I think this is all missing the point. RMS may have been technically correct about what happened, but he chose to speak up at the wrong time, about the wrong topic, and derailed the conversation into a diversion that didn't add any value.
And to make matters worse, he tried to quibble about the definitions of "sexual assault" and "statutory rape", which is pretty insulting and hurtful to people who have been victims of those situations.
Now, I don't necessarily see that this should definitively add up to RMS being forced out of MIT and the FSF, but this, combined with decades of awful behavior around women and some pretty messed up attitudes around what he called "voluntary pedophilia", is an understandable camel's-back-breaking straw.
It's a misapplied kind of pedantry anyway; he can quibble with what he thinks "assault" means but "sexual assault" has a legal definition.
It also confuses me to see people talk about stallman's language tricks as pedantry when he spends a lot of energy redefining terms or trying to pull out alternate meanings -- kind of the opposite of pedantry. Or a pedantry against his private dictionary.
Sexual assault does not have “a” legal definition. It has many different and often conflicting legal definitions depending on which state you happen to be in. Things that might factor in would be the victim’s age, whether the defendant knew the victim’s age, the type of sexual act, etc.
Laws are notoriously complex (it’s why we have lawyers), and if you are going cite “a legal definition” that conflicts with the common definition of a word (e.g. assault), I think that carries a burden of actually citing the applicable law that was violated. But that’s simply not possible with in Minsky’s case as there are just not enough details in the deposition where he is named, and he was never formally charged with any crimes.
The phrase “sexual assault” consists of the adjective “sexual” modifying the noun “assault”, meaning “an assault of a sexual nature”. If I then substitute in the definition for “assault”, I get “a physical attack of a sexual nature”.
I’m not playing word games here, this is just how I understand the English language to work and sexual assault to be defined.
I understand that in certain legal settings, any sexual interaction with a minor is deemed a sexual assault due to the fact that a minor cannot legally give consent. But as mentioned above, the laws in the US dealing with sex crimes are actually quite complicated, and details of what actually occurred between Minsky and the victim are few and far between, so I don’t know if that term would apply in Minsky’s situation.
Maybe I am wrong or maybe we just have different understandings of the phrase (possible given the vagaries of the language). But I think accusing people of “playing word games” and trying to “move the goal posts” is not constructive. You’re assuming bad intent where it could just be something as simple as a difference in understanding.
I am quite honestly happy to accept that you're not playing word games and that your intent with trying to dive into this language is good.
I do not believe the same is true of stallman, after having watched him redefine terms for decades, offer his own set of meaning for jargon in common use elsewhere, and so on. I think his frequent stance of "we must examine what this means" is more often than not a distraction, because sometimes he takes a technical meaning, sometimes he substitutes his own, and it never seems like his goal is a shared understanding; just that we should accept his.
And to make matters worse, he tried to quibble about the definitions of "sexual assault" and "statutory rape", which is pretty insulting and hurtful to people who have been victims of those situations.
Now, I don't necessarily see that this should definitively add up to RMS being forced out of MIT and the FSF, but this, combined with decades of awful behavior around women and some pretty messed up attitudes around what he called "voluntary pedophilia", is an understandable camel's-back-breaking straw.