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.
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".
(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.)
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?"
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
> 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?
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 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.
I greatly dislike the new emphasis on feelings and image over accuracy and truth that has entered the tech sector in the last decade or so.
^ not particularly directed at your comment, it just inspired the thought
(Check your local statutes!)
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.
I don't know... to me it seems totally understandable (even somewhat admirable) that Stallman would stand up for a deceased friend/colleague and try to set the record straight.
The fact that he thinks people don't have issues with that, but with the fact that he may have forced himself on her, is what makes him a piece of shit.
On a partially related note, the abuse of language that has lead to the current definitions of "rape" and "sexual assault" is distressing. :(
Stallman was not saying that Minsky should not be absolved of responsibility. He was just saying that the term "sexual assault" is inaccurate in that it implies violence.
> I think Minsky was smart enough to know what was happening.
That's a fairly large assumption. Minsky's name shows up twice in hundreds of pages of deposition. Once is in a statement by the victim when she is asked to name names:
> They instructed me to go to George Mitchell, Jean Luc Brunel, Bill Richardson, another prince that I don't know his name. A guy that owns a hotel, a really large hotel chain, I can't remember which hotel it was. Marvin Minsky.
And the only other reference (that I am aware of) is in reference to being on a private flight with a bunch of other people.
How are you able to infer so much from so litte information?
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
