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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> You’re right, that is a misquote. But what he actually wrote honestly wasn’t that much better

Agree. Broadly speaking, if someone is accused of a moral crime about which you have no privileged information, publicly hypothesizing about how they might be innocent is tantamount to a defence.

It's a limit on free speech. And in private circles, it could be debated responsibly. But when stated publicly, the argument's components of character defense and appeal to rationality are confusingly (possibly inextricably) balanced, which should be obvious ex ante.

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> Broadly speaking, if someone is accused of a moral crime about which you have no privileged information, publicly hypothesizing about how they might be innocent is tantamount to a defence.

What ??? How ??? Are we supposed to assume that every accusation we hear about is true, and everyone is guilty until proven innocent?

No, but he’s defending something that’s still pretty damn bad. The guy was clearly there and participating.

> Are we supposed to assume that every accusation we hear about is true, and everyone is guilty until proven innocent

No. Not publicly* commenting on an accusation is very different from blindly accepting it. (Note the caveats: moral crime and your having no new information.)

* I recognise he made these comments on a “private” mailing list, but I have to assume someone like RMS understands the futility of trying to keep a mailing list of all things private.

So, you think this statement should not be made publicly but also not in private since a private statement is just a public statement yet to be leaked? Bollocks.

> you think this statement should not be made publicly but also not in private since a private statement is just a public statement yet to be leaked

I think it’s fair to discuss with people you trust. A mailing list between friends could be that. But I know of no reasonable expectation of privacy on anything referred to as a mailing list. (If you don’t know everyone on the list, it may be confidential, but it isn’t a personal conversation.)

This is especially ridiculous in the US where nearly every rich person can be expected to get sued about anything because it's common to hand out hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in settlements to avoid publicity before the case even reaches court.

> And in private circles, it could be debated responsibly.

To quote the original comment in this thread: ""The original Remove Richard Stallman post contained leaked communications from a private mailing list."

csail-related really wasn't all that private. Anybody at MIT could add themselves to it (and perhaps could add others to it) and many undergraduates did just to see Stallman make the comments he did. (Long before this scandal, he had several amusing habits and mannerisms on this particular list.) It wasn't exactly public, but it wasn't really private either. And there had been prior scandals from it that had been made public ("a mailing list" in this article but I remember it happening on csail-related): https://thetech.com/2017/04/20/egg-donor-advert

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