No. He made multiple statements on his website supporting sexual relationships between adults and minors. There was not simply the one statement he made, then retracted.
Here is a comment I made two years ago pointing them all out as well as the context by which any reasonable person would consider them to be in support of pedophilia.
And while it is true that he made a single comment after the controversy retracting his beliefs, almost as if he were forced to do so to try to put out the PR trashfire that he started, that does not mean OP's comment misrepresents RMS's views. It is correct that RMS was a stalwart, passionate advocate for pedophilia for decades.
No, you are using exaggerations to try to justify an invalid point. Stallman is a scientist, has an inquisitive mind, will question the world, the laws, the establishment, has traveled the world. Petty minds have never understood the language of great minds.
Yeah..no. Stallman's language is as plain and direct as his intent. We're not talking about Richard Feynman lecturing on quantum electrodynamics at a physics symposium. Even a cursory reading of Stallman's blog posts on the subject make it clear that he wasn't simply questioning the status quo as some intellectual exercise or testing any hypothesis as a scientist, he was emotionally invested.
He would see stories in the media about pedophiles being arrested and would comment on those stories, expressing outrage that society considered sexual relationships between grown men and children to be a taboo or a crime. He believed it was possible for children to give consent for sexual relationships (a view that, to be fair, he retracted, and to be completely fair, he retracted in the least convincing way possible,) and that children should be trained for sexual relationships by adults.
And you've lost the plot - you made Stallman out to be a brilliant scholar, intellectual and world travelling bon-vivant, which just makes him look pathetic in hindsight given what happened to him. But the narrative is that he's a fragile, socially awkward autistic who barely understands basic human behavior and can't operate in the cold, cruel world, and who shouldn't be held accountable for his words or behavior. Isn't that right? Isn't that supposed to be where the cult of Stallman is circling the wagons?
Here is a comment I made two years ago pointing them all out as well as the context by which any reasonable person would consider them to be in support of pedophilia.
And while it is true that he made a single comment after the controversy retracting his beliefs, almost as if he were forced to do so to try to put out the PR trashfire that he started, that does not mean OP's comment misrepresents RMS's views. It is correct that RMS was a stalwart, passionate advocate for pedophilia for decades.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21287006