Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela fall in that category to name a few. It is no coincidence all three suffered similar injustices to the extent they did including subjugation by the Government (Powers that be)not limited to incarceration, but when most would give up their spirit prevailed and they never waivered in their sense of justice.
When you live in a world where the highest levels of society are literally "above the law", torture as policy is considered acceptable, might makes right, and democracy has been for sale for so long that it's newsworthy when a politician refuses sponsorship; it is very hard to make an argument that anyone who pays attention to the news does not have a very clear idea of the moral status of our ruling elites.
We do have, though, concrete empirical evidence of the eventual consequences of casually thinking of and referring to others, any others at all, as 'human garbage'.
The moral status of that line of thought is much more clear - it's noxious and if there's some sort of moral thing we ought to agree on is that it's to be rejected and opposed, wherever it pops up.
[Edit: and to completely Godwin up this thread - if there's a day to take 30 seconds to think about the implications of such rhetoric, today, V-E day, is a good one].
Calling VC 'human garbage' is, at the end of the day, just nerd message-board hyperventilating. And it's still completely repugnant and talking about other repugnant things doesn't make it any less so.
My direct experience (which is not with VCs) is that the VC-darling startups are mostly run by human garbage, which raises questions about who funds them. Does this mean there are probably some horrible VCs? Yes, absolutely. Does it mean that all VCs are that way? Of course not. There are plenty of good ones out there, too.
My feelings about this suit are complicated. Look, Al Capone was nabbed on tax fraud, rather than the harder-to-prove but more vicious shit he did. If the Greenspan suit starts a process that puts an end to VC note-sharing and co-funding and social-proof calls-- against the spirit of the law, but hard to prove on an individual basis-- then I'm all for it.
It is when you win.
Then there are other people who see unethical behavior and, for whatever reason, can't "just get over it" like normal people. They end up taking some immensely energy-consuming moral stands that often aren't in their individual interests.
Such people are immensely beneficial to society, but it's not fun to be one.