![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chipotleReading this entry, I came across this fascinating analogy:
You want to know what it's like to be a Mac user? Watch some guys drinking Budweiser and marveling to each other in hushed tones about its bouquet and its body and bite. Or listen to someone who drives a Civic, gushing in rapture at its horsepower and its handling.
Better yet, listen to someone ascribing "moral equivalence" to the Palestinian suicide bombers and Israeli forces bulldozing the homes of terrorism suspects, or claiming that 9/11 is no more reprehensible than the bombing of Afghanistan, because such a position is more comfortable for someone trying to fit in with the International Community?, regardless of how such a view might clash with our most deeply-held ideals.
Is it just me, or does anyone else get that run-off-the-road feeling, like you've asked a butcher to get you a couple pounds of ground beef and while he's feeding the meat through the grinder he's suddenly dropped into flashbacks from 'Nam, so even though you only set out to get stuff to make a nice cheeseburger you're afraid you're about to start having to duck semi-automatic weapons fire?
I read a bit more of Brian's blog, and--pardon the impending sentence construction--it hits one of my beefs about the way a lot of conservatives seem to express their beefs with liberals: arguments get reduced down to black and white, us versus them, or as George W. might say, "with us or against us." The idea that people might condemn suicide bombing and responding to bombs by razing the homes is evidently completely alien. And the possibility that people could simultaneously think the WTC/Pentagon attacks were horrific and that the bombing campaign against Afghanistan was an unjustified response? The hell you say! Couldn't happen!
No offense, Brian (not that I expect he'll read this), but this boils down to a very old, clichéd moral principle: "two wrongs don't make a right." I don't think Israel's responses in the ongoing intafada have been helpful, at all. That's not a statement of support for Arafat's leadership (which by any realistic measure has been abysmal). And while I don't think there are many people anywhere, including most of the Muslim world, shedding tears for the Taliban, that doesn't automatically mean the war against them was a "just war," to borrow a Catholic phrase--and America's continued operations in the region seem to increasingly be misdirected against civilian targets (as intelligence provided to us by Afghan political factions vying for power against one another becomes increasingly unreliable). Does anyone really think that acknowledging that means that I support blowing up office buildings?
Even if I come out and assert that America's Middle East policies have heightened tension in the region, do you think that means I think terrorism isn't reprehensible?
And just how did we make the leap to this from the funny (and logically defensible) Civic and Budweiser examples? That has to do with people being unable to tell the difference between the pedestrian and the superior, which is what Mac zealots usually claim about PC partisans. The same logic doesn't apply to the second examples. Flying passenger planes into skyscrapers is, when measured against acts of terror and war committed against civilians, certainly not pedestrian. And "violence should not be met with violence" may not be a statement you agree with, but it's pretty obviously not in the same category as "all beers taste the same" or "my Civic is as good as your Porsche."
And what the hell does any of this have to do with the Macintosh?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2002-07-18 14:23 (UTC)I love Macs and see them as very much better than PCs. But... eeee...
I can. Oh, my God! It's -- so awe-inspiring! My heart -- it can't take this excitement! I can't bear it! Oh! Oh! Whups, just had a spontaneous orgasm at the very thought! Oh, here comes another one! A PEN! My God! A PEN!! A PENNNNN!
A bit over the top, isn't he?
"We want to see Apple's efforts recognized. We see them as a lone guy bailing out the Titanic with a bucket-- no matter how hopeless it may look, he's still pumping away, jaw set, teeth clenched, ignoring the jeering lifeboats full of people who just want to feel more secure in the choice they've made."
Oh dear. This is just Not The Best Analogy. I jolly well hope he's not being prophetic.
"Almost nobody who has anything bad to say about Apple has any facts to back it up. It's all just paranoia and ignorant sloganeering, and just as we refuse to buy it when protesters burn American flags in Gaza and publish Jew-killing tracts for the exhortation of their neighbors..."
GAH. Goodness. This person Has Issues. Or needs a decent handbook about proper use of analogy.
Maybe he needs a religion or something. Only, if he were promoting mine, I'd be really embarassed.
I love Apple, Mac, etc., but for God's sake, it's only a computer.
no subject
Date: 2002-07-18 14:56 (UTC)Arguments with conservatives...
Date: 2002-07-18 15:03 (UTC)I wouldn't normally worry about them, except that they have the bad habit of getting elected.
Re: Arguments with conservatives...
Date: 2002-07-18 15:46 (UTC)--Oh, don't mind me. I'm just keeping up with my stereo-types.
Re: Arguments with conservatives...
Date: 2002-07-18 16:02 (UTC)Re: Arguments with conservatives...
Date: 2002-07-18 16:05 (UTC):)
Re: Arguments with conservatives...
Date: 2002-07-18 20:39 (UTC)Re: Arguments with conservatives...
Date: 2002-07-18 20:35 (UTC)Cryptonomicon, or the New Hotness
Date: 2002-07-18 15:04 (UTC)Also!
Date: 2002-07-18 15:07 (UTC)Re: Also!
Date: 2002-07-18 15:45 (UTC)While I'm fairly sure (from poking around his web site a little) that I'm more on the left side of political life than Mr. Tiemann is, the 'ducking grenades' feeling came less from the conservatism than the Gratuitous Unrelated Political Rant in the middle of a (perhaps too) passionate ode to the Mac. It'd be like me talking about some great underrated cuisine I'd found and interjecting a diatribe against privatized medicine in the middle of it. Regardless of where they stood on the issue, readers would wonder just what I was on.
As for Porsches and Civics, one drives with--and computes with--what one needs, can afford and feels comfortable behind the wheel (or keyboard) of. For me, a PowerBook with OS X represents the best available tradeoff between things I really appreciate and things that really drive me nuts. Mac zealots drive me nuts, but so do Linux and Windows zealots.
no subject
Date: 2002-07-18 15:46 (UTC)no subject
Date: 2002-07-18 15:50 (UTC)In this post he cleverly dissects a letter written by a Muslim fanatic--conveniently forgetting all the Christian fanatics the world has spawned--with highlights and his own carefully thought out sub-text before coming to the ultimate conclusion that all Muslim’s clearly won't be happy until all Jews are dead and Christianity is abolished. His final solution remains unspoken, though he pretty much advocates military action against a third world nation filled with relative innocents, the majority that have an extremely low literacy level and no access to current events. He even makes a reference, comparing the Qu’ran’s account of the Jews trying to kill Mohammed to a child crying about his favourite Pokemon character dying in a battle for Christ’s sake! Does he spend much time watching Pokemon, or better yet, around young children!? But let’s not get personal.
The problem here, essentially, is that it’s easy for someone to take an objective view of a situation when they’re sat behind their 21in flat screen or in their parents basement (I get a twinge of irony as I’m writing this from my parents conservatory, though I don’t have a flat screen monitor) but to take a multiple-subjective view of a situation is infinitely more humbling. How would you feel if you were the father---or mother--- of a son who was shot ‘accidentally’ by Israeli soldiers? After your own offspring were killed, would you freely offer yourself to the local terrorist faction as a simple bomb laden puppet and step onto a bus filled mostly with Israeli soldiers? Hell, would you even bother to wait until the bus got there, it’s not as if you’ve got much to live for past your mud hut and three goats?
But no, I don’t agree with people blowing themselves up as an act as retribution, but I won’t pretend I can’t imagine why they do it. Even Tony Blair’s wife said; “While the Palestinian youth have no hope, they’ll keep blowing themselves up.” You can imagine the fuss that caused. The next day headlines hinted she was a terrorist sympathizer that then prompted a weary looking Prime Minister to spend hours at press conferences using the straw man technique to bail his wife out of the dirt. Amazing.
I guess this is my long winded way of saying I think this guy’s a jerk.
no subject
Date: 2002-07-18 17:15 (UTC)Perusing other entries, I get the impression he's rather anti-religion in general. I also get the impression he's not a stupid guy; he just has a certain set of self-imposed blinders. While I suppose we all do (and we all would like to think we don't), I do wonder about the tendency of some people to go out of their way to find the most extreme examples of things that they find ludicrous and/or enraging. Our blogger here is evidently on a mailing list for Muslim fanatics. I've met liberals who enjoy reading the most wacko right "news sites"--not just stumbling across them on occasion, chuckling sadly and moving on, but making them part of their browsing routine. I have an atheist humanist friend who spends countless hours looking at the fruitiest religious sites he can find--usually out-and-out cults like Scientology and UFO conspiracy theorists. And, last but (sadly) not least, Rush Limbaugh seems to have served as a role model for thousands of dittoheads citing examples of the Politically Correct Liberal Police State to bemoan about. (The fact that many of these examples, from the recent "7th graders in California are forced to pray to Allah" to a variety of outlandish claims about ex-President Clinton, are so exaggerated or out-and-out false they appear on the Urban Legends References Pages (http://www.snopes.com), doesn't seem to deter them.)
Maybe it's just me, but I don't get an amazing amount of joy from finding real things to get upset over--deliberately searching out dubious ones strikes me as perverse. (As the Urban Legends site noted when debunking on a false story run in the abysmal WorldNetDaily.com, "when only one source runs a story, there's usually a reason why, and that reason is not a 'media cover-up.'")
no subject
Date: 2002-07-19 07:04 (UTC)Yes, blush, angst, guilt. But I am in recovery. ;) See my postings on "Escaping Planet Misery."
I think it's my old bad habit of "Look! It's something bad! Let me dwell unhealthily on it! And share it with others! Oooo!" which I'm sure you recall from our time rooming together. If looking at such things helped me to deal better with them, that would be great, but it really doesn't, and just depresses me. I think the poor attitude, alas, seems scarily popular among a certain type of conservative, but I do maintain that it is possible to hold conservative views without the scary (self-righteous, paranoid, etc.) attitude. I just wish I could meet more conservatives who break the stereotype. (There's my old friend Tom, who used to be a Randist but got better, but he's from Europe so perhaps he's in some different category.)
no subject
Date: 2002-07-18 16:01 (UTC)>>regardless of how such a view might clash with our most deeply-held ideals.
What is this 'our'? I've never been part of 'our'... have you? I'm sorry, but a phrase like 'our most deeply-held ideals' is to me equivalent to 'once upon a time' or 'the land of the sugarplum fairies.' Whenever somebody makes a statement like that you can pretty much write them off as narrow-minded. 'I shall assume all of you believe what I believe, and if you don't you're clearly scum.' Who is the possessor of 'our most deeply-held ideals'?
Or maybe I'm just a mutant. Do you wake up some mornings and feel yourself struck by realization that you're surrounded by retarded children with guns?
no subject
Date: 2002-07-18 16:33 (UTC)One of my "deeply-held ideals" is the idea that acts of war intentionally perpetrated on civilian populations are unjustifiable. Such acts are the quintessential definition of terrorism. I suspect a lot of people would agree with that--then would start getting very uncomfortable when you follow the thought to its logical conclusions. A cynic might think that Mr. Tiemann's deeply-held ideal, ultimately, is that you don't follow thoughts to their logical conclusions if those conclusions aren't flattering to "your side."
no subject
Date: 2002-07-19 14:20 (UTC)Recently Donald Rumsfeld made a statement regarding our bombing of an Afghani wedding party (the second wedding party we've bombed, incidentally) to the effect of 'when you're using this much firepower, civilian casualties are inevitable.' Last October it was repeated over and over again that we were going into Afghanistan to stop terrorists in order to prevent the loss of more innocent lives; the great political push for this came from grief and anger at the deaths of innocents. Now Rumsfeld is saying that we went into this with our eyes open; we knew we would be killing more bystanders. It was just somehow not mentioned at the time, possibly because the US population was very much against any action which would kill more innocent people. Now that we're nine months into the war and with civilian casualties mounting it's okay for Rumsfeld to admit that our rulers were bullshitting us. Or were we lying to ourselves? Did anyone really believe the might of the US arsenal could be brought to bear upon Afghanistan and no innocents would get in the way? It's very difficult to convince the rest of the world that we weren't intelligent enough to see this, just like it's hard to explain how we aren't responsible for the actions of our rulers when we have a democratic system.
A point I've made elsewhere is that when the US and its proxies disregard UN resolutions and commit what are essentially war crimes, the global political situation is destabilized. Weaker nations learn that they can't appeal to the UN for protection, and so take alternate routes of resistance, and stronger ones understand that if they can take what they want by force they might as well do so, as long as it doesn't incense the US. There is no deterrance to war, save US interests, and the US tends to ally itself with repressive regimes (and arm them) because it keeps populations under control.
It's interesting to consider our allies in the Middle East, the Islamic countries at least. The leadership generally supports us; it's just the population at large which despises us. It may be inferred that, for example, we are not allied with 'Saudi Arabia;' we are allied with the constituents of the family dictatorship which runs the country and which is in collusion with western oil companies. The large mass of the population is irrelevant and therefore does not count as 'Saudi Arabia' in our estimation. What this implies about our love of democracy is never examined; and when our rulers say, in so many words, 'they hate us because of our freedom,' nobody asks who is keeping it from 'them.' Everyone knows why Saddam Hussein's dictatorship is bad but no one asks why King Fahd's dictatorship is acceptable. The fact that most of the Sept. 11th highjackers were Saudis is not worthy of comment; the fact that al Qaeda is essentially a US/Saudi construction dating from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is rarely mentioned; the fact that a lot of the people in our current administration were also in power at that time mysteriously never comes up. [contd]
no subject
Date: 2002-07-19 14:21 (UTC)So in a way, yes, the viewpoints Mr. Tiemann gave as examples do clash with 'our most deeply-held ideals;' those ideals being that we reserve the right to behave like monsters and then lie about it as is convenient. Since the balance of power is presently so overwhelmingly on the side of the US, the lies aren't as well-crafted as they might normally be, but we still insist upon our 'rights,' the same rights that all empires have claimed and whose abrogation they invariably bewail when their victims manage to get a poke in.
In the case of Sept. 11th, we the general population are the victims not only of the saboteurs, but also of our own government which created the conditions which generated the saboteurs; this is especially true when we've got so many Reagan administration alumni in the government now. The call to arms, the bombing of Afghanistan and the war on terror are in some ways one huge act of dissemblance. The claim by some pundits that to even imagine what might've motivated the terrorists is tantamount to supporting them is a naked attempt to distract people from discovering some presumably undesirable truth.
no subject
Date: 2002-07-19 18:29 (UTC)I'm not sure I agree with that, of course. If we go with economic terminology rather than historical analogy, the United States is essentially a natural monopoly on the political stage. Economic theory--at least until very recently--held that monopolies, even natural ones, needed to be regulated in ways non-monopolies weren't for markets to do well. (And those more Keynesian theories may be coming back into vogue, as people realize that while removing regulation from markets does indeed "take the brakes off the economic engine," there is a reason engines have brakes.) It might be argued that "political monopolies" need comparable restrictions in order for other states to thrive.
no subject
Date: 2002-07-19 22:13 (UTC)There is a reason. The people who've been on the deregulation bandwagon since the late 70s don't seem to know their history. In the 30s, FDR wasn't autonomous when his administration enacted all these regulations; the tycoons and industrialists of the time were in collusion with him. They wanted business to be regulated, because they could see that raw capitalism was just going to rip them to shreds. It was their idea to have regulation. It's not like Roosevelt could or would have gone against corporate interests.
Because of the New Deal everybody remembers him as this selfless grandfatherly figure, but FDR was a rich man and he had a rich man's agenda... the New Deal was an effort to thwart revolution, which looked like a serious prospect during the Great Depression. He was considerate of the needs of the common people, but this was part of a keen survival instinct; if the people didn't get the basics of existence, it was feared they would drastically reorder American society in order to get them. All the gains by the common people in the 30s stem from this: an economic collapse resulting from unfettered capitalism, causing societal upheaval which threatened the status quo. One would think such a lesson would not be lost on the wealthy and powerful... but they're all dumb! *laughs evilly*