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.
“Of human beings, none are good but all are sacred.”
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.
Younger folks don’t remember that world. I wonder who of their heroes today will be the monsters of tomorrow.
That's why binary is a good thing.
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”.
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[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
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.
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.
I'm sure they weren't pure evil either but sometimes people deserve the label.
...But at least he wasn't Larry Ellison.
The category being human.
> 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?".
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.