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English law punished homosexuality with chemical castration, but (according to ESR) Turing could easily have avoided this fate. Was Turing thus a "victim" of "o
by mhartl 14y ago
English law punished homosexuality with chemical castration, but (according to ESR) Turing could easily have avoided this fate. Was Turing thus a "victim" of "oppression"? We're quibbling about words. Your notions of "victim" and "oppression" are simply different from ESR's. (Note: I'm confident that ESR isn't in favor of chemical castration for homosexuals.)
- scott_s 14y agoApparently. I feel that if someone suffers due to a bigoted policy, then that person is the victim of oppression. He seems to think that it is not "oppression" if the person who suffers had an out. The mental gymnastics bit come in when he tries to gel that with what demonstrators suffered during the civil rights movement, which he does classify as oppression.
- mhartl 14y agoWas Einstein the victim of oppression? How about Feynman? If "No", how does that jibe with your definition? If "Yes", is being a victim of oppression necessarily that big a deal? (Both Einstein and Feynman seemed to do OK for themselves.) (Note that nothing here excuses or condones the antisemitism that affected both Einstein and Feynman.)
- scott_s 14y agoEinstein fled Europe because of it. That seems like "a big deal" to me. That he "did OK" for himself afterwards does not somehow make having to leave your home continent less of a big deal.
- rictic 14y agoThey were both also victims of oppression, in different ways and to different degrees. A large number of people were and are. More attention is paid to the oppression that Turing underwent because it seems likely that it was a major factor in his death. If Einstein's life had been ended at a young age, but after he had made contributions to physics that made clear what had been lost, his death and the circumstances around it would be a large part of what we remember about him.
- mikeash 14y agoEinstein fled Nazi Germany due to their anti-semitism. Are you actually trying to claim that Nazi Germany's oppression of Jews was not necessarily a big deal?
- mikeash 14y agoHe could have easily avoided this fate? How? As far as I know, Turing's choices were either 1) chemical castration 2) prison 3) stop having sex with people he was attracted to. Which of those alternatives qualifies as "not oppression"?
- mhartl 14y agoYou're arguing with ESR, not with me. ESR implies that there was another alternative. My role in this is to explain ESR's position and to defend its correctness assuming his premises are true. My role is not to defend his premises, which in fact I am unqualified to do.
- mikeash 14y agoNot sure I understand the point of that. Is ESR somehow less wrong for saying Turing wasn't a victim of oppression if he says this because he's mistaken about what Turing was faced with?
- haberman 14y agoIt's not clear to me that (3) was an option that would have helped him avoid (1) or (2): he was found guilty of a previous "crime," and (1) and (2) were his two options for punishment/"rehabilitation".
- tzs 14y ago> English law punished homosexuality with chemical castration, but (according to ESR) Turing could easily have avoided this fate. Yes, Turing could have chosen to go to prison instead. Would that have been better somehow? How were homesexuals treated in English prisons then?