@grainloom @strypey @natacha I find the idea that Minsky just couldn't possibly find anything sufficiently unusual in this to raise his suspicions that the girl in question wasn't enthusiastically consenting to be entirely implausible.

This is a supportable (and, I think, most plausible) reading of the Medium article.

@grainloom @strypey @natacha The further point here is that people could have read his words in a more generous light - as merely thoughtless and insensitive.

…if he hadn't consistently said things like “I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children”. Or “If you'd like to love and care for a pet that doesn't have normal human mental capacity, don't create a handicapped human being to be your pet. Get a dog or a parrot...”

@RAOF @grainloom @strypey
Thanks for this...
A quick note about the term paedophilia latin for taste for kids, it defines it from the point of view of the perpetrator, which is always problematic, talking about child abuse or child rape represents a lot more what this is about, adults abusing minors.

@natacha @RAOF @strypey
one is a subset of the other. a non-offending pedophile is still a pedophile, even if they never abused a child and even abstain from child porn.

@grainloom @RAOF @strypey
I am not very concerned in examining peoples thoughts what they like or don't like, I am obviously here talking about the victims, I mean the people who are being hurt. I think minimising the social tolerance to old men abusing young kids by not saying what this is about does not help the kids to defend themselves.

@natacha @RAOF @strypey
Sure, which is why calling child abuse "child abuse" and not just "pedophilia" is a good thing.
But if a pedophile wants to go to a psychologist (which they should), the distinction matters.
Intent should not be conflated with action, otherwise we get punishments based on thought crimes.
But if a child abuser says they prefer to be called a pedophile, that's gross and normalizes child abuse.

@natacha @RAOF @strypey
(I wanted to make that distinction because it seemed like you were saying that the two are the same.)

@RAOF @strypey @natacha
He has changed his mind about pedophilia though, you are quoting something from 10+ years ago.

@RAOF @strypey @natacha
Idk what he thinks of kids with Down syndrome now, but philosophically, "if you know for certain that your child will be severely disabled in some way, then maybe you shouldn't have a child, because it will be your fault if their life will suck" is... not _that_ far fetched.
Of course that's not how he phrased it, and the phrasing matters, but it's not as bad as defending pedophilia.

@RAOF @strypey @natacha

However, now I'm more convinced that the reaction people had to his statement about Minsky were proportional.
My issue was that it felt a lot like mob justice was getting out of hand (which wouldn't be a surprise, given the nature of mobs), but if he hasn't been kind of a jerk for such a long time, it wouldn't have come to this.

But I still don't think people should think of him as a monster and forget the good things he did and stood for.

@grainloom @natacha @strypey @RAOF I heard something on public radio about acknowledgement of heroes' flaws making their legacy stronger because at some point if you just constantly defend them they become irredeemable. RMS has had his legion of fanatics refusing to acknowledge his great many flaws for a long time now. It's possible it's too late especially given where the rest of society is now.

@freakazoid @RAOF @natacha @grainloom Personal vantage, but possibly transferable:

Heroism IS the problem. The primary issue here isn’t his creepy personal views per se. For decades RMS is exemplar and model for techie men on how (not) to act in tech fora. Perving on colleagues is right out. Period. Dodging hard boundaries with “but muh Autism.” He has been a piss-poor face of FOSS for decades. Put him out to pasture. How many won’t do so is the deeper problem.

@freakazoid @strypey @natacha @grainloom This was a large part of Thomas Bushnell's piece; that those who supported RMS failed him by protecting him from the consequences of his bad behaviour.

(This is in addition to RMS' own failures to act on the plentiful feedback given to him, rather than diminishing it)

@icedquinn @grainloom @strypey @natacha But we are neither in a clinical setting nor in a court of law, so their specific terminology are not particularly relevant.

Describing a 79-year-old having sex with a 17-year-old as “paedophilia” is absolutely within common usage of the term.

And while age-of-consent laws have obvious edge cases, 79-year-old to 17-year-old is not one of them, and bringing such hypotheticals up is a deliberate distraction.

@grainloom @RAOF @strypey
I am not sure what your point is is saying this but please be aware that people with Down syndrome, or parents of people with Down syndrome can read you. They do not care about Stallman low key philosophy, or phrasing or whatever, they just need respect, and no one but them is in position to judge their experience of life. So please be clear about your intentions when moving in such muddy waters.

@strypey @RAOF @natacha
Ehh, it's not necessarily smearing. People seem to support abortion in theory but when they realize people can abort any unwanted pregnancy, even due to concerns about the future child's health issues, they start to hesitate.
It's perfectly understandable that people who want to protect kids with Down syndrome have a strong emotional reaction to something like what Stallman wrote.

@strypey @RAOF @natacha

Like, he did compare those kids to pets. Even if the core of his point made sense, that was really going too far.

@grainloom @strypey @RAOF @natacha going too far where?

@epicmorphism @RAOF @strypey @natacha
?

@RAOF @strypey @natacha
That's true, but that's not what people said. There is a difference between claiming that Minsky didn't rape someone and protecting pedophilia or claiming that rape is OK.

He was wrong but he didn't claim the latter two things.

@RAOF @strypey @natacha He did use the word "could" a lot, though.
He didn't say it was a certainty.

@grainloom @RAOF @strypey @natacha yes okay
but

context

he's defending his dead friend and mentor, founder of the AI lab on an MIT list of said lab, to kids, some of who are the age of the girl his dead friend is accused of having had (non-consensual) sex with, because one of those kids is trying to organise a protest against the director of the MIT, who knew, and who took money from the guy helping Minsky with his alleged endeavours.

@hirojin @RAOF @strypey @natacha
Hmmmm. Yep, that's where he fucked up big time.
I'm not sure he considered those factors, but it's true that he should have.

@hirojin @RAOF @strypey @natacha
But the intent still matters to me. If he acted irrationally because his friend was being (in his eyes) unjustly accused, that differs from being a rape apologist.

@hirojin @RAOF @strypey @natacha
But there is also the possibility that he _did_ consider all the circumstances and concluded that protecting his friend mattered more.

Which would suck.

@grainloom @RAOF @strypey @natacha here's another viewpoint to consider:

as long as protecting a dead old white man is more important than protecting young girls from him, what's the point of even getting them into this career? other than as fodder for these men…

@hirojin @RAOF @strypey @natacha on hmm, good point.
although obviously to him he was more than a "dead old white man".

@grainloom @RAOF @strypey @natacha obviously, yes.

but that means that we're, again, and forever, centering the viewpoints and stories of men, over the lives of women and girls.

i guess it's just really hard to empathise, or even sympathise with people who's stories are never told, and who's lives are always declared less important than those of men, or, heck, even the careers of men.

@hirojin @RAOF @strypey @natacha ye, he should have learned to be more sensitive to certain issues.
he didn't, so now it comes back to him.

@strypey @hirojin @RAOF @natacha
Then he shouldn't be the figurehead of Free Software. Because his outbursts hurt the cause.
This thread goes into more detail on how:
https://pleroma.site/notice/9nh9bWH6RbrQinMp1M

@RAOF @strypey @natacha thank you for boosting my feminist posts, @grainloom! i usually reserve those for my human account, @meena.

who would've thought tech needs feminist viewpoints?!

@hirojin @RAOF @strypey @natacha @meena
Ok, I guess I deserved that snark.
My initial reaction was that yeah, fuck Stallman, but I realized I might have been giving into a mob thing, and I needed to re-examine it.

@grainloom l it's good to be critical of one's opinions, to examine and re-examine one's movement(s)

and i have bad opinions, too: i agree that the social justice movement has turned toxic, af, and i blame two things on it:

it's mostly fought online, and it's mainly lead by queers who have not yet processed their own life's trauma, but have taken it up to process their community's trauma.
online, live, and with no filter or reflection.

@grainloom @hirojin @RAOF @strypey @meena
Indeed the issue is not the mob (I also hate them).
The question is: how not to get in that situation again, and furthermore, where do "we" as freesoftware people go from there? What do we do now? How do we organize in order to have a functional governance in between our different initiatives and across all our different opinions.

@strypey @grainloom @RAOF @natacha young girls are safe from Minsky*, but they are not safe from men like Minsky*, so long as men like Stallman go around acting as their shield

*the man Minsky is accused / alleged of being

@strypey @grainloom @RAOF @natacha if you think it's not wrong for a leader of such a movement to poison the streams and wells of potential new members with his massively misplaced pedanticism, then i have one very simple counter point: i disagree.