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.
In this case, it’s really easy to write down people with asocial or socially inappropriate behavior as errors or tryouts of nature. In fact these two things can be hardly related – the culture is pure human invention and it strongly differs from place to place. The nature on other hand is a sporadic random (but causal) process. You can’t tell if the person who did the inappropriate action was created by nature with a “defect” in brain or the “defect” was caused by the surrounding social atmosphere. Also, to be taken into account, are the obstacles at which such phenomenon has appeared – anonymity and place that provokes people on hate (the meankids portal that i didn’t had chance to see).
That’s why i think that second and third paragraph of your text are somehow out of line. Also, regarding your suggestion of ignorance – nobody ignores the trolls – you find appropriate manner to shut them up. I think that the same should be done with the person who is writing those comments.
I agree with the rest very much though!
Oh, did you see Shelley’s entry on this accident?
http://burningbird.net/connecting/disappointed/
“You can’t tell if the person who did the inappropriate action was created by nature with a “defect” in brain or the “defect” was caused by the surrounding social atmosphere.”
I agree with this. I indeed don’t know the person(s) who did this, I miss context (which is also what Shelley’s blog item is suggesting: that we should be careful, because we’ll all miss context).
Note though that “a defect in the brain” isn’t really what I meant. Rather: genes that defined the arrogance and aggressiveness of this individual, which made it do the actions it did.
It’s not or might not have been a defect. Humans have a lot genes. I don’t know what amounts of bad ones you need to be called “an individual with a defect int he brain”, luckily for society I’m not a psychiatrist :-), else I might have known this. Although I believe it’s philosophic and difficult to define (ethics, I don’t think even the world’s best psychiatrists can define this).
Anyway, I don’t want to judge on that level right now but I will, as an individual, make the choice of not wanting to be interested in the individual who made the death threats to Kathy.
Anyway, I indeed took the subject too serious. I guess that Kathy does some seriously good things with her skills, work and blog. I guess this makes all this very serious for a lot of people like me.