Remove Richard Stallman
I&#x27;ve noticed that people who write posts like this like to quote their subject, and then go, oh my, how shocking! what an appalling thing to say! without addressing the thing that was said, which in this case was (among other things):<p><i>“I think it is morally absurd to define “rape” in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”</i><p>He was responding to a student, who said &quot;Giuffre was 17 at the time, this makes it rape in the Virgin Islands.&quot; He was addressing her specific point. He brought up the 17-18 thing because <i>the student herself</i> specified Giuffre&#x27;s age as the condition of her being raped.<p>Like, if the student had said &quot;Giuffre was raped because she was coerced against her will,&quot; that&#x27;d be different. But you can&#x27;t yourself bring up the technical definition of rape to make your point, then get mad when other people point out that the technical definition makes no sense. If what you really want say is that rape is wrong because it&#x27;s wrong, just <i>say that!</i><p>Of course, the author cares about none of this, because what Stallman said was &quot;problematic.&quot; What does that even mean, by the way? This whole post consists of the author repeatedly asserting that various things Stallman said were problematic without explaining why.<p>This brings me to my next point. Here&#x27;s an article about &quot;tact filters,&quot; a term describing how different people deal with the issue of tact:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mit.edu&#x2F;~jcb&#x2F;tact.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mit.edu&#x2F;~jcb&#x2F;tact.html</a><p>People like Stallman don&#x27;t get offended, so they assume other people won&#x27;t either. People who do get offended try hard not to offend others, and expect the same courtesy. These two groups of people have difficulty getting along.<p>Neither point of view is invalid, in the sense that both sides get along extremely well with other people who are like them. But people with outward tact filters happen to be the majority, so Stallman gets seen as the bad guy. But I could imagine an alternative universe where inward-tact-filter nerds were the majority, and people like this author were expected to e.g. have the mental resilience to not let other people&#x27;s words hijack her emotions.<p>So I guess I&#x27;m offended that people like Stallman are made to feel bad for being who they are, just because they&#x27;re a minority.