Gordon Brown apologizes to Alan Turing - 57 years later

Thank you for this unionist, I did not know.

What a hypocritical shit he is. Thousands of men were persecuted for being gay, and he apologizes to one of them. Why? because Turing was a "war hero"!

And the occasion? 65 years since the Normandy invasion and 70 years since Britain's declaration of war. This is all about war, nothing else.

Wow.  As a computer geek, Turing is one of my heroes.  I just finished Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" which makes lots of references to Turing machines.  I even watched the great production with Derek Jacobi playing Turing.

Good news indeed.

This story isn't about Gordon Brown, who is indeed a hypocritical shit. It is about Alan Turing, and the tens of thousands of people who campaigned to have this savage act of the British society recognized and revoked.

Joe's take on this:

http://joemygod.blogspot.com/search/label/Alan%20Turing

I love this man's blog.

Touring was more than just a war hero. He is considered the father of the computing theory and modern cryptoanalysis, the Einstien of computer science. And the annual "Touring Award" by ACM is the equivalent of Nobel prize for the computing field.

More on him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_turing

Words are cheap. Last I checked there was a whole legislative agenda that could be implmented at little cost that would ensure equality for the LGBT communities in the UK. Marriage, adoption, expungement of criminal records for those still living who may have been convicted under gross indencency or sodomy laws. It's not like we are demanding reparations or anything....

[ETA] Not to mention laws and regulations governing refugee status and immigration for the purposes of uniting partners one of whom may not be a UK citizen. If he has seen the light, he should act on his realization.

Wiki says about Turing state machines:

 I had no idea. You can learn something new every day.

HA!

That picture is interesting in more ways than one.

Alan Turing's "Turing Test" was devised as a test of the ability of a computer to demonstrate artificial intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations and communicate by text messaging. If the human judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

In a similar vein, it can be challenging to create a parody of religious fundamentalism that can't possibly be mistaken for the real thing. This is known as Poe's Law [12], which says as follows: "Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article."

In other words, [13] "no matter how bizarre, outrageous, or just plain idiotic a parody of a Fundamentalist may seem, there will always be someone who cannot tell that it is a parody, having seen similar REAL ideas from real religious/political Fundamentalists."

The above picture is of such a parody: it is totally bizarre and outrageous, but nevertheless there will be some who cannot tell it is a parody, because genuine religious fundamentalism inherently has no limits on how bizarre and outrageous it can be.

As a corollary of Poe's Law, there can be no "Poe test" analogous to the "Turing test", because no human judge can reliably tell the genuine article from the parody!

I assume that's why the woman who was holding the sign was also holding a small rainbow flag.

I'm with bagkitty on this one: talk is cheap.

It's worse than cheap. The proper word escapes me just now. I was going to thank you for this update, CF, but now I'm not sure.

Indeed. I can only imagine what those prosecuted under that law who are still alive must think reading such monstrous rationalization.

I find it ironic that Turing was killed by the exact same medicine which probably saved my life. His was a death by chemically induced gender dysphoria.

Actually Turing died of cyanide poisoning, ruled at the time as a suicide.

Yes, his death was a tribute to his favourite movie, "Snow White." He coated an apple with cyanide.

Unionist, if you haven't by this point grasped that gender dysphoria's most fatal complication is self-harm (Though the stress does have cardiovascular and oncological knock-on effects) I don't know quite what to say other than that he likely would not have taken the cyanide if he hadn't been forcibly given the medroxyprogesterone.

I wasn't aware of that, RTTG. I was under the impression though that suicide among queer people was (and maybe still is) not an uncommon response to harassment, humiliation, bullying, etc. - and it must have been especially so in Turing's time when to be queer was to be a criminal. I don't know of any stats, though.

It was high doses of estrogen, not MPA, that were given to Alan Turing. And giving estrogen can itself cause depression (in addition to the criminal prosecution and humiliation).

Unionist, trans people who have yet to transition face an incidence of suicide about 25 times higher than the general population. Most of that goes away after treatment, though ostracism does cause a significant increase in the numbers over the general population.