When I read your story originally I remember that I had mixed feelings. But lately I've been reading some of the lies that RMS haters tell about him and his views on sex. Reading his blog posts changed my mind about some things and now I've realised that you were right and that RMS has a similar opinion.
Richard Stallman was criticised for saying that it's normal for teenagers (Stallman defines them as people that are at least 14 years old) to have sex with adults. He believes that the laws that call sex with children or teenagers "rape" are dishonest and that the definition of rape shouldn't depend on someone's age. His haters criticised him for that too, but your story shows how crazy such laws are.
When he made that statement about pedophilia, I think he was just trying to extend the rights that teenagers normally have onto children (Stallman defines them as people that are 13 years old or younger). I think that he meant well and he really didn't realise that pedophilia is harmful.
Still, if he’s talking about cases like mine, yes, I can get onboard with that. But with an age gap of 10+ years, no, I really can’t.
I've been thinking about the age gap argument and that's also something his haters like to point out. I think Stallman doesn't believe that an age gap itself is wrong. So I'm curious why do you think it's wrong? I couldn't think of a logical reason and I realised that I'm unable to define what the acceptable age gap should be. Because as you pointed out, big age gaps seem weird even when both people are adults:
My mom was almost 20 years younger than my dad m, but she was 27 and he was 46. That may seem weird, but both of them are adults.
This is unusual, but it's not wrong. So why would big age gaps be wrong for a teenager and an adult? After all we accept that teenagers should be able to have control over their own bodies (at least in most of Europe and most of US). So shouldn't it be their decision?
Sorry for posting such a long comment on an old post. I just realised how insane the whole hate campaign against RMS was, because he is right about most of the things he was criticised for.
Your bank already knows who you are, but with Taler you will be able to make payments using libre software and the bank won't be able to track them. I guess if you send money to a friend, their bank will know they received the transaction, but won't know who it was from. At least that's my understanding.
It's not a currency - just a new payment system, but I don't know how it works exactly. In order to make payments with it, your bank has to support it. Some banks are working on integrating it now. It's supposed to be anonymous and the transaction history is supposed to be private. Currently only cryptocurrency has such features, but it looks like Taler will change that.
Btw, have you guys heard of Taler? It's pretty interesting and I think you will be able to use it with a libre app
NGI TALER is a pilot funded by the European Commission and the Swiss State with the very concrete objective to roll out a new, best-in-class electronic payment system that benefits everyone: people, merchants, banks, financial authorities, auditors and anti-corruption researchers. The project doesn't have to start from scratch either, but builds on the strong foundations of GNU Taler — the privacy-preserving digital payment system developed by the GNU community and Taler Systems SA with support from the NGI initiative. This offers privacy for those that make payments, while enforcing transparency on those that sell. By providing micro payments at very low overhead, GNU Taler permits internet business models to shift away from advertising revenue or subscription models, especially for online publishers. No-risk transactions can lower transaction fees and open online payments for the underbanked population and citizens marginalized from digitalisation.
It's funny, because people who defend DRM also use this argument. They are happy with the service, so they don't mind losing freedom. They can't understand that they could have both.
I see this a lot in discussions about climate change lately: country X is polluting just as much or more than us so we shouldn't do anything. This argument makes no sense.
People deserve to be able to control their own devices, but you are saying that we should be happy if they can get only some control? Having to run even one program that you can't control is bad. So I see no reason why I should be happy with that. I see no reason why we should lower our standards and let somebody get away with doing unethical things to us. We can do much better than that. Hurd is irrelevant and we don't need it. We certainly don't need to let Valve abuse us.
You are right that the world isn't black and white, but proprietary software and libre software are incompatible ideas. You can't have freedom when someone is actively trying to take it away from you. Developers of proprietary software are our enemies and we can't support them. If we let developers have power over us, they will abuse it. It's been happening for decades and it will never stop. We need to work on making our society less dependent on non free software, not find ways to sustain our dependence. If you want to run a proprietary game on your system that's your choice, but we don't have to pretend that the developer of that game isn't doing something unethical and that there isn't an ethical way.
I also don’t think people will take much more abuse, the EU is also pushing back hard against abusive US companies.
Yes, but it's not good enough by itself. It's nice that Windows users can now uninstall Edge or whatever, but it's only in EU and that's just one of many terrible things Microsoft has been doing to their users. It is a small improvement and I'm glad they are doing something (other than spending lots of money on funding free software projects every year), but the law is not enough.
We will keep enough freedom. It’s a gradient.
But you are not just proposing a journey to freedom. You are proposing that we should accept proprietary software and praise companies that develop it, because it will somehow give us more freedom in the future. You want us to support the same type of abuse that we need to get away from.
When I read your story originally I remember that I had mixed feelings. But lately I've been reading some of the lies that RMS haters tell about him and his views on sex. Reading his blog posts changed my mind about some things and now I've realised that you were right and that RMS has a similar opinion.
Richard Stallman was criticised for saying that it's normal for teenagers (Stallman defines them as people that are at least 14 years old) to have sex with adults. He believes that the laws that call sex with children or teenagers "rape" are dishonest and that the definition of rape shouldn't depend on someone's age. His haters criticised him for that too, but your story shows how crazy such laws are.
When he made that statement about pedophilia, I think he was just trying to extend the rights that teenagers normally have onto children (Stallman defines them as people that are 13 years old or younger). I think that he meant well and he really didn't realise that pedophilia is harmful.
I've been thinking about the age gap argument and that's also something his haters like to point out. I think Stallman doesn't believe that an age gap itself is wrong. So I'm curious why do you think it's wrong? I couldn't think of a logical reason and I realised that I'm unable to define what the acceptable age gap should be. Because as you pointed out, big age gaps seem weird even when both people are adults:
This is unusual, but it's not wrong. So why would big age gaps be wrong for a teenager and an adult? After all we accept that teenagers should be able to have control over their own bodies (at least in most of Europe and most of US). So shouldn't it be their decision?
Sorry for posting such a long comment on an old post. I just realised how insane the whole hate campaign against RMS was, because he is right about most of the things he was criticised for.