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Old 18th September 2019, 10:04     #159
Ab
A mariachi ogre snorkel
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by fixed_truth
He used a public mailing list to comment on a subject outside his sphere of expertise, knowing it was going to cause controversy
I think you're wrong on each of the three of the claims you make here (bolded).

1. It was a private mailing list for the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

2. It was exactly his sphere of expertise - he was lecturing people about the meanings of words. That's what he does. You know the phrase "Free as in speech, not free as in beer"? That's literally a quote from Richard Stallman. Stallman saw an announcement of a campus protest event and started breaking down what the words in the text of the announcement meant and implied; he wasn't disagreeing with the validity of the protest or the issue being protested. Check the first lines of the email that has ended his life:
Quote:
The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin
Minsky:

“deceased AI ‘pioneer’ Marvin Minsky (who is accused of assaulting
one of Epstein’s victims”

The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault”
is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation:
taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as
Y, which is much worse than X.
He's talking about the words of the announcement, not about the event or the people or the things they did. He's giving a lecture to the readers on how language works.

3. He's a sperg with no social skills who neither knows nor understands how people are going to react to anything. This is a guy who while delivering a lecture to a hall full of people, in front of cameras, took off his footwear and started peeling loose skin off his toes and eating it while answering questions from the audience. It never entered his head that people might react in any sort of way because he's a fucking autistic mutant and his brain doesn't work like that and everyone who has ever met him knows that.

Quote:
I do wonder if this would have escalated as much if Stallman didn’t have a history of defending paedophilia
(Real world) True, but (ideal world) who the fuck cares? Stallman doesn't have a history of defending paedophlia, he has a history of not instinctively rejecting it without qualification. I've sat in expensive university courses* and bounced around exactly the same ideas that Stallman is being unpersoned for. What is paedophilia? Is it psychological attraction to child bodies, or a legal definition based on statute? Ages of consent are arbitrary and differ from place to place for no reason! issues like agency and harm and consent and personhood are all relevant (which is worse: healthy caring relationship with an emotionally stable and mature consenting 15-year-old, or abusive relationship with a mentally deficient immature 18-year old?)! What if a sex partner is a mature adult with a growth disorder and presents as pre-pubescent - is that paedophilia? Grownups can have these discussions without having their professional lives ended.


* lol if any of those philosophy lecturers are still on staff at the University of Waikato they must be shitting themselves
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