this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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beat me to it... yeah, he said that weird shit about 'consenting' underage children not being traumatized or some shit... or there was no evidence they were...
later apologized and said he was shown evidence but, nah... plus the whole Epstein friendship thing...(maybe he was just naively getting fsf donations? ) dude did some fantastic things for computers and humanity overall with gnu... but he's definitely not cool
He probably talked about age of consent in most of European countries. As mentioned by CrypticCoffee above even in UK it is 16.
He wasn't talking about people above the age of consent.
16 is underage. Also 16 is above age of consent in Europe.
It's not underage if it's above the age of consent. Europe isn't a country, it varies across Europe. And it's also 16 in most of the US.
Wasn't context about 17-yo or something like that
Unfortunately it doesn't seem like it. Between 2003 and 2013 he really used to believe that pedophilia doesn't harm children. But he really only mentioned it a few times and hadn't talked about it again until 2019 when it was brought up again. He said then that he had changed his mind since and that he was wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Controversies).
I don't think we should cancel people for believing something stupid 10 years ago, but his haters love to use this. Just like they like to misquote him or spread fake rumors about him (https://stallmansupport.org). They are probably too angry to think clearly or verify information, but sometimes I wonder if for some of them it's really only about his position on proprietary software (he wants to destroy it) and that's why they wanted him removed from the FSF.
Nope
That's not exactly what happened.
1. In 2019 he was misquoted by a blogger and then by the press:
Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/9ke3ke/famed-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-described-epstein-victims-as-entirely-willing
What he really said was:
Source: https://stallmansupport.org/explaining-events-that-led-to-stallman-resignation-csail-emails.html
There is no "Epstein friendship" that I know of. He called him a "serial rapist" before that (source).
This is what he was criticized for at the time + unconfirmed rumors (some of them debunked now) of allegedly creepy behavior around women. You can read more on https://stallmansupport.org.
2. Some people dug up his old blog posts.
Between 2003 and 2013 a few times he expressed his views on pedophilia. It was literally a few times, but yes this is something he actually said and used to believe. He hadn't mentioned that topic again until it was brought up in 2019. That's when he said that he had changed his mind since then and that he was wrong. You can read about it on Wikipedia (can't find the link to the original quote at the moment): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Controversies
As far as I know that was the last time he mentioned this topic.
So now that we got the facts right, the question is if he should be punished for having a wrong/stupid opinion on something 10 years ago. I think no, but apparently some people disagree.
"presented herself as willing"
a. i think she was too young to appear willing
b. he's staying at this weird rich dude's island and suddenly a very young woman wants to have sex and you don't think she's cooerced?
... i guess there's some point in the term "assault", but the other term would be statuary rape, which still implies violence...
but that wasn't what i was talking about... i was talking about the few comments from before where he expressed his views on pedophilia...
given his position, i don't think it's responsible to try to claim pedophilia might be moral, if the child is "consenting", etc...
like sure, it's okay to discuss ideas... but he acted as if he knew for sure there's no evidence that it's harmful...
i don't think he should be punished, but i don't think he should be accepted as a spokesperson, figurehead, or leader...
at the very best, he's speaking very harmful things out of pocket... at the worse, he's rationalizing something he did.
i felt the same way about Stallman as i did about Allen Ginsberg when i found out he was a pedo...
That could be true. It's a valid point.
It's certainly weird, but I think there is some chance that he didn't know.
I don't know much about that, but according to Wikipedia, it's usually not connected to violence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_rape. Statutory rape is a legal term, it's not actually the same thing as rape. See, this is another example of what Richard was talking about.
It would be better if he didn't have stupid or weird opinions, but he is a philosopher, so he thinks and talks about ethics and stuff like that all of his life. Especially on his blog - you can check stallman.org. He is even against using paid toilets. I don't know where he got the idea that a child could consent or that it wasn't harmful, but I've seen some pedo say online that there is some research, which allegedly proves that. So I assume they just cherry pick to find something that supports their claims, but then they of course ignore all of the overwhelming evidence against it. This often happens in pseudoscience. So maybe he read something stupid like that, I don't know.
But if he wasn't who he is, I don't know if he would have created the Free Software movement. Many people today still think that it's a radical idea that users should have rights, which nobody should be able to take away from them. I think we need people like him in our society. I also don't know anyone else who has been fighting for this for 40 years refusing to make compromises on people's freedom (unlike Linus Torvalds for example). To this day he still travels the world and gives talks about Free Software in multiple languages.
But Richard Stallman is not a pedo.