I honestly have no opinion on the matter, and I no longer think it’s important. I don’t need to think he committed suicide to believe that his (and everybody el

I honestly have no opinion on the matter, and I no longer think it’s important. I don’t need to think he committed suicide to believe that his (and everybody else’s) persecution for homosexuality was a massive injustice. It doesn’t make him a more romantic or dramatic figure to me, the rest of his life was already wildly romantic and dramatic. So I guess when I say that an argument is “reasonable,” what I’m really saying is, “I get where that person is coming from, and I don’t think they’re unhinged for thinking what they think, or for saying what they say.” But that doesn’t mean I hold the same views. And without checking everything you’re saying, It seems reasonable too. Lots of people don’t understand suicide, I don’t think we understand much about mood disorders or suicide (and for that matter, not all suicide is related to mood disorders! Lumping the two together reflexively is probably a sign that I don’t understand suicide either.) Anyhow, this I do believe: If we can speculate that “Today, we would likely come to a determination of X instead of Y given the evidence,” we can also speculate that today, we’d have much, much better evidence. And even better, if Alan Turing did commit suicide, and if he was motivated by his persecution, well then, today he would not have been persecuted to begin with. And if he had some mood issues for other reasons, well, while our society is still deeply flawed in this area, it’s still much, much better than it was in the 1950s. Regardless of what actually happened, the larger story of our social progress around homosexuality and inclusion of atypical people——whether socially or neurologically atypical—- is the thing that matters, and his life’s story forms a part of that progress no matter what exactly happened to end it.