[AndrewBissell]

Stallman seems quite "offended" on behalf of Minsky in his original email, so your whole thesis here that he is somehow blind to the moral considerations at play won't hunt.

What is shocking about Stallman's email is he apparently thinks it would absolve Minsky of guilt to simply assume that Virginia Roberts "willingly presented herself" to him for sex. But this is of course nonsense -- it's the exact set of conditions under which sex is forced on many trafficked victims who are handed off by some procurer. And of course no one really believes that Minsky didn't know the score; many try to defend him by saying, "but he was disturbed by her offer and didn't accept it!" That he continued to associate with Epstein after that, rather than immediately leave or offer help to Roberts and Epstein's other victims, says all there is to day about Minsky's character which Stallman feels so compelled to defend.

[badatshipping]

Did he try to absolve Minsky of guilt? I thought the thesis of his defense of Minsky was:

"Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."

"The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X."

He's not wrong that "sexual assault" is used ambiguously to describe a wide range of behaviors, some worse than others. If a guy does something that's 7/10 bad, and everyone's saying it's 9/10 bad, what's the right way to point out that it was only 7/10 bad?

[AndrewBissell]

This is such an odd argument. No one kvetches over the meaning of "murder" because some are more brutal or premeditated than others.

[rumanator]

> This is such an odd argument. No one kvetches over the meaning of "murder" because some are more brutal or premeditated than others.

This assertion is patently wrong. Discussions whether an homicide constitutes murder (1st degree or felony) or manslaughter (voluntary or not) are plentiful.

[toast0]

Isn't that the whole point of manslaughter? Killing people is (usually) a crime, but it's not always murder.