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Debian Founder Ian Murdock Has Died (docker.com)
Unknown Lamer writes: It has been confirmed that Debian founder Ian Murdock has died. From the Docker blog: "It is with great sadness that we inform you that Ian Murdock passed away on Monday night. This is a tragic loss for his family, for the Docker community, and the broader open source world; we all mourn his passing. ... Ian helped pioneer the notion of a truly open project and community, embracing open design and open contribution; in fact the formative document of the open source movement itself (the Open Source Definition) was originally a Debian position statement. It is a testament to Ian's commitment to openness and community that there are now more than 1,000 people currently involved in Debian development."
So all the race baiting about police brutality and how nobody believed him because he was white (and not a "n*gger" - his words) leading to a massively publicized suicide-note-rant-against-the-police on his twitter, that was actually covered on a similar website to this one, was legit? And nobody stepped in or did a gd*** thing?
How is it non of their business? The dude was threatening suicide on Twitter. That hardly is a bastion of privacy.
Goodbye from a Debian Developer. Thanks for all the fish
There are very few situations under which I'd condone the use of that word. This is in the grey area. What he meant in the context of his suicide (on which he blames, in large part, his mistreatment by the SFPD) was that we're a sufficiently fucked-up society that we ignore police brutality against poors and minorities, and maybe now we'll start paying attention when we realize that even the wealthy have something to fear.
That's not an endorsement of privilege, it's a refutation of it. Niemoller wasn't fascist or anti-semitic for saying "First they came for the Socialists / Trade Unionists / Jews ..." his point was that sooner or later, they'll come for you.
Ian chose his words poorly and under great emotional strain. But his point remains: if you ignore police misconduct when it's only happening to a group you consider "the other," pretty soon you'll find "the other" expands to include a group you do care about.
Great job at posting stuff out of context.
What he said was among the lines of "look, now it's happening also for a successful white man, you cannot ignore it like you did when they were beating up NIGGERS".
That's more like "stop belittling the problem with your racism, it's not about who is being beaten, it's about police". Of course given his situation, he was more focused on trying to show the police abuse than fighting the racism and without all these sudden emotions you would definitely find better words to use, but saying that he was racist in those posts is MASSIVE misinterpretation and cruelty.
Note to self:
Never, never give up after torture, abuse or rape. Few can send a real signal by killing himself. Suicide destroys the meaning of one's suffering.
Live to the end. Live and fight the injustice. Live and tell the truth.
And that word has been used in an "anti-racist" way...
I read his comment "until now, people complaining were discarded as "niggers" but here, it's not the same so it can't be discarded that way", putting the "nigger" word in the mouth of the protagonists.
and I am ashamed to live in a society where there was no one around to help him find a better way through this.
If there's anything we could reconstruct out of the fragments, he probably suffered torture at the hand of police.
I think about the most we can say right now is that he probably wasn't in a rational state of mind.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Why is Barack Obama not white? Is it because he has more than zero drops of native Kenyan blood in him? If that is the case, aren't you in all actuality subscribing to the 'one drop of blood / white is the norm' position? And if you don't - because that would be quite racist - then why is Obama black? He has a 'white' mother after all... And if your position is that 'he identifies as black', then can he change his mind tomorrow? And if he can't, then at what age do people get to choose their 'race'? And if he can, what in the name of bloody bollocks does an outdated concept of 'race' even mean outside the industry that breeds cats, dogs and horses?
Race is a load of meaningless crap. Humans like to fark too much for it to exist. It has no concept in biology, and even in its last hold-out - sociology - it can easily be degraded to meaninglessness, see the reasoning above.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Old programmers never die. They redirect to /dev/null. RIP, Ian.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And if your position is that 'he identifies as black', then can he change his mind tomorrow? And if he can't, then at what age do people get to choose their 'race'? And if he can, what in the name of bloody bollocks does an outdated concept of 'race' even mean outside the industry that breeds cats, dogs and horses?
These question contain a raft of invalid assumptions.
Clearly, race is a social construct, not a genetic one, and anyone who tells you otherwise hasn't looked closely enough at the question. This means that to a large degree people do choose what race they are. Obviously there is no age by which people must make that choice, but that's not because there is no choice to be made, but because they're perfectly free to change their choice at any point in time. Racial identity is really just a form of tribalism, and people absolutely can choose to move from one tribe to another.
However, that in no way implies that changing tribes is easy, because what tribe you're a member of depends less on what you think than on what the other members of the tribe think. Tribal boundaries are fluid, dynamic and context-dependent, but they shift based on group decisions, not individual decisions. Witness the public hue and cry over Rachel Dolezal.
But, in fact, people do change their racial identity. A 2010 study found that going to prison can turn white people black. Specifically, people who previously self-identified and were identified by researchers as white committed crimes, went to prison, and subsequently self-identified -- and were identified by researchers -- as non-white, in most cases black.
Could Barack Obama decide to be white? Sure. He could decide to self-identify as white, and he could announce that to the world. The response would be a mixture of bafflement, outrage and laughter, and no one would buy it, because his tribal membership is too strongly and publicly established.
Race is a load of meaningless crap.
Any notion of genetic, objective race is meaningless crap, sure. But tribal identity is very, very far from meaningless. For many people racial identity is a central part of their individual identity. Identity is powerful... people befriend, ostracize, even kill over identity.
Note that I'm not saying this is good, or right, or in any way desirable. We'd all be a lot better off if everyone discarded racial identity from their personal worldviews. But that's not the world we live in, and calling it meaningless, ostrich-like, is foolish.
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