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Comment by solosoyokaze | Hacker News Reader

This is not his field of study. He's defending a friend of his who is credibly accused of raping a minor. It's not philosophy, it's personal interest and serves no value to the community or anyone other than RMS and Minsky.

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Defffffinitely fair game at a university, then. I thought we were talking about the more abstract investigation of why it's wrong to have sex with minors. This sort of direct political stuff is regrettable but totally within the realm of acceptable.

It may be acceptable to you but for me and a lot of people, it is not. The solution for me is to never associate or work with the FSF and advocate against this type of behavior from "leaders" in our industry and field.

The age of consent in some European countries is generally lower than the US, some as low as 14, most about 15 with some having 16¹. If we assume that the majority of citizens of such a country agree that their country has a reasonable age, would your response then be to “never associate or work with” anyone from that country?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent#/media/File:Age...

I would not work with anyone who held those views, regardless of which country they were from. I find it abhorrent and especially so in the context of work.

But how do we all decide for ourselves what is abhorrent? Hopefully by some sort of reasoning right? (And hopefully not as tortured and ill-advised as what RMS wrote all those years ago.)

The same reasoning that says it's bad to murder someone. I would say empathy and a modicum of human decency.

In Japan age of consent is 13.

Do you find Japanese people abhorrent?

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