Slashdot Mirror
Alan Turing Apology Campaign Grows
chrb writes "Several British news sources have recently reported on the growing campaign that calls for an apology to Alan Turing for his persecution by the British government. The petition to the Prime Minister was started by John Graham-Cumming, who has also written to the Queen requesting a Knighthood for Turing, but admits that a pardon is 'unlikely,' saying, 'The most important thing to me is that people hear about Alan Turing and realize his incredible impact on the modern world, and how terrible the impact of prejudice was on him.'"
Unless you were being deliberately ironic, don't be so quick to congratulate Western society for how wise we are "today." After all, Magdalene Asylums were a roughly equivalent "treatment" for a similar "condition," and the last of these, in Ireland, wasn't closed until 1996.
Prescription, invented during the Roman Empire, is supposed to stop never ending guilt, while the rule "an eye for an eye" would have left the world full of blind idiots.
Or, maybe, we could get over this notion that guilt is hereditary
The Head of State is the same. It makes sense for her to apologize (or not).
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
It is interesting that you cite Sharia for Muslim law, but do not cite your references for Hindu law. Practices in India today, do not neccessarily have anything to do with Hindu law. By all accounts Hinduism has been generally liberal with sexuality and open and accepting of various different practices including homosexuality.
When Europeans arrived in India, they were shocked by Hinduism, which they termed idolatrous, and by the range of sexual practices, including same-sex relations, which they labeled licentious. British colonial rulers wrote modern homophobia into education, law and politics.
The Wikipedia entry on Homosexuality in India also does not refer to any of the conclusions you have made. Sure, it might sound kind of cool to make up your "facts", but please cite your sources.
The creative reconstruction of history is exactly what is being discussed here and you do make a good case against it.
Can I borrow your sig?
off the top of my head, Milo of Croton (father of weightlifting) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton but that was actually 300 years earlier, he was in Pythagoras' time.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Often, GLBT-issues get completely ignored by the history books.
Here's one that has major implications for the Slashdot crowd: One person was responsible for two of the major revolutions in computing in our era: Lynn Conway, a transgendered individual. Back in the 1960s, "he" worked at IBM, where "he" invented multiple-issue dynamic instruction scheduling, the way-ahead-of-its-time idea of executing multiple instructions at the same time in a single CPU that was to make the performance boom of the late '90s and the '00s possible. Conway was fired by IBM in 1968 for stating her intent to transition from male to female, and had to rebuild her career up from scratch a second time around with a blank slate (starting out as a contractor and building up to ultimately heading the LSI group at Xerox PARC). And from this work, she and Carver Mead invented VSLI -- the Mead and Conway Revolution that lead to the boom of CPU advancements of the '80s.
Dear Lord: I don't want to go back to college, so please help me be sexy. Amen.
Canada has more than three times the land mass of India.
Additionally, the section of Manu Smriti that you cited is this:
That pertains to infidelity, not homosexuality.