Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

Comment by malermeister | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Maybe Varoufakis should try creating an Amazon instead of writing some book and running Greece’s economy into the ground.

This is not only factually wrong, but also an ad hominem fallacy.

> We are serfs for even commenting here, by the way. This site is owned (and created) by the technofeudalists who founded YC, not by Mr Varoufakis.

We are. I don't like it any more than medieval serfs did, but I don't think you should get to blame me for it.

> So what brings you here, serf on their property, if you don’t see any value in it? They are certainly not putting a gun to your head just like Amazon is not making you shop there.

All of you fine fellow serfs have made this a fertile land for discussion, by plowing the fields of comment threads. Direct threat of violence is the most unimaginative way of exerting power and modern day feudalists avoid it in fear of awakening class consciousness after all.

> ad hominem fallacy

It's not ad hominem to judge a critic's own track record in order to measure the weight of his words. Otherwise we'd end up listening to any little trust fund ideologues with no actual idea about how the world really works, like Marx.

We should be listening to Marx in these times.

Anybody who tried has starved to death or needed a bloody revolution to get rid of their dictator and his nomenklatura.

Like Allende, who was democratically elected and then couped by the CIA?

Plenty of communist experiments ran unimpeded (a few are even running right now) and they pretty much all had the same predictable miserable ends.

Oh, and to address your earlier point:

> you fine fellow serfs have made this a fertile land for discussion

Yes, the community is where the value is. But we all congregated here and not on some free and open-source place somewhere else on the Internet. So there must also be some value added by the creators and maintainers of this place, value we recognized and built upon.

Whether you like it or not, Marx is one of the most important philosophers from XIX century with important contributions to politics, sociology and economy.

I never said he wasn't important. So was Hitler, btw. Marx's sick ideology just killed more. But I am glad you consider that an important contribution.

No, Hitler was no relevant philosopher and had no widely recognizable contribution to the mentioned areas. It's a pity that ideology prevents people to discuss or even to understand other people's ideas and contributions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com