I'm a movie fan, but I am a software guy. Spike Lee is a movie guy and a basketball fan. I know what he thinks about movies and basketball from Twitter, which happens to be the kind of software I make. So I make software that guys like Lee use, and I love movies that guys like Lee make. That's something we have in common.

As a software guy I encourage people to use software. I'm never going to judge a piece of software without using it. There may be software I don't like but not software I don't like that I haven't used.

That's why I wish Spike Lee would go watch Tarantino's movie, Django Unchained. Yes, they say "nigger" a lot. I find myself using the word in my inner conversation a lot after watching the movie (in my head it's Samuel L Jackson's Django character saying it). I don't dare say it out loud, cause I'm white, I guess. I think that kind of sucks, btw. Why can Patti Smith whose music I love sing a song with nigger in the title, but it's not cool for Tarantino or me to use the word? I don't get it.

I honestly don't understand what the problem is. I'd like to understand. Maybe it's that Spike Lee would like to do a movie about slavery but can't get it funded? Surely he doesn't think no movies about slavery should be made? I can't get behind that idea. I think a lot of the BS in this country going on around the Tea Party and all the gun zealotry is all part of the legacy of slavery. We're still living in the country that was founded on slavery. Even right here in New York. (A lot of people don't know that the slave trade came through NYC.)

You know Mississippi is still a shit state. Maybe if more people see the movie they'll understand why it's such shit. It's because their ancestors treated human beings as property. It wasn't that they used a disrespectful word. It was something much worse.

Tarantino is an artist who communicates with audacity, but also with a wink. I saw Inglorious Basterds and laughed at the idea of a bunch of Jewish vigilantes in the American Army in World War II in Nazi Germany. I esp liked that Hitler liked Tarantino movies. And you know what -- I'm Jewish, and while I don't want to try to compare the pain my people feel around those events to the feelings of blacks have around slavery, there is something to be said for looking at these events with more of our senses, from different points of view, and thinking about them in ways different from the ways our ancestors taught us to think about them.

I just don't support the idea of not listening to the artist because -- because what? I don't even understand what the issue is.