[koonsolo]

Show me the text where he has a bad idea about consent. And then show me how his statements are false.

I guess you refer to this text:

On MIT's internal Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) listerv, Stallman had seen the description of a protest of Marvin Minsky which said Minsky was "accused of assaulting" one of Epstein's victims. Stallman argued that "the most plausible scenario" is that "she presented herself to him as entirely willing" -- even if she was coerced by Epstein into doing so -- whereas the phrase "assaulting" implies the use of force or violence, faciliating what he calls "accusation inflation... Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."

So please explain to me how this statement is false.

[Latty]

My point was that this article makes no attempt to address those issues.

However, I do happen to believe there is an issue, as I outlined in a sibling comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26646676).

Statutory rape law is a trade-off because proving sexual assault is hard and we value protecting children from abusers more than we value letting people sleep with children. If you disagree with that, yes, I believe you are not suitable to hold a leadership position at any organisation that needs to protect it's contributors, some of whom will be children.

[koonsolo]

First of all a "child" is defined as the age between birth and puberty, so you might want to update your own usage of that word.

Secondly, the bigger part of the world seems to agree nowadays that 16 seems to be a reasonable age of consent.

US is very conservative in this regards, depending on the state. So basically it's OK that a 50 year old has sex with a 16 year old in 1 state, but when you cross the state border, two 17 year olds having sex is illegal.

So you claim that a person pointing out these absurdities should not be allowed in a leadership position?

[Latty]

Sure, replace the word "child" with "minor" or whatever, I'm not a lawyer here, it's clear what I mean from context.

The point is that once the rules are set, you follow them because to do otherwise means either you are an abuser, or you are willing to do things that are indistinguishable from an abuser, giving them cover and breaking the rules that are designed to protect minors. Either way, you are endangering minors.

Stallman didn't just talk about the numbers being different in different places and the issues with that, he talked about a specific case where someone had done this in a place where it was illegal, and claimed that it could have been OK.

There is no room for that if you want a leadership position where you need to protect those people, it endangers them by refusing to always hold those who break the rules accountable.

[koonsolo]

As a leader you indeed need to protect people, and when someone is accused of "assault", I think it's OK to put things in perspective. He gave a clear objective description of the situation, and nobody can claim his observations were wrong. Remember that the accusation was "assault", and I agree with Stallman that this was too harsh given the circumstances.

I want my leaders to stand up for reality. If you prefer your leaders to be "think about the children", then that's up to you.

[Latty]

You can absolutely claim he was wrong, we are talking about a case where it was assault. A minor can't consent under the law. Claiming it was consensual is an excuse that the laws specifically says does not hold because it abusers will always say that, and the responsibility is on adults not to have sex with them. It doesn't matter if there was consent given or not, the person committed assault because the society chooses to have a rule where that is the crime when the other person is a minor. Either way, minors were harmed because it allows abusers opportunity.

Refusing to enforce that rule is absolutely wrong, and it is disqualifying for a leadership position. You are now using "Think of the children" as a thought terminating cliche in reverse, where any attempt to protect minors is unreasonable.

[nojokes]

The world you are looking for is "abuse". Abusers (your wording) abuse, they do not assault (when they do, then they become an assaulter).

What Marvin Minsky did in that situation was to abuse this 17 year old girl. What he did was morally (and most likely also legally, I do not know the full details) wrong but as far as we know, he was not violent or forcing.

That is the important difference Richard Stallman tried to make.

What Marvin Minsky did was wrong but we should not accuse him in something he did not commit.

The same goes with manslaughter and murder.