

Venture Capitalist Says "War" on the Rich Is Like Nazi Germany's War on the Jews - killwhitey
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/venture-capitalist-says-war-on-the-rich-is-like-nazi-germanys-war-on-the-jews/283347/

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_delirium
Meh, I think this is probably not the best intro to a good discussion. I
sympathize with the impulse to mock Tom Perkins (and he probably deserves it),
and VCs being idiots is a time-honored genre of tech discussion. But judging
by the Slashdot discussion on this same article that started an hour or two
ago, it doesn't seem likely to be productive. Either we will all agree "yeah,
that was a stupid analogy and also Tom Perkins might be crazy", or a few
people will try to defend it and then those threads will trail off into
argument, either way, meh.

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tomasien
Perkins' post has now topped David Brooks' piece on pot as the worst thing
ever written. Well done Tom.

Relevant
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law)

~~~
davidgerard
Mike Godwin called him out directly.
[https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/427253083966435329](https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/427253083966435329)

(Godwin's Twitter has of course been melting.
[https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/427257508231532545](https://twitter.com/sfmnemonic/status/427257508231532545)
)

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tomasien
This is amazing thank you for sharing

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MaysonL
What's interesting about Perkins's letter is the fact that the WSJ thought it
was worth publishing.

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Roboprog
Also of interest is that the people (Googlers, a writer) that were mentioned
as being harassed sounded more like "the 10%" to me than "the 1 %".

Deliberate misdirection of identity???

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Tycho
I think 1% is a ridiculous misnomer. You need to get to the 0.01% before you
find people who are what you might call 'disgustingly rich.'

The 1% are doctors, programmers, accountants...

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thrill
Yeah - those people - the ones that pay 30% of the nation's taxes.

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Tycho
I wasn't making a value judgement about the megarich, just a statistical one.

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dllthomas
"Disgustingly" implies a value judgement, which doesn't necessarily mean one
was intended but certainly explains the reception as such.

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Tycho
It does but notice I put it in quotes. Anyway hopefully it is clarified now.

~~~
dllthomas
Hopefully, yes.

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sentenza
Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121533)

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al2o3cr
I'm sure Mr. Perkins thought that getting a $10k fine for killing a man with
his yacht was "just like Nazi Germany" too. What an assclown.

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Tycho
Side question - to what extent was the attack on the Jews in Nazi Germany
associated with their wealth? (at the time)

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HillRat
The vast majority of Jews in Weimar-era Germany were middle-class clerical
types or tradesmen; however, Nazi and other right-wing propaganda grossly
inflated the economic power of the Jewish community in order to whip up public
anger.

Of course, the persecution of Jews in Europe was because they were _Jews_ ,
not because some of them were wealthy; the shoah was basically the extreme
culmination of hundreds of years of persecution, segregation, and pogroms.

Perkins' analogy is really, really ugly, because it both trades, perhaps
inadvertently, in anti-Semitic stereotypes of "rich Jews," and because it
dismisses the centuries of brutal persecution the Jewish community faced as
simply the resentment of the disenfranchised.

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yummyfajitas
_This is the reductio ad absurdum of a rich-guy 's persecution
complex...Therefore, criticizing the rich is akin to committing genocide
against the Jews._

This Atlantic commentary is a ridiculous straw man. According to Perkins,
criticizing the rich today is akin to criticizing the Jews in 1930 (8 years
before persecution).

Demonize and dismiss - so much easier than attacking the actual argument being
made (note: I'm expressing no opinion on that).

