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Some things need to change

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Re: Some things need to change

#151

Post by [deleted] »

scott_s wrote: post #68
hk wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? You think that spitting on someone should be illegal !? I don't understand what you mean, anyway. You don't like his business, you don't like his writing, but you have all sorts of cares for him ? Er .. why? What would he have to do to make you finally relinquish your sympathy? In my book, a man is but the sum of his actions. I can't stand Arrington's actions, therefore I can't stand him, ergo I have no sympathy…

Spitting in someone's face and then standing your ground to accept the consequences takes balls. Running away is, almost by definition, cowardice.

[deleted]

Re: Some things need to change

#152

Post by simonk »

TweedHeads wrote: post #74

Using lies and manipulation to attack some companies you dislike (or get paid to do so) is not the same as reporting on startups, once you threaten others' way of life, yours will be threatened back too. Focus on startups as you say, and stop mudslinging with a hidden agenda.

Oh come on! Very few of his posts are negative and mostly those are when the company closes up shop. Paid to do so, you have any poof of that?

Re: Some things need to change

#153

Post by unalone »

geedee77 wrote: post #27

For a while now I've been wondering about the industry and the people in it, and this story just makes me question it all so much more. It seems that the majority of people who work in IT (or at least, those that contribute to the various sites) are acting like they are still in high school. You've got to be associated with this person or that site to be 'cool' and a 'guru' and if you're not you're nothing. It's gett…

Partly it's because this is an industry that acts like it's very geared towards youth. The emphasis is on the young millionaires: Zuckerberg comes to mind. (I'm 18 and applying to YCombinator, so I fall into this category too.)

The environment is much more geared towards the hotheaded youth. It's not that you have a few outliers that act immature that get kept in check: everybody is immature, and the outliers are the people who act mature. Beyond that: a lot of the people in this scene are the unpopular sorts. People like that often have a ramped up persecution complex: they feel like everybody's got to be against them. As a result, you get very ramped up fights over really stupid things.

I get this a lot whenever I take the time to read Gawker - I followed the big Jakob Lodwick fight when it happened. Every side was awful. Gawker took potshots at Lodwick to get hits, people online started threatening him because he was a public figure, Lodwick worked up, and in the end he denounced the masses for being "common", Gawker still takes every chance it can get to diss the guy, and people like Ted Dziuba go out of their way to denounce him as pathetic and meaningless. It's a shame, because Lodwick does incredible work and Dziuba doesn't, and so the one takes it out on the other.

(Then, of course, there's Connected Ventures, which makes a few good-but-overrated things and whose staff tries to act perpetually like they're frat kids. They're fun, but it doesn't help this attitude of people that it's okay to be over-the-top and conceited and loud about it.)

It's an attitude that I despise, and it hurts the community at large.

Re: Some things need to change

#154

Post by yters »

zupatol wrote: post #115
jsdalton wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have so much animosity toward him? You say he represents everything you hate about Web 2.0 greed culture, but is that a valid reason to delight in someone receiving a nice cream pie in the face? I think you need to stop and reconsider whether this is the appropriate attitude to take toward someone who really does nothing more than write articles and speak at conferences. I'd also argue that a culture of to…

At least in the french-speaking world, celebrities have gotten used to this. Pieing is the act of throwing a pie at an authority figure, as a means of protesting against a perceived flaw (arrogance, hubris) in the target's character. and also: Godard was very pleased at being pied. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieing

Ok, that's definitely something we need to inherit from the French. How awesome would it be to regularly see a pie fight break out during a movie opening? That would be totally sweet!

Re: Some things need to change

#155

Post by yters »

jsdalton wrote: post #60
hk wrote: post #15

Spitting in his face is going a bit far, but it's pretty difficult for me to feel sympathy for the guy. I struggle to think of a more dislikable, arrogant jerk. This belated plea for human-to-human sympathy falls on deaf ears, for me at least. In my group, Arrington symbolises everything we hate about the "Web 2.0" greed culture. He's relentlessly promoted himself as the gatekeeper to this bullshit world of easy VC m…

Why do you have so much animosity toward him? You say he represents everything you hate about Web 2.0 greed culture, but is that a valid reason to delight in someone receiving a nice cream pie in the face? I think you need to stop and reconsider whether this is the appropriate attitude to take toward someone who really does nothing more than write articles and speak at conferences. I'd also argue that a culture of to…

Presidents do nothing more than say and write things. Why are they so hated?

Re: Some things need to change

#156

Post by mattmaroon »

zhyder wrote: post #142
mattmaroon wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see nothing at all morally wrong with speculating over Steve's health (though it's often not very useful). Remember that every AAPL owner is a part owner of the company. It's not at all untoward for an investor in the company to want to know what health the CEO is in, especially one thought to be as influential as him, and Jobs has been opaque about it since the beginning. A lot of people have, collectively, over $…

Worrying about his health if you own stock in AAPL is understandable. But there was just something tabloid-like about _how_ people approached it; just didn't feel right.

How they approached it was due to his blatantly lying about it, in the rare instances in which he addressed it at all. He chose to make it tabloid-like. He could have ended it at any point by simply being upfront. Remember when John McCain had a team of Mayo Clinic doctors examine him and publicly announce the results? It was because he knew that if he were elected, his health was our business. People may have joked about his health, but there wasn't the tabloid-like obsession with digging up dirt.

Instead he treated AAPL owners largely with contempt (pretty much the way he treats everyone from the sound of it) by not speaking about it, or saying one day that he's well and a week later that he's not, while 10s of billions of dollars are on the line.

Re: Some things need to change

#157

Post by giles_bowkett »

I think this is awesome and terrible at the same time. Awesome because I wanted to do it myself, and you knew it was only just a matter of time. Terrible because even though Arrington deserved it, Kathy Sierra didn't. Attacking people because you disagree with them, that's a really awful trend.

For Arrington to be surprised that this happened, though, jesus. That's ridiculous. Go to my blog and google "Arrington." Got at least five links to him spitting in people's faces online. Probably many more than five. And that's not even going anywhere near the politics, power-playing, manipulation, or his claim that promoting his own companies means "journalism is evolving." He's a horrible human being.

I'm against the idea of randomly attacking bloggers, but if you had to pick a blogger to randomly attack, you couldn't find somebody who deserved it more. And if this incident shuts down TechCrunch, we should find the spitter and give him a medal for helping the tech community scrape that thing off our shoes.

Re: Some things need to change

#159

Post by RobGR »

xenophanes wrote: post #138
litewulf wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would the police do? Break his legs? (Honestly, it seems the kind of circumstance where I can't really think of anything the police should be able to do to anyone who seems dangerous or "suspicious", because both are very much judgement calls.)

OK I looked up "assault". He is blatantly guilty of assault, as far as I can tell, so why not just put him in jail? Assault: (Law) an act, criminal or tortious, that threatens physical harm to a person, whether or not actual harm is done

So suppose the cops arrest him. He is unlikely (statistically speaking) to be held without bail, so he's out in a day or two. Then you have a trial. Suppose you have people like me on the jury -- I know that morons threaten to kill each other all the time on the internet, in person, and on CB radio and via snail mail and every other means of communication man has invented. I would likely acquit unless you can present some serious evidence of actual intent, and owning a gun having a previous a felony would not cut it.

So now what ? Is the situation better or worse ? It better be LOT better, because society is collectively out of quite a bit of money by the time all that is said and done.

I don't think Arrington is necessarily over reacting to the threat, either. Without knowing the details it's impossible to tell, and even if you knew the details you might be uncertain. There is a very wide zone between something that will justify society's all-out response and what makes you feel creepy.

There is probably no way for society to make everyone feel warm and comfy about all their interactions with each other. Think about if we had a general policy of jailing people based on a definition of "threatens physical harm" that was that lose. Think back over every bad relationship you ever had . . . are you absolutely sure that some disasterous former manager or former employee could not have gotten you jailed ? Absolutely sure ?

Re: Some things need to change

#160

Post by xenophanes »

RobGR wrote: post #159
xenophanes wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK I looked up "assault". He is blatantly guilty of assault, as far as I can tell, so why not just put him in jail? Assault: (Law) an act, criminal or tortious, that threatens physical harm to a person, whether or not actual harm is done

So suppose the cops arrest him. He is unlikely (statistically speaking) to be held without bail, so he's out in a day or two. Then you have a trial. Suppose you have people like me on the jury -- I know that morons threaten to kill each other all the time on the internet, in person, and on CB radio and via snail mail and every other means of communication man has invented. I would likely acquit unless you can present…

Why can't you have a very brief trial where you explain the definition of assault and present the uncontroversial evidence of the assault, and that's that?

Not trying to argue. Just don't see why that wouldn't work. the jury should just be like "well, it's a crime, and he did it" instead of saying it's common so we'll ignore it.

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