I recently learned that Steve Ballmer is a director of and major donor to the Jewish National Fund, which supports the Israeli military and the settlers in the West Bank and around Gaza. This made me like Steve Ballmer slightly less.
https://shopisrael.com/blogs/support/does-steve-ballmer-support-israel
I’m not saying we should tolerate fascists, or expend all our energies trying to understand why a hateful person is hateful. But we have to recognize that they’re not monsters or subhumans, they’re people. Cruel and hateful people, but people like us. Those tendencies are in us all, but in some people they become totally dominant and in other people they shrink until they’re almost not there. But they’re there.
They are worthless animals not fit to be called humans
That’s the kind of attitude towards fascists that leads to complacency and a belief that it couldn’t happen here or we’re better than that. The most important thing to understand about a fascist is that they’re a person like you. No one is immune to the risk of falling into it. All it takes is the right circumstances to incentivize a person, and there’s a decent chance they will take up fascism.
If we hold that Nazis were monsters, or subhumans, or some other kind of beast entirely unlike us, we will never dig deep to understand what makes fascism appealing or what needs it serves, and we will miss the warning signs in ourselves and those around us should we start sliding towards it. I think most Americans missed their own country’s capacity for fascism until it was right on top of them, because they had spent decades imagining the Nazis as some special kind of inhuman monster. That attitude is dangerous. Fascists are ordinary people like us.
Torvalds is still very active on the Linux kernel. As far as I know, he’s in charge of it and makes major decisions about its direction.
Bill Gates retired from Microsoft in 2008.
In 2000. Al Gore won that election, but Republicans cheated.
Some things are never forgotten.