[Barrin92]

>For many, the conclusion was clear: Richard Stallman must be “cancelled.” Many failed to make any distinction between what Stallman had done, question age-of-consent laws, and an actual pedophile or child rapist.

These discussions about cancel culture truly have taken a strange turn. I hope the author is not suggesting that the barrier for getting fired is to be an 'actual child rapist'. The response to that is prison.

Firing someone for holding views that go as far as defending sexual predators (Minsky/Epstein mentioned in the article), defending pedophilia, having a history of misbehaving towards students and so on has nothing to do with cancel culture. That is just responsible behavior because we should expect basic moral standards from people in leadership positions.

I won't give money and I wouldn't want my company associated with institutions that put people in charge who trivialize child abuse. You don't need to be a literal sex offender to be unfit to run a public-facing organisation. These contrarian cancel culture blogs have become bizarre.

[throw6119088]

Yeah you said it best. RMS shouldn't be the head of FSF. I say it as someone who does't think he is malicious at heart. He's got a string of behaviours towards women that would drive them away.

Maybe someone should email him these classic papers on sexism in tech. They are old but still relevant. Seems like many here need to read them too:

[1] Why are There so Few Female Computer Scientists (Ellen Spertus, 1991)

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7040

[2] How to Encourage Women in Linux (Val Henson, 2002)

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

[3] What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You (Kathryn S. McKinley, 2018)

https://www.sigarch.org/what-happens-to-us-does-not-happen-t...

[4] Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, 2001)

https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-P...

[mixmastamyk]

Sounds like you didn't understand the piece.

[Barrin92]

care to enlighten me on what part I didn't understand?

[saagarjha]

The part where it mentions that he isn’t defending sexual predators.

[Barrin92]

He is, and I'll quote the relevant part from Stallman's statement that is included in the article:

"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... The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing... We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing."

Not only is Stallman wrong about the fact that sexual assault requires force or violence, sex between a 73 year old man and a 17 year old is not only sexual assault but statutory rape, something which Stallman in another post declared to be a 'technicality'.

[etchalon]

It's interesting the degree to which people will claim his quotes were "taken out of context" or "mis-represented."

Some of the quotes, I suppose you could be charitable and read them as more of a discussion of the logical flaws in language, but it many cases, as is the one above, the quote is so obviously, hilariously heinous, and the mentality behind it so obvious, it's hard to understand why people defend it.

"It's not sexual assault if I thought she was game and didn't use physical force" is such a pedantic defense.

[saagarjha]

I think the biggest conflict here is the fact that most people are not actual pedophiles or sexual assault defenders; however, many may have confused, internally inconsistent or overly simplistic views on those topics. To that end, I really think you need to put on a Stallman hat to understand his viewpoint. (Not that I’m not saying this is something you should wear normally, this is just an attempt to interpret his words in good faith.)

Seeing through those lenses, I think the point being made was that Stallman believes the situation was that Minsky was unwittingly approached by a girl who had been coerced by Epstein to present herself as being of the age of consent and genuinely interested in him, and he felt that the term "sexual assault" in this case was unfair as it projected the view that Minsky had done something coercive, similarly to how someone who buys something that was stolen is unknowingly "trafficking in stolen goods". His views on statutory rape are, IMO, fairly straightforwards: he clearly subscribes to the "if the law says it is legal tomorrow but not today there is something unsatisfying about its definition" viewpoint.

Now, these viewpoints have multiple issues, the largest of which is probably that one is supposed to do due diligence in their choice of partners to ensure that they are what they seem and not underage or being coerced, especially if one is a 73-year-old man with a woman half a century younger. And the reason we have a specific age set in law is that otherwise we would have to do exceptionally difficult value judgements on whether a person is mature enough to provide consent. But I think both of these are just the failings of a rational person to make sense of the world, rather than the rants of a deranged and actively malicious lunatic as most people (including you) claim.