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Comment by edw | Hacker News Reader

You've reminded me of an observation I made recently about Star Wars: the behavior of Han Solo (pre-Greedo-shoots-first-bs) and Darth Vader aren't that different. It's the context that matters. If you're small and scrappy, antisocial behavior makes you a charming scoundrel. If you're big, the same behavior makes you evil.

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But the difference is that Han came around at the end of A New Hope, joined the Rebellion, and saved Luke’s ass, which lead to the Death Star’s destruction. This proved he wasn’t a complete scoundrel and had good within him.

Uber’s corporate culture was ugly and toxic from the start. And it never got better or “came around” to a good cause. A better analogy would be Anakin moving from small-time massacres of Sand People to blowing up planets as Vader. The scale changed, but it was still evil all along.

I think it’s misleading to defend Travis as some misunderstood scoundrel whose enabling of sexual harassment didn’t “scale”. He’s just a shitty person who initially had less power to be shitty.

Not to mention the stories of early stage Uber engaging in shady tactics like hailing and cancelling Lyft rides as a manual DDOS, or ripping mustaches off parked Lyft cars.

The Old Republic was OK with slavery and left Anakin’s mother to die. Any one of us would have done the same in his place.

Unfortunately many people lose close family members, even parents, in tragic, horrible, unfair circumstances that never see justice all the time. Most of them - I would wager almost absolutely all of them - do not commit mass murder afterwards. I vehemently disagree with your opinion about what I would have done in his place and register my unease with how you raise it as an obvious general norm.

Vader moved fast and broke things sure, but he succeeded in disrupting the Old Republic. That’s why he’s the real hero of Star Wars, and a role model for the tech community in general.

Not sure if you’re joking, but I think “moving fast and breaking things” is a bit of an understatement. I mean Vader enabled a heartless dictator to take over the galaxy and personally saw to it that a whole planet of billions of people blew up. Doubtless in the years after Order 66 Vader was responsible for millions of other deaths. I mean he personally strangled Captain Antilles for god’s sake.

The Old Republic was flawed, but disruption in this manner was clearly a step towards a new, shittier status quo. Disrupting something and making it worse doesn’t make him a hero.

Not sure if you’re joking

Disrupting something and making it worse doesn’t make him a hero.

Put it this way: I am posting this on a thread about Uber ;-)

The Death Star's destruction also killed thousands and thousands of soldiers, bureaucrats, and construction workers. A lot of who is good/bad in Star Wars is perspective. The Jedi can also be seen as religious extremists that kidnap children to indoctrinate in their ways, to lead in terrorist missions that help impose their view on an entire galaxy. Darth Vader is an emperor protecting his empire from a growing threat.

The moral is, multiple things can be true.

By creating a weapon of mass destruction that destroys whole planets? I think the scale of that endeavor and the resulting destruction of Alderaan is justification enough for destroying the Death Star. But destroying Alderaan itself? I don't see any justification for that in the vein of him protecting his empire. They certainly didn't seem to pose a threat big enough for the planet to be destroyed.

When one side escalates to that point, and the other side takes away their weapon of escalation, it's false equivalency to try to equate the two.

Han shooting first is totally legitimate. Greedo is an organized crime thug who is going to take Han to an incredibly painful and certain death. It's self-defense even if he shot first.

“If you're small and scrappy, antisocial behavior makes you a charming scoundrel. If you're big, the same behavior makes you evil.”

This is with regards to businesses only, though. With people, it’s flipped. Poor? Bad behavior is vilified. Rich? Bad behavior is justified.

(Just an observation of a weird social phenomenon, without agenda).

You're completely ignoring the most important data. Han Solo and Darth Vader are not the same person. Maybe one is just more likable than the other?

You can have two different comedians tell identical jokes, word for word, and only one of them will be funny. Jim Jefferies does an entire bit about a journalist who reviews his jokes harshly after transcribing them to text. His conclusion is (paraphrasing) "my entire job is to say offensive things while still being likable."

...because it is different? If you're a small fry, you hurt fewer people, and any claims that it's a survival necessity are at least plausible. It's also quite likely that people you hurt are actually worse than you, as is possible with Greedo.

If you do the same as the director of FBI, _excuse me_, Lord of the Sith, things are quite different.

Edit: but also, Uber and Kalanick were never small fries. So that's where it breaks down.

It was still ugly when Uber was small.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain

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