141–150 of 163 posts
Pardon ? For what? Thanks but no thanks.
Buggery. It's been illegal many places for a very long time because it spreads disease. The sodomy laws were effectively repealed and we got AIDS. It was not a coincidence.
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They used to lock you up for adultery, too, right up to the 60s. Disease was a consideration. So it's not just a matter of targeting gays. > AIDS didn't become an epidemic because of anal intercourse Yes it did. This is not remotely controversial. Aids and many other STDs are spread chiefly by buggery. This is why the red cross does not want blood donations from homosexuals.
Red cross (in the US) doesn't want blood donations from people who lived in Europe for long enough. Because they have HIV? No. You got something wrong with correlation and causation there in several ways.
This is politically motivated nonsense. At right wing government trying to prove its not homophobic. Yes the Queen issued the pardon, but it wont have been done without the government being consulted. Pardoning one person like this when thousands suffered is an insult. They should have either pardoned everyone who was convicted under these laws, or none of them. Favouring one man because of his historical significanc…
Turing often seems to get most of the credit for ending the war early (probably due to the injustice he suffered), but we shouldn't forget others suffered in different ways. Tommy Flowers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Flowers ), who arguably created the first electronic computer to decrypt the Lorenz cypher was just as important and his work was not acknowledged until the 1970s. Flowers wanted to create a comp…
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Sexual intercourse of any kind spreads disease. AIDS didn't become an epidemic because of anal intercourse. It's pretty clear that AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases spread just as well from almost any kind sexual activity, and many of them -- including AIDS -- spread from any transfer of bodily fluids at all. Going further, I'd wager that any form of interpersonal contact, even non-sexual, is as likely to…
I grew up around the time teens were force-fed sex education regarding AIDS, and the message was loud and clear and consistent: Ordinary sex is a great way to contract HIV. This, in fact, was always a lie--and a coordinated lie--and the scientists knew about it. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/895/what-are-the-od... the odds of a heterosexual becoming infected with AIDS after one episode of penile-vaginal in…
75,000 men were convicted under the same law, of whom 26,000 are still alive. [1] Only Turing has been "pardoned". My understanding [2] is that the "pardon" implies there was nothing wrong with the law as such, just that Turing is forgiven for having broken it. So while I guess this is better than nothing, I don't know if it's really the way to go about it. [1] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldhans…
They can apply to have their convictions disregarded, though. (It's also 16,000 of them.)
Yeah, not quite the same, but better than I expected honestly. :)
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> so maybe there's a problem with this system? There are many problems. When you find a better system to replace it with, then let us know. Until then throwing away a millenia of history so we can have President Cameron sounds like hell to me.
Well, any democratic system in which no citizen is institutionally above every other citizen by mere reason of being born certainly seems better to me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to troll. It's just that I would have a really hard time living in a country where such privileges by birth exist.
And by the way, if you think is undemocratic to have an unelected head of state, just think about the reasons that supreme court members are not elected. Democracy has its limits :-)
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So much this. It drives me nuts that the narrative on this issue always seems to boil down to the idea that Turing somehow earned not being persecuted for being gay through his efforts in the war and the injustice was that the government didn't live up to its end of the bargain, not the fact that he and many others were driven to suicide or horrible lives by this terrible law.
It's symbolic. The pardon does absolutely zero for Turing himself - he's long gone. It's symbolic that society is progressing and saying "we don't agree with this thing we used to do".
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It's symbolic. The pardon does absolutely zero for Turing himself - he's long gone. It's symbolic that society is progressing and saying "we don't agree with this thing we used to do".
It doesn't even do that, pardon is more like forgiveness: "We forgive you for what you've done". And I don't think that's the same as admitting that law was bad.
75,000 men were convicted under the same law, of whom 26,000 are still alive. [1] Only Turing has been "pardoned". My understanding [2] is that the "pardon" implies there was nothing wrong with the law as such, just that Turing is forgiven for having broken it. So while I guess this is better than nothing, I don't know if it's really the way to go about it. [1] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldhans…
So much this. It drives me nuts that the narrative on this issue always seems to boil down to the idea that Turing somehow earned not being persecuted for being gay through his efforts in the war and the injustice was that the government didn't live up to its end of the bargain, not the fact that he and many others were driven to suicide or horrible lives by this terrible law.
75,000 men were convicted under the same law, of whom 26,000 are still alive. [1] Only Turing has been "pardoned". My understanding [2] is that the "pardon" implies there was nothing wrong with the law as such, just that Turing is forgiven for having broken it. So while I guess this is better than nothing, I don't know if it's really the way to go about it. [1] http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldhans…
So much this. It drives me nuts that the narrative on this issue always seems to boil down to the idea that Turing somehow earned not being persecuted for being gay through his efforts in the war and the injustice was that the government didn't live up to its end of the bargain, not the fact that he and many others were driven to suicide or horrible lives by this terrible law.