Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bscphil | Hacker News Reader

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You're going to have to do better than that. It really just comes across as trolling since you're making the claim that he didn't say something he very clearly seems to say, without any evidence. Abbreviated, for anyone else who can't be bothered to go read it:

>The announcement of the Friday event does an injustice to Marvin Minsky:

>The injustice is in the word “assaulting”.

>The word “assaulting” presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing.

>We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.

So the claim is that (assuming Minsky had sex with an underage sex trafficking victim), we shouldn't say he assaulted her. Why shouldn't we say he assaulted her? Because it "presumes that he applied force". Why is it the case that he didn't apply force? Because ("plausibly") "she presented herself to him as entirely willing."

So if an underage trafficking victim presents herself as entirely willing to a man she has sex with, that man did not commit sexual assault. Because sexual assault "presumes that he applied force".

That is exactly what I've said this entire thread. My original claim, which apparently was inciting enough to cause this furor:

> He said that an underage sex trafficking victim's "plausible" apparent consent means that the people who raped her did not commit sexual assault.

So let me see if I get your definition of assault right:

It doesn't depend at all on alleged attacker's intentions or actions, it doesn't depend on alleged victim's actions, only thing that matters is if the alleged victim did it for one motivation (wanted it) or other (didn't want it, was forced to do it by some external factor).

I would say that any reasonable person disagrees with such definition.

Where, in this entire thread, do you see me define assault? I don't understand what you're responding to. My claim, through the entire mess this thread has become, was and remains that Stallman said something.

Man, I read your entire thread of comments. You are all over the place. Your insistence made me repeat my reading of the RMS email and I think you should just drop this.

The email is extremely clear, and in fact I'm not all over the place. I keep repeating myself so much precisely because no one is bothering to respond to the same, repeated point, which has never changed since my first post in this thread.

Do you have any dispute with my characterization of RMS's comments? Can you defend any alternative reading to the plain meaning of his statements, as I set them out above?

> So if an underage trafficking victim presents herself as entirely willing to a man she has sex with, that man did not commit sexual assault. Because sexual assault "presumes that he applied force".

And here is where you make the switch. The first part is where you repeat RMS argument why he thinks what Minsky presumably did should not be called by the word "assault".

The second part is where you attribute to Stallman that he said Minsky didn't do what we call "sexual assault". That's not what he said. What he said is that we shouldn't call what he did "sexual assault" because of reasons, not that he didn't commit the deed. That's different things - just as saying "if I copy Microsoft Word without paying the license this shouldn't be called piracy" is different from "if I copy Microsoft Word without paying the license it's not a crime". You start with the first one and then try to make it looks like the second one. That's where the problem is.

If we take "she presented herself to him as entirely willing" as a fact then we can deduce that Minsky did not rape her.

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