Debian Founder Ian Murdock Has Died (docker.com) 464
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."
Whoa (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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?
What do you mean by "legit"? Are you asking if he actually said it, or are you asking if what he said was a resaonable description of actual events?
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It was in response to people trying to claim previously that Ian's Twitter was hacked after he started threatening suicide and posting racist shit.
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racist shit?
the use of the word "nigger" in that last tweet could just be emphasizing the point of view that many have that police brutality against blacks doesn't matter.
plenty of people use the word "nigger" in contexts without any racial hatred.
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If songs count there's Bob Dylan & Elvis Costello.
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No it doesn't, e.g.
Black people in the United States used to be called niggers. Originally from the latin "niger" for black. It's use is considered highly offensive.
Also why is it only white people who aren't allowed to use the word?
As a liberal I do think someone's right to use slurs is more important than those who are hurt by it. I regard your comment as offensive. I'm not going to run off to the court of popular opinion to try and whip up a witch hunt. We're grown ups now. If you don't like what someone is saying I suggest you: (optionally) politely point out to them what they've said that offended you and why, and then move on. The right t
Re:Whoa (Score:5, Insightful)
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And now it's being covered up. His twitter account is gone, and his blog has been scrubbed clean. The discussion he wanted to grow out of this won't happen, because some people find the subject too embarrassing. It's fucking tragic.
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When are the ****ing
Re:Whoa (Score:4, Funny)
Or they were too busy trying to get systemd to work.
Dat's racist (Score:5, Interesting)
And what great parting words [googleusercontent.com] he left for us:
Maybe my suicide at this, you now, a successful business man, not a NIGGER, will finally bring some attention to this very serious issue.
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You have to be in a seriously fucked up place in your head to commit suicide in the first place. Completely out of character twitter posts are not the strangest thing that suicidal people do. Though the posts are fucked up, I'm willing to cut a little slack given the mental state he would have had to be in to do this. It's not the best way to go out but, suicide never is.
That's real (Score:2)
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So, why are you not posting as yourself? Rhetorical question. You live up to your name and it is you that does not want their goose cooked. I stand by my words. You do not.
In most circumstances self sacrifice (by males) is common and instinctive. I have actually put my body between harm and someone else. When you have actually expected to die protecting some one, then you can talk. I have actually been there, "manned up". Have you? Do you actually know what you are talking about? Self sacrifice ma
Read again (Score:2)
One one hand, most decisions are made on an emotional not a rational basis. But it is almost impossible to entirely separate them as we will rationalise the emotional decision. But in urgent, emergency situations it is almost purely emotional. So, jumping on the grenade is a purely emotional decision. Rationally, throwing someone else on the grenade would produce the same result - one death - but you would survive. A thick steel table would be even better. But there is no time to examine data, to t
Re:Dat's racist (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yeah, I thought the same thing. You can interpret his use of the word as putting words in the mouth of someone who dismisses the issue of police violence because "well, it's only happening to [insert terms of racial abuse here], so who cares". When you only have 140 characters, that's a very powerful way of putting it.
Re:Dat's racist (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 part was clear... but what was less than stellar clear is if it was "You think you can beat me up the way you beat up NIGGERS? I'm going to raise hell." or "You think you can beat up people, but now you picked on a person who is not a NIGGER and can raise hell."
Re:Dat's racist (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong on two counts.
1) He is not attributing it to the police, but to us, his audience. Or to "the American people" or most broadly speaking, "everyone". His intended scope is not clear here because this clause is written in the passive voice with no explicit owner. "bring attention to this issue" - Whose attention? Dunno.
2) There is no perception that black people are 'niggers' in this sentence. The perception (our perception) is that police violence isn't important (to us) because it is happening to 'niggers'.
(Note that I'm not making any claims beyond the meaning of the sentence as written.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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If you bother to read and think a bit instead of going off in some kneejerk reaction. It appears he had some sort of altercation with the police where he receieved a righteous ass whuppin. Then was charged for assaulting the cops. When he got home, he claims they kicked his ass again and had to go to the hospital for stitches.
If you read his last comment and *try* to put even a little bit of context around it, it appears that he felt that he was trying to say something like "it doesn't just happen to
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It's quite obvious when you read the rest of his feed from that night that he is claiming the police and the apathetic public are the racists. Even in that quote alone, addressed to a reader who presumably doesn't care about brutality when it happens to black people, as most middle-class whites feel. You idiots seem to think any use of the word 'nigger' is an ultimate condemnation, as if the meaning of words is innate to their very letters, instead of being determined in relation to the rest of their cont
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Thanks for saying this.
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Wait. Is that real? Is that really his twitter account (and not some impersonator, like what happens quite often actually)?
Re:Dat's racist (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dat's racist (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: Dat's racist (Score:2)
Not immediate death... They deserve the chance to learn that they were raised by and/or among ignorant people. Older generations maybe cannot be expected to change the racist views they were imprinted with, but younger people in this bigger more communicative world should be expected to see beyond that crap, and also be able to see that people of any race can be an arsehole.
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Ask the people in Rwanda if that's true or not.
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No, Black people can have institutionalized racism. Just not in your location. By the way, as I've said before and my hair indicates, I'm part black. If you don't believe that black people can effect institutionalized racism then I'd encourage you to step out of your bubble and visit somewhere that has black people as the majority. South Africa would be a great place to get some experience, perhaps Nigeria, Somalia, Ghana, or Senegal will help you understand it.
The willful, it can be nothing less, ignorance
42 year old dies and nobody asks why? (Score:2)
In this day and age, it's highly unusual for healthy 42 year olds to die all of a sudden. TFA says nothing about how he died, just that he died.
Car accident, drug overdose, heart attack, or ???
Re:42 year old dies and nobody asks why? (Score:5, Informative)
Suicide. [reddit.com]
Re:42 year old dies and nobody asks why? (Score:4, Informative)
what? biggest demographic for suicide is white males 35-64, and since 1999 up 30+ percent
over police brutality he says, hmmm maybe some other things and this plus some substance abuse was trigger
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no long term worries, the typical SJW is tumblr femi-nazi who won't reproduce. their kind is going to be Darwined out of existence in one generation
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Everybody has problems. Everybody deserves consideration form them. SJWs are just the ultimate in racism, sexism, etc. and are at heart fascists that want to humiliate and destroy everybody except their chosen group "victims". A force of evil and destruction to be sure.
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His family asked for privacy. People are trying to give it to them.
That said, there's a The Register Article [theregister.co.uk] that implies some erratic mental state. All the more reason to not pry and not guess. They're having a very hard time. Our best tribute to what Ian has done is not to make his family worse off.
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It looks like He blamed it on Police Brutality. Some sort of incident happened where he claims(ed) he was beaten by the police badly enough to go to the hospital, got home, was assaulted again by police.
http://pastebin.com/yk8bgru5 [pastebin.com]
Re:42 year old dies and nobody asks why? (Score:5, Insightful)
How is it non of their business? The dude was threatening suicide on Twitter. That hardly is a bastion of privacy.
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How is it non of their business? The dude was threatening suicide on Twitter. That hardly is a bastion of privacy.
His family is asking for it now and there's no reason not to honor that. It changes nothing and gives them the space they need and deserve.
Re:42 year old dies and nobody asks why? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's every reason not to honor it: it was the last wish of the deceased that we use his death as a springboard to discuss issues that the was, at least at the end, very passionate about. Fuck the family. Fuck their discomfort with the topic being cause to cover up the reason behind this man's death. He had his own values and wishes, and they should be respected; not whitewashed to make a few soon-wealthy beneficiaries a little more comfortable.
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No, there is every reason to honor their wishes. His family presumably wants privacy because they don't want to see anyone's memory of him be tarnished, and most likely that's because he obviously committed suicide in a non-suspicious manner after having some kind of mental breakdown. Which may have been the culmination of some kind of ongoing series of mental breakdowns that they'd rather not have him be remembered by.
The guy threatened suicide, and ranted about the police, and then stated that "my career
Re:42 year old dies and nobody asks why? (Score:4, Funny)
My theory is Hans Reiser.
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The Reiser Uncertainty Theorem.
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FWIW Ian was anti-systemd so it would have been pro-systemd assassins if it wasn't the police.
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I'd say it was pretty unhinged. He threatened to kill himself because he thought his career was over, which he presumably thought was because of a bogus arrest?
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Most likely, yes, and the fine blurb does a disservice in stating "passed away". Certain euphemisms are just out of place.
Rest In Peace (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a Debian user. But thanks Ian. That's a great thing you did with Debian!
So long. And thank you for the fish.
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RIP, Ian Murdoch from an Ubuntu user. Thanks for the father of my fish.
Re:Rest In Peace (Score:5, Insightful)
RIP, Ian
Thanks. This is the first decent post I read on this thread about someone's death. Everybody before this just trolled about either racism, or the circumstances of his death. Can't people be more civilized in paying homage to him, regardless of what they think regarding Debian, systemd, Wayland or anything else?
Note to self (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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You might never give up but you will surrender to torture. Everyone does.
The soldiers tortured during Vietnam without exception gave the Vietnamese torturers what they were asking for. They also gave them a pound of garbage for every real thing they gave them, because that's what torture does, forces the torturee to provide invalid and garbage intelligence to make the torture stop and it's the reason there is little to no point in doing it.
There is no dishonor is surrendering to torture or other forms of ab
RIP (Score:2, Insightful)
Your uptime was shorter than normal, but you were a master of creation and you served the community well.
Something is very fishy (Score:5, Interesting)
The bizarre nature of those last tweets and the fact that the attached email domain on those was imurdock.com rather than his actual website which is ianmurdock.com makes this situation very suspicious. I hope more information is release soon as it seems highly likely foul play is involved.
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Ian Murdock, of course, being different to Ian Jackson,
This is what mental illness looks like... (Score:4, Insightful)
and I am ashamed to live in a society where there was no one around to help him find a better way through this.
Thank You, Ian (Score:3, Insightful)
I am very, very sad to hear this news. Debian GNU/Linux has brought much joy to my life. Thank You and Rest in Peace, Ian Murdock.
-drew (@pdp7)
Not sure about suicide (Score:4, Interesting)
People deciding on suicide for real rarely make future plans, but his last tweets were full of them. I wonder about head trauma, mostly because of the extreme confusion here. Note his first line. He didn't want anyone to stop him from killing himself, because he had stories that he wanted to tell.
RIP (Score:5, Insightful)
Old programmers never die. They redirect to /dev/null. RIP, Ian.
No official report after 48 hours+ ? (Score:3, Interesting)
I certainly will not believe any official reports - the fact that they're late means they're being cooked, without doubt. Some multi-millionaires out there need to make sure to get all the way to the bottom of this.
Fuck the SFPD (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org] 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
Bizarre (Score:2)
You know I asked my grandfather about the weird banker deaths, Swartz's death and now this one this evening and he had a interesting response:
"During the purge in the 1930's lots of people went missing. Mainly individuals in societal roles that some in society are not happy with."
I replied: "But these people had families and nobody hated them they did interesting things and certainly were not criminals."
His response?
"Not criminal perhaps to you and me, but those in power have their own rule of law."
A Requiem for Ian Murdock (Score:5, Informative)
Any more information? (Score:3)
Any sign of the bruises / beating? When did it occur? I'm curious wtf happened and when it happened
Also, nothing on his web page, did someone revert it? Anyone got a cached copy?
Just that? (Score:2)
Horrible (Score:5, Informative)
This is horrible.
Having gone through the data I could find this evening, it appears that Ian was a victim of mental illness and perhaps substance abuse which initiated two interactions with police. I do not have sufficient information to say if police conduct was at fault.
He was a very bright and creative guy who, unfortunately went through lots of ups and downs. He didn't deserve to end this way. Nobody does.
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Yeah he did: [googleusercontent.com]
Maybe my suicide at this, you now, a successful business man, not a NIGGER, will finally bring some attention to this very serious issue.
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Others have already pointed out that said message is posted with a domain name that isn't known to be associated to him and is designed to look like it is his normal domain (imurdock versus ianmurdock) and which doesn't match any of his previous twitter posts.
This makes the messages entirely of suspicious origin.
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wouldn't a successful businessman with money normally go round up the lawyers normally and stay out of town and retaliate from the outside. unless he went on a bender right after and never sobered up, going into depression spiral
Re:Circumstances surrounding his death disturbing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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he probably suffered torture at the hand of police.
Torture? He didn't even suggest that. It sounds like he was arrested against his will. He suggested that the arrest was unnecessary or illegal, not that there was torture.
It's certainly fair to ask why, but presumably his family has done that or feels it is unnecessary because the why is already obvious. I'd rather not see his decades of effort bettering society being minimized if he had some kind of substance abuse or emotional issues and ended up taking his own life.
Re:Ian Murdoch was a racist (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Nope, sorry, choice of words has little to do with racism, it's how you arrange them that counts. Plenty of racists say very nasty things using flowery nice-sounding language, it's far worse than your average racist but no one calls them out on it because they didn't use any banned words. In this case Ian was warning that police brutality can affect successful white men too, and not just [short word for "who cares, it's just poor and/or black people"].
Re:Ian Murdoch was a racist (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ian Murdoch was a racist (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [jstor.org] 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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Are you daft? Race is not a social construct. Have you ever seen black people? They have a completely different skin colour from white people. That's a fact, not a social construct. It proves that different races of human beings exist.
Your SJW attitude to *facts* is appalling, retract it.
Is Obama black or white? Are Kazakhs arab, asian, or a different race? What about Moroccans? Are the East African ethnicities that dominate the marathon the same race as the Jamaicans who dominate sprinting? Their skin colour is the same but the body types are drastically different.
You can draw a dividing line one the colour scale and call every darker than that "black" and everyone lighter "white" or some other ethnicity, but it's not nearly as meaningful as we imagine. We use that characteristic because i
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You can draw a dividing line one the colour scale and call every darker than that "black" and everyone lighter "white" or some other ethnicity, but it's not nearly as meaningful as we imagine. We use that characteristic because it's the easiest to see, but if we started grouping by some other gene variants then we would get a drastically different set of races.
In the context you are talking about, is race only color? Race has also had the meaning of a subgroup within a species sharing characteristics. In the terms you are talking about, is only characteristic superficial skin color?
When referring to humans race is almost exclusively used to refer to colour, in which case it isn't much use outside of an often harmful social construct. If we start talking about ethnicities then it becomes more useful, but at the end of the day it's important to remember we're just referring to probability distributions of genes.
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Have you seen a chihuahua? Have you seen a bulldog?
They exist, and they're quite easy to tell apart - try kicking one in the butt. And yes, I know what a mongrel is, and no, that doesn't disprove the existence of St Bernards and greyhounds.
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Did you know that there are actually standards which define terms like "chihuahua" [akc.org]? That's because dog breeds are marketing terms, not descriptions of phenomena found in nature.
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"Race is a load of meaningless crap. Humans like to fark too much for it to exist. It has no concept in biology"
The first and third parts of that are a lie.
That interbreeding occurs does not diminish the concept. It just means that the concept doesn't apply as cleanly to as many individuals as it used to.
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No, the third part is pretty much correct. Biologically speaking, "race" isn't a thing.
There are genetic traits that run in families, and this effect does scale up. There is no trait or collection of traits that correlates with whatever "race" means this decade.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course that person was trying (and failing) to parody what they think a "SJW" (whatever that means these days) would say.
Ask practically anyone that you would consider to be a "SJW", and they would no doubt agree that both Ted Cruz and Ben Carson are a) not white (by the standards of a white supremacist), b) privileged and powerful, and c) prone to racism, at least when it comes to Syrian refugees.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
Sounds like you are a victim of newspeak reeducation. Racism is the use of race as a discriminator either for or against an individual or group.
Re: (Score:2)
I didn't say they were.
Re: (Score:2)
Looks like SJWers on 4Chan were egging him on last night:
https://archive.is/2Cdj1 [archive.is]
https://i.imgur.com/A1xlnVi.pn... [imgur.com]
Re: (Score:2)
SJW's, on /pol/? Come on. They're calling *him* a SJW on there.
Re: (Score:2)
Just like "troll" (ah, the Golden Age of Usenet, I remember it well), the term "SJW" used to mean something specific. The Urban Dictionary definition [urbandictionary.com] is the best one I've seen.
Today it's meaningless, and that's a shame, because we've lost a really good word. The distinction between real-world activists who are honestly trying to make the world a better place as they see it, and those who forcefully regurgitate half-understood material exclusively online in return for kudos points, is still a distinction tha
Re: (Score:2)
I read Slashdot 4x a day
.
Which is why you're posting as AC.
Fuck Ian in his dead racist ass.
Did you even read his posts in context? They make perfect sense, should he have put quotes around "Nigger", would you have understood it then?
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
But instead of institutionalizing him, they left him at his house
It is very, very difficult to institutionalize someone against their will - personal freedoms and all that.
Why do you think there are so many homeless people wandering the streets? Everyone agrees they are mentally ill and need help, but you can't force help on them unless they are violent.
Would you want the police to have the authority to decide you need to be locked away and drugged into a stupor?
Re: (Score:2)
Everyone agrees they are mentally ill and need help, but you can't force help on them unless they are violent.
I wonder if you could replace "force help on them" with "get the money to help them."
Re: (Score:2)
They won't. They will drag you away to be assessed by a mental health professional. Look it up. [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)