| Someone emailed an event for protesting Minsky, and Stallman accused her of wrongly inflating the term "sexual assault" when using it to refer to Minsky and Epstein. Stallman bends over backwards for Minsky, saying that he shouldn't be automatically to blame if Epstein forced someone to have sex with him. It's little different than the absurd pretzel that Lessig bent himself into when trying to defend his friend Joi Ito [0]: > Q: Doesn’t it make sense to you that people would say someone who is taking money from and cozying up with a guy who is a pedophile and who is targeting young women, maybe he shouldn’t lead an institution that includes women? > Lessig: I’m not sure it describes the case, and more importantly, what about the institution? > Q: What do you mean it doesn’t describe the case? > L: I don’t know about the “cozying up to.” > Q: Going to his house, being socially in his orbit, taking money from him. > L: In the context of raising money — just like you would go up there and meet with him in the context of an interview... > L: When you say that he is cozying up to him, that’s something very different from what I understand actually happened, which is: Joi, in the context of his job for the M.I.T. Media Lab, built a relationship with one of the people he’s raising money from. I don't begrudge Lessig and Stallman for attempting to apply what they think is logic and rationality in approaching these topics. I absolutely despise them for their hypocrisy in the way they refuse to acknowledge how they themselves are tainted by irrationality when defending their friends. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/business/lessig-epstein-i... |
It's massively different, because Joi Ito's interactions with Epstein were after Epstein's sexual atrocities were known. Minsky's were in 2001, which as far as I have been able to find is before Epstein was known to be evil.