8 ms·

The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful ta

by csb6 7y ago

The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful take on the situation. If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. There are no Internet vigilantes hunting down dissenters. There are people trying to downplay sexual assault. As the internet and as the tech community, we absolutely have the right to condemn public figures when they say stuff like this. That’s what free speech actually means. If you or I said what Stallman said, but to a coworker or to the boss, we would get fired - justifiably. This is not a new concept unique to the digital age, nor is it a concept that should be done away with. The popularity of your comment depresses me deeply.

gojomo 7y ago
I didn't read RMS's "take" as in any way excusing what happened to Giuffre, but rather disputing whether it was accurate to accuse Marvin Minsky of "sexual assault", if from Minsky's perspective at the time nothing seemed wrong. (Sensationalist reporting and selective paraphrasing, like you've done here, has conflated the two issues.) Suppose there's a boxer, "Joe", and he has a scheduled fight against a named opponent. It's set in a legitimate venue, is freely advertised as if the promoters have nothing to hide, includes a normal ref & audience, and then proceeds like any other boxing match, including the traditional cordialities between opponents before and after. To "Joe", nothing's wrong. But then, years later, it's discovered that the opposing boxer was coerced into fighting, perhaps with threats of violence or blackmail. Is "Joe" now guilty of physical assault, for repeatedly punching the other boxer, even if to "Joe" at the time it seemed like a normal voluntary encounter, no seedier than any other boxing match? Maybe RMS's take was dumb. Maybe my analogy is dumb! But it's not "shameful" to try to work out the reasonable characterizations, given Minksy's possible mental state, the law, or common-sense. It might even be possible, under formal legal definitions, for Giuffre to have been "assaulted" while at the same time Minsky's actions don't rise to the level of "assault".
- jacobush 7y ago
  RMS's take was really dumb. He may not be the right fit for the job. The example you gave with the boxer was a really good comparison, but for him to handle the topic that way is so incredibly tone-deaf and frankly, stupid.
- kelnos 7y ago
  The problem with your analogy is that, in reality, "Joe" was presented with a beautiful woman over 50 years younger than him who supposedly wanted to have sex with him, while at a gathering on a billionaire's private island. If "Joe" were a reasonable, non-sketchy person, the absolute best interpretation there is that she was a prostitute of questionable age, which is still pretty bad. Going along with that without asking some very hard questions would seem to be not only morally questionable, but also personally risky. (Of course, there's also reasonable debate as to whether or not Minsky actually had sex with her. One person who was present at the gathering claims Minsky didn't.)
  - gojomo 7y ago
    If Minsky didn't realize she was essentially a prostitute, he was foolish. But how do you know Minsky didn't "ask[] some very hard questions"? At the time of the alleged sex, 2001-2002, Epstein's cover as an investment billionaire who threw money around to win the attention/affection of young-but-legal women was still secure. He'd been a recent repeat visitor to the Clinton White House, and President Bill Clinton's multiple trips in Epstein's plane were contemporaneous or followed soon after. The thinking at the time would have been: "If an ex-President (and husband of sitting Senator Hillary Clinton) can hobnob in public with this guy Epstein, he can't be into anything too shady, can he?"
  - dragonsngoblins 7y ago
    Why is the best interpretation that she was a prostitute of questionable age as opposed to just... a prostitute? Legitimate question, I haven't been following this closely enough to know. If it was reasonable to assume she was an adult I don't see an issue with it, but I don't have a moral objection to prostitution
kjeetgill 7y ago
> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. I mean, given everything in the news these days, this is blatantly untrue. I suspect it wasn't ever quite that true before either. Maybe it should be but I don't think it's quite that easy. > The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful take on the situation. [...] There are people trying to downplay sexual assault. I'm hesitating to respond to this (self-censorship and all) but I'm not a public figure so I can risk being wrong, right? Right?!? This isn't exactly what RMS was getting it and you're kinda missing the point in the same way RMS kinda missed the point. He didn't get why we use the term "sexual assault" as broadly (and reasonably so) as we do, and it doesn't sound like you get why he decided to argue the semantics of it. His point was that he felt calling what Misnky had done "sexual assault" seemed to imply that Misky hadviolently attacked and raped her in a physically restraining sorta way instead of, to his best knowledge, in a "she was coerced by a third party without his knowledge" sort of way. He missed the point that regardless of those details she was sexual assaulted. Further, he seems oblivious to the fact that splitting hairs defending his friend distracts from the real issue: that this isn't about any of them, it's about what happened to the victims. I think that take is fair enough but I agree making that case is bone headed. Not because he shouldn't speak his mind, but that it's just besides the point. I think you're missing the fact that at all RMS was about was just clearing up the record of what Minsky did and didn't do. Not even that he was fully innocent. I agree it was in poor taste but I think if he was any less a public figure it would have been read more charitably with an awkward sigh instead.
- csb6 7y ago
  I think it’s wrong to absolve Minsky of responsibility, though. He would have had to be pretty clueless to not at least wonder why all of these teenaged girls were hanging around Epstein’s place. Whether he knew doesn’t mean he did not still have sex with an underage girl. Claiming that he didn’t know she was underage seems shaky to me. At the very least he was taking advantage of a woman in the employ of Epstein who seduced/tried to seduce him. At the very least Minsky was involved in indirect, coerced sexual assault as the one having sex with her (if ended up doing so), even if Epstein is the mastermind. I think Minsky was smart enough to know what was happening. So that is why I disagree with RMS. I think calling it sexual assault done, perhaps unknowingly, by Minsky is an accurate description.
freetime2 7y ago
Essentially Stallman takes issue with accusing Marvin Minsky of sexual assault because: > The word "assaulting" presumes he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way. And then Stallman goes on to point out there is no evidence to suggest that Minksy acted violently toward the victim, and may have been unaware that the victim had been coerced by Epstein. Given that the definition of "assault" is "a physical attack", I can't really disagree with him from a purely semantic perspective. And I would agree that there are other terms terms such as "statutory rape" and "soliciting prostitution" that may better describe what Minsky is accused of. Is it "shameful" for me to see some merit in his argument?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 7y ago
  Legally any form of touch can be considered assault in the wrong context. It doesn't have to "look violent". (Check your local statutes!)
- kelnos 7y ago
  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.
  - Frondo 7y ago
    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.
pjc50 7y ago
> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. Sadly this is not true; it's been routine for all kinds of authority figures to blame the victim and excuse the perpetrator in cases of sexual assault and rape. Including police and judges. The only way we've moved forward is the public making very clear that that is not acceptable, but this actually has a low hit rate. For every Stallman there is a Kavanagh, and a hundred rape apologists to back then up.
michaelmrose 7y ago
You believe free speech actually means not being able to express an opinion on anything anywhere that someone else could be offended by or lose your ability to live/eat/get medicine you need to survive. This is what getting fired means to normal people lest you forget. Having a a factually or morally incorrect viewpoint on a public happening isn't an assault on a victim. Its an opportunity to help that person learn better and even more importantly to help the many more who believe the same as the speaker but who wont speak up learn as well. Silence dissent and you lose that opportunity and everyone is poorer for it.
chimprich 7y ago
> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. "I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. [...] Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
al_form2000 7y ago
It was in fact a very popular concept in Victorian England.
concordDance 7y ago
Is whatever he said (I doubt he used the words "sexual assault") actually untrue?
- DanBC 7y ago
  > I doubt he used the words "sexual assault" A child who had been captured by Epstein and coerced into sex with a bunch of people said that Minsky was one of those people. RMS said let's assume it did happen, and then started defending Minsky by quibbling about the definition of assault. RMS said that minsky having sex with a coerced child shouldn't be called assault because assault requires force or violence. He's wrong. Assault has an every day English definition and it doesn't require violence or force. Assault has legal definitions and they don't require force. His position on the word "assault" makes no sense. This follows on from earlier comments where he said that children can be willing participants in incestual abuse, or that he thinks it's unlikely that children who are abused are harmed by that abuse. He retracted some of those after people told him that yes, in fact, children who are abused are often harmed by that abuse.
  - concordDance 7y ago
    > Assault has an every day English definition and it doesn't require violence or force. Not sure where you live but in my subculture it does. It's quite possible it also does in RMS's social environment. Do you have a source on his retraction? I would have thought Rind et al (and a bit of first principles thinking) would have been his main source.

by csb6 7y ago

gojomo 7y ago

I didn't read RMS's "take" as in any way excusing what happened to Giuffre, but rather disputing whether it was accurate to accuse Marvin Minsky of "sexual assault", if from Minsky's perspective at the time nothing seemed wrong. (Sensationalist reporting and selective paraphrasing, like you've done here, has conflated the two issues.) Suppose there's a boxer, "Joe", and he has a scheduled fight against a named opponent. It's set in a legitimate venue, is freely advertised as if the promoters have nothing to hide, includes a normal ref & audience, and then proceeds like any other boxing match, including the traditional cordialities between opponents before and after. To "Joe", nothing's wrong. But then, years later, it's discovered that the opposing boxer was coerced into fighting, perhaps with threats of violence or blackmail. Is "Joe" now guilty of physical assault, for repeatedly punching the other boxer, even if to "Joe" at the time it seemed like a normal voluntary encounter, no seedier than any other boxing match? Maybe RMS's take was dumb. Maybe my analogy is dumb! But it's not "shameful" to try to work out the reasonable characterizations, given Minksy's possible mental state, the law, or common-sense. It might even be possible, under formal legal definitions, for Giuffre to have been "assaulted" while at the same time Minsky's actions don't rise to the level of "assault".

jacobush 7y ago
RMS's take was really dumb. He may not be the right fit for the job. The example you gave with the boxer was a really good comparison, but for him to handle the topic that way is so incredibly tone-deaf and frankly, stupid.
kelnos 7y ago
The problem with your analogy is that, in reality, "Joe" was presented with a beautiful woman over 50 years younger than him who supposedly wanted to have sex with him, while at a gathering on a billionaire's private island. If "Joe" were a reasonable, non-sketchy person, the absolute best interpretation there is that she was a prostitute of questionable age, which is still pretty bad. Going along with that without asking some very hard questions would seem to be not only morally questionable, but also personally risky. (Of course, there's also reasonable debate as to whether or not Minsky actually had sex with her. One person who was present at the gathering claims Minsky didn't.)
- gojomo 7y ago
  If Minsky didn't realize she was essentially a prostitute, he was foolish. But how do you know Minsky didn't "ask[] some very hard questions"? At the time of the alleged sex, 2001-2002, Epstein's cover as an investment billionaire who threw money around to win the attention/affection of young-but-legal women was still secure. He'd been a recent repeat visitor to the Clinton White House, and President Bill Clinton's multiple trips in Epstein's plane were contemporaneous or followed soon after. The thinking at the time would have been: "If an ex-President (and husband of sitting Senator Hillary Clinton) can hobnob in public with this guy Epstein, he can't be into anything too shady, can he?"
- dragonsngoblins 7y ago
  Why is the best interpretation that she was a prostitute of questionable age as opposed to just... a prostitute? Legitimate question, I haven't been following this closely enough to know. If it was reasonable to assume she was an adult I don't see an issue with it, but I don't have a moral objection to prostitution

kjeetgill 7y ago

> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. I mean, given everything in the news these days, this is blatantly untrue. I suspect it wasn't ever quite that true before either. Maybe it should be but I don't think it's quite that easy. > The wrong opinion? Stallman questions whether the victim, who he admits was coerced into sex, was actually sexually assaulted. This is an incredibly shameful take on the situation. [...] There are people trying to downplay sexual assault. I'm hesitating to respond to this (self-censorship and all) but I'm not a public figure so I can risk being wrong, right? Right?!? This isn't exactly what RMS was getting it and you're kinda missing the point in the same way RMS kinda missed the point. He didn't get why we use the term "sexual assault" as broadly (and reasonably so) as we do, and it doesn't sound like you get why he decided to argue the semantics of it. His point was that he felt calling what Misnky had done "sexual assault" seemed to imply that Misky hadviolently attacked and raped her in a physically restraining sorta way instead of, to his best knowledge, in a "she was coerced by a third party without his knowledge" sort of way. He missed the point that regardless of those details she was sexual assaulted. Further, he seems oblivious to the fact that splitting hairs defending his friend distracts from the real issue: that this isn't about any of them, it's about what happened to the victims. I think that take is fair enough but I agree making that case is bone headed. Not because he shouldn't speak his mind, but that it's just besides the point. I think you're missing the fact that at all RMS was about was just clearing up the record of what Minsky did and didn't do. Not even that he was fully innocent. I agree it was in poor taste but I think if he was any less a public figure it would have been read more charitably with an awkward sigh instead.

csb6 7y ago
I think it’s wrong to absolve Minsky of responsibility, though. He would have had to be pretty clueless to not at least wonder why all of these teenaged girls were hanging around Epstein’s place. Whether he knew doesn’t mean he did not still have sex with an underage girl. Claiming that he didn’t know she was underage seems shaky to me. At the very least he was taking advantage of a woman in the employ of Epstein who seduced/tried to seduce him. At the very least Minsky was involved in indirect, coerced sexual assault as the one having sex with her (if ended up doing so), even if Epstein is the mastermind. I think Minsky was smart enough to know what was happening. So that is why I disagree with RMS. I think calling it sexual assault done, perhaps unknowingly, by Minsky is an accurate description.

freetime2 7y ago

Essentially Stallman takes issue with accusing Marvin Minsky of sexual assault because: > The word "assaulting" presumes he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way. And then Stallman goes on to point out there is no evidence to suggest that Minksy acted violently toward the victim, and may have been unaware that the victim had been coerced by Epstein. Given that the definition of "assault" is "a physical attack", I can't really disagree with him from a purely semantic perspective. And I would agree that there are other terms terms such as "statutory rape" and "soliciting prostitution" that may better describe what Minsky is accused of. Is it "shameful" for me to see some merit in his argument?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 7y ago
Legally any form of touch can be considered assault in the wrong context. It doesn't have to "look violent". (Check your local statutes!)
kelnos 7y ago
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.
- Frondo 7y ago
  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.

pjc50 7y ago

> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. Sadly this is not true; it's been routine for all kinds of authority figures to blame the victim and excuse the perpetrator in cases of sexual assault and rape. Including police and judges. The only way we've moved forward is the public making very clear that that is not acceptable, but this actually has a low hit rate. For every Stallman there is a Kavanagh, and a hundred rape apologists to back then up.

michaelmrose 7y ago

You believe free speech actually means not being able to express an opinion on anything anywhere that someone else could be offended by or lose your ability to live/eat/get medicine you need to survive. This is what getting fired means to normal people lest you forget. Having a a factually or morally incorrect viewpoint on a public happening isn't an assault on a victim. Its an opportunity to help that person learn better and even more importantly to help the many more who believe the same as the speaker but who wont speak up learn as well. Silence dissent and you lose that opportunity and everyone is poorer for it.

chimprich 7y ago

> If any politician or public figure said this statement in the past 70 years, they would have ended their career. "I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. [...] Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

al_form2000 7y ago

It was in fact a very popular concept in Victorian England.

concordDance 7y ago

Is whatever he said (I doubt he used the words "sexual assault") actually untrue?

DanBC 7y ago
> I doubt he used the words "sexual assault" A child who had been captured by Epstein and coerced into sex with a bunch of people said that Minsky was one of those people. RMS said let's assume it did happen, and then started defending Minsky by quibbling about the definition of assault. RMS said that minsky having sex with a coerced child shouldn't be called assault because assault requires force or violence. He's wrong. Assault has an every day English definition and it doesn't require violence or force. Assault has legal definitions and they don't require force. His position on the word "assault" makes no sense. This follows on from earlier comments where he said that children can be willing participants in incestual abuse, or that he thinks it's unlikely that children who are abused are harmed by that abuse. He retracted some of those after people told him that yes, in fact, children who are abused are often harmed by that abuse.
- concordDance 7y ago
  > Assault has an every day English definition and it doesn't require violence or force. Not sure where you live but in my subculture it does. It's quite possible it also does in RMS's social environment. Do you have a source on his retraction? I would have thought Rind et al (and a bit of first principles thinking) would have been his main source.