And what's wrong with that take, exactly? It's a natural conclusion any critical thinker who strongly values individualism will come into before they start to consider the differences of power at play that make giving and recognizing actual consent very tricky (even for adults, let alone children); which actually isn't that obvious to notice at all if you have never been in such situation yourself before. This is a take that is logically coherent and honest - and naturally progresses once you learn new information. Which seems to be exactly what happened in case of Stallman, who retracted his earlier opinion in a logically coherent way.
Honestly, I'm amazed at how many bad ideas people can come into just because they don't understand that other people may think with different processes than they do. I'm honestly not sure whether it's intellectual laziness or pure malice (or both).
You know what's wrong with it and you described what's wrong with it over the next several sentences. Somebody who doesn't understand that is not fit to be a leader. If you don't understand those power imbalances, you are bound to do harm.
> If you don't understand those power imbalances, you are bound to do harm.
That's not a bad point. But then it turns out that it's not really connected to the statements about Minsky, is it?
> Somebody who doesn't understand that is not fit to be a leader.
This is stretching it way too far, since this assumes that understanding of power in hypothetical scenario that doesn't connect to yourself somehow translates to ones ability to assess their own power. This may be true for some, but doesn't have to be. I won't be convinced that someone is unfit to be a leader because they didn't recognize the issues of power in a hypothetical scenario they have never been in. Heck, I myself constantly learn and start to see them in cases I never considered before. Different perspective changes everything, and there are perspectives I simply never witnessed until someone told me about them!
> That's not a bad point. But then it turns out that it's not really connected to the statements about Minsky, is it?
The statements about Minsky are harmful. What reason is there to be coming to somebody’s defense when they are credibly accused of something like that? Frankly I don’t want friends who would react like Stallman did if I were to be accused as seriously as Minsky has been.
People who are going to do harm because they don’t understand power imbalances should not be leaders. Yes, we’re all bad at something, but if that’s the thing you’re bad at, it’s probably not the place for you in our society. On this I will be firm. It is incumbent on leaders to understand power and take the potential for abuse in situations of power differential seriously. They must be scrupulous. These comments would not be made by someone who is scrupulous about power imbalances.
> What reason is there to be coming to somebody’s defense when they are credibly accused of something like that?
Accused of what exactly? See, the whole point of Stallman's statements was to clarify what exactly Minsky was being accused of, no more no less. He didn't even doubt those accusations in any way. It's plainly written there in his e-mail. You're being dishonest.
Accused of having sex with one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking victims.
>See, the whole point of Stallman's statements was to clarify what exactly Minsky was being accused of, no more no less.
It's quite plain what Stallman was responding to. Stallman himself even says he sees no reason to disbelieve it. Unfortunately, "I didn't know she was a 17-year-old sex trafficking victim when I raped her" is not much of a defense, to me, ethically. Stallman imagines a situation in which Minsky was duped into having sex with this person without knowing her situation or her age. Why does Minsky get the benefit of the doubt here? This is not a court of law, and he was not a stupid man, to say the least. He even organized an academic symposium on Little St. James with Epstein in 2011, after he was already registered as a sex offender.
So what? It's not a defense, obviously, but it's enough to ask not to use the word "assault" when talking about those accusations because it's clearly misleading. It makes you imagine different things when you hear it than what is actually being talked about. You don't even have to give Minsky any benefit of doubt to ask for that.
Whether that changes the moral or ethical outcome is completely irrelevant (and of course, I don't think it does).
We're talking about a person who refuses to use singular they because... it's grammatically ambiguous so he comes up with and consistently uses perse/per/pers instead[0]. Like, c'mon, showing up in that thread to argue about used words is the most on-brand thing he could do.
> It's not a defense, obviously, but it's enough to ask not to use the word "assault" when talking about those accusations because it's clearly misleading.
Is it though? If the victim was coerced, and he’s complicit in causing a great deal of harm, why wouldn’t we call it assault? Not all sexual assault involves battery, and pretending that it does is silly.
>Like, c'mon, showing up in that thread to argue about used words is the most on-brand thing he could do.
I don’t think I ever argued this was atypical behavior for him. The fact that it’s expected is the part I find unacceptable.
"To assault" means "to make a physical attack on". You can rape someone or deal harm otherwise without assaulting them.
> The fact that it’s expected is the part I find unacceptable.
Thanks for explicitly spelling this out then. This is a pretty standard way of thinking for many neurodivergents. You're just saying "people of your kind cannot be public figures, and if they are they have to be taken down".
> "To assault" means "to make a physical attack on". You can rape someone without assaulting them.
That’s not how sexual assault is defined though. Quoting Wikipedia: “Sexual assault is an act in which a person intentionally sexually touches another person without that person's consent, or coerces or physically forces a person to engage in a sexual act against their will.” Avoiding this, like Stallman did, is a way of playing with semantics to reduce the seriousness of an accusation. He may be doing this because he’s autistic and rigid. I’ve done similar in the past because I’m similarly rigid, but it absolutely comes from a place of defensiveness too.
>This is a pretty standard way of thinking for many neurodivergents. You're just saying "people of your kind cannot be public figures, and if they are they have to be taken down".
I’m autistic, dude. This shit makes no sense to me. Saying it’s a “standard way of thinking” is doing us a disservice. Public figures cannot express opinions like this about rape! Autistic men who don’t seem to understand consent like this, or think they have figured out an inconsistency in society’s rules around sex, freak me the hell out. I expect other autistic people to have a hard time complying with social rules, but the fact that the rules are difficult for us is not an excuse for not following them, particularly if you want to lead a diverse group of people.
Stallman is certainly not the best the autistic community has to offer, and I really wish you would stop implying he is.
> Avoiding this, like Stallman did, is a way of playing with semantics to reduce the seriousness of an accusation.
Well, yes, since the point was to speak against what he called "accusation inflation" - which, I believe, wasn't even directed as much to Minksy's case as into general usage of that term in English:
The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky: “deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting one of Epstein’s victims [2])” The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as Y, which is much worse than X... The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing...
Notice how it was "accused of assaulting" that Stallman spoke against, and that "sexual assault" was then mentioned by Stallman as a way to explain his position.
And guess what? I don't actually agree with his opinion about the term "sexual assault". I mean, I see his reasoning and I agree with it on its own, but to me that ship has sailed - it's not enough for me to challenge the already existing usage of that term; especially when it does actually make some sense to "inflate" its meaning, because the harm done by non-consensual sexual acts often greatly exceeds the physical attack aspect itself (which may not even be there). So I can accept that term even though I find it somewhat inaccurate, technically. Kinda metaphorical. It clearly is enough for Stallman though, as evidenced by many other language crusades he's been on for his whole life.
That said, the fact that it was "assault" and not "sexual assault" that was used there in the announcement seems to just prove the Stallman's point.
> Stallman is certainly not the best the autistic community has to offer, and I really wish you would stop implying he is.
Where was I implying that? That's very far from what I'd ever be comfortable with suggesting. Stallman doesn't even properly recognize his shortcomings and could really put much greater effort into dealing with them which would help him and his causes (and in turn, my causes, since I share his concerns about software freedom). This particular case is, however, not an example of that.
> Public figures cannot express opinions like this about rape!
Which opinions? What does "like this" mean? I honestly don't follow! My own views on this matter are exactly what some would describe as very "leftist" or "woke", and I do share your concern about men who don't understand consent. People in privileged position (which men that don't have to wear in a specific way every day out of the fear of being assaulted certainly are in) have greater responsibility when it comes to understanding such issues. That said, you don't need to belittle consent to point out that "assault" in "sexual assault" doesn't mean literal "assault" anymore, especially in context of situation where there was no evidence that the act even took place at all in the first place (which might have changed since, I don't know - I really couldn't care less about Minsky himself). Mind you - Stallman didn't even mention that. If his intention was to defend Minsky, he was a very poor defender.
Also,
> Autistic men who don’t seem to understand consent like this, or think they have figured out an inconsistency in society’s rules around sex, freak me the hell out.
That's a real issue, and it leads such people to plenty of suffering and depression. They should be educated, not ostracized. If we don't do it, they may turn somewhere else where they'll get worse - there are some circles that claim to offer them "help" and "answers" already, but those don't make the society a better place.
>It clearly is enough for Stallman though, as evidenced by many other language crusades he's been on for his whole life.
The context is significant here though, because he has a history of belittling women and being insensitive to concerns about consent. These specific characteristics are red flags. It doesn't really matter whether the person bringing them up thinks they have wholly rational reasons to, or that they're just pointing out something interesting about language.
>Which opinions? What does "like this" mean? I honestly don't follow!
He said that Minsky probably would not have known that he was having sex with a minor who was also being coerced, and thus to him the victim would probably have appeared "entirely willing," as if that would make the act ok, or make it not constitute "sexual assault." He also said that he thought defining age of consent based on the law was ridiculous, which would be a colorable philosophical argument if we had any better way for defining and preventing child sexual abuse in our societies.
>If his intention was to defend Minsky, he was a very poor defender.
I'm sure he was, since he ended up essentially getting fired for what he said. I'm not here to litigate whether his specific example is sound, as you acknowledge that it's not. But the fact that he had to turn an accusation aimed at another MIT colleague with connections to Epstein into an opportunity to further a personal vendetta over the precise use of language used to describe rape — charitably you could say it was said in immensely poor taste. At worst, it does amount to attempting to defend or minimize the accusation.
>That's a real issue, and it leads such people to plenty of suffering and depression. They should be educated, not ostracized. If we don't do it, they may turn somewhere else where they'll get worse - there are some circles that claim to offer them "help" and "answers" already, but those don't make the society a better place.
It's sure led me to a lot of suffering, and depression, and severe anxiety. I don't feel safe around many men I meet in tech-centric spaces. All my friends have horror stories about abuse and harassment in our field.
And I'm sure the abusive men are depressed too. That's, of course, sadly common with autism. But they do need to get educated, and stop using their disability as an excuse for being insensitive. I'm not required to spend time around people who make me feel unsafe, regardless of gender, just so that they don't feel ostracized.
> as if that would make the act ok, or make it not constitute "sexual assault."
It doesn't appear to me as "making the act ok", I'm not sure where that comes from at all. He didn't even hint that it wasn't a case of "sexual assault". All he said is that it wasn't "assault" (which was the exact term being used in the announcement), and that he dislikes the way the other term - "sexual assault" - leads to people misusing the term "assault" in the first place; and explained why.
Was that a proper way, time and place to do that? Nope! Was it in poor taste and prone to misinterpretation? Absolutely! Does speaking in poor taste (or even questioning the institution of age of consent) make you child abuse apologist? Heck no.
Regarding the context of belittling women and consent insensitivity - I don't have enough information about Stallman to accurately assess that. I've seen some stories that appear credible, but I've also seen some that are so blatantly misinterpreted that reading them makes me feel sick. Therefore I remain cautious, both ways.
Based on what he was accused of? You want all of your friends to ditch you based on an accusation? Regardless of the Epstein thing, this is not a take that you have given much thought.
I could accuse you right now of touching 5 year olds in the park, and by your own claim, you would want all of your friends to abandon you.
Your whole rationale about power imbalances doesn’t even make sense in this context. He is writing unix tools, not running a daycare.
Honestly, I'm amazed at how many bad ideas people can come into just because they don't understand that other people may think with different processes than they do. I'm honestly not sure whether it's intellectual laziness or pure malice (or both).