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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.
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.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 28 2017, @04:52PM (6 children)
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.
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(Score: 4, Funny) by Grishnakh on Friday July 28 2017, @06:46PM (2 children)
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
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
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)
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)
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
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.