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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?
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.
i remember him as a genuinely nice guy. 15ish years ago, when i was a naive youngster just starting with gnu/linux (progeny linux), i often got stuck on pretty basic stuff. one day i simply emailed him and asked these absolutely beginner's questions about partitioning and debian installer. he, the legendary debian founder, took his time and patiently explained things to me. we exchanged over 50 emails that year. i wish i still had that mbox file. we kept in touch until he started working for sun.
FWIW, in context, he was (after implying he had a fairly substantial confrontation with the SFPD) saying that police misbehavior might be taken more seriously now that a successful white male, rather than black person, was the victim of it.
It's poor wording, but I don't think the choice of word there was meant maliciously or in any racist sense, rather than a comment upon the SFPD's and general publics perceptions of whose word is worth taking seriously.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Yeah, that's how I read it. However, I spent about an hour catching up and reading a few other things before I felt like I had enough information to actually opine in this thread. I've also had personal interactions with Ian and have found him insightful and intelligent. We never met in person - our communication was via email.
My reading is that it was an attempt to open the dialogue and things went steadily downhill from there. Well, things were already going downhill at that point. As mentioned above, I'm partially black and not even remotely offended by the word in the way that it was used. Then again, I'm not actually offended by words - only deeds. Words don't offend me one bit, how they're said may.
Unfortunately, this will be maligned to make all sorts of conclusive statements, probably none of which were the intended statement, and nothing will change. It looked to be a cry for notice - that the police are abusive authoritarians with far more power than they should have. It looked to be an attempt to say, "I'm not even a nigger, it happened to me!" Could it have been better said? I don't know - would it have carried the weight?
That said, hopefully more and more people will start to get the opportunity to notice. We've got someone up thread who's claiming black people can't be racists, they even claim they can't have institutionalized racism. We've got people claiming that the account was hacked. We've got people thinking that the guy's a racist and are hell bent on social justice. We've got others who are saying that it's about time the stupid fuck learned that niggers were evil. So, I'm pretty sure nothing will happen and that nothing good will come of this.
It's unfortunate. It is what it is.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
This hits very close to home for me. I was also arrested for felony battery and held by the SFPD. (The San Mateo County sheriffs, who police Caltrain, were the ones to make the arrest, but I was taken to the SFPD jail.) That's the only time I've ever been in jail, and it seriously fucked with me. I always thought that I would be able to handle jail/prison - hah, wrong! It's a completely dehumanizing experience.
When I first got there, I was thrown in the drunk tank and left for hours. (After a false felony battery charge, why not a false drunk in public charge?) Like Ian, I couldn't find out anything about my situation. The guards refused to answer any of my questions. There was a phone in the cell, but it was next to useless because everyone I called was unable to navigate the byzantine collect call system. (I briefly wrote about this in a previous comment in an earlier story.) The only things to do were to ponder how truly fucking scary it would be if I were eventually tried and convicted or stare at the ceiling and wonder if the stains were feces or peanut butter from the disgusting sandwiches they provided. I'm a self-confident, mentally-stable person, but that started evaporating disturbingly fast.
Things got a little better for me once they moved me from the drunk tank to a regular cell. I finally made some progress on getting bail. They took my mugshot and started processing the fingerprint/background checks. At this point, at least there was a light at the end of the tunnel. While things were looking up for me, at this point I started seeing the more fucked up shit other people were going through. The majority of the people in my new cell were making phone calls to anyone who would answer (this phone made local calls free) trying to scrounge together bail. While I was mad as hell that I was throwing away >$2,000 in bail (10% of the $25k that Ian mentioned), I'm well-off and would have spent far more to get the hell out of there. This was a Friday night, and you wouldn't get arraigned until Monday morning if you couldn't make bail. It was heartbreaking to watch these guys make call after call for bail money that they just didn't have. In retrospect, maybe I should have helped them out, but at the time I was doing my best to keep to myself.
The low point for me was one point when I saw a number of guards rushing to some situation. I couldn't see what was going on, but it was a few minutes of a lot of shouting and one voice yelping in pain. I then saw 5-6 officers manhandling an inmate to lead him to a cell. They were forcing him to do some reverse crabwalk sorta thing with his wrists chained down by his ankles, all while he's clearly in pain and protesting that he didn't do anything. This is when it really dawned on me how much these corrupt fucks can control your lives. I was confined to this cell of thick glass and concrete because of a lie. Once in jail, there's virtually nothing stopping them from using further lies to justify abuse. I have no clue if the inmate actually did something wrong or was being abused by sadistic guards, but I sure as hell wasn't going to believe the guards (who are sheriffs) just after being falsely arrested by one of their fellow officers.
Eventually my bail went through, the background check came back clean, and I was going to be released soon. For some reason I don't understand, they again transferred me to another cell. When we got there, it was full of what I stereotyped as mentally ill homeless people. One dude was lying on the floor drooling and shaking. I could not deal with this and froze up. Ignoring that this man clearly needed to be in a hospital instead of a jail, all I could do was ask to go back to the previous cell. Thankfully, it wasn't a sheriff but an administrative employee moving me around at this point, and he was sympathetic enough to take me back to the previous cell. That was the only shred of humanity I saw from anyone who worked at the jail, and it's not