MacOS: the choice of fuzzy thinkers!

[chipotle]

So I went to Joel Spolsky's Blog and saw a link to another blog criticizing the Mac Over-Faithful, which in turn led me to somebody else's blog--Brian Tiemann, a FreeBSD hacker and arguably one of the Mac Over-Faithful.

Reading 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?

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I suppose the attitude you're referring to may be part of what torqued me a little. The blog author is taking whatever he means by "deeply-held ideals" so much for granted that the idea that someone might read his analogies and react with hey, wait a minute here! is, I can only assume, completely off his radar screen.

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."

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Well, technically, war upon civilian populations is illegal, in other words a war crime, but the British and US justified bombing German cities during WWII in order to stop the Nazi menace, which was already in collapse at that point anyway, and have been galloping ahead ever since.

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]

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

But, uh, yeah, speaking of digression... I agree with your belief that war upon a civilian population is not justifiable by the standards humanity claims to hold to, as exemplified by the UN Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. But the US more or less rejects these, and since it's the most powerful economic and military entity in the world by far, it can pretty much do what it wants. The rest of the world will follow suit for the reasons I noted above. In this respect nothing much has changed in world affairs since the end of WWII; it's also important to remember that historically, wars are wars on populations. Genocide was the rule. I mean, look at the Bible, it'll make this clear. Look at even recent history, where wars have been masked as 'colonization' or 'exploration' or 'opening free trade,' and it was stated in no uncertain terms that extermination was the goal. It's only very recently that we as a species have played with the idea of limited war. If you're looking for 'deeply-held ideals,' it's hard to find one more deeply-held than total war, particularly in American history. Racism and class war also persisted here longer than in other industrialized nations.

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.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Another LJ friend of mine made the assertion in his journal that America is the new Roman Empire. I'm not sure if he meant that to be a disturbing thought or not, but to me it is--even though there's a "like it or not" truth to the observation. It wasn't the first time I've heard it, though; I recall hearing a commentator a couple months ago arguing that since America was inescapably in that role now and will be for at least the immediate future, we'd do less damage--and perhaps even some good--if we stopped pretending we weren't.

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.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

The 'Roman Empire' analogy has been brought up (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/issue_julyaug_2002/wallerstein.html) by several people; my favorite part of it is that Rome eventually fell, by rotting from within... there were the Nordic hordes, of course, but these did not pose a problem when Rome, as they say, had its shit together.

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*