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Comment by free_rms | Hacker News Reader

RMS was the only one punished for the Jeffrey Epstein scandal at MIT. He never even went on any of those trips! He was just weird, and a mob formed to shame him for it.

All the people with good social skills, who went to the Epstein island? Totally fine, no consequences.

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The people with good social skills got (and are still getting) plenty of outrage directed at them - the problem is they also had people defending them on the basis of having good social skills. It's ridiculous that many, many people believe that someone being nice to them means they cannot be awful to others.

None of them got fired, though.

Revealed preference is a mother.

That's revealed preference of their employers.

What this shows us is not that being weird gets you fired, but that being outwardly "normal" and "nice" saves you from being fired when you go to private rape islands. Try fixing that one.

Also revealed preference of the angry mob!

I saw zero medium posts saying "hey, forget about RMS's posts, let's go get mad at the people who actually did this stuff". I'm sure they existed, but in general the mob wanted a 'creepy' scapegoat and they got one.

Why forget about RMS's posts? You know people can be angry about multiple people at once. And many people will be angry at people in their own communities more than others - so if you're following a bunch of tech folk, yes, they're going to focus on the tech folk. And if you follow a bunch of British people with an interest in the royalty, they're going to focus on Prince Andrew and largely ignore RMS - which many did.

> RMS was the only one punished for the Jeffrey Epstein scandal at MIT.

It was way too little too late but Joi Ito, Peter Cohen and Seth Lloyd got punished. The MIT Media Lab's reputation was tarnished forever from this. Saying RMS was the only one is disingenuous.

> banged underage girls?

What a vile way to describe the rape of children.

Edited. But, really, you're proving my point here with who you get outraged at. I didn't go on that island either.

People can be outraged at more than one person at a time.

Or for more than one reason.

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