Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.
In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil - he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction.
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@pluralistic Billionaireism should be seen as a mental illness.
@Dknuffke @pluralistic as an OCD owner of 300 shower gels and 500 eyeshadow palettes: if you own that much of anything something isn't working right up there.
@Dknuffke @pluralistic if you have one billion - you are basically a hoarder at this point.
The length of this thread really exposes the inadequacy of this medium for essays.
This has been on my mind lately due to the length of this thread.
Also, those with great wealth are sometimes stupid and their wealth can shield them from criticism and amplify the negative consequences of that.
@pluralistic men i fucking love you, this thread is the best of best, thank you so much for existing and making it, and placing sources.
@pluralistic Rich "people" believe the STUPIDEST shit. For example: They believe they deseeve to be rich.
@pluralistic If I only knew what shit that I believed was stupid.
The problem isn't whether rich people believe stupid shit; it's the fact that when a rich person believes something stupid, that belief can turn into torment for dozens, thousands, or millions of people.
Here's a historical example that I think about a *lot*. In 1928, Henry Ford got worried about the rubber supply chain.
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@pluralistic I often remember Disney CEO Michael Eisner thinking EuroDisney's color should be purple, and Disney would own that purple the way Coke owned red.
Trouble was, in Europe purple is often associated with funerals and death.
Less harmful than other examples, but pure stupidity.
@pluralistic I mean, it's arguably what killed the Roman empire. Rich Romans got fancy indoor plumbing, made of lead for easy maintenance. The lead leeches onto the water, giving them a strange line on their gums and a tendency to believe idiotic nonsense.
@madengineering @pluralistic The Romans knew about lead poisoning and to avoid it in drinking water. They preferred clay pipes over lead for drinking water, wherever possible. To the extent that lead poisoning was a problem, it was more likely because of the preparation and widespread consumption of must (grape juice) reduced to a half or a third volume in copper or lead containers.
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/Encyclopaedia_romana/wine/leadpoisoning.html
@madengineering @pluralistic
The Roman empire ended when the Ottomans conquered it in the 15th century, long after their plumbers did the initial work.....
@ColmDonoghue @madengineering @pluralistic still takes that long to find a plumber
@madengineering @pluralistic Until Trump I assumed all the discussions of Nero were hyperbole 8)
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
As I posted elsewhere, "if there are future historians, I wonder if they will wonder if Trump literally golfed while the world burned."
@ferricoxide @pluralistic @etchedpixels @madengineering The world would be in a much much better place if all he had done was played golf for 4 years.
All the world's rubber came from plantations in countries that he had limited leverage over and he was worried that these countries could kneecap his operation by cutting off the supply. So Ford decided he would start cultivating rubber in the Brazilian jungles, judging that Brazil's politicians were biddable, bribeable or bludgeonable and thus not a risk.
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Ford took over a large area of old-growth jungle in Brazil and decreed that a town be built there. But not just any town: Ford decreed that the town of Fordlandia would be a replica of Dearborn, the company town he controlled in Michigan. Now, leaving aside the colonialism and other ethical considerations, there are plenty of *practical* reasons not to replicate Dearborn, MI on the banks of the Rio Tapajós.
4/
For one thing, Brazil is in the southern hemisphere, and Dearborn is in the northern hemisphere. The prefab houses that Ford ordered for Fordlandia had windows optimized for southern exposure, which is the normal way of designing a dwelling in the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, you try and put your windows on the *other side* of the building.
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Ford's architects told him this, and proposed having the factory flip the houses' orientation. But Ford was adamant: he'd had a vision for a replica of his beloved Dearborn plunked down smack in the middle of the Amazon jungle, and by God, that was what he would get:
Fordlandia was a catastrophe for *so many* reasons, and the windows are just a little footnote, but it's a detail that really stuck with me because it's just *so stupid*.
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Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.
In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil - he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction.
7/
