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 also noticed that entry, but didn't get into it. Our erstwhile blogger's wrote at its end, "Believing the words of a book written centuries ago by superstitious tribes of nomads, and accepting those stories as anything but allegorical fables from which to gain guidance for daily personal conduct, is the height of human gullibility and weakness of mind--and is only going to result in more 9/11s as time goes on." One at least hopes he's aware the same sentiment can be applied to people who follow the Bible.

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.'")

[chastmastr.livejournal.com]

"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..."

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.)