Bill Gates Is More Admired Than the Pope 470
walterbyrd writes "Americans admire Bill Gates more than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and even Glenn Beck. The Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist was named the fifth most admired man of 2010, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll."
Problem: (Score:3, Insightful)
eww (Score:4, Insightful)
the fact that Glenn Beck and Billy Graham are even on this list makes me want to vomit.
Re:Problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ADMIRED??? (Score:5, Insightful)
The man gave billions of his personal fortune to help make real change possible. Tangible things that save lives. The Pope may have done some great things too--but his biggest accomplishment is being politically successful in the church. That may require a higher level of personal generosity than does Bill Gates' decision to give billions away once he had them. But the church would have done good with a different pope. And most billionaires don't give so much of their fortune away.
Part of it may also be the institutional problem--people think of leaders as the individual doing something great more than of the individual making slight political changes to a major established institution.
A lot of it will also be the money. A lot of Americans have problems in their life that money can solve. Spiritual guidance may help them be content with their lot in life, and make them happier--but it doesn't solve the fact that you're out of work while your spouse has cancer and needs the insurance, or that your son or daughter needs money for college, or for legal bills about one really stupid thing they did. Money makes these things easier. It doesn't always make them easy, but it makes them easier.
Re:It's a given (Score:5, Insightful)
Flamebait? It has been proven that the current pope personally acted to relocate molesters and hide the evidence of their misdeeds. If not a child molester himself, he is directly responsible for child molestation.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Insightful)
Another thing, Catholicism never got out of beta. They are still working on the same code base as 2000 years ago. Can't keep people's attentions if you don't add new features.
You need to study your theology. Continuous implementation of new ideas. Slowly. And always with claiming its Gods will and its always been that way. But by no means the same codebase. Things like no married priests and stealing all the pagan holidays for themselves (christmas, etc) are much more recent than 2000 years. Think "GNU hurd" speed not "Linux" speed. Cathedral vs bazzar, literally.
Now if you want programming analogies, try codebase forks like the protestant revolution and holy wars like vi vs emacs.
Re:Problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
Many people simply assume that he has to be smart in order to have created Microsoft and made so much money. In a way, they are correct, but it doesn't necessarily mean he was the smartest technically, which is what also many assume.
I think if you got together many of the technical thinkers of our time and asked them who the 20 best computer innovators were, Gates would have a hard time on that list (as well as Jobs) and it would be filled with people whom the average guy would never have heard of. Gates' real accomplishment is being able to take other people's ideas, dumb them down, and give people a wink and a nod to make people think they are his without really lying.
Re:He only donated enormous amounts of money... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of drug lords donate enormous amounts of money to their cities neighborhoods. Go look in Columbia. It is one of the reasons they are adored in their own hometowns. Doesn't change the fact that they are drug lords and will kill people to make a profit.
So, perhaps we should look at the TOTALITY of Bill Gates career, rather than just what he did with the money after he got more than he could ever spend.
Duh, Bill Gates never covered up for molesters (Score:5, Insightful)
People are distrustful of religion in general, and the Pope in particular. Bill Gates comes with none of that baggage. Aside from a few of us /. geeks, Bill Gates' reputation as both a philanthropist and entrepreneur is pretty much spotless among the general public. And, among much of the American public, Companies like MS and Apple are also seen as some of the few bright spots in an economy that has seen American manufacturing going into the shitter for the last 40 years. It wouldn't surprise me if Steve Jobs beat the Pope too.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
The Dali Lama, while he certainly strikes me as a nice, chill kind of guy, totally wouldn't mind having some people like him in the neighborhood, is a living PR machine on a scale that makes any president look like a piker: "Hey little kid, we've determined, by the traditions handed down through centuries of theocratic feudalism, that you are the reincarnated Lama." "Ok, so, I guess that I get to live in exile and jet-set around making serene and innoffensive to everyone except the Chinese statements about freedom and human dignity and stuff, with somebody else picking up the bill?" "Yeah, pretty much. As long as you aren't a total prick about it, you'll come out smelling like roses."
And the Pope? Our current bishop of Rome is, undoubtedly, a smart guy; but he is a pure reactionary water-carrier(and probable un-indicted criminal for his work during his 'congregation for the doctrine of the faith' days) for an organization that freely veers between covering up criminality and giving terrible health and family planning advice to desperately poor people. For fun, he occasionally appears in a cloth-of-gold robe on the steps of his gigantic marble live-in-museum-of-priceless-art to give a talk on how charity is a virtue and money-hungry atheism is a scourge upon the world.
I am deeply under-impressed with our current president, as I was sort of hoping to move away from our policies of unending foreign adventurism and unrestrained abuses by ever-multiplying clandestine agencies; but the idea that the Dali Lama or Pope deserve much in the way of respect and esteem seems pretty dodgy.
Sounds like a classic book plot (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, I can't shake the feeling that I've read that kind of argumentation before. Is it ok to do something evil, just because then you'll use (some of) the ill gotten gains to do something good? Oh, right, that's Dostoevsky's "Crime And Punishment".
Turns out that in America you can actually be admired for being a modern day Raskolnikov.
It also turns out that you don't even have to do all that soul-searching and all, either.
Re:Problem: (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd have to take Gates from those four as well.
Gates is monopolistic businessman, who has got out of that business now and is doing something worthwhile with the ill gotten gains.
Beck is either insane or an entertainer playing with fire.
The Pope and the Dalai Lama are both actively evil.
With one important difference (Score:5, Insightful)
With one important difference: Jean Valjean's fortune isn't a direct result of his crimes. He doesn't get to be the good guy by robbing Paul to give to Peter, no matter how far apart the two events are. Whereas Gates is getting to be the public philantropist hero with money made by breaking the antitrust laws in the '90's.
Re:ADMIRED??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but Obama is so far ahead in this poll that the others are all just a bunch of no account losers in comparison; Gates included. The message of this poll is not that Gates comes in ahead of the Pope; it's that Obama overshadows all the others put together.
Re:Problem: (Score:4, Insightful)
The proles have no taste. The fact they like Billy boy is nothing to get excited about.
Half of them probably read Ayn Rand and think they are Atlas.
Re:He only donated enormous amounts of money... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're trivializing what the cartels have done to those countries and the people who live within them by comparing Microsoft's relatively benign practices to the murders, rapes, enslavement and atrocities committed by the cartels.
Yes, Microsoft lead by Gates (and he was not the ONLY player there) has done some bad stuff. So had Oracle, so has Apple, so has *insert name of ANY corporation* - it's part of the whole corporate concept. Corporations are, by design, essentially sociopathic entities bent on profit at all costs.
But the fact of the matter is, there are lots of extremely wealthy people out there - people who, in many cases have made their fortunes in FAR more "evil" fashions than Gates, who have been responsible for killing hundreds or thousands of people and poisoned huge swaths of the Earth - who do exactly fuckall for anyone but themselves.
Looking at the ENTIRETY of Gates' career and comparing it to most other people - yes, Gates has done some rather admirable things and a few things that, since you decided to start comparing him and his organization to other groups - barely even rate on the scale of evil that corporations perpetrate every single day.
Re:Problem: (Score:2, Insightful)
As opposed to releasing mosquitoes into a room that may or may not have carried the Malaria plasmodium?
I'm sorry but I just can't stop laughing at this.
Were there people in the room? You should probably state that. I mean "Releasing mosquitos into a room" doesn't sound all that bad. I occaisonally release my pet into the yard that may or may not have a bad odour when wet. Does that make me as evil as Bill Gates?
Re:Problem: (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Gates is very intelligent. He wrote significant parts of Microsoft first set of products, he can code (or at least he could in the early 80s). In business he was a deceitful backstabbing manipulative bastard. And now his is spending billions on his philanthropy. I won't dismiss that Gates is/was an ass, but he does deserve some credit.
Re:Problem: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why should the pope be admired? (Score:0, Insightful)
Because your view of the world isn't the only one, and some people do admire the things you clearly don't about the Pope.
Is it so hard to understand that people have different view points of the world? What you think is right and just is not the same as what I think is right and just.
I'm certainly not advocating raping little boys or gay bashing, but I am against abortion in principal and see abstinence as a valid form of birth control for people who can actually keep their dicks in their pants/legs closed, which clearly isn't everyone.
I'm not alone, nor does the entire world share my point of view. I neither like nor dislike him, I simply don't care about him.
What I can't understand is why people such as yourself don't realize your viewpoint isn't the only viewpoint in existence. The world does not revolve around you. No two people share the exact same set of values.
Your lack of understanding that other people have their own minds and opinions is just amazing. The fact that so many people are so ignorant is far more frightening than anything Benedict has done.