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.
That article was insane. How dare he try to get actual houses built so people can live there! And those crazy tech people with their law and order, and the jobs they create in the service industry! We cannot tolerate that!
Let's pretend Google isn't causing very real problems for the poor and lower middle class in the Bay area. Let's also pretend that we can blame an inorganic "corporation", but never the individuals who design it, steer it, and totally embody it.
The point of the protest isn't to destroy a person's life, the point of the protest is to (1) make Google's employees reluctant to continue being Google's employees and as a result (2) make Google rethink their official and unofficial policies, in order to (3) make the world a better place.
AFAIK, they haven't really hurt anybody (this time). They are just pressing the points that (they think will) hurt the most.
No one deserves to feel unsafe, especially in their own home. Just because they haven't literally harmed his person doesn't mean that they're acting morally.
That's not a particularly good argument, because one of the main point of people protesting the NSA surveillance (which Google is a part of) is that it makes them feel unsafe. It's all a matter of perspective.
I'm not sure how I feel about the protest in general, but I was reacting to the idea that they "haven't hurt anyone". As far as my system of morals is concerned, making someone feel unsafe is still hurting them.
If one takes "kind of" to mean "not," then yes. Otherwise, no, the point of protest is not to threaten anything or anyone, including revolution.
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.
Your argument suggests a certain naïveté, or else a desire to claim there is no subtext whatsoever in organizing a mob to serve as the medium of the "communication" to which you refer.
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?
My argument parrots the dictionary. Yours smuggles in all kinds of baggage, such using a weak definition of the word "mob" while implying the strongest and saying "surrounding" when they were likely only in front of.
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.
You talk of parroting the dictionary as though that were desirable. While a dictionary is a good and useful thing, there is much of value which is not to be found in such a book.
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. The essence of the argument is whether or not threatening to maim and murder as necessary, to produce whatever result the protesters hold dear, is a morally sound tactic.
They haven't really hurt anybody physically this time would be a more accurate way to put it. Its hard to imagine that he and his family aren't going to be up late nights worrying about what comes next. I'm truly stunned to see folks on hn defending this behavior.
I wish I were. They agree with the protesters, don't you see? And, because they feel themselves to be on the "right side of history", whatever that means, they are utterly innocent of fear that they should ever themselves awaken to find a shouting mob on their doorstep.
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.
They agree with the protesters, don't you see? And, because they feel themselves to be on the "right side of history", whatever that means,
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 . . .
I really can't believe people are trying to justify bullying like this. The points they're trying to smear him on are outlandish like saying he's personally responsible for NSA surveillance, or because he made an app for construction blueprints he's personnally kicking people out of their homes?
You'd have to be completely insane to believe #3 is in any way related to #1 and #2. I personally feel the world is a much better place (certainly Oakland is) with highly skilled employees flushing out the trash.
The people taken in by this movement are worse then insane, and they are worse than morons. They are articulate enough to be dangerous.
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.
Right. It is important to cast this protestor out rather than try to understand their perspective. Thats the kind of response that has no consequences.
No defense is possible for the truly evil and nonviolent behavior of that sinister protestor.
Wait, what? I'm not sure which levels of sarcasm you are applying to which parts of your post. Do you think there are real negative consequences to casting out this moron?
Morons are going to find things to protest. Some address real issues, others invent issues, or build them out of poor research.
No, there aren't "people"; there is "a person", me. Just one person.
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
Why shouldn't googlers carry weapons? Everyone has a right to self-defense, and certain recent actions at least hint that googlers may be at an increased risk of being attacked. Choosing to carry a weapon is just being prudent.
That kind of egalitarian viewpoint is alien to these protesters. They are entitled to attack this individual because he is powerful and wrong, and they are powerless and right. You're thinking "no punching" and they're thinking "punch up, not down."
A group posts pictures of your house, your name, and detailed descriptions that attempt to dehumanise you and paint you as some supervillain.
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.
They state that they chose to block his personal commute not merely protest at his residence. That means they chose to attempt to prevent him from leaving (since once he left he would be out of their control and may well go to work).
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.
So if I hang out in your front lawn and prevent you from leaving your house (in a non-violent manner) with a bunch of my friends, does that make me non-threatening and non-oppressive?
I'm a marxist - certainly not aligned with any right wing libertarians. But right from the headline that article disgusts me.
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 appreciate the perspective of a person who identifies as Marxist.
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.
My wife is from Cuba, I've witnessed first hand what "applied" marxism creates, misery and strife. Let alone places like North Korea etc.. Honest question, how do you cope with the reality vs the ideal?
> My wife is from Cuba, I've witnessed first hand what "applied" marxism creates, misery and strife. Let alone places like North Korea etc.. Honest question, how do you cope with the reality vs the ideal?
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.
Wait, do you actually think DPRK is actually communist? It reads far more like an autocracy to me.
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.
A friend of mine calls this "The Horror". It is in the very application of Marxism that the whole thing falls to pieces. I think Marx was great at analysis, however he didn't understand work or the layers of design and engineering that lies behind the means of production. Also, he was a theorist whose ideas got applied while he was still tinkering with them and pretty much all of his ideas of how to solve the problems he had identified were pretty terrible. The economic questions he posed however, have still not been satisfactorily answered.
> I've heard Marx described as having been great at diagnosis, but terrible at prescription.
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.
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.