> What's "child abuse"? If you spank your child, in some jurisdictions that's fine. In others it's illegal. For all I know, there may be some where it's okay so long as you don't leave bruises. Does that prevent us from making justified accustations of child abuse?

How does it not? I was abused as a child, physically and psychologically tormented and coerced into taking drugs and participating in weird religious things I wanted no part of, and many people I've encountered, including my own mother, don't view what I've been through as abuse. I consider it child abuse but even the multitude of police who visited my dwellings growing up in rural Louisiana sided with my abusers.

This is an example of the independence and often disparity between objective morality and law. Law wants to emulate morality, but it never will. And thus we cannot use law as a roadmap for morality. That is what people are doing in this case, clinging to the arbitrary laws defined in their section of the earth instead of only making safe moral assumptions based on scientific inquiry.

Stallman has just lost a position that he has spent his whole life working towards in a misplaced attempt to play the devil's advocate for a friend whom he has trouble imagining a dark side of. For what, so we can be morally vindicated? After everything which Stallman has helped give us? What kind of purist authoritarian hyper-reactive world are we living in? Without Stallman the two of us wouldn't even be able to have this discussion.

That's all fine and good, but Stallman argued that it was absolutely wrong to use "sexual abuse" in an accusation, not morally wrong.

Stallman's position appears to be that you absolutely cannot call what happened to you "child abuse."

Stallman doesn't seem willing to learn what others mean by "sexual assault" before making up his own definition and claiming that's the definition they were using.

Stallman has also spent his adult life as a sexual creep. This is an open secret. Your moral calculus appears to be that people are free to creep on others so long as the good they do outweighs the creep, and Stallman's good means he can be as creepy as he wants to, with no direct consequences?

If after 30 years the free software movement can't survive and thrive without Stallman then the movement has failed. The indirect consequences include all the people who left or never joined the movement because of his creepiness. Is that in your calculus?

> When we're talking about objective morality, we are talking about absolutes. Don't twist Stallman's words away from their intended meaning.

> Stallman has also spent his adult life as a sexual creep. This is an open secret.

Oh brother... want to share some sauce on that instead of making wildly uncited claims? You're on some next level shit here.

"intended meaning"

Stallman gave the wrong definition of "sexual assault".

He chastised people for using the wrong phrase.

Legally speaking, it's the right phrase.

If the argument is really about "objective morality" and "absolutes" then those cannot be decided, so your interpretation of Stallman's text would also have Stallman object to calling Epstein a pedophile - something he rejects. Therefore your interpretation must be wrong.

Are you paying any attention to any of the cited claims in the last few days? It's not like these deep dark secrets. Searching HN for "Stallman creep", for example, finds:

"There are many valid criticisms of Richard Stallman: ... he has creeped out some women by making passes at them (or so they tell me). - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2327849 (2011)

I also know a woman who worked down the hall from Stallman, and she found him to be a creep this way.

Then there's all the people on Twitter saying the same thing, and not just recently. Here's are a few from 2018, https://twitter.com/suzanne_hillman/status/99459683376166092... :

> He flirts with anyone who is female, even if they are underage. He is creepy in person, in a way that I cannot adequately describe. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that he kept women out of open source and free software, and many of his ideas stayed even after he left.

and https://twitter.com/starsandrobots/status/994267277460619265 :

> I remember being walked around campus by an upperclassman getting advice during my freshman year at MIT. "Look at all the plants in her office," referring to a professor. "All the women CSAIL professors keep massive amounts of foliage" s/he said. "Stallman really hates plants."

Or elsewhere, like https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2019/09/17/rms-resig... :

> rms was in the whisper network as a creep when I was in undergrad late last millennium, and I wasn’t even at MIT.