Absolutely horrifying.
More so because there are actually people here in this thread defending the crazy person who's trying to destroy somebody's life because they don't like the company he works for.
More so because there are actually people here in this thread defending the crazy person who's trying to destroy somebody's life because they don't like the company he works for.
AFAIK, they haven't really hurt anybody (this time). They are just pressing the points that (they think will) hurt the most.
http://www.mediaite.com/online/read-the-8-biggest-tech-compa...
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what.html
http://www.zdnet.com/google-engineers-rage-at-nsa-7000022874...
http://blogs.computerworld.com/cybercrime-and-hacking/23090/...
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/google...
Seriously, just look up protest in a dictionary. It's an expression, a communication. It's a chance for people to respond. It's a visible, recordable effort, as opposed to an anecdote.
Whatever the overt message, and especially when the purported message is as confused and vaguely threatening as in this case, in the act of arranging that someone should awaken, to find a crowd surrounding his house and shouting imprecations, there cannot but be a subtextual implication which amounts to "And you'd better listen to us, or else!"
Of course, I'm sure that, finding yourself in the position poor Levandowski did, your first instinct would be to argue semantics with the mob! What more reasonable response, after all, could there possibly be? And what more reasonable creature, than a shouting mob, with which to carry on such a discussion?
Your suggestion that a subtext exists would be useful if there were a history of protestors at Google employee's houses. However, there is none beyond what you are imagining in your creative (how do you evidence your statement that they were shouting?) mind.
In fact, now that a peaceful demonstration has taken place outside a Google employee's house, a precedent has begun to form in which the subtext is that employees should NOT feel threatened by protestors. I would not have realized this myself had not you not mistakenly claimed its opposite, so thank you and have an up vote.
In particular, a dictionary concerns itself with what a given word is currently agreed upon to mean, and not with the history of the phenomenon that word might happen to denote; your apparent desire to constrain such historical consideration, to include only incidents in which a protest occurs at a Google employee's house, is quite neat, I suppose, in that it neatly sidesteps any concern over the implicit threat of violence which is part and parcel of any deployment of the tactic. But I don't find such circumscribed historiography particularly compelling.
Of course, they're also utterly ignorant of history, or they'd know what happens, in a revolution, to people who consider themselves on the "right side of history", but are found insufficiently so by those to whom all weapons are friends. Little Dantons, all of them! -- and I'd be perfectly sanguine about the sanguinary fate to which they'd unknowingly consign themselves, did it not take such enormities to slake the thirst of the mob; one of the Terror's distinguishing characteristics, after all, is that it is always so very hard to steer.
This sounds so familiar, where have I heard it before? Seems to have a lot in common with the anti-abortionists who bomb clinics and kill doctors . . .
Are you really defending this shit?
Plus, isn't it obvious that envy DOES have a lot to do with this?
To what or whom does "the trash" refer in your comment?
However, comments like the one you make here just strengthens their movement. "Trash" ? No one is trash! If you refer to criminality, know that good hearted and decent poor people are also adversely affected.
Please, do not call anyone 'trash'.
The implicit threat, made explicit.
No defense is possible for the truly evil and nonviolent behavior of that sinister protestor.
Morons are going to find things to protest. Some address real issues, others invent issues, or build them out of poor research.
It's generally a good thing to ignore the latter.
Everyone else is speculating on how the poor little "Googler"'s life is destroyed by a naive peaceful protest, derailing the issue with anti-left wing jokes, suggesting that "Googlers" carry weapons, and so on.
HN at its best: when its ideological toe is stepped on. popcorn
I am in no way a right winger I was coming at it form the same direction that those who fought in cable street did.
"An injury to one is an injury to all"
Would I feel threatened and oppressed if I was the target of that? Yes. I'd probably make sure I had weapons in the house.
My lunatic meter went off time and time again while reading their flier. I would not for a second trust that there's not at least one crazy guy that decides to take things one step too far in that group.
If you were someone that needed to go to work, and needed to drop your child somewhere on the way, and there was a large group of people outside your house with the stated intent of preventing you from doing so, you would not feel threatened? I mean sure they are peaceful while you are inside not attempting to leave, but when you try to oppose their goals by leaving, it raises the question of how dedicated they are to their goal, which I believe would make a rational person feel threatened.
If they had not made the point that the purpose of this was to restrict him from going about life then I would be much more willing to consider the view that he should not feel threatened.
You might want to talk to a few people outside of your group from different ethnicity / group.
Unless they have concrete proof that this specific guy have done something particularly bad (and they've not presented any), calling him out by name and with photos of his home is way over the line to begin with.
Not only is it creepy, it is deeply counterproductive and will only serve to alienate people that might otherwise be sympathetic.
What they describe as a "pompous two story palace with stone lions guarding the door" looks to me like a quite average suburban house. Yes, I get that there are people substantially worse off, but they're not getting any sympathy with crap like that.
Further, trying to dehumanise him with their descriptions of him as a "robot" and contrasting him with his child, and their use of words like "evil" ought to make everyone concerned.
This is not progressive. On the contrary, this is moronic petit bourgeois luddites staging ineffective and creepy demonstrations that will achieve nothing but play straight into the hands of their opponents.
It also shows that they fundamentally fail to understand the mechanisms they are fighting. Everyone on the other side will see what they are doing as perfectly reasonable. They are just "hacking the system" and following consequences. The moment they are described as "evil" and faced with personal demonstrations, these guys start creating enemies, when they could instead have searched for partners.
But these clowns use socialist terms while they clearly don't understand much of its basis. Marx, for example, was very clear in his agitation against the kind of moronic vilification demonstrated in this text: The typical capitalist, and those aiding him, according to Marx, is no more evil than the worker he oppresses - capitalist and worker alike for the most part are trapped in the same machine, and have little choice but to stick to their roles: A capitalist that stops exploiting labour will fail, and end up a labourer by necessity himself. Marx was not against the capitalist. He was not even against the capitalist system per se - on the contrary, he realised that for any chance of socialism to succeed, it would be _essential_ to bring about the economic development and automation required to be able to meet the needs of everyone.
In fact, socialism as an idea is a child of the industrial revolution more than anything: It arose out of the hope that the industrial revolution would bring about such wealth that poverty could finally be beaten, Marx held that the capitalist system would play out its role once production had reached such a height that poverty could be eradicated.
Socialism originated as an ideology deeply intertwined with a positive view of technology and automation as tools of liberation. To see these guys play modern day luddites and drag out socialism in the same breath just shows a staggering degree of lack of awareness of history. To see them target individuals rather than the system equally so.
I'm not a Marxist but I've been struggling to articulate why I believe this sort of protesting is counterproductive. For one thing, their complaints are not actionable-- they're co-opting a grab-bag of leftist, luddite terminology and the end result rounds down to a primal scream. I don't live in SF, but it seems to me that the horse is out of the barn: SF has changed irrevocably and it will never go back to what it was. I suspect they know this on some level.
A large subset of tech workers have libertarian leanings, to be sure, but there's a strong leftist/liberal bent, as well. More than a lot of other well-off folks, I'd expect tech workers to be allies. Regardless, though, they're/we're not going to consider ourselves evil just because someone says so. The incentives are simple and compelling: we get paid well for doing work we ostensibly enjoy. They want "techies" to go away because we're ruining everything but the only way to make that work at any scale is highly, highly questionable-- shit like violence and/or intimidation, in other words.
I'm sympathetic to the protesters' feeling of disenfranchisement, but it's increasingly difficult for me to remain sympathetic. The top tier tech companies can't undo the last few decades of Bay Area history. Gentrification is not a solved problem, but density seems to be one way to go. That involves compromise. My sense is that these folks feel entitled enough to claim ownership over SF such that I'd expect a rather cool response to compromise.
Anyway, thanks for speaking up.
IME, self-identified Marxists outside of countries run by Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships tend to view nominally "Marxist" Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships as having roughly the same relationship to Marxism as modern self-identified proponents of democracy outside of Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships have usually viewed nominally democratic Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist dictatorships like the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" of having to democracy.
On the other hand, look at the rest of the industrialized world. Almost every industrialized nation has socialized medicine, social insurance/welfare, etc. You're trying to characterize it as a binary when it's a lot more like capitalism in that there's a lot of latitude.
Marx and Engels weren't all that bad at prescription -- a substantial portion of the 10 key concrete policies for "advanced countries" in the Communist Manifesto have been widely and successfully adopted in the modern, developed, "capitalist" world.
Lenin's rewriting of Marx's program to a very different one, with notionally the same end state and, in many cases, similar near term policy changes to be applied in very different contexts, that was supposed to work in conditions which had neither the specific problems Marx's program was designed to address nor the foundations from which Marx's program was designed to address them, hasn't worked out very well, but that's a different issue.