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Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

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Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#241

Post by oh_sigh »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #220
oh_sigh wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could he have thought she was "just" a prostitute?

I suppose this extremely charitable reading is possible, but it still doesn't exonerate Minsky. Not only did he fail to confirm she was of age ("I never asked how old she was" is not a defense), he maintained professional and academic ties with someone who (as far as he supposedly knew) was sending extremely young prostitutes to him and his peers. Given that even the Virgin Islands locals took to calling it "Pedophil…

How would he confirm she is of age? Isn't the scenario that she was forced to hide the fact she was sex trafficked from him? Would she not also have to lie about her she then too? 17 year olds can frequently pass for 18 year olds, which is a legal age almost anywhere.

> Given that even the Virgin Islands locals took to calling it "Pedophile island"

Locals almost always have more knowledge about a place in their backyard than someone flown in for a special occasion.

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#242

Post by throwaway5849 »

nemothekid wrote: post #226
eoxenford wrote: post #122

Throughout this whole brouhaha, I’ve been astonished at how nobody in the mainstream press, nor any of those in tech calling for Stallman’s head, ever challenged the statement that Stallman said Epstein’s victims were “entirely willing.” Indeed, quite the opposite. From the Medium post that kicked the whole thing off [1]: …and then he says that an enslaved child could, somehow, be “entirely willing”. And from Vice [2…

I don't fully understand the point you are trying to make. At the end of the day, Stallman is trying whitewash Minsky's responsibility by trying to pretend that a 70-something year old man didn't know that the underage girl at convicted Jeffrey Epstein's private island wasn't actually "entirely willing". In other words, he's taking us on this garbage thought experiment that Minsky is somehow an innocent bystander. To…

> convicted Jeffrey Epstein

The alleged Minsky assault happened in 2001.

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#243

Post by [deleted] »

marcinzm wrote: post #55
ceejayoz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2006: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2006-may-aug.html#05%20Jun... > I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing. 2013: https://www.stallman.org/archives/2012-nov-feb.html#04_Janua... > There is little ev…

Why are people down voting this? ceejayoz cited specific quotes with references. Seems sort of hypocritical to me that people who seem to be arguing for the freedom of intellectual debate do the exact opposite if facts don't line up in their favor.

[deleted]

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#244

Post by pryce »

esotericn wrote: post #16

Is anyone else baffled by the idea that discussing something on an intellectual level, even related to a person, has to somehow be a 'defense' or an 'offense'? I've spent basically my entire life discussing things in the abstract. I'm not a politician, I don't make laws, and frankly I wouldn't want that power. To me it makes absolute sense that someone would attempt to "defend" even the most heinous person. It's weir…

The conditions that apply to an "Ethics tutorial in a philosophy paper" aren't universally applicable, and that isn't a sign of something being wrong. It took me a while to understand this myself.

Suppose you wished to discuss "ethical problems" in a tutorial, people can do that, and in some other (limited) environments too. You might - to invoke a particularly awful idea - like to hypothetically explore whether what people wear had relationship to their likelihood of being targeted for sexual assault.

If you are in a position of leadership however, you incur responsibilities. People under your leadership must be confident that if someone were to tell you they have been sexually assaulted, your response would not be to wonder what they were wearing. The reason for this is, as is well established, that speculation over what women (or survivors in general) were wearing at the time they were sexually assaulted is a loaded idea that has widespread use in casting blame on the victim of sexual assault, and has been very effective at this for hundreds of years, leading to a vast amount of preventable suffering, all because of we continue to tolerate the mistaken idea that women might somehow 'invite' their own assault.

A person in a leadership or representational role doesn't get to publicly speculate about "clothing and sexual assault" in the abstract, because they have a duty to be aware of how incredibly damaging that is in the general sense, and how public speculation about that sort of relationship would clearly act to dampen survivors of sexual assault from coming forward, including in the org they are leading, in addition to being distressing for the people who have experienced it in the past, which is a significant fraction of people in general, even supposing the speculator meant well.

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#245

Post by zenhack »

michaelmrose wrote: post #227
zenhack wrote: post #174

Something that I think most folks in this thread are missing, that's hugely important to what actually happened here: This was not an isolated incident. If it were, I'd look at his comments and write it off as his usual tendency to jump on a minor point and derail a conversation with some totally pedantic technicallity, and I do think the thing he actually said in this case has been wildly mis-interpreted and oversta…

Can you please link some claims of him harassing and propositioning and harassing students?

The follow up to the original blog post includes a few quotes (they start in section 2):

https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-appendix...

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#246

Post by fwip »

michaelmrose wrote: post #153
fwip wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, this certainly isn't the first time that he's publicly said that he thinks "consenting pedophilia" is 100% fine, and it's not the first time that people have told him "Hey, don't say that, you're gonna get in trouble." At a certain point it stops looking like ignorance and stubbornness and more like he's got a horse in the race.

Your unfounded accusation isn't acceptable. You ought to remove it.

It's not an accusation. It's just a comment on the optics of continuing to spout the same bad take for decades.

It looks bad.

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#247

Post by javagram »

pryce wrote: post #233
javagram wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You appear to be confusing Minsky, who was dead before any of this hit the news and was never charged with any crime, and Epstein.

It looks like you're right about that reader beign confused. To clarify further, however, Minksy was not dead "before any of this hit the news"; he died in January 2016. Claims against Epstein had significant publicity much earlier than that; as just one example, in 2015 the Prince Andrew - Epstein connection was making headlines due to the Virginia Roberts case.[1] [1] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bbc-plann…

The allegation against Minsky were made in a deposition in 2016 though, and I believe that deposition was only unsealed this year, hence making the news this year (leading to the recent resignations at MIT). I don’t think Minsky had a chance to respond to the allegation before he died, hence this mailing list thread between his former colleagues speculating about it.

You’re absolutely right that the allegations against Epstein were in the news before 2016 though, after all he was initially sentenced for his crime in 2007.

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#248

Post by amanzi »

I think we should be more worried about the control that media (and especially clickbait-worthy online media) can exert over our lives. It's clear to anyone who has done their research, that his quotes were taken out of context or mis-characterised to create a specific narrative meant to fuel anger and drive visitors to the 'news' websites. It's a real shame that we can no longer discuss certain topics without fear of retribution.

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#249

Post by partialrecall »

javagram wrote: post #239
partialrecall wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 20th century the NYTimes acted as Stalin's mouthpiece for 50 years, denying the Soviet-perpetrated genocide in Ukraine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Walter... Which, again, is worse than anything they've done recently.

OK. At least, as your link shows, they eventually admitted they were wrong once the Cold War ended and the records became available. In my experience outlets like the NYT do issue corrections - e.g. just over this weekend, they published a pretty questionable story about Judge Kavanaugh but then published a correction within a day when the article was challenged and compared to the book it was based on. In comparison…

Many contemporaries of Walter Duranty knew he was full of shit, but for the NYTs his lies were politically convenient. That time it took them half a century to come clean. In your example with Kavanaugh, it took them no more than a year or so. So if anything, they're getting better.

Certainly some organizations have better reputations than others, and I do trust the NYTs more than I trust Vice. My point in all of this is that when talking of some sort of golden age in journalism, one needs to keep in mind the severity of lies told in the past, as well as the relative opportunity the truth had to surface in different eras. Could the NYTs have suppressed knowledge of the Holodomor so effectively in the modern era when the wrong viral video from some random bystandard with a smartphone can circulate widely without the assistance or cooperation of organizations like the NYTs?

Re: Richard Stallman resigns from CSAIL at MIT

#250

Post by williamDafoe »

tzs wrote: post #206
selfawareposter wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the part where he got taken to a remote island by a billionaire and was presented with a very young woman who immediately wanted to have sex with him.

You mean the island that Epstein regularly invited numerous people to in order to discuss assorted legitimate things, like supporting their charities or their research? Epstein's island wasn't some stereotypical villain lair where anyone who steps foot on it must be up to no good. It was a place that he conducted the normal business that any entirely legitimate billionaire would conduct, in addition to the villain st…

Except for the temple in the middle of the island which had a very special room with no windows and locks on all the doors.
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