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It's a habit of the internet diaspora to label a person either good or bad; binary, with no wiggle room to model the complexity of psychology. Steve, like any
by sidcool 4y ago
It's a habit of the internet diaspora to label a person either good or bad; binary, with no wiggle room to model the complexity of psychology.
Steve, like any other human, is a shade of grey. He did some awful things and some great ones. That's that. It neither makes him a monster nor a saint. It makes him a... Human.
- dbxkcichhdfufu 4y agoHitler, mao and stalin can all go jump as far as I'm concerned. I'm sure they weren't pure evil either but sometimes people deserve the label.
- tastemykungfu 4y ago[flagged]
- YesWeWill 4y agoLinks? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I hope you're not going to link Russian fascist propaganda, though.
- sidcool 4y agoThose are extreme exceptions. Steve Jobs and the others you mentioned are not even in close leagues. That was my point, we try to judge everyone with the same yardstick and divide them in strict binary buckets. By that logic, Steve Jobs would either belong to same category as either Hitler or Gandhi.
- dbxkcichhdfufu 4y agoAre they exceptions? I'm sure they had normal families and lives prior to their murderous transitions. My point is be careful how much you choose to let people get away with a "they're just human" pass. Some people deserve the labels. For anyone that worked with Steve I'm willing to bet they think he deserves the arsehole label they give him.
- cdelsolar 4y agoGandhi was a horrible racist.
- teddyh 4y agoSince they’re long dead, little is lost by labeling them evil. But the closer they are to our present time, the more we must sacrifice by declaring someone an anathema. Worst of all is living people, of course.
- LewisVerstappen 4y agoIn what universe is Steve Jobs in the same category as dictators who killed tens of millions of people?
- neals 4y agosomething something modern slavery
- jacooper 4y agoCursed user name lol
- LewisVerstappen 4y agoBetter than TotoHorner
- AshamedCaptain 4y agoIn NO way anyone is making a comparison of Steve Jobs to a dictator. The original post was claiming: > It's a habit of the internet diaspora to label a person either good or bad > Steve, like any other human, is a shade of grey. i.e. the completely correct but also completely useless claim that there is no person who is absolutely evil or absolutely good . What the analogy is trying to do here is to say "OK, so you don't think Hitler is absolutely evil?", not "OK, so you don't think Steve Jobs is Hitler?".
- JasserInicide 4y agoIn a universe with too many terminally online doomscrollers who make politics their personality
- jasonlotito 4y agoFrom the grandparent comment, "Steve, like any other human, is a shade of grey." The category being human.
- DonHopkins 4y agoAdmittedly one of the most horrible things about Steve Jobs was that he was good friends with Larry Ellison. ...But at least he wasn't Larry Ellison.
- markdown 4y ago
- bloppe 4y agoI'm sure I have a lower opinion of him than most but come on this is just slander
- markdown 4y agoSlander? It's factual that he used his money to get to the front of the line for an organ donation. It's possible someone in Tennessee died because a foreigner took the liver he deserved. > Jobs couldn't pay for an organ. Nor could he pay to cut the queue. But what someone with Jobs' resources could do, according to liver transplant surgeons and ethicists, is to use money and mobility to improve the odds either by going to an area of the country where there are more organ donors, or by signing up at multiple transplant centers. > "It's not for anybody but the rich. It's called multiple-listing, a practice some would say is unethical," said Arthur Caplan, co-chair of the United Nations Task Force on organ trafficking and chair of the department of medical ethics at University of Pennsylvania. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Economy/story?id=7902416&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Economy/story?id=7902416&page=...
- iso1631 4y agoThe American healthcare system, and capitalism in general, tells us that richer people have more right to healthcare than poorer people. Even when supply is fixed (say land), we distribute it based on the ability and willingness of someone to pay, not on need. Why should organ transplants be any different?
- ekianjo 4y ago> Why should organ transplants be any different? the organ collection does not follow any capitalist principle. You can't sell your own organs even if you wanted to. So thats a pretty bad point to make.
- 4y ago
- frederikvs 4y agoI doubt this is specific to the internet. Seems to me that people have always had a tendency to separate everyone else into "good people" and "bad people".
- pizza234 4y ago> Steve, like any other human, is a shade of grey. He did some awful things and some great ones. That's that. It neither makes him a monster nor a saint. It makes him a... Human. This statement is a truism; it's valid for every person, and it doesn't contain any information. Based on the information publicly available, my assessment is that he had a narcissistic personality disorder. People with such illness are certainly not in the ballpark of mass murders, but they're definitely very damaging to other people, and they are generally labelled as "bad people". What saves Steve Jobs in the eyes of the public is that he had, without any doubt, exceptional talents. Since he's dead (and he hasn't been diagnosed by a specialist), there will never be certainty, however.
- xani_ 4y agoIt might be truism for you but it evidently isn't for many people that defend their saints and condemn their devils.
- spoonjim 4y agoAnd honestly does it even really matter. So he neglected his kids. Big fuckin' deal, I'm sure they'll survive.
- dspillett 4y ago> Steve, like any other human, is a shade of grey. Not the lightest of shades though, to many people? I'm sure there is good in Alex Jones. It is very well buried if so, but it probably does exist. I still feel justified in never wanting to interact with him and wishing the rest of the world didn't have to either. While we shouldn't be completely dogmatic and only consider someone's bad points¹, and I wouldn't say that Jobs was at all actively evil², the fact that someone isn't the blackest-of-black pantomime evil, or the gaudiest-of-gaudy moustache-twirling pantomime evil, doesn't mean we can't discuss their bad points. It might actually help other arseholes who don't realise that they are being a problem, if they see the discussion and think “hang on, I do that, maybe I'm upsetting people too, perhaps I should try a different tack”. ---- [1] or conversely only their good points: Churchill was undoubtably what we needed as a prime minister during and in the run up to war, a good family man by most accounts, supported some good social reforms, ete., but he also had some questionable views on race (less so by the standards of the time than now, but still), supported the use of chemical weapons, and so forth, [2] just a bit of an arsehole by many accounts, and presided over a company that at the time³ benefited from what we now call modern slavery [3] and to this day doesn't have a clean record on that count
- quitit 4y agoHating Steve Jobs fits tidily in the Anti-Apple rhetoric: which started precisely when they were pulled into the smartphone wars. When I look at the criticisms of Steve Jobs or Apple, I look at it in context of the life of people and other businesses, and it takes a lot of double standards to make the argument land one way “he’s satan” or the other “he’s god’s gift”. It's why when I hear Steve Jobs/Apple is evil, I hold it with the same credibility as people that say Steve Jobs/Apple are the greatest. I.E. With no credibility whatsoever.
- elliekelly 4y agoThis is really ridiculous. I am definitely someone who would fall into the category of “zealous Apple fan” but Steve Jobs was clearly an asshole of the highest order. Read the Walter Isaacson biography or his daughter’s memoir, Small Fry. Lisa Brennan Jobs has no reason to peddle “anti-Apple rhetoric”. She has a vested interest in the opposite! But her book tells her story about growing up with a massive asshole for a father.
- avg_dev 4y agoI read a quote recently that I keep coming back to. “Of human beings, none are good but all are sacred.”
- xtiansimon 4y agoDid you read the same tweet I did in the op?
- ambientenv 4y agoI believe this is mostly true. When we - the broad-brush, general "we" - try so hard to vilify others, I find myself questioning the motives for doing so and it often appears to be self-serving. Looking carefully at the crises unfolding in our world, one can see that we - humans - are not the grand, omnipotent domain -rulers we believe we are. I think the bigger question for Mr Jobs and the rest of us is, what do we truly value and how do we honour and stay true to those values?
- daniel-cussen 4y agoThere's no gray in chess. It's all blackwhite.
- revskill 4y agoThe issue with not binary, is you never know which's good, which's bad. That's why binary is a good thing.
- nirui 4y agoAs I see it, people put label on things/others as a form of self-protection. In layman's logic, someone who's already committed something bad in the past are likely to commit it again. Based on that logic, it's not completely unreasonable to use a critical point of someone's history to define that individual. Of course it might be unfair, but the cost of error testing can be high, and your empathy might be exploited. Plus, if someone indeed did something wrong in their past, maybe they're the one who should put in the effort to redeem themselves. That said, while I think it's not fair to judge someone based on few decisions they've made, I also don't blame labelers when they have good reasons.
- hindsightbias 4y agoA couple decades back, Jobs was the hero and Gates was the monster. There is no hyperbole in that statement. Younger folks don’t remember that world. I wonder who of their heroes today will be the monsters of tomorrow.
- hnfong 4y agoI shudder to think that Zuckerberg could be the hero of tomorrow :D