| Raymond, as is his wont, sets up a strawman and proceeds to set it on fire pitching himself as a champion of "the just side". It's a strawman, because in truth the only important part about Turing's life in view of his accomplishments is that it was cut short. i.e. his genius could no longer produce progress. Whether this would have been due to suicide, an accident, or murder is not relevant.
It is not relevant because for the people under which his work was meant to be dissipated (people in the same field), the circumstances in which the results are produced are of no importance. Because of the progress he produced he became a people's hero to his country. People think about and tell tales about their heroes and their lives and circumstances. Irrespective of the direction these tales take, the accomplishments stand on their own among his peers, to wit, those who can actually understand the accomplishments. Whether people appropriate a part of a life of a hero to underline certain aspects of it, or deny parts of it to underline other aspects of it, matters not one iota. The facts of the matter are. "The work of Alan Turing was seminal to the entire field of computer science." The rest is history, and, as sometimes happens with history, can be rewritten by whomever needs the pageviews. "this sort of politically motivated myth-making diminishes the object of the myth" And any sort of tug of war between two sides who purport to propagate "the true story" is part of this myth. Pretending otherwise is just disingenuous. |