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No Pardon For Turing
mikejuk writes "A petition signed by over 21,000 people asked the UK Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing. That request has now been declined. A statement in the House of Lords explained the reasoning: 'A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd-particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.'"
ensure instead that we never again return to those times
Then perhaps pardoning him would be a step in the right direction?
Summation 2
Alan Turing was outright persecuted for failing to conform to society's norm. The government owes Turing's family and the rest of the country, even the rest of the world an enormous apology.
But granting a posthumous pardon does not change the past. We were still robbed of one of history's brightest and greatest minds because of homophobia. I agree with their reasoning, granting the pardon ignores and whitewashes the past. We should remember and tremble at what intolerance and hatred produces, not pat ourselves on the back for being more forward-thinking than our predecessors since as a society I don't think we've actually changed. Sure, it's no longer as popular to hate on homosexual people as it was in the past, but we have all new forms of hatred and intolerance which our modern society deems acceptable, and which will be just as subject to the next generation's ridicule and derision.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
What they essentially mean is - "It was Turing's fault that he was born in those times apparently and there is nothing we can do about it. May his soul never rest in peace."
They are actually spot on with this. What entitles Alan Turing to a pardon above all others that endured the same fate? The statement is clear and regrettable, and effectively a pardon to all rather than a select few - it's just not a formal pardon. If they had to do it with every past law that was deemed unfair by modern standards they would waste a lot of time, especially in the United Kingdom.
rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times
This train of thought is not so stupid at all. "Pardoning" Turing would help no one, and would not increase his glory. The glory he has, he has in our minds.
QFD
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
More likely is the issue that they would then have to deal with requests by other people in similar circumstances and they don't want to spend the resources to handle those cases. Camel noses and tents and all that.
That much is certainly true. Still, it seems reasonable for the government to acknowledge the law was unreasonable, and that it was their mistake, not his.
Well this is inconsistent:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8249792.stm
And backwards, and horrible. To think they'd uphold the integrity of a mere law that was clearly wrong in retrospect over the integrity of a good person...disgusting.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Makes sense - otherwise everytime a law changes we'd have to pardon everyone dead or alive who had ever been convicted - what a waste of resources. Its not like he cares either way now and a pardon wouldn't change how people view him.
So I guess then by their logic Anne Boleyn should remain "guilty" for all eternity as well, after all she should have known better than to not bear a son.
Monstar L
However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, long-standing policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times.
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We trade with communists now. They are our biggest trading partner. We love them. We do deals with terrorists (Pakistan, hiding OBL). They are now our friends.
Our world sees being a banker as fine today... let us hope they are persecuted in the same way in the future! (or are they!)
After all, even Jesus hated bankers.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
Instead of retroactively correcting the injustices of the past, how about we look at who is suffering injustice today? What are we doing today that future generations will be appalled at? We still persecute people for making harmless personal choices. Let's stop.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They are going to use Turing to represent how bad it is to pass judgment on someone based on an unjust law? How... Turing complete.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
to judge people from a different age. Values change over time. Would it be just to posthumously find Thomas Jefferson guilty of slavery when it was legal in his time? There's probably something each of us is doing today that in 100 years will be looked back on as a hideous crime (keeping pets? Scolding our kids?) and there are things we consider crimes now that in 100 years they won't believe anyone was ever so primitive as to believe it's a crime (drug use? Assisted suicide?).
It may sound ridiculous, but it is.
cb
I have no idea if this ever came to bear or not, but I remember recently, I was reading up about "Bills of Attainder", and one of the things about British Law, apparently, was that if someone was "attainted" because of a criminal prosecution, they could in some cases be forced to forfeit all property/wealth, and so their family would be effectively "dis-inherited".
I don't know if anyone ever had forfeiture because of those particular laws, but I should think that *if* anyone was subject to that, that it would be appropriate *today* to posthumously pardon those people and give reparations to the families (it might not be possible to give lands back, as they presumably long since been given/sold to someone else, but they could at least compensate those people for the seized assets).
Yes, we know the law was unjust. Does that mean all verdicts based on this law should be changed?
What if a new law - that is considered just and necessary - is made? Should everyone who broke the then non-existent law in the past be punished for it now?
Don't try to change the past from the present. The law was unjust, therefore it was changed. The verdict based on the law was legally correct, therefore it shouldn't be reversed.
Ok great. Now lets see them put right what can be put right. There are people in Britain's jails today that are every bit as persecuted as Alan Turing was in his time. They're just there because of a different prejudice.
The right thing to do is to pardon anyone and everyone who is convicted of a victimless crime.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Perhaps equally importantly, the background was one of gay-bashing in the US Establishment, who regarded homosexuals as a security risk (because, in typical backwards thinking, the Russians might blackmail them...which could not happen if their behaviour was regarded as unexceptional.) The US was already very worried about UK agents with Russian links spying on them, and was demanding a purge of unreliable elements from the British security services. Turing was high enough profile to show that we were "doing something", but low enough status to be thrown to the wolves,
This is the real background: class solidarity and stinking hypocrisy. Not much has really changed in the upper echelons of British society; it still comes as a shock to them when the British public turns out to be years ahead in their attitudes. And the actual workers in the security services are still treated like shit - Peter Wright wrote his book, Spycatcher, because as a mere surveillance expert he didn't qualify for a pension, unlike the higher-ups with their Eton and Oxford backgrounds.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
And if reddit/atheism and Dawkins are anything to go by its adherents are basically the same rabid bigots that in the past would have been running the Inquisition in Spain "because we KNOW we're right!"
Fundamenal Christianity and Rabid Atheists in the mold of Dawkins have basically the same mind set. Closed minded, intolerant of difference and utter certainty that they are right and that if you disagree with them then you are in some sense damned.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
The term "pardon" means forgiveness of a crime, so the fact that Turing was properly convicted under the law back then isn't an obstacle to a pardon it is a requirement; if he hadn't been convicted, he couldn't be pardoned now.
Furthermore, you pardon someone when you find that his positive contributions have outweighed the harm he has caused. For Turing, that is true not only because of his immense positive contributions, but because what he was punished for then is now not even considered worthy of punishment.
If anybody ever was deserving of a pardon, it is Alan Turing. And you really have to wonder about the motivation of the UK government for denying it.
Was this decision made by humans, or by machines applying a rule-based database?
If Turing didn't commit suicide as a result of this, we may have had a working time machine by now! So all we need to do is a send a message into the past to tell Turing to hold out a little longer and he'll get a pardon. If only Turing was here, he'd know what to do.
A few years ago, there was a decision in the other direction, to grant posthumous pardons to all soldiers executed for cowardice in the Great War. That had been dismissed repeatedly on grounds very similar to those given here, but (after many years of campaigning by relatives) was finally conceded.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/hundreds-of-soldiers-shot-for-cowardice-to-be-pardoned-412066.html
I think Turing's case might eventually go the same way --- perhaps more likely if done in concert with the case of others similarly mistreated, including still alive. Give it time.
Think about all of the things that Turing accomplished in his life. Father of computer science. Father of artificial intelligence. Incredible at code breaking. Brilliant mind with exceptional talent. A genius. Patriot during a time of war. Marathon runner. A leading and formidable intellect he had.
But all of that didn't matter because he was gay.
A pardon is a joke and whitewashes history and puts a false Disney happy ending on a horrific story. "Oh yeah he was persecuted for being gay but at least after he died he was pardoned so we get to feel good about ourselves". This isn't a fairytale. This is history and it wasn't nice.
He was one of the smartest people alive and majorly contributed to the war effort and none of it mattered against him being gay. And after being humiliated and stripped of his security clearance he killed himself. End of story.
And how did he kill himself? Just like Snow White was poisoned in his favorite fairytale. He poisoned an apple with cyanide and then took a big chunk out of it and waited to die. That's his fairytale ending. A pardon is an empty gesture in my opinion.
The right thing to do is to pardon anyone and everyone who is convicted of a victimless crime.
I'll be testifying on a bill on Thursday that would allow this as a defense in a trial.
If you care about this kind of stuff, c'mon over to New Hampshire where we're actually making some progress. A thousand activists have moved so far (to join those of us already here) and 19,000 more are waiting for the mass move.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Damn, we're still doing it...please freeze me for awhile longer.
Maybe a simpler explanation has more to do with the fact that there are still 26 bishops sitting the the House?
Ref: http://www.churchofengland.org/our-views/the-church-in-parliament/bishops-in-the-house-of-lords.aspx/
I don't think we'll see much in the way of progressive/human thinking here...
There's at least five distinct variants of atheism, although many atheists aren't interested in philosophy of religion so they haven't studied it, and thus can't really discuss it intelligently.
The kind of atheism that is orthogonal to agnosticism is not a religion.
However, the type of atheism that is entirely based on a fanatical devotion to unprovable postulates is, indeed, a religion.
To put it another way: People who say "there's probably no God" (like Dawkins) or "you can't prove the existence of your particular beardy sky-man" are not practicing a religion. But people who froth at the mouth on Internet forums, and have an unshakeable, unprovable belief in the non-existence of any sort of God (like Hitchens) have abandoned science and reason, and are proselytizing their faith. You cannot rigorously disprove the noodly appendage with logic, reason or math; therefore any belief or disbelief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster is faith-based. Agnosticism avoids this trap.
Atheism isn't a religion by any definition of "religion" that is in use today. Try it:
Wikipedia: "Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values."
Atheism: no. There is no spiritual or moral component of atheism.
Wikipedia: "Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to explain the origin of life or the universe."
Atheism: no. There are no symbols, no narratives, no creation myths, no attempt to explain the universe.
I could go on, but I think we've established that atheism does not match the (presumably generally accepted) Wikipedia definition.
Let's try another: "The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods." Nope.
Dictionary.com gives several definitions. Some don't apply because of the lack of gods etc. The rest don't apply because of the lack of practice - there are no religious practices associated with atheism. Some other definitions include a requirement of "faith" which could qualify, but when we define "faith" in a religious context the definition is something like "Strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof." Kind of a circular definition.
So, here's the thing: what is the definition of "religion" that would include atheism, and is this definition widely accepted? Would it make sense for somebody to say "Yes, I am very religious - I'm an atheist", or would people find that odd? Because if they would find it odd, then it probably isn't a valid definition. And if your definition is too broad, and just includes practicies, beliefs etc. and negates the need to believe in a personal god, then you are going to end up defining sports fans as being a religion (belief - "my team is the best", communal acts/practices - "watching the game" etc.) Apple fans ("Apple is the best", communal acts "queing for new iphone", group spirituality - "mourning of Jobs" etc.).
This topic is an obvious cheerleading piece for political correctness.
We all know what we're "supposed" to say.
As a result, it is not only boring, but works as a form of oppression to exclude any opinion which does not agree with the "correct" one.
This is in contrast to science, where we explore experimental results, make tentative conclusions, and explore those through a heuristic process.
Years ahead toward the great Utopian goal?
I don't think history works the way you think it does. It's popular to think the way you do, however, and that's why you do it.
We should focus on logic and experimental proof instead.
Pardon's have been granted to soldiers shot for cowardice during WWI. Why is that an acceptable correction of an injustice, but this not? Cowardice was just as illegal as 'gross indecency' at the time, yet that was overlooked in favour of righting a grievous wrong.
What a bloody disgrace.
don't ask don't tell. best practice. used for thous of years now.
The UK government needs to be beheaded en masse.
I am straight but Turing was a genius who deserves respect even
if it is posthumous.
Fuck you, UK government, from the colonies.
Precisely. I think it should be standard procedure to, when an unjust law is repealed, formally grant a pardon to everyone convicted under it. To not do so is an assent that the law was just, at least for its time, which in this case is absurd and horrid. Especially in this case, since many of the people in the establishment were also gay but not tried, while Alan Turing was turned into an example because as a geek avant la lettre he wasn't "one of us" - an expendable pawn.
What this seems to say is that the government believes that everyone did their job correctly at the time except for those who enacted the law which Turing broke, a position which seems rather absurd to most though perfectly normal to some. I can think of a variety of laws now on the books where I live (some not too unlike those relevant here) that, if enforced, would bring considerable wrath upon the prosecutors for exhibiting inhumanity and cruelty.
I think you forget that such branding will affect future generations of that family. Possibly even forfeiting property. I do know there were (at least) laws that claims property from criminal's families. Plus, now there will always be a "mark" on the folks who were prosecuted. Sorry to say, but legalities transcend life.
Having said that... it was illegal at the time and the court's decision is logical. Whether or now the law should have been there is a different conversation.
What was done to Turing was just wrong, period, and would be wrong regardless of his contributions to the war effort. Pardoning Turing would be like saying they should have given him a break from the unjust persecution they were inflicting on others--which misses the point. If we were to pardon everyone ever convicted under any unjust law in all of history, we'd be pardoning people for a long time. Better to admit wrongdoing and move on. Save the legal system for the living.
Believing the Earth revolves around the Sun was once illegal. Breaking some laws was illegal under the Nazi regime too. Yet, it is okay to pardon the people who did the right thing under these circumstances.
That's gay.
Thing you are doing now are even more absurd.
The current policy is wrong headed and contributes to current and continuing injury.
This policy must be changed such that convictions based on any crime that is now considered "cruel and absurd" must be overturned.
The trouble is you are using todays yard stick to measure what a victimless crime is, that yard stick isn't the same as the one fifty years ago and won't be the same fifty years from now. When Turing was convicted popular feeling was that being gay caused offence worthy of punishment. That feeling has, thankfully, gone the way of the dinosaurs but we still have similar laws. If you don't believe we do try walking down the street in your birthday suit, I reckon you'll find yourself arrested pretty quickly but the "crime" really has no more "victims" than someone being gay does.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
His family are/were convinced that he didn't actually commit suicide, just that he was really careless with toxic chemicals.
Apparently his lab was such a mess and he was so sloppy that it would've been more in character to have been a tragic accident than suicide. These were the people who knew him best too.
For those who are interested, the BBC did a really good documentary on Bletchly park. Went into great detail about the code breaking process and, unlike most programs, actually showed in detail how the codes worked and how you could break them.
A pardon means "we forgive you for your offense".
It would be better for us to say "This law was wrong and the conviction was illegitimate." The only people who should be asking for a pardon are those who voted for and upheld that law.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's so gay.
^The tin.
That feeling has, thankfully, gone the way of the dinosaurs but we still have similar laws.
That's the problem. We need to look at our history, examine all the horrible injustices of the past, and figure out what the common theme is. Then we can look for that theme in our current society.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Make public domain all his works. And I don't mean his manuscripts which are poorly catalogued and barely readable (and unpractical to read, as they are scanned as bitmaps). What I mean is, make public domain his published papers - all of them. It's a damn shame that in 2012 we still can't access his last paper "Solvable and unsolvable problems", published in Penguin Science News 31, in 1954!
And for those who don't know, "Solvable and unsolvable problems" may be Turing's most important work, one that casts a dark cloud over our misplaced certainties.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The lions' possible sentiments on the matter aside, when Christianity became legal in Rome, did they pardon the ones they had executed for it?
Lets not forget that Churchill mustard-gassed civilians... and he gets a statue
it is clear the trend over time is for more and more control of lawmakers by corporate corruption and then as a secondary force the fad of popular will in a multimedia and entertainment-obsessed culture. Were you to be frozen, you would wake to find things much, much worse. Remember the equilibrium form of western government, monarch and with plutarchy and their courtesians over serfs.
I am not clear on what 'gross indecency' means?
Okay, let's use your definition:
Wikipedia: "Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values."
Based on your comment above, you agree that Atheism is "a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews" which seems appropriate given that only "cultural systems" is questionable.
"moral values" is behind a sometimes, so is not required to meet the definition.
So, the main open question is, does Atheism "relate humanity to sprituality?"
Atheism most decidedly DOES relate humanity to spirituality. Specifically, Atheism includes a belief that humanity created spirituality to serve its own interests. This is not the relation proposed by most religions, but Atheism isn't most religions.
NOTE: I'm unclear on what "establishes symbols" means in the context of the Wikipedia definition. If it is essentially referring to ritual, I suspect many Eastern religions would not fit this definition. The definition holds without it, so I'll choose to consider it non-operative for now. Parent also did not argue this point.
Does Atheism require a person to go to Atheist School on Tuesday mornings? no. There is no ritual in Atheism. However, many Eastern religions also have very little to no ritual.
Does Atheism require a belief in the Supernatural? no. However, as this is the defining belief of Atheism, that alone seems slim grounds to exclude it.
Do Atheists self-identify with Atheism as their religion? not usually. This is probably the best argument that Atheism is not a religion, but it won't keep others from classifying it as such, just like no matter how much Mormons claim to be Christians, most evangelicals will not accept them. The unsettling part here is that the argument is quite literally: "Atheism isn't a religion because Atheists say it isn't."
meh.
By letting his good name remain sullied, they are somehow making sure they don't make unjust laws in the future?
I say the opposite. By leaving that as a crime on his record, they are saying that they could return to having that as a crime at any time. They have not legally acknowledged the wrongness, despite their public apology.
Grant a blanket pardon to everyone they convicted of this 'crime' that was not a crime and they WILL send the message that justice is their goal.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I don't know, or care, whether atheism "is a religion." In fact, I don't even know what that sentence means.
What I do know is that, like the religions, it is becoming a group identity -- an "-ism" -- as evidenced by the extremely defensive posts being made here. If it were just a collection of ideas relating to abstractions, if people didn't identify with those ideas, if people didn't see attacks on those ideas as attacks on themselves, then nobody would care enough to get angry.
Maybe that's ok. Maybe it's useful. Maybe, most atheists grew up in staunchly religious communities, and the politics of group identity, of belonging to an oppressed minority, are helpful to resist a more generally destructive culture of religious bigotry.
But for those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in a secular environment, it gets annoying. Me? I don't need to "fight back." I'm not so afraid of the concept of God that I need to destroy it. It's an abstraction. Asking whether it exists is meaningless. Do the integers exist? Mu. I like Spinoza. I'm cool with panpsychism (what makes your unfalsifiable worldview better than mine? Maybe contemplating my part in Infinity alters my outlook.). We can flirt with ideas without marrying them. Unitarian Universalists? Sometimes too New-Agey for my tastes (For me, "energy" is measured in Joules), but I think the basic idea is the right one. Jesus of Nazareth? He did say things worth hearing. The Beatitudes? The Golden Rule? I don't need to accept Old-Testament jingoism, or Paul's sexual issues, or the dogma of a politicized medieval Church, or the divinity of Christ, to recognize that they stand on their own merits (and probably predate Jesus, which is OK).
The other day, I saw a car, with two bumper stickers. One was the common "CoEXiSt" sticker. The other was a shot at Christians. They're at odds, no? Get along, I say.
In law, respect for the process is paramount, even when the process produces results that are obviously absurd or unjust. There was no procedural problem with Turing's abuse by the system, so there is nothing to change.
In science, respect for results is paramount. If there is a reproducible result that shows the textbooks to be wrong, they will eventually be changed.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
A "statement explained the "reasoning"'. Bah. The reasoning is clear: they condone what was done.
If it is right to pardon Turing does that then make it right to try everyone in the past who did things that are illegal now but weren't then? The death penalty is illegal now in the UK, does that mean that the executioners of the past are now murderers? Decisions that were made in the past that were correct with the laws at the time should stay exactly as they are. Pardons are for decisions that were wrong under the laws at the time.
Instead of re-writing history, perhaps the crown could officially acknowledge the tragedy and point to the laws involved. We should never forget what happened to Turing. In this way, perhaps Turing's experiences will not have been for naught, and we can say a prayer for the closeted-bigoted-homophobic-christian-neanderthal-fagots.
Presentism is a bad thing. We should never forget where we came from. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, we accrued to knowledge we have today at a tremendous cost to our ancestors.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
So what if it were a choice?
/really/ think gay people are harming you in some way? Do you /really/ think that you or your children could "catch" gayness from someone? There is ridiculous amounts of evidence that this is impossible. Teens are absolutely /not/ recruited into a gay lifestyle, but quite clearly the opposite. Every gay person tries not to be gay, and only acts long after they have acknowledged their feelings, and cultivated the gall to accept that some people will hate them and harass them and treat them like inferior shit.
/ever/ shown a reliable way to cure gayness, despite a century of pig-headed research. All we can do is push people around, and try to convince them their life will be better if they accept our choices.
What if it were? lol!
Well, firstly, homosexuality really isn't a choice, although this isn't a purely black and white matter.
Secondly, although there is a vast preponderance of evidence for the biological basis of homosexuality (and sexuality in general), this fact does nothing to affirm the place of gays within society.
Thirdly, even if it were a choice, what is it to you? Do you
And finally, if it were a choice, then it could be "cured", but nobody has
Are you really that person?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
"A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence."
It doesn't matter how stupid the laws, it's their fault if they broke them! The Catholic church was waaaay too progressive in admitting they screwed up in convicting Galileo after just 400 years! The UK isn't going to make that kind of mistake!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
You can't change the past: the decision is important for how it affects the future.
Pardoning Turing puts a nice "The End" on the story, and allows people to put it in their little mental box of "things we used to do but don't anymore", like slavery and religious persecution, and forget about it. Leaving him unpardoned reminds us that his story belongs in the present, not the past, and that none of the things in that box have truly disappeared.
If the statement did anything but totally reject the bigotry that led to Turing's conviction, I'd feel differently.
From the statement by the House of Lords:
"He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted."
This is a downright hypocritical lie. Turing knew lip service was paid to the law at that time and had every right to expect not to be prosecuted,
The English ruling class tolerated homosexuality and didn't prosecute their members at all. Prosecutions were occasionally made of the lower classes as long as no "Proper person" was involved.
The British theatre had been dominated since 1930 by a homosexual producerm Binkie Beaumont. Noel Coward was gay and had a Nineteen year "friendship" with the Homosexual Duke of Kent, the current Queens uncle, to the point where someone quipped: "You can't be the Duchess of Kent, Noel."
The Burgess and Philby memoirs record numerous homosexual forays in London, often visiting "The Lilly Pad" a Lyons Tea Shop in central London where they picked up stble boys from the race courses (one was interviewed by the BBC about his experiences.) Then of course there are the memoirs and biographies of the Bloomsbury group, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, etc. There was an open and thriving gay sub culture in England from at least as early as the 1930's and everyone knew.
All the House of Lords has done is confirm that the rotteness at the core of Britain continues to this day.
Doesn't Turing represent a flaw in your logic?
Being homosexual, he is still responsible for some of the greatest advances in recent human history. Thus he, by default, has done more and benefited humanity more despite his "notable handicap" than most of the straightest of men. This is in contrast to, say, (oh Godwin strike me where I stand) Hitler, a heterosexual enough man who has managed to actually thin the human herd quite a bit through systematic execution and warmongering.
Or, if we need an example of a person who HAD children, why not Joseph Stalin or Kim Jong Il? Or Mary, Queen of Scots? Baby Doc? People who were trusted in positions of extreme political power and preferred the company of the opposite sex have still managed to do spectacular damage.
I'm not saying that homosexuals are beyond such cruelty, but perhaps child-rearing is not as effective a primary motivator for human compassion as you would believe. Your absolutist philosophy on the subject has a lot of gaping, horrible flaws in it... maybe it would actually be a net benefit for the world if you too did not have children.
UK government not worthy of a pardon on this one.
Check your premises.
It would be well worth while for the government to pardon all who were convicted under these laws.
This is just another story designed to provoke in-fighting amongst the slave population.
There are bigger fish to fry, folks. Divide and conquer only work if you let it.
Convenient for the Government - kick Turing into the long grass before the petition gets too many signatures ...
At least the church pardoned Gallileo and recognised it did wrong. Now elected governments can't do that, go figure.
The Lords are right, particularly about the need to NOT repeat such prosecution, but most importantly, that the system of law itself is far more important than interest group identity stuff. It would be different if that wonderful man were still alive, of course he'd get a pardon in that case, but he is dead and the past did happen.
Interestingly, there was similar debate http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-20-parks-pardon_x.htm only 6 years ago when they were trying to get Alabama to issue a pardon for Rosa Parks (and other civil rights protestors convicted under the laws of the time).
Folks as divergent as the Mayor of Montgomery and the pastor of Parks' church came out against granting the pardons, but ultimately the law was passed and the pardons issued. I do wonder if Alabama would have passed the law if it hadn't been under pressure from a live woman who had been convicted under the old laws.
I think I can say with little exageration that Alan Turing won the Second World War, invented the computer and was killed by the British Government for being gay. When he died, his work was considered so important that it was kept secret for decades after. Is this how we reward our heroes? Every allied soldier and sailor had Alan Turing behind him supplying enemy locations and intentions. If you don't know what a Turing Machine is, you are illiterate. If anyone deserves the highest honors Britain has to offer, it is Alan Turing.
My point was that there's no evidence for the second claim in GP's message, and yet his message was modded "insightful".
Actually, evidence is very simple.
When presented with evidence of the falseness of their particular flavor of religious teachings, religious people either simply reject the evidence or try to readjust the definitions of their religious teachings so that it is all still "true" in face of the evidence to the contrary.
Basically, they try to maintain the "truth" by lying to themselves.
But that is just practical evidence.
True reason for the debilitation factors of faith and religion is that every single one tries to explain EVERYTHING there is, there ever was and that there ever will be with its dogma.
Dogma, which every proponent of that particular faith/religion must accept as true, undeniable and unchangeable as it contains both the principles of their faith as well as the explanation of the Universe.
Those explanations being ultimately limited by their own definition as absolute truths, undeniable and unchangeable facts are BOUND to clash with actual data sooner or later.
At that moment, the religious person can either accept the new data throwing away his/her entire life and the view of the world, reject the clearly visible new data and stick to their dogma OR try to jury rig the new data onto the old dogma.
And so we get people claiming that there were dinosaurs in the garden of Eden and all the way up to the Biblical flood.
Basically, the victim of religion can choose between acceptance of selective reasoning and self-immolation of their "self" by rejecting the single most important thing in their lives, on which they've built not only their view of the world but also every single relation to the world around them - social, economical, philosophical... etc.
Either way, the person is scarred for life from that point on.
By a mere act of being exposed to new information, be it an idea or simply data.
And anything that can damage person's most important ability, to reason, by making them basically highly allergic to the truth and knowledge is not only debilitating but essentially evil as well.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It should also be pointed out that "being Jewish" was against the law in Nazi Germany, so, no harm, no foul, right?
If you don't believe we do try walking down the street in your birthday suit, I reckon you'll find yourself arrested pretty quickly but the "crime" really has no more "victims" than someone being gay does.
If your average Slashdotter were to walk down the street naked, EVERYONE would be a victim.
People want the government to forgive Turing for being homosexual? In honour of the great logician - lets apply it here: -Pardon, or forgivness of a crime, can only be given the guilty -Pardoning Turing implies he is (still) guilty ergo, homosexuality is a crime. I won't sign that petition, ktnx.
According to his family and many associates, he probably died accidentally rather than committed suicide anyway. So it may have been completely irrelevent to his future productivity.
Doesn't mean the guy deserved any of it, but still, no sense in going off ad infinitum.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
People who were convicted of "crimes" we now understand should never have been crimes in the first place should not be given "pardons" they should be given APOLOGIES.
An Apology should fully strike the conviction and even the indictment from the criminal record and furthermore should open the door for a lawsuit for reparations.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Homosexuality is de facto a choice. It can be converted to heterosexuality very easily, at least male homosexuality. I know this because I happen to have inadvertently changed into homosexuality and managed to change it back.
It's simply caused by psyhological block of attraction of women. It can be on physical level on emotional (note: guys that sleep around with lots of women are sometimes in fact emotionally gay - let me say it can be a bit of a shock having a friend that taught you a lot about women admiting having emotional attraction towards you).
If any of you who have homoerotic feelings read this, you can try: whenever you feel passive (either emotional or physical) attraction towards some man, ask yourself: would you let a woman feel that way about you? Would you yourself do the action or confidence projection that stirred the attraction and direct it towards woman? In other words, would you play the role that this man has for you towards a woman? Your answer might be "not really". Why not? Figure that out and you have just found your emotional block. Note that you migth need to give up active emotions for a while in order for this to work. The point is to first admit that your feelings are passive homosexual (active homosexuals sometimes don't perceive themselves as "gay") and convert them to the feeling that the guy that you are attracted to you becomes some kind of "spiritual father", a role model and possibly a competitor, without erotic attraction. Yes, you have to admit it first, it won't work if you try to hide from yourself that you have gay feelings.
This works significantly better if you in advance accept monogamy, i.e. focus on having only one woman in your life and accept that you will spend 20+ years raising children, possibly in adverse conditions, regardless of the problems with them. If you don't have this straighetned out yet, you will at some point arrive to question whether you would genuinely, from your heart, give your time and money to woman and participate in child upbringing. Heterosexuality/homosexuality switch is in fact a kind of TPM chip to ensure that you have serious intentions with transfering both your genes and memes to next generation (the main cause is the failure of child to identify with the parent of the same gender, i. e. the parent of the same gender fails to properly set up the transfer of the memes to child). Note that since it's implemented in your brain, it has direct access to your innermost desires, it has access to things that you would't trust even to the google search box.
Now the problem is that fixing the block, once found, might not be easy. On emotional level, you migth need to work on improving your behavior towards other people. On physical level, you might need to increase your confidence and skills, you migth want to compete with other men, get interested in competitive rule-based games and sports, ... There's a reason male children play competitive games: they instinctively need to develop and measure their skills in a competitive settings, under rules. This is one of the ways the evolution works. Women subconsciously perceive this and this is why they more often sleep with jocks than nerds.
The point of homosexuality is simply that it enables people to have sex that they don't deserve from evolutionary point of view. They can have it, but not quite the right kind. Note that you might not think that you are doing anything morally or otherwise wrong, but you might live in a way that is not compatible with a concept of evolution on the basis of tribal groups (combined cooperation and competition). Strictly speaking homosexual behaviour is not wrong, it's just exercising an option to withdraw from rules of evolution. The genes that enable all this persist because they give humans flexibility through choice to "bend a rules a bit", but sours the life a bit (note that partially homosexual persons, male and female, can and do have sex with opposite sex, in some cases homosexuality even helps with getting partn
We are talking about a person who enjoyed the company of men sexually. Reality check people. Goes in the pink not the stink.
It's not the conviction that needs to be repealed here, it's the sentence itself. Had he been sentenced with half the character reference he deserved, he could easily have been sentenced to a smack on his limp wrist rather than chemical castration. I find it hard to imagine an ace pilot from the Battle of Britain being sentenced to chemical castration had he raped a member of the royal family (good grief, you idiot, why didn't you ask? Well, now you've gone and done it, we're going to have to send you to Ireland until this cools off.)
What Roman Polansky did was illegal too, and unlike Turing, continues to be illegal in most of the free world. Yet half of Hollywood attests to his character and accomplishments. Certainly Polansky had a rough go during the war. In a completely different way, so did Turing. What amazes me about Bletchley is how they broke so many codes suffering from sleep deprivation and double-vision. The stress must have been unbelievable.
OK, let's not leave out the Americans, either.
Limewire Cruft Leads to Jail Time for Matthew White
Somehow you have to make a discrimination of what is child porn and what isn't. If this human discrimination could be coded into an algorithm, this algorithm could [ignoring run time] be used to manufacture child porn from a dead pixel stew (just keep changing random pixels until the klaxon sounds) without ever involving a child or a camera or human genitals. If the discriminator returns a continuous hot-cold signal, you can iterate to illegality through efficient steepest descent. Is it illegal to harbour this algorithm? Stay tuned, someday we'll find out.
With this in hand you could break a nearly-illegal image into three chunks which must be combined and then iterated by the algorithm into the fully illegal state. We're well on our way to a distributed Trojan horse by which you can summon the FBI to perform a DOS attack on any old chump you don't like (not without risk, since it does involve hacking and wire fraud, but fortunately for your purpose the FBI considers this extremely incidental to their suburban assault).
Aside from the stupidity of volunteering your computer for confiscation because some image on the internet wasn't what you expected, this also nicely illustrates that apart from conviction, the sentencing process can independently be riddled with horrific bugs.
In this case the image was so deeply buried within his file system, the FBI doubted this particular Girls Gone Wild aficionado had the technical ability to even find the file for which he was convicted.
But let's return to the British. They have a long history of treating secrecy as a curse for anyone who enters into it. The Peter Wright story was not to their credit, either. As far as I can tell, all he really wanted was a decent retirement pension. Yet for the same reason Turing received no character support, Mr Wright had no avenue to appeal his pension claim to the Ministry of Brazil. So he wrote a book instead. How did that work out for MI5 and MI6? Just wondering. I wonder if Mr Wright considered the Turing story when deciding how to wear his fate? Had Turing merely broken his security restriction, the British would have had to hang him (try playing that down fifty years later) or send him off into exile, where he would have done just fine in the court of public opinion, as his heroism came into proper focus.
Maybe
I guess all those witches that got burned are just shit out of luck.
Here's an adequate apology if the British are having trouble coming up with one of their own:
Turing's criminal tendencies were well known to authorities when he was still useful. Apparently, a crime is not a crime when Hitler comes knocking.
Talk about ungrateful! You Limeys might be speaking German if it weren't for Alan Turing's insightful, original crypto work.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Speaking as a 'bloody Yank' may not be seemly in this conversation, but I can't resist. Of the three citizens of Great Britain that America owes the greatest debt of gratitude too, Alan Turning stands, in my humble opinion, with Prime Minister Churchill and Lord Mountbatten. Perhaps Alan will not get justice here and now (a far different proposition than Law), but with Artificial Intelligence drawing ever closer, maybe the Turing Test will cement his place in history in a way that Bletchley Park did not...
Bruce Abbott
The latent hypocrisy from the Lords where homosexuality/bisexuality throughout the ages was rampant to turn away from this man's genetic makeup and therefore cite they can't undo a wrong now truly goes to the real cause--Alan flaunted his sexuality and forced their hands. It was better for whispers and to hold high station with leverage over your fellow Trinity alumni who had their young men trists than to go out and live that life style. The number of famous authors who alluded to bisexual tendencies in their writings is quite numerous. I suppose they just chose to codeify it instead of throwing it in the establishment's face and thus that protected them from being convicted of what we all [at least most of us heterosexuals agree upon] is part of the distributed nature of human sexuality. Perhaps Turing didn't heed warnings from the power brokers and so they destroyed him in the process. I find it a disgrace that they cannot undo and pardon all the individuals whom they convicted back then. It would show a sign of evolution of the human spirit, but clearly these guys preferred the closeted approach to living.
This is far enough down that it may not get any attention from anyone who actually knows, but given the explanation for a lack of pardon I feel compelled to ask:
Just what does the UK government offer pardons for, aside from perhaps pardoning someone after they have completed their sentence when it is concluded they were incarcerated for crimes they did not commit?
I'm truly interested in what cases pardons are granted in the UK.
'nuff said.
What you're describing is simply atheists with a social conscience. They wish to help society at large instead of just standing idly by.
They're like doctors who want not only themselves to be healthy but the rest of society as well, and so they fight disease and explain the principles of infection. And that is an especially apt analogy. After all, theism and religion are symptoms of mental insanity, so a medical response to them is very much in order.
Calling doctors a cult, political party, sect or religion because they want to cure disease would be quite ludicrous too.
A pardon is for the guilty. What is appropriate in this situation is an apology to the victim of a government that violated his human rights.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm slightly curious: can you point to any bigoted statement by Dawkins himself, or do you slander him because some people on reddit are, in your opinion, "rabid bigots"?
I *believe* it is the case that to be pardoned once must, by legal definition, admit guilt. One might take the position that this action ought not to have been lawless as the act was not lawless in essence but simply by (closed minded) convention. Perhaps Turing would have preferred to stand firm and refuse to accept guilt. We cannot know. I actually think the governments statement was well chosen. In any event, as is evidenced by this exchange, the vast majority of sensible people feel this was unjust and that is a greater vindication.
Pardons are not unheard of. For example Galileo was pardoned for heresy, albeit 400 years later.... The UK Govt can officially nullify the convictions of everyone convicted earlier due to the gay law. That should have been done as part of changing the law...
Only the historical revisionists, who consistently judge the past with the benefit of the present, comprehending fully neither in the process.
There's something to be said for admitting this stain can never be simply wiped away.
I take it, by evil, you mean things you don't like.
You can quote, but apparently you can't read what you quote. The very sentence you quoted above explains WHY religion is evil.
The fact that you apparently can't grasp (or you refuse to grasp it) its pretty straightforward language and meaning does not really represent a proof positive for my claim, but it does strongly indicate that it is true.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My comment is this
http://www.everything2.com/title/September+13%252C+2009?author_id=3473#teleny