RMS addresses the free software community

So what lesson can we learn? that some sexual encounters in Japan that should be considered rape, aren't.

I think it does. "Rape being rape" relies on the word having a precise meaning where all things in the category share essential characteristics that allow you to make moral judgements based on category membership.

But "rape", like all heavily contested political words with high moral weight, is definitely not such a word. It has a canonical example value (unfortunately I feel I have to be specific here: a stranger dragging a fighting women into the bushes and sticking his penis in her until he cums), but has a range of meanings that varies fairly drastically across conversational contexts (e.g. we talking ethics/morality? Law? Descriptiveness?), geography (e.g. is drunk sex rape? Depends on jurisdiction. What counts as a "minor"?), time and even subcultures.

There, "rageflagging" (flagging because you do not like what is being said, not because it violates some content policy) is fairly common. I don't know why it wouldn't be here on Hackernews, despite the latter's pretense to "quality discussion".

The difference is, at least on DeviantArt the staff intervene when there's a flag, and politely tell the flagger to block the person if they don't like what they have to say. Flagging on HN seems automated and algorithm-driven, which makes it abuse-prone.

That could be true.

But 30 times less is hard to explain with that.

Remember that he majority of rapes are perpetrated against adult women and Japan is the country with the oldest population in the World, right before Italy.

I guess that living in a society where crime rates are generally low (Japan has one of the lowest rate in the World) helps a lot.

In Japan half of the people are not having sex, that makes it one of the countries with the lowest rate, hardly a country of rapers.

So what lesson can we learn?

That violence is key to injustice

The whole discussion about diversity and inclusivity in the States revolves around self segregation and punishment for those who do not abide, it is based on fear of the consequences not on a general understanding that conflict is an integral part of the society and inclusivity means to accept it, not to remove it.

Stallman is a non violent man, he doesn't adhere to the American standards, he's a weirdo, but never harmed anybody nor committed violent acts, let alone crimes.

I write an email to his address from time to time, have been doing it for the past 10 years, and I always receive the most polite replies (days later of course, he reads them offline).

Sometimes it's like talking to Sherlock Holmes, he's very logical, has strong opinions, lingers on the most miniscule detail and that can be unpleasant to some.

He can be confrontational, but not dangerous.

I would rather share the proverbial desert island with him than with those who attack him for not being "standard compliant"

I know I shouldn't have to feel frightened by him.

Maybe we could learn a thing or two from him, once we go past the preposterous social indignation à la carte because he likes to walk barefoot.

p.s. In Sweden age of consent is 15 years and sexual assault (so not rape specifically) reports are very high, but under the Swedish laws half of the planet would be in prison (in Sweden not using a condom is considered rape).

Eurostat figures show that Sweden had 64 reported rapes per 100,000 residents in 2016, compared to 10 in Germany. When Sweden's figures were recalculated using the German definitions, the new figure was 15 reported rapes per 100,000 residents.

p.p.s. if in Japan they are "hiding" the real rape numbers, what makes you think the same thing is not happening elsewhere?

USA laws about rape are not stronger than those in Germany, that has a third of the rapes of US and where age of consent is 14.

What's the difference then?

In Germany violent crimes in general are a lot less than in USA.

> It restarted, however, when Poimboeuf came back a few days later with another idea for solving his problem: recompiling all plugins when the GCC version changes. This was refused by Yamada, who noted that Ubuntu does not have the GCC mismatch problem, so the problem seemed to be specific to Fedora. Linus Torvalds also disagreed with the proposal, but for another reason. For him there is no technical reason to recompile everything when the GCC version changes, but he expressed his concern on the usage and design of the GCC plugins in general. In a followup message he explained his reasoning in strong words:

>> The kernel gcc plugins _will_ go away eventually. They are an unmitigated disaster. They always have been. I'm sorry I ever merged that support. It's not only a maintenance nightmare, it's just a horrible thing and interface in the first place. It's literally BAD TECHNOLOGY.

> For Torvalds, the right way to implement such plugins is at the intermediate representation (IR) level, but GCC plugins were designed differently for non-technical reasons (out of fear for non-free plugins, which LWN covered back in 2008). People who are interested in plugins should use Clang, as it has a clean IR and easily allows adding similar checks at the IR level, he said.

So here we have Torvalds himself annoyed at GCC's ridiculous plugin architecture.