way?

> The firing was appropriate and reasonable, not a response to extremists, zealots, or some other kind of witch.

Many people, including you, have lost their grasp for the concept of different moral attitudes. The above is just your opinion, not mine. I do not agree with it and find it irritating that you consider your moral judgement an argument that requires to be countered.

>This is a man who said something wildly inappropriate in an MIT forum and got fired

In my opinion, you are conflating inappropriate statements with statements to which you disagree.

The university campus is where minds should go to get challenged by different and somewhat uncomfortable opinions. RMS presents different and uncomfortable opinions in spades. But he does not present them in an inappropriate way. The thread RMS was responding to was explicitly political and opinion based. It was absolutely fair game for his response.

As an example, when I attended university, I took a class (Anthro 2A) where the material presented pedophilia as normal behavior in the context of certain cultural customs. I personally disagree with that research, but I didn't call for the instructor to be fired. Cultural relativism is an important concept that should be thought about even if one disagrees.

But the actual Stallman/MIT kerfluffle is actually not that big a deal IMO.

The bigger deal is the mob acting on deceptive reporting by Vice & DailyBeast. It's one thing to say that Stallman's factual statements on Minsky were inappropriate. It's another to conflate them with statements on Epstein. The vast majority of the outrage is based on the reporting that makes Stallman appear sympathetic to Epstein which is a complete fabrication. It is literally 'fake news'.

> RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused

So what? Lawyers do this all the time. Is it really important that the person accused was Stallman's friend?

Also, what's exactly wrong with an argument that one should not conflate "having sex with Bob" with "sexually assaulting Bob"?

this is a very very very dangerous viewpoint that you are expressing, and I very much hope that you are over simplifying. Because if you really think that somebody needs to be fired, for stating a point completely unrelated to their job, then that is a problem that we, as a society, need to address urgently.

Everyone is allowed to believe anything they damn well please. They are even allowed to state it. There should not be a viewpoint holding which makes one unemployable. because as soon as that exists, there is no freedom of speech, only a caricature of it.

freedom of speech is not about saying things that everyone agrees with. It is about saying things everyone disagrees with. and yes, speech comes with consequences. But those should be doled out logically, not by an angry mob forcing an institution's hand.

The common argument that I hear is that free speech does not come free of consequences. Fine. But those should be clear and well defined. Not decided by a mob at any given moment. If you want to clearly state that you will not employ anyone who holds the following views, that is okay with me. But firing somebody because the mob demanded it, is against the very idea of freedom of speech

> Because if you really think that somebody needs to be fired, for stating a point completely unrelated to their job, then that is a problem that we, as a society, need to address urgently.

The issue is not voicing an opinion in private -- it's voicing it on an institutional mailing list in his capacity as a member of that institution.

Like I said: clearly specify which opinions your employees are not allowed to hold, and that is okay. Arbitrarily deciding this AFTER they have already expressed the opinion is terrible.

Deciding post-facto smells of favoritism and can never be proven to be fair. It also creates a chilling effect since nobody ever knows what is and is not ok to say, since at any point in time AFTER the fact you might decide it is not ok.

It definitely makes sense to have some kind of official policy about what kind of speech is acceptable, but I don't think it's possible to enumerate all opinions that are unacceptable in a reasonable way.

I'm almost certain MIT has an employee handbook that reasonably covers situations like this. If anything, it's a demonstration of favoritism that he wasn't fired in the past.

> I don't think it's possible to enumerate all opinions that are unacceptable in a reasonable way.

The beauty of REAL freedom of speech (like we had in 1977 [1]) is that the answer to that is: none

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

the instution that is at the heart of a current scandal regarding jeffrey epstein, it should be noted.

That they feel they cannot take on the burden of RMS's stupid comments in addition to their existing scandelous items is not surprising, and should not surprise anyone.

RMS may well have gotten away with making the comments he did, had he been posting on the UCB mailing list.

Why is it wrong to defend someone that is accused of something ? Does an accusation equate to culpability ? He defended him by doubting that he did the things he's accused of, not by excusing those things.

Yes, this bashing is totally unreasonable, he expressed an opinion that the charge against Minsky is not valid. One party makes an accusation, it's a perfectly acceptable thing to do for the other party to counter it. Accusation is not the same thing as proof. There is a category of accusations these days that are just the same as a jury sentence, if you're labeled, then you're done. No evidence, witness saying this didn't happen ? Still guilty.

It's frustrating and hard to find real information regarding what he did say and what he did not say, so I feel I shouldn't play the judge here. I did find this direct quote of him on his website, and it doesn't sound to me, from reading this piece, that he was trying to defend Minsky:

> Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he deserved to be imprisoned.

https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...

I do not think this changes everything, but if this is indeed his honest opinion, then I do feel that he might have simply communicated his opinions very poorly.

> It's frustrating and hard to find real information regarding what he did say and what he did not say

I got your back: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-sci...

It's the PDF of the email thread (sigh) at the end of the article.

(Not gonna make any comments because of the mob roaming around.)

What he said, for posterity:

> "The most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing," Stallman wrote in his post last Wednesday. "Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates. I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term 'sexual assault' in an accusation."

Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/17/richard_stallman_in...

[and in my opinion: it's the last sentence that made his statement wildly inappropriate. It's one thing if he wanted to raise the possibility that Minsky was deceived, and while incorrect it would be excusable, but his last sentence is a belligerent assumption of bad faith, and it is highly inappropriate for him to use such absolute language in denying sexual assault]

His use of "plausible" is interesting here. It is plausible that she wouldn't announce that she was a blackmail-trap/underaged sex worker/trafficked slave or whatever.

It's not plausible that an 17 year old would be propositioning old men without any external influence in this situation. I think he's strongly implying this and that's part of what got the strong reaction.

I'd suggest due to that, the statement is dodgy even before you get to the bit you highlight.

Well, he could have assumed she is paid for it and does it for money. I mean, I agree that remote island full of underage girls throwing themselves at old men raise questions and most reasonable men would conclude it's too likely to be coercion rather than voluntary sex work to get involved but I still think it's not ridiculous to have discussion about it. I also happen to agree with Stallman about the wording. If you call any activity that constitutes statutory rape in some jurisdictions a sexual assault you're doing disservice to people who experience what is more commonly understood as assault as that devalues the term and the suffering that comes from it.

> said something wildly inappropriate in an MIT forum

I don’t think what he said was wildly inappropriate for the forum. It’s an open discussion forum. People not understanding and being offended is not something that RMS or a reasonable poster could predict or prevent.

I read through the entire thread and it’s not as bad as people are interpreting. I think people are inferring intent and meaning that just isn’t there.

I’m pretty disappointed in FSF.

> The firing was appropriate and reasonable, not a response to extremists, zealots, or some other kind of witch.

In a country where the current president was elected on a platform of "grab them by the pussy"? Ha.

The last person who tried providing counter-arguments just got fired from MIT.

Let's be honest, the people who disagree with your comment are worried that eventually someone will out them for their terrible behavior as well! It's shocking to me how unaccustomed to being held accountable some people are.

Here's a radical supposition: it's actually good when speech has consequences in society.

Welcome to online witch hunt. Anyone defending the witch is probably a witch as well.

How about a rational debate concerning factual things? I have allmost no background information, knew RMS only as the weird FSF guru .. and it is very hard for me to find facts. Most of the debate is about other stuff, than what actually happened.

edit: so apparently all of it started with this:

https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...

A rant by a female MIT student, offended by something she rad of RMS she did not know before. She writes very emotional, but much better, in terms of facts, than what vice etc. made out of it

Now to make my own conclusion:

Yes, RMS seems to be a sexist, unsensible at least, maybe not fit to lead such a position, but the media coverage about it is disgusting and misleading. But so is also some of the criticism of the women who started it. She seemed to be really upset about it and not just a "attention whore". Because there still is lots of sexism in the IT nerd world and being a man I can only try to understand what it means, when you try to show good computer work, but get sexually responses instead. So she reacts different, when she sees the sign on his door: " knights for justice (also hot ladies)" to which I would think, stupid maybe, but not to be taken too serious. But I am not a women. I do not have to avoid his office to not fear sexual mollesting, which apparently quite some students experienced.

> rational debate > factual things

its getting increasingly boring to have to engage with people who don't see the irony in a belief that they can be an objective observer of what is "factual" and "rational" in their lives.

Yeah yeah, all information is through a subjective bubble, we can only make approximations to truth, blah blah. Save your thoughts for beginners philosophy course. That is nothing new. Of couse "factual" means, "as factual as possible". Meaning all the accusations, which apparently have been written, listed clearly.

Ok cool i just wanna leave a choice snippet from the vice coverage of the emails here so we can all be on the same page about what we're doing devils advocate for here:

> Early in the thread, Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked. Stallman goes on to argue about the definition of “sexual assault,” “rape,” and whether they apply to Minsky and Giuffre’s deposition statement that she was forced to have sex with him.

> In response to a student pointing out that Giuffre was 17 when she was forced to have sex with Minsky in the Virgin Islands, Stallman said “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.”

These are totally reasonable things normal people say!

Yes and anyone who disagrees with you is probably on a witch hunt /s

> Here's a radical supposition: it's actually good when speech has consequences in society.

Let's consider the logical conclusions of "society" being able to inflict consequences upon someone if they speak an unpopular opinion.

If you're an individual human being, it's likely that you have at least one opinion about something that isn't inline with the overarching culture. The particular issue of Epstein or Stallman or whomever is irrelevant; while you may agree with the mob in this case, next week or next month you might not. Under your proposition, that leaves you with three options:

1. Keep your opinion to yourself and refrain from telling anyone for fear of reprisal. In other words, self-censorship.

2. Changing your opinion to match society's, out of fear of being ostracized.

3. Expressing your opinion and then having your personal or professional life ruined, or at the very least, affected to the point where you suffer financially, mentally, emotionally, or socially.

Which of those three options sounds beneficial to you?

You're describing life in every single society that has ever existed. Do you really believe that any of these things don't happen today or that there's been a place where they didn't happen?

Further, all of your "options" sound amazing if what the person is doing is calling human trafficking victims "willing." It turns out that there is a difference between good and bad things. AND it's actually possible to determine which is which!

This notion that a social technology such as public opinion can be used in a negative way is not some sort of revelation. Weapons only have the morality of those that deploy them. Just as we must decry immoral use we must also celebrate moral use, otherwise we'll be living in a society where people can claim that victims of sexual violence were "willing."

> what the person is doing is calling human trafficking victims "willing."

Please stop spreading this misinformation. As explained in this thread countless times, Stallman never called the victim "willing" -- he just said she might have been threatened into looking like she is.

I understand what you're saying and i'd like to point out, as i have done in other places, that I am a real fan of RMS and his works and have been for years. I'm not on a witch hunt here.

But.

I think its really important for people making this sort of argument to deal with the fact that public people who make public statements do not get to control how those things are taken. In much the same way that your production as an artist isn't entirely yours when you release it to the public, RMS' actions have consequences outside of what he may have meant. I for one dont think for a moment that he means to justify human trafficking. But what he did do what make a statement that can be taken as victim blaming. This is very, very dangerous and there should be consequences.

I'm purely arguing against the idea of there being serious consequences for merely expressing an unpopular opinion.

What about a harmful one? What if the CEO of a company went around the office telling anyone that’ll listen about how women are just dumber than men and really they should stay in the kitchen. I sure hope there would be consequences.

And what im saying is that

1) there are material consequences for "expressing an unpopular opinion." some of which aren't up to the person expressing them. 2) those determining the consequences, such as the organizations that let RMS go, are and should be allowed the freedom to self-govern in this way. they are well within their right to refuse to be associated with people who say these things.

So they are arguing for an logical improvement upon the way things work as opposed to your desire to keep things at the status quo.

Self censorship, the first world's most horrible suffering... Dude, grow up, we all self censor. There are people I want to slap and people I want to fuck, I calm down and think twice before maybe making a relevant face, and let it go, horribly self censoring myself :D

I sure know better than to redefine the moral value of rape in a corporate mailing list, but heh, who would want to horribly self censor their every brain farts, surely not heroic stallman, defender of free speech and provider of no value.

I disagree with Cole's comment, and i think yours is designed to suggest that my disagreement makes me an unaccountable creep.

That's totally bogus, and I think you should consider the consequences that your speech is already having on the people around you.

It's designed to suggest that richard stallman's comments are exactly what a creep would sound like and blind defense of him without acknowledging this fact doesn't win anyone any points.

Personally I love the guy and his weird contributions to the field. But how can you look at this and not think "wow thats not ok to say" no matter what we can consider he may have meant after the fact?

> "wow thats not ok to say"

I read what he wrote, and i DO think it's okay to say. Further more i think it's RIGHT to have said it, publicly, especially by a person of his standing.

It took an incredible amount of courage and determination for rms to have the impact that he's had on the world.

And now, he's been cancelled.

This is a bad sign.

insofar as we have no evidence or inclination to believe that rms has engaged in any criminal behavior or wrongdoing or abuse of his position, why should it matter at all whether what he says is or is not 'ok'? people say stupid shit all the time, none more so than yourself.

Um, I'm actually worried that I or other person will be punished for something that they didn't do. In the third world country I live in you'd have to accuse someone and then bribe the judge. Turns out that in US one don't even have to bribe anyone, mob will lynch them. You just need to accuse them of right things; e.g. stealing and homicide won't do. Is that the progress that humanity has made?

You (and to be fair, others) are using "lynch" grossly inappropriately here.

Let's see: - judged by angry mob -- yes, - no ability to defend oneself -- yes, - killed -- no (though seeing polarization and level of anger here it's possible that he'll be eventually physically assulted), - person demolished, life ruined -- yes (Stallman got removed from the org he created, got fired from his work. Another poster here written that his friend got accused, defended in court with hard evidence, life is still ruined).

Comparison with lynching seems fair to me.

All of this got me thinking about creating, you know, accepting tech community where everyone is free to express their own opinions. I'm personally fine with my code being called shit and me being called dumbass for a good measure, just tell me what you really think and we'll sort things out faster instead sugar-coating stuff to not hurt my ego.

Lynching has a specific context in the United States; it has the history and connotation of racist terrorism.

No one dislikes Stallman on the basis of the color of his skin, and no one is murdering him. The use is a grossly inappropriate metaphor that diminishes the real meaning of the word.

I'm totally certain you've sifted properly all possible consequences, as well as what does and does not constitute accountability....

I find your comment and it’s tone as “absolute” fact to be disturbing.

The issue is that the girl was 17.

Who owned the island is not relevant, how much money they make is not relevant, and whether they're Stallman's friend is not relevant to either the morality or legality of the matter. Being wealthy or old is not a crime.

Stallman's controversial comment was:

> “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.”

Whether you agree or disagree that is a reasonable statement to make.

I think RMS made a completely faulty argument and doesn't understand the world assault, which calls into question his state of mind.

That said, I don't really see how this is grounds for termination. Again, I am not defending the guy or his utterly bizarre opinion on the matter. He had a disagreeable personal opinion and wrote it out load... so what? He wasn't advocating for harm of any person, persons, or group.

People are way too sensitive and we are giving away far too much to save face among people who aren't worth the effort. If I were king for a day and ran some kind of public facing organization here is how I would manage these things:

1. Anybody who communicates or advocates harm to any person, persons, or group gets a naughty warning. On the second offense they are permanently banned, terminated, or what ever.

2. Anybody who communicates offense or defensive language (cry babies) gets their post flagged (suppressed and locked). Sad people feed trolls. They are not hostile, but they are still part of the problem. I am sure they have all kinds of wonderful justifications, but I don't care.

This would allow people to disagree within bounds of acceptable behavior while also preventing mass hysteria and echo chamber insanity.

I don't have US cultural background and it looks insane to me, about level of witch hunts or lynch mobs. Like one accusation of peadophilia is enough to ruin a life, and lives of others that dare to voice opinions counter to that. Same thing with rape. It doesn't matter if it happened or not. Court of law? Nah, why? Clearly if they are accused then they are guilty.

How can you request a counter argument when you have not provided an argument?

"When someone claims they 'didn't see anything suspicious' re: Epstein, just remember he had girls around him at all times. They are lying."

https://mobile.twitter.com/RadioVcs/status/11714435848069939...

I do a great job do triple overtime and get fired so they can save money it's hard to feel sorry for celebrities when us ordinaries are trashed so hard in the course of regular work why should I feel sorry for Epstein when the industry treats me as trash disposable labor it's refreshing that people are standing up for women finally.

You are burning an innocent men alive with all his legacy just because you believe that he might be wrong when defending a friend. Not even the worst dictatorships were as evil as you. When you think about fascists, think about you .. doing what you think is right as the cost of everyone elses.

It's worth mentioning that Minsky died in 2016, so this is not an attempt to influence a forthcoming trial, but to defend a friend's memory.

I wonder where is the "liberal" rainbow-flag waiving mob, and why none of them remembers that gays were persecuted just a little while ago in exactly same manner. And if they do, why don't they speak out

"colechristensen" is basically spamming this thread with the same message, repeated over and over again. I counted 20 similar comments. One begins to question this guy's sanity.

> RMS was defending his friend who, at the age of 74, is accused of having sex with a 17 year old girl on a billionaire's private island.

That's not what happened.

RMS defending his friend was happening

Minsky was accused, and those are the details.

It doesn't matter if it didn't happen, RMS was defending Minsky in the situation that it did by saying the girl who was less than a quarter of his age would have appeared willing.

That gets you fired. Even if it is entirely hypothetical.

And never shall a man accused of treason have a lawyer, for to defend someone who is accused of treason (and therefore has likely committed treason) is itself an act of treason, is it not?

And surely to defend a rapist, even an accused one, is nearly as bad as being a rapist? Why, perhaps we should skip the courts all together and simply tar and feather them in the public. That's worked out well historically...

He resigned.

He was asked to resign because it's a good play for MIT, you don't have to defend against a wrongful termination suit if the person in question willingly resigns.

If he wanted to defend himself, he would have stayed and fought, let himself get fired, file a lawsuit.

But he resigned, willingly.

> If he wanted to defend himself, he would have stayed and fought, let himself get fired, file a lawsuit. But he resigned, willingly.

Or possibly, because both the SFC [1] and the head of the GNOME foundation [2] said that they would find it unacceptable to work with the FSF as long as Stallman was still the leader, he realized there was no way staying on would be possible.

[1] https://sfconservancy.org/news/2019/sep/16/rms-does-not-spea... [2] https://blog.halon.org.uk/2019/09/gnome-foundation-relations...

To be fair, it is morally absurd to define ‘fired’ in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was asked to resign or volunteered on their own volition.

This isn't in the courts.

You're right, extra-judicial punishment is much easier to carry out.

> This isn't in the courts.

Clearly, as the angry Twitter mob of virtue signalers clearly has no desire or respect for objective arguments and accusations based on facts, let alone what the law actually says.

> RMS defending his friend was happening

Although it looks like you really believe that's what happened, it is not what happened.

And no amount of repetitions can change the fact that he did not "defend his friend from rape accusations".

> It doesn't matter if it didn't happen

It kinda matters though...

> That gets you fired. Even if it is entirely hypothetical.

And that's absurd.

We always arrive at the same conclusion.

EDIT:

can I ask you why all these comments look the same?

it kinda looks like a pattern to me...

https://imgur.com/a/Wm92IDQ

You wrote 'it is not what happened' twice now, but don't offer another point of view on what did happen. That's not how argument works.

But id didn't.

He just expresses on honest opinion on the matter.

Like he always did all of his life.

> That's not how argument works.

To prove you wrong I don't have to prove an alternative scenario.

You are wrong, that's enough.

It doesn't matter if Minsky did it or not.

It does matter that RMS, in a hypothetical defended the supposed actions in the way that he did.

And yes, I repeated myself many times to several people saying similar things with the intention of facing all of the threads with a similar challenge. So what?

> It does matter that RMS, in a hypothetical defended the supposed actions in the way that he did.

Like... he wrote about it?

Many others did, nobody lost the job.

It must be horryfying to read someone else's opinion in 2019 America...

You're talking like Stallman is some kind of new Ted Bundy...

> And yes, I repeated myself many times to several people saying similar things with the intention of facing all of the threads with a similar challenge. So what?

are you sure you're not simply obsessed with it?

I don't see it as RMS defending his friend. He was purely concerned with making the correct accusation. Some people considers that as "defending", which might have never been his intention.

Why would he be concerned with such details if not for defending Minsky? He is weird, and pendatic. But that we knew for a long time.

He's insufferable, you mean. They don't give a rat's ass what he actually said or thought, they wanted him out for so long they couldn't believe their luck he decided to publicly redefine the morality of statutory rape on a corporate mailing list.

Some people do software, like Linus Torvalds, other linger for decades doing nothing and discuss the value of rape. Hope we'll hear less of his nonsense in the future.

I actually haven't seen Minsky being accused. That court transcript says that she was 'directed to have sex' with Minsky but nowhere does it say she did and there is an eyewitness claiming he - Minsky - turned her down.

So RMS is defending his deceased friend as though he was accused, it would have been more effective to question the accusation rather than to defend as though it had happened.

In the email thread RMS actually argued that point.

He should have left it at that.

I would have said: I take upon myself to guarantee my friend never touched that poor girl, and he always felt horrified she was exploited so.

He said: The girl was most likely willing, and it's morally imprecise to call this a rape, at worst it would be a statutory rape.

Who gets respect, who gets fired ? :D

> He said: The girl was most likely willing

He very clearly did not say that, he said the girl was most likely presented to him as willing.

How is it you've made half a dozen posts in a thread about this without even bothering to read what you're commenting about?

> The girl was most likely willing

Why do you feel compelled to paraphrase (and in the process lie)?

Care to elaborate?

> This isn't us vs. them.

The discussion is between free speech and appropriate speech. Which is both sides have tribes supporting them Libertarian vs SJW. You might not see the divide but every one else does and you can see that.

> The prevalence of comments trying to turn this against "SJW"s or whatever "other"

You might not agree with or recognise the tribes but they exist.

> This is a man who said something wildly inappropriate in an MIT forum and got fired.

MIT is a university its a public place where adults go to seek truth, if this is an inappropriate place for adults to discuss adult subjects then where is?

I get the argument it's not "public" because the land is privately owned but it is a place where the public gather. While I frequently see this argument it is never accompanied with what would be an appropriate public venue for adults to discuss inappropriate things.

Stop the cancel culture .. LEARN TO SPEAK WITH PEOPLE YOU DISAGREE WITH ! You fake belief that you are perfect is the exact reason you will be cancelled if you ever succeed in anything

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