Red Hat Withdraws from the Free Software Foundation After Stallman’s Return

It makes sense that for people who struggle with subtlety, the explicit world of academia and religion would be highly appealing.

It's difficult to reverse engineer the dynamics of the subtle in the language of the literal but I suspect it is not impossible. There are people with social disorders that had to learn all the social cues that we take for granted as intuition, explicitly but many end up having better social skills than the average. Why? Because by being forced to learn these skills in an explicit way, they have to come to a higher level understanding than that of the average sociable person.

The same is true for the artist with aphantasia or the mathematician without the ability to do mental arithmetic. In many cases, the same systematic study that people with these unique deficiencies have to undergo to learn those skills must be done by even average people to acquire real proficiency in that area, except average people have less of a blank canvas to work with which is both an advantage (there is already a bit of mileage in terms of practice) and a disadvantage (suddenly, you have to unlearn biases and bad habits that you have been unknowingly reinforcing).

This was a bit of a rant and a half but I just wanted to put down the train of thought your comment put me under.

I would find any older man hanging out with 18-19 year olds sufficiently weird to raise my guards. I can imagine just a single reason that makes them think its a good idea to skirt the line that closely.

You're right, in the end you need proof for a conviction. We however don't need that high a bar to get a pretty good measure of a person, and we're free to dislike someone for manoeuvring themselves into situations where abuse of power imbalance is made so easy. I'm always open to correction in particular cases, but my default will always be to be aware of the decreased barriers of committing abuse.

So you think a young prostitute flown into a remote Island by a billionaire is able to consent with 100% impartiality? It's not the specific age that is the biggest issue here - the age of consent in my country is 16. It's the age gap between the parties and the fact that she was flown into private property entirely at the mercy of Epstein.

I don't agree that consent magically becomes a possibility at the age of 18 but not 17 and neither do most advocates for an age of consent for that matter. The reason for having one is because there does need to be a line drawn somewhere and pitching it higher than the onset of puberty is not a bad safety margin.

Also, may states and countries have laws that dictate cases underage sex between parties with smaller age gaps so the motivations here is not some infantalisation of the young, it's to try to have some level of checks against the often overwhelming power difference between minors and adults.

I also never claimed that RMS had any interest in participating in pedophilia or necrophilia himself. My claim was that his view on the morality these acts betray a lack of understanding as to why they are considered so objectionable.

Your point on American Muslims is just plain disingenuous and relies on trickery by omission. They believe in scripture that has views on those matters but the same is in fact true of American Christians yet if you took them aside and asked either the average Christian or Muslim on the street if they thinks sex with minors is ok, they would likely say no. Contrary to your delusions, there are a lot of practices in both the Quran and the Bible that are not widely practised by their adherents today. The vast majority of Muslims do not practice polygamy for example and the vast majority of Christians don't hold a vehement hatred for the consumption of shellfish.

> It may be a statutory definition, but marriage means "matrimony" such as Christian "Holy matrimony" to a lot of people and for them "gay marriage" is simply an oxymoron.

Other religions have marriages. What the law says cannot be restricted to what Christianity (some of it) believe to be the Only Right Thing.

How can you seriously claim that there is somehow more media attention on the sexual misconduct of software engineers than Hollywood? There is probably more articles and news coverage on the acts of Harvey Weinstein alone than every sexual abuse case in the software world combined.

They probably are not talking that much about Hollywood actors being caught with prostitutes specifically because they are preoccupied with the rampant sexual abuse that goes on between actors themselves including towards many child actors.