File this Business Insider story under: We do not make this shit up
Over the weekend, billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins caused controversy when he said that the way activists and progressives in San Francisco are starting to treat the super rich reminds him of how the Nazis treated the Jews.
Here's Perkins of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers fame (high-tech venture capitalists)—
Regarding your editorial "Censors on Campus" (Jan. 18): Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its "one percent," namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the "rich."
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. 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. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a "snob" despite the millions she has spent on our city's homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.
This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?
The Business Insider tells us—
His comments were met with near-universal scorn.
Well, that's good. I mean the scorn part. But what about near-universal?
Famed venture capitalist Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson thought Perkins had a point.
On Tom Perkins, he is a brilliant man, and he is identifying schadenfreude, something that continues to be a thorn in humanity’s side.
The bitter taste of envy brings us all down. I like to celebrate the wealth and success of great heroes like Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Larry Ellison. I think it makes us all better to strive to be better and brighter...
Schadenfreude? Does Draper even know what that German word means?
a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people
I can't figure out what he means ... oh, wait! ... I think he means that "progressives" are taking pleasure in whatever discomfiture the demonized rich are feeling from their disdain. Oh, my!
And what about that bitter taste of envy?
Did you detect any envy in my story Silicon Valley — Where The Assholes Are?
No, you did not. That story was about assholes. I do not want to be an asshole. Assholes are, for lack of a better term, assholes. Therefore, I do not envy assholes.
Unfortunately, and despite obvious ways to identify them, humans living in what I call Flatland (which is nearly all of them) are entirely confused about who is an asshole and who is not.
You might consider using this general rule of thumb concerning members of our species Homo sapiens—
The more socially or monetarily successful a human is, the more likely it is that the person in question is a total asshole.
I hope this point is entirely clear. That's just the nature of the deal. That's the Human Condition. A successful human is a contradiction in terms in so far as Nature's human experiment is a failure as far as I can see.
Sorry.
And it is stories like the ones I've quoted today that confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt (as if there were any doubt) that some of the Biggest Assholes on the Planet live in Silicon Valley.
The only good thing about Perkins' and Draper's statements is that they are sufficiently, nay surprisingly compos mentis to sense what's coming.
Posted by: Oliver | 01/27/2014 at 06:53 PM