Source: Hacker News
Article note: Stallman has a lot of ideas that are ...far outside the mainstream... and make him unpleasant, and I'm sympathetic to people who don't want to deal with him as a result. He certainly deserves credit that a bunch of his seeming paranoid ramblings have been proven very right over time, and he probably would be better served being less of a public figure because his eccentricities dilute his ideas.
HOWEVER, the specific old 2006-era remark "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." being used as proof he's irredeemably horrible makes a lot a sense in the context that it was addressing issues like
"Probably we shouldn't paint a couple whose ages are (e.g.) 18 months apart and happen to be 16 and 18 with the same brush as an adult trying to fuck prepubescent kids."
"Probably we shouldn't treat a 15 year old who sends their friend a racy picture the same as someone filming kids getting raped and selling it to paying customers."
Which are _technically_ defending pedophilia within the current legal framework, and also things most of the "woke" people using it as ammunition would agree with.
Likewise, his attempt to differentiate Minsky (possibly) doing something unacceptable inadvertently from Epstein doing something unacceptable intentionally and systematically that sparked off the cancel ritual ... though the fact that he stated it so carelessly is why he probably shouldn't be such a public figure.
Comments 