Comment by blep_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blep_ | Hacker News Reader

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Sigh, this again. I expect better from HN than getting mad at things based on blind keyword matching.

> must have presented as “entirely willing”

Everyone insists on interpreting this as "Stallman thinks she was entirely willing", which is obviously not what he said in at least two ways:

First, he said it was possible, not that she "must have", and advocated for not drawing conclusions without full information.

Second, "presented herself as entirely willing" is different from "actually was entirely willing", considering we're talking about a woman who was being coerced into things. Nobody's seriously claiming the latter, but the former is a different statement, one that leaves open the possibility for Minsky to simply not have thought of the alternative at the time.

> has referred to child sexual abuse as “voluntary pedophilia”

That one was less defensible, but he did later change his mind: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-sep-dec.html#14_September...

I read it as an "I, personally, would not be bothered by this, and it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would be traumatized by it" thing, which would be consistent with his obviously-some-kind-of-neurodivergent mind.

> First, he said it was possible, not that she "must have", and advocated for not drawing conclusions without full information.

He didn’t say that it was “possible”, he said it was the “most plausible explanation”. Those statements are not the same because one implies a certainty of truth. He defended this heavily in a 20-something page long email thread.

> I read it as an "I, personally, would not be bothered by this, and it hadn't occurred to me that anyone would be traumatized by it" thing, which would be consistent with his obviously-some-kind-of-neurodivergent mind.

You’re right, he eventually relented and said we probably shouldn’t be doing this. If this were the only questionable thing he had done and he later said “you know what, I was wrong” then I would be much more willing to give him some leeway here. However, that just isn’t the case. His entire academic career has been riddled with inappropriate behavior and misguided statements.

Stallman tried to defend his accused-rapist colleague by asserting that we need to be “scientific” and look at facts. I agree, and the fact is that RMS has a long-standing pattern of behavior that trends towards immoral, misogynistic, and hateful. Scientifically, you can’t cherry pick the one time he doubled back and admitted he was wrong and ignore the overall trend.

If you personally choose to ignore all of this and worship at the cult of personality here, that’s fine. You do you, I’m obviously not going to convince you that zealotry is wrong. But asserting that he’s some paragon of virtue for his humanitarian fight for the freedoms of software is just laughable.

> He didn’t say that it was “possible”, he said it was the “most plausible explanation”.

You're right, I had misremembered. This is still not the same thing as "must have", but it is much scloser.

I still have trouble seeing this as problematic, because it's still explicitly referring to "presented herself as willing" and not "was actually willing".

> If you personally choose to ignore all of this and worship at the cult of personality here, that’s fine. You do you, I’m obviously not going to convince you that zealotry is wrong.

This is another example of you reading a lot into what someone wrote that they did not say. I wish people would stop doing that.

I think he takes the free software thing well past the point of counterproductivity.

Separately from that, yes, he's said some other things that are not socially accepted, many for good reasons. I didn't even respond to the last paragraph of your comment, because I have no counterargument to it. This does not mean he is automatically wrong about everything.

I simply empathize with him in some specific cases, because I also live in a world that's actively hostile to me in many of the same ways. I just wound up with more social skills and less executive function than he did. This is very different from agreeing with everything he says. People are complicated.

> by asserting that we need to be “scientific” and look at facts

Unspeakable!

The issue is that he wasn't actually doing that.

He was having an entirely understandable emotional reaction to the idea that his beloved mentor might have raped someone, and leapt to Minsky's defense.

What he did, though, was not "be scientific and look at facts," it was knee-jerk defending of someone he loved and respected, in the guise of being hyper-rational.

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