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posted by martyb on Friday July 28 2017, @02:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the karma-gonna-get-ya dept.

The University of Delaware is cutting ties with a part-time professor who provoked a controversial firestorm for saying North Korea detainee Otto Warmbier "deserved" to die.

The Newark school said it will not re-hire Katherine Dettwyler, the adjunct faculty member who blasted the 22-year-old student as "young, white, rich, clueless" in a since-deleted Facebook post Tuesday.

source

The school's statement (pdf):

The comments of Katherine Dettwyler do not reflect the values or position of the University of Delaware. We condemn any and all messages that endorse hatred and convey insensitivity toward a tragic event such as the one that Otto Warmbier and his family suffered.

The University of Delaware values respect and civility and we are committed to global education and study abroad; therefore, we find these comments particularly distressing and inconsistent with our values. Our sympathies are with the Warmbier family.

Also at; CBS News.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @04:35PM (14 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @04:35PM (#545846)
    How many of you want to still be alive long after all the stars in the universe have gone cold?

    I can't think of anyone I would wish to live forever in this universe.

    So I think everyone should die.
  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 28 2017, @04:52PM (6 children)

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Friday July 28 2017, @04:52PM (#545859) Journal

    If you can live that long, you might be able to find a way to jump into a different universe. Or create a new universe.

    Regardless, if anti-aging is cracked, people should off themselves on their own terms. And those people who want to do XYZ or travel the stars forever can do that instead.

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 4, Funny) by Grishnakh on Friday July 28 2017, @06:46PM (2 children)

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Friday July 28 2017, @06:46PM (#545908)

      You beat me to it: jump to a parallel universe, or make your own if possible. Maybe in the future, we can all create our own, personal parallel universes which we can set up however we want. There won't be any Microsoft in my universe.

      • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday July 28 2017, @10:32PM

        by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday July 28 2017, @10:32PM (#546012) Journal

        There won't be any emacs in my universe. I kid! I kid!

        --
        Washington DC delenda est.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @10:32PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @10:32PM (#546013)

        Ironically, in your Microsoft-free world you'll get bitten by a mosquito and then die of a disease that was eradicated by the Gates Foundation in this one. A more realistic ideal universe would be systemd-free.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday July 28 2017, @10:23PM (2 children)

      by aristarchus (2645) on Friday July 28 2017, @10:23PM (#546007) Journal

      Your estimation of the rate of human progress is extremely over-optimistic. You don't have to live forever to know this, a couple of millennia is more than enough.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday July 29 2017, @12:31AM (1 child)

        by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Saturday July 29 2017, @12:31AM (#546058) Journal

        You may be right. But it's hard to make predictions, especially about the future. Biotechnology is moving at a rapid pace. The cost of human genome sequencing has dropped from hundreds of millions of dollars [genome.gov] to just over a thousand dollars per genome in about 15 years. CRISPR has lowered the costs of gene editing and has been successfully used on human embryos. Genome synthesis from scratch is also possible. SENS anti-aging research [leafscience.org] is chugging along [fightaging.org].

        As for traveling to an alternate universe, creating a universe, traveling back in time, or whatever other solution would be needed to postpone heat death, there's billions of years [wikipedia.org] to make progress on that. It isn't even settled that the expansion rate of the universe is increasing [ox.ac.uk].

        --
        [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Saturday July 29 2017, @12:58AM

          by aristarchus (2645) on Saturday July 29 2017, @12:58AM (#546076) Journal

          especially about the future.

          Ha!

          Living through a couple of Dark Ages tends to make one cynical. And seeing signs of a new one coming on currently is rather unsettling. But I hope you are right, takyon! The last few centuries has been a hell of a ride. But when you consider the gap between my own theories, and those of Copernicus and Galileo, being right is no guarantee of future progress in human knowledge.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @05:44PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @05:44PM (#545882)

    Speak for yourself.

    I want to live for as long as life is still preferable to death.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @06:25PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @06:25PM (#545898)

    Rather myopic if you think about where we were just hundreds of years ago. And that order of time is so small that it hardly exists on the orders of time you're discussing. It's the strange thing about society. People seem to think we're going to be living in more or less the same way doing more or less the same things indefinitely, even though you can see massive and constant changes -coming at an obviously heavily accelerating fashion- through practically any lens of history. And yes, I'd be rather happy to live indefinitely along with countless others. I am quite convinced that this universe is a simulation, but I'm certainly in no rush to test out that hypothesis.

    • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 28 2017, @06:31PM (3 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday July 28 2017, @06:31PM (#545901) Journal

      People are doing the same things today, that they did thousands of years ago, for precisely the same motives. Greed, lust, power. Women, wine and song. The song hasn't changed in tens of thousands of years. The manner in which the vices are expressed may have changed a little bit, but the same kind of people are answering to the very same drives that their many-many-great forebears did.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @07:31PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @07:31PM (#545932)

        Yes, those darn guys pushing things like the internet that's now allowing you to communicate to me - instantly - when we could very well be half way around the world from one another. Undoubtedly Tim Berners-Lee just pushed out these technologies for the wealth, women, and wine. If you're not aware of the story there. He is the developer behind most of the fundamental technology behind the world wide web today. He knew it had enormous potential and actually intentionally avoided patenting anything to ensure its growth and potential gain for society. He even developed the first web browser, and gave it away for free.

        The people that really push our society forward are the Einsteins, of past and present. Politicians and peddlers get credit for as much but in reality they do little more than draw invisible lines and declare laws that are obsoleted and forgotten even within the timespan of a single individual. Indeed if society was directed by the King Whoever the Whatevers, we'd still be small tribes going at each other with pointy sticks and rocks with huge swaths of the entire world's population being wiped out in the process of such.

        And before you make a lazy analogy to replacing sticks and rocks with machine guns and missiles, realize how absurd it is. Today we have 7 billion people with deaths from war direct and indirect in the hundreds of thousands. That's on the order of 1/10,000 people dying because of war per year. That is something that would be completely inconceivable in times past. We have these weapons which could kill vastly more effectively, yet we are more reluctant than ever to use them. It's so easy to forget all of this because we tend to naturally focus on the negatives in our view of society. "Boy we sure live in a time of unbelievably peace and harmony." seems incredulous at best when you turn on some sensationalistic cable news network, yet it is true in every single quantifiable way.

        Or think about things like education. We live in a world where educational opportunity is completely unprecedented. Not even thousands of years ago, information was considered some private luxury only the indoctrinated, wealthy, and powerful were allowed access to. It was something to be hoarded and hidden away. Now you have the opportunity to learn practically anything all at the tip of your fingers. And this possibility and potential is expanding exponentially. This is all absolutely incredible, and you could go on and on. Yes, people that seek power will tend to be those that obtain power. And they tend to make up the worst of us. Fortunately, while their whims can be harmful in the short run - ultimately, they are irrelevant. And we are entering and era, technologically and socially, where things such as decentralized governance are beginning to become a possibility if not an inevitability. I could go on and on, but really - quantify things and the world starts to look far different than we think it does. It's so easy to get lost in the moment, yet the moment is irrelevant.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @01:03AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @01:03AM (#546080)

        People are doing the same things today, that they did thousands of years ago,

        This is how, and why, Runaway is a conservative. Nothing ever changes for him. "Humans will never be able to go faster than the speed of a galloping horse, the internal pressures would rupture their guts, so railroads will never work. If god had meant for humans to fly, he would have given them wings! Man on the Moon? No wonder they think it was all faked. And Communism? Women will never be able to participate in politics. Health care for everyone? How will we afford that? Cheaper to let them die." Republicans.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:31PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:31PM (#546430)

          Sometimes change is for the worse. For example, the planet is worse off now that your useless ass exists in it.

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:03AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Saturday July 29 2017, @09:03AM (#546195) Journal

    It's up to you if you want to die. But others may wish to live on far beyond the current possible life span regardless of your wishes. Besides the present calculations is that people will live on average for 1000 years if natural causes would not make them die. After 1000 years fatal accidents tend to happen.

    Besides, anyone able to live 1000 years or further could easily take a trip to the nearest star which would take something like 160 years with current technology.