Posted on 10/07/2011 1:30:39 PM PDT by toma29
Steve Jobs is dead. A tech genius has passed on. Sad. Certainly a devastating loss to Steve Jobs' close friends and family members, as well as to Apple executives and shareholders. The rest of you? Calm down.
Among my Facebook friends yesterday, more than one wrote publicly that they were "crying" or "can't stop crying" or "teared up" due to Steve Jobs' death. Really now. You can't stop crying, now that you've heard that a middle-aged CEO has passed, after a long battle with cancer? If humans were always so empathetic, well, that would be understandable. But this type of one-upmanship of public displays of grief is both unbecoming and undeserved.
Real outpourings of public grief should be reserved for those people who lived life so heroically and selflessly that they stand as shining examples of love for all of humanity. People like, for example, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who—along with his family—was bombed, beaten, and stabbed during his years of principled activism in the US civil rights movement. Shuttlesworth died yesterday, the same day as Steve Jobs. He did not die a billionaire.
Death, of course, is not a competition. All deaths are sad for the living. Everyone deserves to be mourned, and well-known people will inevitably be mourned more loudly than others. But it is actually important to keep our grief in perspective. When we start mourning technocrats as idols, we cheapen the lives of those who have sacrificed more for their fellow man.
Steve Jobs was great at what he did. There's no need to further fellate the man's memory. He made good computers, he made good phones, he made good music players. He sold them well. He got obscenely rich. He enabled an entire generation of techie design fetishists to walk around with more attractive gadgets.
(Excerpt) Read more at gawker.com ...
“Cancer is a disease of personality..deep buried anger that transforms some of the bodies cell into the demonic creatures minions which inhabit that body. That is why so much rage and sexuality in our society corresponds with huge numbers of deaths by cancer. It is not God’s judgment, but the devils...Be still exercise has helped cure many people.”
So I can have as evil a personality as I want so long as I stick to a fitness regimen? Good to know.
No, I’m not flaming anyone, people are flaming me, all I did was post sources claiming it, it seems more likely than not. Decide for yourself.
If your god is only materialism and amoral marxism, Jobs is a god of the “citizens of the world.”
“Kaposi’s sarcoma of the pancreas possibly mimics pancreatic cancer in HIV-infected subjects.”
POSSIBLY MIMICS
He had pancreatic cancer, not AIDS. Work on your reading comprehension.
I already gave him/her the award for stupidest post in the history of FR.
There is nothing wrong with mourning a genius, the likes of which we will probably not see again in our lifetime. Screw the cynics at Gawker.
He is not God; he was, though, an icon.
He stood for a lot of things. Also, many identified with him.
When he passed, we were reminded that the greatest among us (the richest, most creative, most successful) are subject to death just like everyone else.
It shocked a lot of people who don’t have a biblical foundation.
For sure.
And yet, it is impossible to count the number of lives his life blessed.
I don’t know why but considered himself an artist, and many (including this morning’s editorial in the WSJ) did as well. I can’t find his quote but it was something along the lines that I’m a half artist, half businessman. He was an industrial designer, OK? Are such animals artists? I dunno. One renowned designer of signs, placards, posters, wine labels, book covers, and menus, among other practical things, protested against being called an artist, saying he was an illustrator.
Mr Forte, WTF are you talking about?
That was actually someone else who called you on the use of wiki ... you may want to try to keep up a bit better.
I am laughing at your use of the imageshack photo as though it were the smoking gun.
It’s not.
But you believe what you want to believe.
I’ve read a few things about Jobs just now. It is interesting the change in tech stuff that he helped bring about. Even though I don’t use it!
I don’t mourn him, and I think the writer is half-way right on this public mourning stuff. Although the difference between Jobs and this Shuttleworth guy - it sounded like Shuttleworth had made his impact on the world. Whereas who knows what Jobs might have come up with next.
But as one poster said - the ipod, etc. may be the next decade’s 8-track.
“He was an industrial designer, OK? Are such animals artists? I dunno. One renowned designer of signs, placards, posters, wine labels, book covers, and menus, among other practical things, protested against being called an artist, saying he was an illustrator.”
Here we get into the vagaries of the word itself. You have to one side masters of high art like Shakespeare, Beethoven, or Michelangelo, which he clearly was not. But we also call carpenters artists, because they ply their craft as experts. Jobs was an artist in that sense, though I wouldn’t say his expertise was in design, a craft closer to high art than others, as such. I don’t actually know how closely he was involved in that process. But I do know that for the computer world, that sort of thing is the result of code, and that Jobs didn’t write code.
He was an idea man, and his ideas may have been the most perfeclty precise of any that a non-programmer could ever dream, without being an actual programmer. But still there’s that divide. Shakespeare could have had the plot, themes, characterizations, etc., of “Hamlet” explained to him in detail, but he had to actually write it. And the artistry is in the writing.
If Jobs was an artist, it was as a dreamer. A visionary, a guru, a seer. Someone who could see where the market was headed. Moreover, as an administrator. Not the sort of administrator who works as efficiently as possible, squeezing every last bit out of every last penny; I don’t think Apple even had a budget in its early years. No, he bossed via motivation. Surrounded himself with the highest talent and ran them like a slave driver with the whip of belief. Belief in himself, his ideas. It was a cult of personality.
Are cult leaders, even of the religion of technology, artists? Probably not.
True.The Iphone is assembled in China!
Okay, well I told you decide for yourself.
It’s odd that he kept the same diet as an HIV patient would, that it’s possible that kaposi sarcoma can mimic pancreatic cancer, and then the images (possibly fake) that show HIV positive for a Californian SSN, with Steve Jobs full name. It adds up, but again, decide for yourself.
Probably not El Rushbo, who is a die hard Apple fan.
“The point is that Apple’s device made the format and, more importantly, digital music storage popular with everyone, not just geeks like me.”
Exactly. No one uses the 1981 IBM PC anymore, but only an idiot would argue it will ever be “PC, what?” That was the watershed, and even if it had started collecting duct the next month it would live forever in history. Jobs had a bunch of watershed.
It’s one thing to be an idea man, or a visionary, it’s a whole other kettle of fish, to make that vision a reality.
I won't shed any tears when "Hamilton Nolan" dies.
Generally speaking, Ayn Rand was wrong about everything, but reading something like this makes me think she had a point.
People are mourning someone who was a part of their lives, of their youth, somebody who made the world a better and a more interesting place.
Maybe the tributes can get a tiny bit excessive, but you shouldn't have to lay down your life for some cause to receive some gratitude when you die.
Living, working, achieving something -- even when you get a lot of money for it -- can also be reason for appreciation.
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