Lawrence Lessig, Harvard law professor, writes on Medium about campaign finance reform, electoral system lawsuits, and his disputes with the media.
HN links it for his essays on Joi Ito and MIT's Epstein donations and his Mayday PAC efforts; commenters debate his claims.
Cultures can have varying degrees of tolerance for diverse viewpoints, e.g. anything from mobs on Twitter to social credit scores in China. Attacking someone's livelihood for raising a philosophical question is somewhere on that spectrum.
There are a lot of incendiary political topics de jour where it's obvious that important voices are being silenced. See, for example, the pseudoaddiction post from SSC yesterday. Popular uprisings are often based on kernels of truth, but the conversation becomes distorted when experts or just laypeople with diverse viewpoints decide, fuck it, it's just not worth the liability of weighing in.
A couple weeks ago there was a story about a minor girl in high school charged by a prosecutor and found guilty by a judge of distributing child pornography--upheld on appeal--for texting her friends a video of herself. [1] But if it's political suicide to even try to have a conversation about how the laws on child pornography could be harming children, then it will never be fixed.
So at some point it should be acceptable for someone to stick their head out and say, "This term 'sexual assault' it doesn't really mean what most people think it means a lot of the times. It would make for much healthier discussion if we could be more specific!" Or, "These arbitrary age barriers (which change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) can catch innocent people engaging in consensual intimate acts." And it's also OK for someone else to say, "That's just not what…
Lessig's original essay: https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7
Lessig's response to the NYT article: https://medium.com/@lessig/on-the-careful-reading-of-the-new-york-times-editors-8f543418c1df
Suffice it to say that he disagrees with the characterization in the NYT article: "Whatever else my essay from a week ago was doing, it was not my trying to “defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” It happens sometimes, maybe not a lot, but here the editor at the Times took truth and rendered it as completely false."
>> and a well-known Harvard Law School professor.
> almost certainly Alan Dershowitz, who is up to his eyeballs in epstein dirt.
My guess is Lawrence Lessig, since he himself wrote about this ("Our conversations then were about his diligence to determine whether Epstein remained an abuser"), see
https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7
Lawrence Lessig just asserted on Medium [0] (without specific evidence) that the anonymization of Epstein's donations was done at the direction of MIT. If true, that loops the Institute generally into the whole scandal, where previously they had an almost bulletproof defense.
[0] https://medium.com/@lessig/on-joi-and-mit-3cb422fe5ae7
That exists: Mayday PAC. Lawrence Lessig organized it last year. They raised $11 million and tried to influence some key Congressional races, but it didn't really work. Now they're trying some different things:
https://medium.com/@lessig/we-tried-we-learned-we-re-trying-something-new-mayday-us-v2-f56bb96abff