Although Kathy‘s message is to be passionate and although I can (try to) imagine how ill people like psychopaths can easily translate her call for being passionate into an act of making what they see as a funny picture, but what normal people see as a death threat: I don’t believe this was Kathy’s intention and hers isn’t to be blamed for this.
Rather the fact that biology needs discrepancies to detect faulty designs within our genes. Differently put, the people who did these dead threats are simply tryouts or rather errors of nature. They are an error because it’s in the interest of our society to neither encourage nor have asocials.
A lot human-like societies (like baboons) would have responded to this asocial by things like not offering the specimen access to females. So, the nature of other species shows that the best technique is to ignore these people, to try to make sure that they don’t have access to females (or males, if the guilty are females) and by forcing them out of the group, etc etc. Right? Let us let nature do its work: ignore them, deny them access to females and let their erroneous genes get extinct.
Kathy’s attempt of teaching us, software developers & co., about how to be passionate people and all that, has been in my opinion exceptionally good. I hope Kathy understands that by stopping her work on this, she would let them win the battle. I’m sure that this is just a pause for Kathy though.
In our society we need more passionate people Kathy. Through your work you created a lot such people. We need passionate people to be successful. You have been teaching us, passionates, how to be successful.
It was your book on design patterns too that made me want to do the project that I am doing right now. Your work is precious and important.
Kathy, I hope you won’t stop. But do pause if that is what you need.