November 2010
82 posts
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“…’most men will not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty? Naturally, they wont swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
—Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf
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“Private homosexuality was a criminal offence in Britain up until – astonishingly – 1967. In 1954 the British mathemetician, Alan Turing, a candidate along with John Neumann for the title of father of the computer, committed suicide after being convicted of the criminal offence of homosexual behaviour in private….He was offered a choice between two years in prison (you can imagine how the other prisoners would have treated him) and a course of hormonal injections which could be said to amount to chemical castration, and would have caused him to grow breasts. His final, private choice was an apple that he had injected with cyanide. As the pivotal intellect in the breaking of the German Enigma codes, Turing arguably made a greater contribution to defeating the Nazis than Eisenhower or Churchill. Thanks to Turing and his ‘Ultra’ colleagues at Bletchley Park, Allied generals in the field were consistently, over long periods of the war, privy to detailed German plans before the German generals had time to implement them. After the war, when Turing´s role was no longer top secret, he should have been knighted and feted as a saviour of his nation. Instead, this gentle, stammering eccentric genius was destroyed, for a ‘crime’, committed in private, which harmed nobody. Once again, the unmistakable trademark of the faith-based moralizer is to care passionately about what other people do (or even think) in private.”
—R. Dawkins (this is one of the worst things I think I’ve ever heard)
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