The Exigent Duality
The Strange Case of Dr. Stallman - 15:02 CST, 9/18/19 (Sniper)
I may not like his politics, but long-time readers will know how much I admire Richard Stallman's contributions to personal computing. I frequently advocate for "libre" software, and sit here transcribing this very post into GNU Emacs, running on the GNU operating system.

When I read that he "defended Epstein" and consequently caused a virtual earthquake by resigning from both MIT and the Free Software Foundation, I figured I owed it to him to see if the accusation was true.

After a little digging, I unearthed the email chain in question. Below, I've reproduced the relevant part of the conversation verbatim, bold emphasis is mine:

Stallman: "We can only listen to what is said to us.

All I know she said about Minsky is that Epstein directed her to have sex with Minsky. That does not say whether Minsky knew that she was coerced. It does not report what each said and did during their sexual encounter. We can imagine various scenarios.

We know that Giuffre was being coerced into sex-- by Epstein. She was being harmed. But the details do affect whether, and to what extent, Minsky was responsible for that."


And that's it!

Quite literally all he said was, "Hey guys, let's not throw Marvin and his legacy under the bus quite yet, until we know more details." But because this is crazy-eccentric Richard Stallman, he made zero efforts to sugar coat or offer disclaimers.

It didn't help that in the same thread he went on to to engage in abstract philosophy. Only Stallman would think this was the ideal time and place:

Stallman: "I think it is morally absurd to define 'rape' in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.

I think the existence of a dispute about that supports my point that the term 'sexual assault' is slippery, so we ought to use more concrete terms when accusing anyone."


*sigh*

At least someone did come to his defense in the email chain. But it evidently wasn't enough:

Redacted: "No on in this thread has accused Giuffre of lying. Rather, the discussion has been of whether Giuffre actually accused Minsky of sexual assault or not. I will not step into that discussion, but will instead ask the following meta question: 'If someone in csail says in this discussion group that Minsky was accused of sexual assault, a very serious accusation, and someone else in csail thinks that he was not, should the latter person refrain from saying so in this same discussion group out of concern that the conversation will leak and be misconstrued by the press?

The 's' in CSAIL stands for 'science'. The job of scientists is to evaluate evidence and seek truth. We have a social responsibility to do that as well. I hope that we scientists will never evade our social responsibility to seek and defend the truth out of fear that the press will misconstrue our search.