Er, sorry, no. A public mailing list is not the correct venue for this discussion. Supposing as you do that society currently holds the wrong opinion on "does sex with minors constitute sexual assault?", the right answer is unlikely to be hashed out on a MIT list for CS activities.
You also lend Stallman more weight than he deserves. His resignation will go unnoticed by all outside of our specific tech sphere and certainly will not "set a precedent that will absolutely lead to self-censorship" (???).
Should we cheer his resignation? It's undoubtedly a sad moment for him and his supporters, but Stallman's behavior quite likely has held back the FSF for some time. He's an ideologue, not a leader.
1. His post was not an out of context rant on an unrelated school mailing list. He was criticizing the words used by MIT students in connection with a protest at MIT, and that mentioned his ex-colleague. The MIT students posted this in the first instance, and it was a direct response to them. It seems to me like an appropriate forum.
2. Stallman's argument was simply to call a spade a spade, and not a defense of Epstein or Minsky. If you told 10 people (each unaware of any of the facts alleged) that Minsky sexually assaulted a girl, and then asked them to describe what they imagine occurred after hearing he sexually assaulted some, many might assume he violently assaulted someone. The degree of differences in guesses that you might receive makes the word functionally prone to tarnishing someone with a reputation for a different crime than the one they committed.
Stallman therefore asked for the incident to be described in unambiguous terms; for example, that Minsky had sex with a sex trafficked 17-year old 50 years his junior on Epstein's island. That does not mean he defends that scenario -- you can still view it as reprehensible, and condemn it, but at least you are not engaging in "accusation inflation", where you are condemning someone for a potentially worse crime than they committed.
3. I agree that Stallman is unnoticed outside this sphere, but this is part of a continued trend of threatening people's reputations and livelihoods for stating an opinion. I created a throwaway for the first time ever simply for this comment (which I think is relatively benign), so yes, I think this trend will continue to lead to self-censorship.
I think you should be aware that all non-consensual sex is sexual assault, and all sexual assault is violence. Sexual assaulters have committed violent crime.
How old were you when you first had sex? How old was your partner?
If you were both under the age of consent, as is often the case, in many jurisdictions [0], neither of you were able to give consent, and your sex act was technically non-consensual on both sides. This is not just theoretical -- there are many cases of prosecutors charging consensual underage couples with statutory rape, or with child pornography charges for sexting a picture of themselves to their boyfriend/girlfriend, and often using these laws in unjust ways (e.g. charging only the black boyfriend with statutory rape, but not equally charging the white girlfriend).
Let's assume you and your first love grew up in California, had sex for the first time just days prior to your 18 birthdays (when you both became legal), and are now 30 and have been happily married for 10-years. By your definition, you both committed violent sexual assault, and I'd be correct to go around your workplace saying things like "oh zzzeek? you know he's committed violent sexual assault. Some sort of rape. I don't know the details, but just wanted you to know."
This is a contrived example, and I'm in no way equating this with Minsky or Epstein. I'm not defending either of their actions whatsoever. But I think that Stallman is correct that using words in this type of manner, deliberately ignoring such qualitative differences in degrees, is unfair. It doesn't matter what the legal or dictionary definition might be -- it's creating a misleading impression in someone else's mind as to what you are guilty of, rather than simply stating in clear terms what you did and letting that person decide for themselves how culpable or abhorrent you are.
> If you were both under the age of consent, as is often the case, in many jurisdictions [0], neither of you were able to give consent, and your sex act was technically non-consensual on both sides. This is not just theoretical -- there are many cases of prosecutors charging consensual underage couples with statutory rape, or with child pornography charges for sexting a picture of themselves to their boyfriend/girlfriend, and often using these laws in unjust ways (e.g. charging only the black boyfriend with statutory rape, but not equally charging the white girlfriend).
> Let's assume you and your first love grew up in California, had sex for the first time just days prior to your 18 birthdays (when you both became legal), and are now 30 and have been happily married for 10-years. By your definition, you both committed violent sexual assault, and I'd be correct to go around your workplace saying things like "oh zzzeek? you know he's committed violent sexual assault. Some sort of rape. I don't know the details, but just wanted you to know."
Minsky was not even close to the age of the victim, though. You're creating a false equivalence, and you're even stating this yourself at the last paragraph, so why even talk about these things?
He's not creating an equivalence at all, though. He's constructed that scenario as a direct counterargument to this...
> I think you should be aware that all non-consensual sex is sexual assault, and all sexual assault is violence. Sexual assaulters have committed violent crime.
That definition isn’t so cut and dry (different depending on jurisdiction). Violent crimes frequently depend on use of physical force or threat of physical force.
... No? Well, at the very least Stallman wrote that he doesn't think 'sexual assault' is a meaningful term. He uses the wrong (by which I mean, not the legal) definition for 'sexual assault' and implies that there are no other definitions by rejecting the idea that that phrase can be used in an accusation.
It's funny that Stallman is just being Stallman but since the context is suddenly around a word people are sensitive to, it's somehow suddenly not appropriate behavior.
He is just trying to create public conversation about clarification of the term "sexual assault" when it comes to murky areas of consent. If it came out tomorrow that Minsky indeed raped an underage child, Stallman wouldn't deny the truth. The truth is all he's after.
Then it would be nice if he used the standard legal definition of "sexual assault" rather than use his own definition.
34 U.S. Code § 12291 (29) - "The term “sexual assault” means any nonconsensual sexual act proscribed by Federal, tribal, or State law, including when the victim lacks capacity to consent." - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/34/12291#a_27 . It does not require 'force or violence', as Stallman implies.
Stallman stated: "Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the
criticism."
How is "sexual assault" not the specific term for sex with a coerced minor? Where is the moral vagueness in the accusation?
>> Where is the moral vagueness in the accusation?
The legal definition is wide enough to encompass a broad range of acts that people have differing moral intuitions about (even if they are all bad acts, some are markedly more heinous in a lot of people's minds). That leads to moral vagueness. Pointing to a legal definition doesn't change that.
If I went around calling you a killer, because you kill insects, or a criminal, because you had an alcoholic drink when underage, or a producer of child pornography, because you sexted your girlfriend a photo of yourself when you were 17, and then pointed to a dictionary or legal definition to show that I was technically correct, would you not still object that I'm using terms that are overly vague as to the morality of what you have done?
By that logic, every law leads to moral vagueness. What's "child abuse"? If you spank your child, in some jurisdictions that's fine. In others it's illegal. For all I know, there may be some where it's okay so long as you don't leave bruises. Does that prevent us from making justified accustations of child abuse?
What's spousal rape? In some jurisdictions there is no such crime. In others it is a crime.
What's copyright infringement? Again, the details differ by jurisdiction. Different jurisdictions recognize different fair use or fair dealing considerations, and have different lengths of time for copyright protection.
> calling you a killer, because you kill insects
If I killed someone, and you call me a killer because of that, by pointing to the dictionary and legal definitions, can my friends defend me by saying that the definition is overly vague?
FWIW, I am a killer of insects - Killer is a not-uncommon nickname, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_(nickname) - I am a criminal because I've been ticketed several times for breaking traffic laws, I believe there is a strong argument against defining sexting as the production of child pornography, similar to the argument allowing some minors to have sex with adults of similar age.
I do not believe there is a strong argument in saying that sex with someone who is unable to grant consent is not sexual abuse.
> What's "child abuse"? If you spank your child, in some jurisdictions that's fine. In others it's illegal. For all I know, there may be some where it's okay so long as you don't leave bruises. Does that prevent us from making justified accustations of child abuse?
How does it not? I was abused as a child, physically and psychologically tormented and coerced into taking drugs and participating in weird religious things I wanted no part of, and many people I've encountered, including my own mother, don't view what I've been through as abuse. I consider it child abuse but even the multitude of police who visited my dwellings growing up in rural Louisiana sided with my abusers.
This is an example of the independence and often disparity between objective morality and law. Law wants to emulate morality, but it never will. And thus we cannot use law as a roadmap for morality. That is what people are doing in this case, clinging to the arbitrary laws defined in their section of the earth instead of only making safe moral assumptions based on scientific inquiry.
Stallman has just lost a position that he has spent his whole life working towards in a misplaced attempt to play the devil's advocate for a friend whom he has trouble imagining a dark side of. For what, so we can be morally vindicated? After everything which Stallman has helped give us? What kind of purist authoritarian hyper-reactive world are we living in? Without Stallman the two of us wouldn't even be able to have this discussion.
That's all fine and good, but Stallman argued that it was absolutely wrong to use "sexual abuse" in an accusation, not morally wrong.
Stallman's position appears to be that you absolutely cannot call what happened to you "child abuse."
Stallman doesn't seem willing to learn what others mean by "sexual assault" before making up his own definition and claiming that's the definition they were using.
Stallman has also spent his adult life as a sexual creep. This is an open secret. Your moral calculus appears to be that people are free to creep on others so long as the good they do outweighs the creep, and Stallman's good means he can be as creepy as he wants to, with no direct consequences?
If after 30 years the free software movement can't survive and thrive without Stallman then the movement has failed. The indirect consequences include all the people who left or never joined the movement because of his creepiness. Is that in your calculus?
Stallman gave the wrong definition of "sexual assault".
He chastised people for using the wrong phrase.
Legally speaking, it's the right phrase.
If the argument is really about "objective morality" and "absolutes" then those cannot be decided, so your interpretation of Stallman's text would also have Stallman object to calling Epstein a pedophile - something he rejects. Therefore your interpretation must be wrong.
Are you paying any attention to any of the cited claims in the last few days? It's not like these deep dark secrets. Searching HN for "Stallman creep", for example, finds:
"There are many valid criticisms of Richard Stallman: ... he has creeped out some women by making passes at them (or so they tell me). - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327849 (2011)
I also know a woman who worked down the hall from Stallman, and she found him to be a creep this way.
> He flirts with anyone who is female, even if they are underage. He is creepy in person, in a way that I cannot adequately describe. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he kept women out of open source and free software, and many of his ideas stayed even after he left.
> I remember being walked around campus by an upperclassman getting advice during my freshman year at MIT. "Look at all the plants in her office," referring to a professor. "All the women CSAIL professors keep massive amounts of foliage" s/he said. "Stallman really hates plants."
Coercion is one thing, but Stallman is suggesting that, if it were the case that there was no coercion, then the age alone of the person does not make it sexual assault considering the globally varying age of consent. Stallman is understandingly quick to assume there was no coercion given his past with Minsky but was not suggesting that we do not give the case due process. He was just advocating stricter language around the issue.
I believe I understand what Stallman suggests. I'm saying that it has no merit.
Do you believe it has any merit? His emails suggest that he doesn't have an idea of what the existing laws regarding consent actually is - even the ones which are not ambiguous.
> considering the globally varying age of consent
That's why it must be a merit-less argument. 1) It's a distraction because age-of-consent isn't the issue here, it's the inability of minor coerced into sex work to give consent, and 2) there are regional differences in just about every crime, so if Stallman's argument has merit then it means almost no laws are moral, so talking about the morality of laws isn't that meaningful in the first place.
> He was just advocating stricter language around the issue.
He did not demonstrate that the term was used incorrectly for this case.
He made up his own definition, which requires 'force or violence', then asserted that it is "absolutely wrong to use the term “sexual assault” in an accusation" ... when people are using the term correctly, in its strict legal definition.
Why do you think the use of "sexual assault" for this case is not the correct strict language?
BTW, Stallman doesn't seem to know that "no coercion given his past with Minsky" may be irrelevant to the question of if sexual assault occurred. Some sexual assault laws have strict liability. If 73-year-old Prof. X has sex with a seemingly willing person under the age of consent, with no coercion on X's part, then it doesn't matter if X truly believes the underage person is of the age of consent. In most US jurisdiction, "I honestly thought she was old enough" is not a way to avoid a statutory rape conviction.
For Stallman's argument about coercion to be effective, he needs either 1) to demonstrate that the the laws regarding the Minsky situation require knowledge on Minsky's part that the sex was coerced - and I don't know the relevant laws, or 2) present a strong argument for why strict liability is wrong for that case. He didn't.
I assert it's because he didn't know the basic issues on the topic, but is only arguing what he feels should be the case. Which is not a good basis for complaining that others are being insufficiently strict in their language.
(BTW, why does at 73-year old Minsky think that a young woman wants to have sex with him? Did he consider it might be part of a blackmail plot? Or does he thinks he's so famous that of course a teenager wants to have sex with him? We'll never know.)
There are two issues here, one being Stallman's hesitance regarding the use of the word "child" depending on which country this all took place in, and two being Stallman's comment that there may have not been any coercion at all.
While it's vanishingly unlikely the latter was the case, to vilify Stallman for these statements instead of making scientific inquiry is absurdly reactionary and unempathetic towards someone who is very naturally trying to make rationalizations towards the behavior of someone whom they hold in high regard, as is typical in during the doubting stage of grief.
>but Stallman's behavior quite likely has held back the FSF for some time. He's an ideologue, not a leader.
On this last point, We have to agree to disagree. His firm and unwavering stance on many issues is a flag planted in the sand - "This is how things should be" (whether or not its practical). It is a point of reference which countless engineers, designer, entrepreneurs in tech (including in big companies in FAANG, etc.) have been influenced by (whether or not they were able to live upto his ideal) when building their systems and companies.
Everyday, living in the dystopian nightmare that the modern world (both real and virtual) is becoming, oftentimes enabled by OSS, 'Stallman was right' is something that keeps coming back. Its not just a glib meme.
> ... Supposing as you do that society currently holds the wrong opinion on "does sex with minors constitute sexual assault?", the right answer is unlikely to be hashed out on a MIT list for CS activities.
I expressed no opinion either way on that topic. I don't even consider the topic relevant to my position, which is that once we agree that merely asking some questions will result in harsh punishments, we're hosed as a society.
Today, it's the question you hate that gets punished. Tomorrow it will be the question you hold most dear.
The punishment is not the result of asking questions. The punishment is for his poor judgement of where to ask those questions - namely a mailing list owned and operated by MIT on which he served as a representative of while posting to that list.
So your premise is flawed and thus your position is (ironically) irrelevant to the topic.
Who decides which are the questions that a representative of the university can ask and which will lead to punishment?
As far as I can tell, the discussion was on-topic given that a former professor, Minsky, was being accused of "assault." Stallman's questions and statements revolved around the use of that term and the trouble that its lack of specificity brings.
The university is (ideally) full of scholars holding controversial views, asking uncomfortable questions, and being accused of all manner of crimes. If one of them (Minsky) can be tarred and feathered without a trial, any of them could be.
I don't know what kind of world you want to live in, but I enjoyed my university experience where most of my professors were scholars holding more or less banal views and, to the best of my knowledge, not a one being accused of "all manner of crimes." I don't think professors being accused of crimes is either common or beneficial to the spirit of learning and scientific inquiry.
>but I enjoyed my university experience where most of my professors were scholars holding more or less banal views
If their views are banal, then there is likely nothing novel academically coming out of them. That’s literally the opposite point of professorship, tenure, and academic inquiry.
I recommend you look up the definition of “banal” because you either used it wrong or you don’t know what the point of tenure is.
Technically we don't know for sure what the punishment was for. Especially given that he's said much worse things in the past without resigning, it's possible that these resignations were forced because of some yet worse comments which haven't become public. And even if all of the relevant material is public, it seems likely that this is just the culmination of many issues and the FSF board and supporters simply ran out of patience for rms's antics at last, and that the tone-deaf and bizarre defense of Minsky was just the last straw.
>>I expressed no opinion either way on that topic. I don't even consider the topic relevant to my position, which is that once we agree that merely asking some questions will result in harsh punishments, we're hosed as a society.
Imagine a person emails a large distribution group at their office with the following question: "I notice we have many black employees: does anything think it might be beneficial if we return to chattel slavery and own them? Could lower our bottom line"
Would that person be fired? Should that person be fired? Are there questions that shouldn't be asked? Is everything fair game?
It's crazy to see people taking this stance on a public forum for tech companies. He's talking about Minsky just like you're talking about Stallman. What makes this the correct venue for you but not that for him?
You also lend Stallman more weight than he deserves. His resignation will go unnoticed by all outside of our specific tech sphere and certainly will not "set a precedent that will absolutely lead to self-censorship" (???).
Should we cheer his resignation? It's undoubtedly a sad moment for him and his supporters, but Stallman's behavior quite likely has held back the FSF for some time. He's an ideologue, not a leader.