In Defense of Richard Stallman is a decent article on recent events. Stallman lost several jobs because the SJW, fake-news media fraudulently misquoted him. Too few people wanted to stand up to the lies, or bothered to think enough to know it was lies.
Stallman said of his friend Marvin Minsky (allegedly) fucking an underage girl on Jeffrey Epstein's pedophile island:
the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.
and then the media lied like:
Stallman wrote that “the most plausible scenario” for Giuffre’s accusations was that she was, in actuality, “entirely willing.”
This is a major evil. It's dangerous. And it's complicated: it involves the activists, the lying media, and also, most of all, the much larger group of people who go along with it, who aren't SJW activists but do choose to accept the media's lies.
While I don't think Stallman should have been fired for this, I don't agree with him either. Here's how I view it (assuming the allegation is true):
Minsky was 73. She was 17. He was in a weird situation on a private island. What did he think her motivation was? Did he think he was physically attractive to her? Did he think she didn't have better options for recreational sex? Did he think she was an educated fan of his work? Was she trying to gold dig and get a relationship, money, even marriage, from the married Minsky? Did she have a fetish for old guys? Was she trying to social climb in Minsky's social circle? Was she going to ask for favors later like a higher grade (she wasn't in his class), a preface to her book by Minsky, or introductions to important people?
Did Minsky ask her anything about her motivation? Or did he choose not to consider it, not to ask, and to engage in dishonest, biased, wishful thinking?
Why did Minsky want to engage in statutory rape? Or did he not bother to find out her age, and not care? Or did he figure they weren't in the US, so breaking US laws didn't matter, and he thinks it's a bad law which should be repealed (something he's never said a word about in his life, certainly never advocated, he just wanted it not to exist this one time for him)?
I don't know anything. My analysis is all made up. But I think it's much more plausible than Stallman's suggestion that Minsky was duped. You can't really dupe an honest man like this. They have to go along with it. If they were trying not to be duped, they'd have a bunch of questions and there wouldn't be convincing answers.
Sex and sexual consent are things to be careful with. Sex in unusual situations (like on a private island, in a foreign country, with a large age gap, or with someone outside of one's regular social circle), where your regular intuition may not be appropriate, is something to be extra careful with. Sex with especially young girls, who are generally less experienced and responsible, is something to be extra careful with. Was Minsky extra careful? Doubtful. How could he have been careful and ended up going through with it when there wouldn't actually have been good answers to skeptical questions? If he started expressing a bunch of doubts and concerns, would the girl really have been able to come up with persuasive lies to cover every issue? Was she so much cleverer than Minsky that she could fool him despite the facts being heavily against her?
This is like an extreme version of a guy who believes a bunch of flattery – without really questioning it or thinking critically – from a pretty woman he just met. Except this time, instead of manipulating him to get a favor, she was just offering sex for nothing, for no apparent reason, not even a free drink. At that point, an honest, old, unattractive man is normally wondering things like whether she's a prostitute, because what else could it be? If Minsky did wonder, it would have led to not having sex with her, and if he didn't wonder then he did something badly wrong.
Apparently Stallman and Geoff Greer (who wrote the defense of Stallman article linked above) didn't think of any of this, either. That's bad. And the media, rather than making these reasonable arguments, lied, which suggests to me that, despite their posturing as defenders of women, maybe they don't know this stuff either. (Disclaimer: I didn't read many articles about this. If you can find one which makes arguments similar to mine, especially from the mainstream media, please link it in the comments, I'd like to see it.).
Messages (2)
Minsky allegations
I agree with the analysis in the post above. A tangent about the allegations against Marvin Minsky follows.
According to jacquesm on HN (footnotes mine):
> I actually haven't seen Minsky being accused. That court transcript [1] says that she was 'directed to have sex' with Minsky but nowhere does it say she did and there is an eyewitness claiming he - Minsky - turned her down [2].
[1]. Cryptome published a zip file containing ~2000 pages of Giuffre v. Maxwell files that were unsealed on Aug 9, 2019. Giuffre's remarks about Minsky (who died in 2016) are in the file giuffre-278.pdf starting at page 145 of the pdf. Here is a manually-cleaned-up version of that section (based on the output of the Unix `pdftotext` command):
> Q: Where did -- where were you and where was Ms. Maxwell when she directed you to go have sex with Marvin Minsky?
> MR. EDWARDS: Object to the form.
> A: I don't know.
> Q (BY MS. MENNINGER): Where did you go to have sex with Marvin Minsky?
> A: I believe it was the U.S. Virgin Islands, Jeff's -- sorry, Jeffrey Epstein's island in the Virgin Islands.
> Q: And when was that?
> A: I don't know.
> Q: Do you have any time of year?
> A: No.
> Q: Do you know how old you were?
> A: No.
> Q: Other than Glenn Dubin, Stephen Kaufmann, Prince Andrew, Jean Luc Brunel, Bill Richardson, another prince, the large hotel chain owner and Marvin Minsky, is there anyone else that Ghislaine Maxwell directed you to go have sex with?
> A: I am definitely sure there is. But can I remember everybody's name? No.
[2]. Gregory Benford apparently told Instapundit:
> Note, never says what happened. If Marvin had done it, she would say so. I know; I was there. Minsky turned her down. Told me about it. She saw us talking and didn’t approach me.
#13669 Good point that she may have been directed to do it but got declined. FYI, based on that account, Minsky's wife seems to be a liar:
https://nypost.com/2019/08/09/jeffrey-epsteins-alleged-sex-slave-reveals-the-men-she-claims-she-was-forced-to-sleep-with/
> “I have never met, spoken with or had any contact with Ms. Giuffre,” the statement said. “In my contacts with Mr. Epstein I never observed or suspected any inappropriate conduct with underage girls. I only learned of his actions when they were reported in the media related to his prosecution in Florida. We have had no further contact.”
> Minsky’s widow, Gloria Rudisch, denied to The Post that he had sex with Giuffre or any of the other girls at Epstein’s residences.
> She said that she and Minsky visited Epstein’s residences in New York and Palm Beach “three or four times at the most” and that they always went as a couple.
> “We were always together,” she said. “We didn’t stay at his house or anything.”
> Rudisch said that there young girls at Epstein’s residences, but that “none of them seemed very young.”
> “I’m a pediatrician, I think I would have noticed,” Rudisch said.
> Of Epstein, she said nothing about him struck her as suspicious and that he seemed like “just a rich guy interested in science.”
I quoted extra b/c there are various signs of lying. But in particular she seems to be saying they never went to the island, whereas Gregory Benford, who is defending Minsky, says Minsky was there and that the girl really did approach him.