That said, I think Stallman's position really is fundamentally wrong and problematic.
Legally, sex with underaged people is rape regardless of consent. Morally, that stance really is justified in the most common circumstance - when the non-underaged person has more power and experience than the underaged person. In the case under discussion, you have that in spades, double spades.
The sad thing is that individuals interested in freedom, who make serious contributions to some things called free, don't notice that the massive imbalances of wealth today have produced a situation where simple "free choice" is made a mockery of.
And yeah, the thing about inquisition atmosphere, imo, is that it doesn't reveal the rot behind all the "mere" abuse of power.
1. It isn't pedophilia if the person is sexually mature. Pedophilia is sex with prepubescent children.
2. He draws a distinction between statutory rape (can't legally say yes according to the law, but otherwise willing and sexually mature) and forcible rape (when someone says no). He made a point about how statutory rape wouldn't be considered rape if it happened in a different location (e.g. Italy) or if the person's birthday were slightly adjusted.
I agree with you that in the Epstein case you have a situation with a dramatic power imbalance. Stallman seems to consider Epstein a serial rapist (possibly for that fact?). He seems to be more pushing back on the pedophilia accusations.
Also - there seems to be a thread lost. It really looks like Epstein was a US Intelligence Officer filming powerful people having sex with young women (including foreign officials) to obtain leverage on them for the United States. This whole aspect of the conversation seems to have melted away in the various other controversies.
I agree that the reporting silence on this aspect of the case is odd. The federal prosecutor who worked out Epstein's plea deal (Alexander Acosta) appears to have told the press that the deal was done because he was told "Epstein belonged to intelligence". This was widely reported in July (https://www.google.com/search?q=acosta+epstein+intelligence), and then this revelation was almost completely dropped when Acosta resigned from his position as Secretary of Labor due to fallout from his involvement with the plea deal.
I'll note though that Acosta did not explicitly claim that Epstein was working for the US intelligence services...
The federal prosecutor was not in a position to be able to verify that claim.
No other evidence for it has come forth, making it hard to accept your view that "it really looks like" that's the case.
I understand what RMS is trying to say, but this strikes me as an incredibly weak argument. All laws are arbitrary, but pointing that out isn't a meaningful defense of someone who broke one.
It's like contesting a parking ticket by saying "well if parking had been allowed on that street at that time then I wouldn't have done anything wrong."
Sometimes it's obvious which the sensible choice to make is. If you're arguing whether the GPL allows linking to a proprietary library or not, then it's the law that's more important. But if you're arguing if sex with children is OK then it's some higher moral standard that's important and appeals to the law are essentially appeals to popular opinion as support of some moral standard.
Luckily, people usually agree on what the law means, so they just have to make sure they're arguing about the same point that their opponent is actually making.
In Germany (and I find this disturbing) the legal age under which a grown up (over 21 years) can have sex with a kid is 14[1][2]. Of course a judge can find that the child or their legal representative not having been capable of giving consent in which case it's still considered child abuse.
Western societies themselves have such vastly different legal definitions of consent. To be honest I find germanies version to be the weirdest I've seen although I don't know much about the other european countries.
It is not.
The general legal age of consent in German is 16 years. § 182 (3)
The special legal age is 14 and it's only legal if the other party is under 21.
Even then there are a lot of further exemptions that would make sex with a minor illegal. Prostitution and/or pornography involving minors is always illegal.
One can draw a distinction between rape by physical force and rape by coercion, manipulation and deception - but it's kind of undesirable to push any kind of line that a lack of force makes this a automatically a different kind of crime. For example, sex with police officer or prison guard when someone is in custody is in many jurisdictions automatically considered to be rape because the circumstances mean a person can't really consent - and that's entirely logical. In this sense, "statutory rape" and forcible rape aren't entirely different.
Maybe one might find situations where under-aged sex isn't rape by manipulation - where you can argue consent could reasonably given (an eighteen year old with sixteen year in the same High school is hard to argue against). But the Epstein situation is clearly the wrong place to look for this.
Wait, what? I thought he was objecting to the claim that Marvin Minsky assaulted one of Epstein's victims.
https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...
What's being referred to, in regards to his opinion of Epstein, is this piece from April: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jan-apr.html#25_April_201...
But is it reasonable for someone to be essentially fired for having an incorrect opinion?
Whether or not this case crosses it there clearly is a line where expressing an opinion isn't okay. If he was spouting off racist stuff you would have very few people defending him being fired.
Yes. There are laws against workplace harassment. Harassment may include repeated voicing of discriminatory opinions. The harasser may be fired to prevent the workplace from being a 'hostile environment'.
Even when the law does not require action, someone may be fired even after a single conversation with incorrect opinions (and I mean 'incorrect' in the factual sense here). Take Jimmy Snyder, a.k.a. "Jimmy the Greek". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Snyder_(sports_commentat... .
> On January 16, 1988, Snyder was fired by the CBS network (where he had been a regular on NFL Today since 1976) after making several questionable comments about African Americans during a lunchtime interview on January 15, 1988 with Ed Hotaling ...
More directly, if it's the 1950s and I call my stridently anti-Soviet Union boss "a pinko Commie" to his face, that's voicing an incorrect opinion -- and I might easily be fired for it. (It's not hard to come up with modern-day examples, but I felt it best to use phrases which no longer have the emotional power they once did.)
None of these apply to what happened with Stallman. I instead wanted to address your broader topic of being fired for expressing an opinion.
That’s the point. If it were harassment, false accusation of a colleague, etc, it would not be merely expressing a bad opinion. But as you say, none of those apply.
And I think it’s clear I was not raising an issue of what is legal, but of what is right and just, and desirable for a university, for a workplace, for a society.
My ex-girlfriend dated Prince Andrew (she was in her late 20s). I’ve been around some of these people in South Florida and LA. A lot of allegedly good people will ignore red flags but people openly targeting underage girls seems to be isolated to only one or two principals.
Of course, all of this is wrong —- even this concept of pleasure parties where young (over 18) girls are brought to billionaire parties often by younger guys. Turning regular girls into “sugar babies” or prostitutes is a major problem.
Ah, Dershowitz. The one who says, yes, he got a massage at Epstein's Palm Beach place, but it was from a 52-year-old woman named Olga and he kept his pants on the whole time.
I'm sure we'll see his exculpatory evidence any day now.
Yes and no. With a 17 year old, in some jurisdictions, it's rape in such and such degree, but in other jurisdictions, it's a separate crime, and in other jurisdictions it's not a crime at all. I think the stronger argument is that it's illegal/immoral, rather than getting stuck on a single word.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_Europe
Stallman has a point, even though he should've steered clear of this by 100 miles. People who don't travel internationally probably have a huge blind spot on this issue...
It could happen if your point about power and consent was taken as a given (at least in the context of this topic).
Yes, but how do you understand the wide age variations for "consent" worldwide?
[edit] seems the resignation is due to the comments and I’m living under a rock
There are many jurisdictions where this is not the case.
I'm not so sure. "Free choice" today as defined by those on the left is "free to make choices independent of constraints imposed by personal capacity or personal resources", whereas it has historically been interpreted as "free to make choices independent of constraints imposed by other humans".
The problem with the former definition of free choice is that it requires encroaching on the latter definition of free choice.
If you have two people that are equally poor, both are equal in terms of having free choice under both definitions.
If one of those people becomes wealthy, they continue to be equal under the latter definition of free choice, but are unequal under the former definition even though nothing has changed in the circumstances of the one that became neither richer nor poorer than he was previously.
So you have the default opinion anyone in our society will have. I'm interested in what the heretic has to say why we are wrong.
However with what has happened to Stallman I doubt I ever will. A shame because something has gone hugely wrong when half of all children are thinking of suicide.
