And we grew up laughing at the stupid taboos and weirdly abusive social norms our forefathers had. Only to create similar ones ourselves.

Cultures can have varying degrees of tolerance for diverse viewpoints, e.g. anything from mobs on Twitter to social credit scores in China. Attacking someone's livelihood for raising a philosophical question is somewhere on that spectrum.

There are a lot of incendiary political topics de jour where it's obvious that important voices are being silenced. See, for example, the pseudoaddiction post from SSC yesterday. Popular uprisings are often based on kernels of truth, but the conversation becomes distorted when experts or just laypeople with diverse viewpoints decide, fuck it, it's just not worth the liability of weighing in.

A couple weeks ago there was a story about a minor girl in high school charged by a prosecutor and found guilty by a judge of distributing child pornography--upheld on appeal--for texting her friends a video of herself. [1] But if it's political suicide to even try to have a conversation about how the laws on child pornography could be harming children, then it will never be fixed.

So at some point it should be acceptable for someone to stick their head out and say, "This term 'sexual assault' it doesn't really mean what most people think it means a lot of the times. It would make for much healthier discussion if we could be more specific!" Or, "These arbitrary age barriers (which change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) can catch innocent people engaging in consensual intimate acts." And it's also OK for someone else to say, "That's just not what happened in this case, because <reasons>... and you're blinded in this case by your relationship with the accused." But at the end of it, for everyone to agree that there was a conversation in good faith and everyone can decide for themselves who's right, wrong, or an imbecile trying to cover for a friend, without demanding a head on a platter.

You can take a look at what Lessig wrote about Ito [2] and likewise come away from it entirely incensed and calling for Lessig to resign, or pondering whether the story is more complex than the headline. Where in that case, the NYT took a complex issue that Lessig tangled with, and turned it into;

“It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying.”

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/mds-top-co...

[2] - https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7