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VC Likens Google Bus Backlash To Nazi Rampage
theodp writes "Valleywag reports on legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tom Perkins' WSJ op-ed on class tensions, in which the KPCB founder and former HP and News Corp. board member likens criticism of the techno-affluent and their transformation of San Francisco to one of the most horrific events in Western history. 'I would call attention to the parallels of Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich,"' Perkins writes. 'There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these "techno geeks" can pay...This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent 'progressive' radicalism unthinkable now?"'"
People like that will use any "argument" to justify what they are doing, no matter how remote or unrelated. They will not care whether they cheapen other things that have happened. The only goal is to pull the discussion on an emotional level, because they know the facts are not on their side...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Maybe someone should have told him about Godwin's law.
By invoking a Nazi comparison, he already lost.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Theres a big difference between the Nazis arguments on the Jews and the OWS argument on the 1%.
The OWS believe the ultra rich are ultra rich because they are ultra rich
The nazis thought the jews where ultra rich because the nazis where racist fanatics.
Kind of a difference.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The comparison is inappropriate.
At the same time, I do understand the disgust with the neo-luddites of SF and their alarming witch hunt - it is a mob.
Godwin's Law states: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1" It doesn't mean you automatically lose a debate, it just means that Hitler/Nazis will inevitably get dragged into the conversation.
I have lived in Brazil for quite some years now. Here the gap between rich and everyone else (there is no middle class here so to speak) is to such an extent that if you have money you are a target. This means that you must live in a gated community in constant fear that you or your kids might be kidnapped. You need to own a cheapo car so you won't stand out too much when driving around. Of course you will have a nice car too, but this is only for weekends or maybe travel to places where other rich people go. In the end it is easy to become a prisoner of that wealth that is supposed to make you more free. I would prefer to live middle class in a 1st world country than rich in Brazil. The sad thing is that the erosion of the middle class in the 1st world countries means that they soon might resemble Brazil, and this is not good, even if you are rich.
Somehow I think that actual holocaust survivors would be insulted by this comparison. Also I think the yahoo has lost all sense of perspective and proportion.
I think what angers everyone else is that "the rich" are playing by a different set of rules. Fix that and you'll fix most everything else.
C|N>K
First of all, I'm sure Google/Apple/etc. get to pull some of the cream of the crop, but these guys still don't make the kind of money the Wall St. Assholes make - they are hardly One-percenters.
The dude is truly out of touch with the rest of society.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
1. The Holocaust
I also have a list of things that are like slavery if anyone is interested.
I do agree that the "99% versus the 1%" movement in American politics has some striking historical parallels. However, I don't think that Nazi Germany is the best comparison. A more appropriate historical equivalent would be the Bolshevik/Communist movement that culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshevik_Revolution).
The contemporary rhetoric from the left wing of America politics: i.e. "the 1%", "make the rich pay their fair share", etc... Is nearly word-for-word the same rhetoric heard on the streets of Russia, adjusted for a century's worth of elapsed history, urging the "proletariat", the working people to rally against the "bourgeoisie", i.e. the rich, and the "kulaks", the ultra-rich. Led by the Bolshevik movement, it culminated in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The word "Bolshevik" is directly translated as "ones belong to the majority". In other words, "the 99%". All the great unwashed I saw on the boob tube at various "Occupy " events, in the last couple of years, are the sons and daughters of the Bolsheviks a century ago. Whether they realize it, or not.
There, fixed that for ya.
People like that will use any "argument" to justify what they are doing, no matter how illogical. They will not care whether theyworked for what they have. The only goal is to pull everyone down to their level, because they know they are too lazy too succeed on their own.
Are you talking about the Op-Ed author or the protestors?
Everyone works hard. This myth that the top of the socio-economic pyramid is there because they worked harder than everyone else and that the poor just sit around and do nothing is just complete and utter non-sense. Well, maybe not. There are the folks who inherited their money and just collect rents and dividends and hang out on their yachts.
I work very hard, but could I ever enter the World of this VC?
No. Because I do not know the right people to get there.
I have no doubt that among the protestors there are very hard working smart people that could do a better job than this guy can - any day. But they don't have the contacts and may even be considered someone who is the "wrong sort" and won't "fit in" to their "corporate culture".
Perkins is very smart - I have no doubt - and lucky for him that he had parents who gave him great genes and the nurturing to bring out his god given talents.
But look how he was at the right place at the right time to ride on the coat tails of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard at the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He was lucky enough to get in at the start of the "gold rush".
No sir. This guy had some wonderful opportunities given to him and like most successful people, delude themselves into thinking it was 100% their hard work.
Here's a shocking stat I came across just yesterday: the richest 85 PEOPLE have as much wealth as the bottom HALF the world population. That's 85 == 3.5 BILLION. citation[PDF warning]
Almost HALF of the world's wealth is owned by one percent of the population.
In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.
Unfortunately, I have somewhere to be, or I'd be writing a much longer epistle.
Taking this a bit personally, are we?
For one, the protestors are just going after an easy target - the employees of the companies that were using the public bus stops as their own private stops. If those protestors could, I'm sure they'd rather go after Perkins and his buddies.
These protests are just a symptom of the anger the lower classes at the fact their real incomes and standard of living is declining while being told that they're too stupid to work in the well paying fields while people like the op-ed author are actively lobbying to bring in people overseas that are really no better than they are. (Please, I''ve personally had to train H1-Bs on what a pointer was and what memory locations are. Don't give me this BS that they are smarter or better trained than we are.)
We have an upper class that is trying to turn our education system into a jobs training program for their exploitation. Our education system is for having an educated electorate and not about creating worker drones. Our kids should be learning reading, writing, math, science:chem,phys, biology, critical thinking skills - NOT how to be a code monkey; which is all high school level CS classes teach.
In short, these corrupt people are trying to force THEIR training expenses onto the public while PROFITING off of the potential results.
We DO NOT need more programmer we NEED more people who can think and communicate. And with this World getting more and more integrated, our kids need to learn foreign languages MUCH more than a computer language that will go out of style in a few years.
Today's capitalists are so all-consumed with greed that it's hard to imagine somebody like Henry Ford actually raising wages to his workers could buy mor stuff. Mister Super-Genius Tom Perkins probably can't even imagine an act like that, or imagine reducing the national workweek to 36 hours to force employers to broaden income distribution, which is really how the Great Depression was fixed (48-hour workweek reduced to 40).
Cry me a river when the government takes your obscene wealth away, Tom.
Oh! Oh! Is it raising taxes a few percent?
You should read your history.
If you think that having "Socialist" in the name makes a party socialistic, you probably also believe that the German Democratic Republic was democratic, right?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That is a gross and inaccurate simplification. Read a bit of history yourself, maybe? The Nazis were definitely not socialists in the traditional sense. That you try to deduce from the name of the party what its nature is shows that you really, really have no clue how these things works or what happened back then.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
2. Joseph Stalin's mass collectivization
3. Other policies of Stalin
When you train and educate for current technology and current needs of business, they will be unqualified when things change.
Companies' needs are for the short term. Technology, business and the markets change very quickly and if we train people to be one trick ponies they will have to be retrained again anyway.
And we're not talking about ancient Babylonian or Greek here - we're talking about reading, writing, math, basic science and critical thinking here - as well as civics; which I think has been completely forgotten by everyone. Those are basic things and more important than the programming language du jour; which after going out of style, those people will be unemployable - even if they do retrain inanother language du jour - because they have no on the job experience and the companies will just go and hire some CHEAP new grads who were trained in the language/tech du jour.. The system is gamed to screw the people and enrich the rich even more.
If a company needs a worker they SHOULD train that person to do the job that THEY need. TO demand that my taxes go to pay for vocational training for some high tech company that off shores their profit so that they don't have to pay taxes is a complete ripp-off.
These companies want it all their way: the public pays for their worker training while they keep all the profits and pay little or no taxes.
Google and the rest of Silicon Valley is actually harming our country. They are importing poor people to work for less, not paying taxes, ripping off the system, and all the while keeping the money for themselves.
And this is not similar to Kristallnacht exactly how?
That wasn't said because you originally asked -
I fail to see how this would be a better comparison, would you be so kind to enlighten me?
- when the GGGP mentioned that the French revolution was a better comparison.
See, the Jews were just that - scapegoats - and did nothing to deserve the Holocaust. The French aristocracy, OTOH, were actively harming and exploiting the peasants. In the case of the French aristocrats, they were in fact (mostly) guilty of harming the lower classes. Which is what the upper 1%érs are doing to us by lying about American's lack of skills and lack of intelligence to justify their importing of workers from very poor countries to exploit the wage differential and to put downward pressure on local wages.
The Nazi's were hardcore socialists that very much believed is socialistic ideals. The Nazi's were very zealous about their socialism and enforcing it. They used everything from price and wage controls to verdant support for trains for the masses. Hitler was an adamant anti-capitalist and used this to support his genocide of the jews. Labor unions were replaced by government controlled unions and shops and other business were routinely seized by the state.
You can read some translated propaganda here where the Nazi's explained why they embraced socialism. In their own words:
The Soviets took them seriously enough to form a treaty with the Nazi's in the time leading up to WW2 - something they weren't in the habit of doing with other nations. Industry was effectively owned by the government (even when in name someone else held the title) and German industrial companies were seized as government assets for repatriation at the end of the war.
By way of example Hitler saw the need for a cheap car for the masses and ordered Ferdinand Porsche to design the original beetle to his specifications (Hitlers original sketch is a Google search away). The result was the founding of the Volkswagen (people's car) for the express purpose of building an affordable car for the masses. At the end of the war the English got that bit and almost put Volkswagen out to pasture, leaving it be only because they thought the company was worthless.
http://jerryfisher.hubpages.co...
Strip away all the genocide and war crimes and your left with very socialist ideals.
You seem to have eaten the propaganda wholesale. Yes, they were opposed to capitalism, but for entirely different reasons: They basically wanted the whole population to be one kind of unified army, and capitalism is chaos. Calling this "socialism" was just good for their propaganda efforts.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.