Ian Murdock Suicide

I personally don't see it as being racist. Yea there are MUCH better words he could have placed there. But as George Carlin said, "It's the context that makes it good or bad". I think hes trying to say that police brutality can happen to anyone and not just african americans, or poor ones at that.

Either way its a shame, if the tweets are truly him then he must have been having a mental breakdown (would also explain the suicide).

2 Likes

I am of two minds here, but I'm not... totally convinced that they conflict.

First, we should honor his contributions, his genius. I don't care how you do this -- praying to God for his soul, or reflecting for a moment of silence, just do something, personally.

Second, and this is important -- I think the truth must be allowed to out. If he was tweeting those statements, they suggest a great mind pushed to the breaking point under immense stress. If he was beaten, even once, by LEOs, we need to know.

As @Wendell says, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." I know that Mr. Murdock's family probably don't want sunlight much at all right now, but if this is what it appears to be -- another result of the abuse of power problems we have been having -- then the best thing that can be done by his family, or for that matter anyone else, is to make sure that the public has the true details of what happened.

The American public is a sleeping beast, and with enough evidence, we can wake it up to demand -- and get -- justice for all who have been killed or abused whilst it was sleeping.

Of course, it's completely possible it's something it doesn't appear to be. Either way, it's tragic, and either way, the open source community he helped start deserves to know the nature of the tragedy.

1 Like

This was not meant in a racist way I believe. If you know some of Ians earlier writing I believe the context here is that he is saying that police brutality is problem in the US but apologists would say that brutality only extends to this or that lower class to keep the in line blah blah blah. -- a racist argument in other words.
So others who are racist say the police brutality is not a problem and Ian was sort of trying to quote this argument to say yes it is regardless of race. I think Ian believed police brutality was always a problem regardless of race but believed nothing is being done because most see it as an issue only affecting whatever a person's personal bias regards as a lower class

6 Likes

As a non-native English speaker I am shocked to see so many people misunderstanding that statement...

On a non-rational, completely instinct-driven sidenote - the whole case of his death and what had preceded it just stinks of manipulation...

The use of N***** is the contributing factor to people taking what he said out of context leading to a snap judgement of him being a racist. I'm fairly certain the 'N' word was intended as if it were used in quotations to depict how racist cops refer to minorities.

1 Like

You couldn't have made a better post for conveying the idea behind my comment (and my point of view).

You yourself can't even use that word as an indirect quotation, as if being allergic to it or afraid of being judged and misunderstood in the exact same way that mr Murdocks post was misinterpreted.

My point was exactly this!

If I, as a non-native English speaker can understand the underlying point, than I don't believe it's a matter of language and word usage. In my opinion it is a matter of mindset. Properly educated young minds shouldn't be so allergic to certain words that they react by instantly having their flow of thought blocked. So blocked that they fail to see anything beyond that word.

You, on the other hand, didn't fall for this, you read what he had written and didn't pull things out of context. But I find that the previously mentioned "mindset" is really bad for society and especially media, and seems to be molded and insisted on by both (public opinion AND media) at least in the US media. That's just my point of view.

Now I don't know if usage of that word is prohibited or censored on this website, but you couldn't even use the word to quote the guy...

But anyway, out of respect towards the moderators, I'm not going to continue this discussion in here... It's offtopic, and I don't know if it deserves its own thread but I just had a need for a short rant, sorry.

1 Like

I thought censoring it would be the best course of action in regards to adhering to the forum rules.

-RIP-

Since the forum says I have to be more descriptive: This is me paying respects to his memory.

1 Like

Very sad, I always hate to hear of this happening, regardless of the victims. I'm not even going to try and speculate why this happened. I feel it would do more harm than good. The family wants the public to respect their privacy. That's what I'm going to do.

Yeah I'm not going to go back and edit my previous comment above. Just read the update on the Ars article so he obviously wasn't in his right mind, understandably so. Rather not speculate about his use of racial slurs posthumously. Only thing I can say to eulogize is that even though I don't use Mint as my daily driver anymore I still use my YUMI pendrivelinux swiss army knife of usb tools that include Clonezilla and Mint 17.3 as my live distro along with some other stuff (all based on either Debian/Ubuntu) Those tools have saved me more times than I can count so without Ian I wouldn't have them at my disposal so I'm just going to thank the man for the work he's done. That is all.