Anyone reading today’s headlines might be forgiven for thinking Gandhi had died … again.
But no, it wasn’t Gandhi, nor indeed anyone of even the slightest nobility. It was a patent extortionist with an apparent objection to altruism, called Steve Jobs. Even El Presidente fawned over this selfish racketeer, like he was the new messiah, or something:
‘Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it,’ the statement gushed.
Sorry, but I find that offensive.
According to the CIA World Factbook, 160,521 people die every day. Steve Jobs was just one, and from what I can see he must have been very, very far from the best of them.
I bet very few of the other 160,520 people who died that day ever made sinister threats to ‘go after’ an altruistic software project like Theora, or ran around suing everyone for making ‘rounded rectangles’ and ‘green phone icons’.
I bet they also donated a helluva lot more to charity than Jobs too, given that he apparently had some kind of objection to it, which is sort of like having an objection to love and compassion.
Or how about the time Jobs bribed the police to act like they were his private security agency, to kick down the front door to a journalist’s home, seize his property and interrogate him like a criminal, just because of some crap iGadget accidentally lost by an Apple employee, after that journalist had already voluntarily contacted Apple and returned it to them?
Or how about the daughter Jobs abandoned, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and her mother, Chris-Ann Brennan, whom he also abandoned and left to bring up their daughter on welfare, and lied in court about being ‘sterile’ in the process?
It wasn’t exactly the first time Jobs had lied and cheated others out of their entitlements though: a couple of years earlier he cheated his supposed ‘friend’ and Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, out of $2,150, by lying about how much they’d been paid by Atari.
Then there was the time Jobs (in league with his pal Larry Ellison, another vicious tyrant) sent a nastygram to Michael Murdock (a Macintosh Systems engineer at Pixar, who applied for the position of CEO at Apple), just Two days before Christmas, after falsely leading him to believe he’d won the position.
‘Please do not come to Apple. You will be asked to leave, and if you don’t, you will be arrested.’ ~ Steve Jobs to the job applicant he lied to, two days before Christmas.
Yeah, and a Merry Christmas to you too, you evil bastard. May you burn in Hell.
So given the sort of monster Steve Jobs was, witnessing the spectacle of everyone from Joe Blogs to El Presidente gushing over him, like a bunch of schoolgirls at a rock concert, is absolutely sickening.
These sycophantic ‘tributes’ are an insult to every honest, decent, compassionate and benevolent person who ever lived, yet died in obscurity. Where is El Presidente’s scrawl on their epitaphs? Surely they were far more worthy than some unconscionable miser like Ebenezer Jobs. Sadly though, it seems money trumps morals, in our money-worshipping society.
As for being a ‘visionary’ … the only ‘vision’ Jobs ever had was the one he nicked from Xerox PARC. From that point forward he made a career out of shamelessly stealing others’ ideas, shoehorning them into shiny but otherwise dysfunctional and DRM-infested toys, then branding an Apple logo on them (ironically also nicked, from the Beatles). And then to add insult to plagiarism, Jobs fraudulently stamped his ‘IP’ seal on those ‘shamelessly stolen’ ideas, then embarked on a hypocritical and vicious rampage of litigation. How’s that for gratitude? Add that to the litany of virtues Jobs didn’t subscribe to.
Yet this is the guy everyone is now fawning over?
Oh, but I forgot … he made lots of money. Lots and lots and lots.
So did Al Capone.
Ah yes, American capitalism at its finest, folks.
– http://slated.org/good_riddance_steve_jobs