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1. It isn't pedophilia if the person is sexually mature. Pedophilia is sex with prepubescent children.
2. He draws a distinction between statutory rape (can't legally say yes according to the law, but otherwise willing and sexually mature) and forcible rape (when someone says no). He made a point about how statutory rape wouldn't be considered rape if it happened in a different location (e.g. Italy) or if the person's birthday were slightly adjusted.
I agree with you that in the Epstein case you have a situation with a dramatic power imbalance. Stallman seems to consider Epstein a serial rapist (possibly for that fact?). He seems to be more pushing back on the pedophilia accusations.
Also - there seems to be a thread lost. It really looks like Epstein was a US Intelligence Officer filming powerful people having sex with young women (including foreign officials) to obtain leverage on them for the United States. This whole aspect of the conversation seems to have melted away in the various other controversies.
I agree that the reporting silence on this aspect of the case is odd. The federal prosecutor who worked out Epstein's plea deal (Alexander Acosta) appears to have told the press that the deal was done because he was told "Epstein belonged to intelligence". This was widely reported in July (https://www.google.com/search?q=acosta+epstein+intelligence), and then this revelation was almost completely dropped when Acosta resigned from his position as Secretary of Labor due to fallout from his involvement with the plea deal.
I'll note though that Acosta did not explicitly claim that Epstein was working for the US intelligence services...
The federal prosecutor was not in a position to be able to verify that claim.
No other evidence for it has come forth, making it hard to accept your view that "it really looks like" that's the case.
I didn't use those words, the parent poster did.
Personally, I think the possibility that Epstein was working for a government agency (domestic or foreign) merits further investigation, but is far from a certainty. I agree that Acosta might have been lying. But if this is the case, I find it doubly odd that there has been so little follow up reporting.
I understand what RMS is trying to say, but this strikes me as an incredibly weak argument. All laws are arbitrary, but pointing that out isn't a meaningful defense of someone who broke one.
It's like contesting a parking ticket by saying "well if parking had been allowed on that street at that time then I wouldn't have done anything wrong."
Sometimes it's obvious which the sensible choice to make is. If you're arguing whether the GPL allows linking to a proprietary library or not, then it's the law that's more important. But if you're arguing if sex with children is OK then it's some higher moral standard that's important and appeals to the law are essentially appeals to popular opinion as support of some moral standard.
Luckily, people usually agree on what the law means, so they just have to make sure they're arguing about the same point that their opponent is actually making.
In Germany (and I find this disturbing) the legal age under which a grown up (over 21 years) can have sex with a kid is 14[1][2]. Of course a judge can find that the child or their legal representative not having been capable of giving consent in which case it's still considered child abuse.
Western societies themselves have such vastly different legal definitions of consent. To be honest I find germanies version to be the weirdest I've seen although I don't know much about the other european countries.
It is not.
The general legal age of consent in German is 16 years. § 182 (3)
The special legal age is 14 and it's only legal if the other party is under 21.
Even then there are a lot of further exemptions that would make sex with a minor illegal. Prostitution and/or pornography involving minors is always illegal.
In Germany, having sex with someone in the 14-15 range can be illegal if the other party is above the age of 21.
Relevant passage in German, from the parent's link:
"Über die Vorschriften des § 182 StGB Abs. 1 und 2 (Zwangslage, Entgelt) bezüglich des Schutzalters 18 Jahre hinaus, die auch für unter 16-jährige Opfer gelten, können sexuelle Handlungen von Erwachsenen, die über 21 Jahre alt sind, mit 14- und 15-jährigen Jugendlichen nach § 182 Abs. 3 StGB bestraft werden, falls ein gesetzlicher Vertreter des Jugendlichen Strafantrag stellt und im Strafverfahren das Gericht feststellt, dass der Erwachsene eine – etwa mit Hilfe eines Sachverständigen – festzustellende „fehlende Fähigkeit zur sexuellen Selbstbestimmung“ des Jugendlichen ausgenutzt hat. Der Bundesgerichtshof hat 1996 festgestellt, dass der bloße Hinweis auf das Alter der 14- oder 15-jährigen Person für eine Verurteilung des erwachsenen Beschuldigten nicht ausreicht."
(emphasis mine)
To summarize: Having (consensual, of course) sex with a 14 year old is always legal in Germany if you're under the age of 21 and not a teacher or some such, and can be illegal if you're over that.
One can draw a distinction between rape by physical force and rape by coercion, manipulation and deception - but it's kind of undesirable to push any kind of line that a lack of force makes this a automatically a different kind of crime. For example, sex with police officer or prison guard when someone is in custody is in many jurisdictions automatically considered to be rape because the circumstances mean a person can't really consent - and that's entirely logical. In this sense, "statutory rape" and forcible rape aren't entirely different.
Maybe one might find situations where under-aged sex isn't rape by manipulation - where you can argue consent could reasonably given (an eighteen year old with sixteen year in the same High school is hard to argue against). But the Epstein situation is clearly the wrong place to look for this.
Wait, what? I thought he was objecting to the claim that Marvin Minsky assaulted one of Epstein's victims.
https://medium.com/@selamie/remove-richard-stallman-fec6ec21...
What's being referred to, in regards to his opinion of Epstein, is this piece from April: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jan-apr.html#25_April_201...
