A friend of mine just wrote this, asked to remain anonymous:
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Richard Stallman has, by request, resigned from several of his positions in FOSS advocacy groups, after he publicly defended a colleague, Marvin Minsky, who was caught in the Epstein scandal. And, lest we think this is Cancel Culture overreach, his defense was, essentially, that he felt that the girls had consented. So not so much a "let's not jump to conclusions based on hearsay" but "I assume he did exactly what is being suggested, but I think it was OK." So yeah, Richard Stallman decided to publically become a pedophilia apologist.
So here we have someone who's philosophy regarding intellectual property has been fairly influential to my own, and who is responsible for a lot of work and community building I respect, who also has some reprehensible views. The sad thing is, This isn't the first time I've run into this exact issue. Hakim Bey is a pretty big name in individualist anarchist philosophy, having written "Pirate Utopias," which popularized the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. His writing is part of what inspired the creation of Burning Man, and thus Burner Culture. The problem is, he's slightly less well known for his contributions to NAMBLA. And his less well known essays make clear that his interest in anarchism and rules-free spaces is primarily motivated by his desire to indulge in pederasty consequence-free.
Its.... fairly obvious why philosophies of radical freedom attract evil people. They latch on to the "Do what thou wilt" part, and rationalize away the "If it harm none" part. With Hakim bey, the connection is direct and obvious. With Stallman and Minsky, the link is not direct, but rather a sad kind of Venn Diagram - some portion of open source software supporters are there because "I should be able to do what I want," and some portion of those people want some pretty reprehensible things. I am wondering now if the darker side of the dark web is really unintentional on the part of the software developers.
You see a similar pattern where abusive people use Kink as a smokescreen for their abusiveness. Or when Cheaters use Polyamory to justify their cheating. A philosophy of freedom used to excuse terrible behavior. But it's worse when the people who either thought up or popularized such philosophies are outed as being these kind of people. It's a lot harder to say "well, they are just misapplying the philosophy." Maybe *I* am misunderstanding the philosophy. How many people get sucked into libertarianism because it leads with some truths about the coercive nature of government power, but completely misses the coercive nature of economic power? How long does it take them to recognize that isn't an oversight, and the whole philosophy was built around justifying letting the wealthy do anything they want?
Or what about when the people who taught you the importance of carefully manages generational wealth up and liquidate all the family assets?
They say Kill your Heroes. That means, you should separate the moral lessons you've learned from the people that taught them to you, because those people can and will fail to live up to those ideals. I know this. But you also have to re-examine what you believe and why you believe it periodically. Basically, It's data security time. A Trusted source has been revealed to be compromised. It's time to go through the Moral Code line by line for bugs.
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