Should conservatives take a bite out of Apple?
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| Bite this |
Full disclosure: I own no Apple products and probably never will. Nor am I an orthodox Christian; as I've mentioned before, at best I'm a bad, lapsed libertarianish Methodist. Not only will my ox not be gored in anything I have to say further in this post, it probably won't even be nudged academically. And I've already ridiculed Rod Dreher for getting on his high horse about religious liberty while still enjoying subsidizing Tim Cook's lifestyle.
This said, why would any conservatives not immediately boycott Apple products? Wouldn't that still be a valid response even if made by my avatar while gazing into a jungle cam?
Apple's CEO Tim Cook blithely made a high profile splash for himself and his company with a sanctimonious, lying Op-Ed which helped fuel a boycott of Indiana in general and the reigning down of Hell itself upon the owners of Memories Pizza.
Why should that cost him absolutely nothing at all while he continues to rake in exorbitant profits on his Chinese slave labor-built devices from the very conservatives whose freedom of expression he cheerfully stomped upon?
If, like me, you don't already own Apple products there's admittedly not much boycotting you can do. And if you do, throwing away a device that still delivers good service is also a step that many without a Rod Dreher income just couldn't justify.
But, in the wake of Indiana's RFRA and Tim Cook's involvement (instead of just making electronics, like a good boy) why would any conservative now buy a new Apple product or service or spend money to repair a failing one?
It's not as if there were not now a vast market of products comparable or superior to Apple's. Does Apple cachet really weigh in that much on the scale opposite religious liberty among conservatives?
Why am I, full-disclosured above, even the one raising this? Why isn't it already being exhorted on every conservative outlet? Why is Tim Cook jauntily bringing a gun to the gunfight while conservatives are merely spitting in resentment into the potato salad they've decided they'll bring instead as their most appropriate offering there? That'll show him. Ptui! Giggle!
Because Barack Obama is supposed to be fighting these battles instead? Because there will always be room in Rod Dreher's Benedict Option for refugees with chubby little potato salad-smeared fingers?
Instead of mooning for the Sweet Meteor of Death (SMOD) to sweep away the corrupt GOP - Ace, and others - this situation is really pretty cut and dried: sacrifice a marginal bit of habit-comfort in exchange for demonstrating what gratuitously treading on religious liberty really costs. It's really just that get off your lazy ass simple.
Make what Tim Cook did hurt Tim Cook right now and in the future, and make others fear doing the same thoughtlessly stupid thing if it happens to be percolating in their dim little heads.
Because it really isn't turning the other cheek to turn in one's Christian card and make a potato salad for cheap demagogues instead. It's demonstrating that one might not be worth very much as anything at all.
I never joined the Apple cult so I can't boycott but people are hooked. No matter what Tim Cook does they can't quit him. They'll never give up their iPad.
ReplyDeleteI never joined the Apple cult so I can't boycott but people are hooked. No matter what Tim Cook does they can't quit him. They'll never give up their iPad.
ReplyDeleteI work on a Mac at the office. Macs are common in creative departments, because they are so "intuitive" and so well adapted to the complex software graphic designers use.
ReplyDeleteI also have an IPhone 5. I don't plan to get rid of it anytime soon.
I used to be into boycotts, but now, I confess, I'm not so much. There are just too many things to boycott -- not just SoCon stuff, but, well, what about apparel makers who have sweatshops in Indonesia? Can you guarantee your t-shirts aren't being made by slave labor?
I would end up not being able to purchase *anything.* It gets out of hand.
That said, I wouldn't patronize any business or service provider that was using embryonic stem cells or fetal tissue for ANYTHING.
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ReplyDeleteI so miss Steve Jobs. He always obeyed one of Pik’s Rules: Never insult your customers. You might have suspected what his politics were, but somehow you knew it wasn’t reflected by Apple. My guess is that he would be appalled if there were any customer who choose not to buy Apple because of something political that the CEO said.
ReplyDeleteAnother reason companies should avoid political statements* is the unintended consequence. Ask the NFL about that. They get involved in one domestic violence issue, and then along comes another related situation (Adrian Peterson) that they are now expected to deal with, and of course that’s not enough so they are obliged to run sad-face ads during games, but of course that won’t be enough once the next situation comes in that they’ll have to speak on or be criticized, and on and on and on. (My favorite along these lines is the NHL now punishing players for calling names on the ice – as if the players didn’t already have another way to deal with it.)
Having said all that, I’m with Diane on the product boycott thing. There are so many variables in the marketplace that there won’t be any message sent one way or another. I can see making a purchase decision based on CEO politics if all other things are equal. But rewarding inferior products at poorer values is bad for everyone. Besides, boycotts like this just encourages more corporate statements (might Tim Cook have been encouraged by the Chick-fil-A brouhaha last year?).
Disclosure: I’m now in the Google-verse after firing Apple because an iOS auto-update lost me functionality (unforgivable). Mrs. Pik is iPad/iPhone and enjoys it.
*I’m not talking about Hobby Lobby, Memories Pizza, and Chick-fil-A being closed on Sundays here. Those are actions taken in running a business according to one’s conscience.
P.S. Blogspot has been bad to my commenting today (this is attempt #4). Must be running on a Mac somewhere.
The thought crossed my mind, although I am in no financial position to dump my phone while it's working perfectly well, not to mention re-purchase all the apps on it for a new platform. But then I thought, ok, so who will I give those relatively few dollars to instead? Google? Microsoft? None of these people are our friends.
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't think boycotts are terribly effective as a protest tool except in very specific circumstances, either. In this case, it's not like Apple or any other tech company wants applause and approval from social conservatives or Christians in the first place. If we think they are uncool, it's possibly even a boon to their brand, because to them and their fanboys, we are uncool. The sales they lose from us they will easily pick up from others, so we effectively have no leverage.
I think that expecting corporations to give a damn what we say about anything is a dead end, at this point. What alternative should we look into? Distributism? I don't know yet. But I don't think boycotts are going to do anything except possibly further consolidate all the tribal symbols and signals.
Oh well put indeed! Thank you!
DeleteLet me know if anything in these observations is invalid.
ReplyDeleteIn the political realm, each side, left and right, casts political votes for their respective candidates and issues. Naturally, prior speech in the form of language and campaign dollars shapes who those candidates ultimately happen to be and with what sophistication their appeal is presented to the voter. But at the ballot box, one cannot use dollars, only votes, one man, one vote. Because political votes are not fungible and those cast by conservatives cannot be added to a liberal candidate's total, in recent history those votes divide virtually 50/50 politically, with elections decided on the margins.
In the economic realm, firms can only survive and flourish from consumers, liberal or conservative, voting with dollars, no matter what other speech may be sent their way. Those consumers may vote or abstain economically for or against firms for any number of reasons. However, in the economic realm, unlike in the political realm, dollar votes, unlike political votes, are fungible: conservative dollar votes for mechanical devices can flow directly to support liberal causes and vice versa.
This is the only reason, beyond sheer pusillanimity, that political correctness can even function: institutions fear the consequences of opinion in materially directing the flow of dollar votes toward or away from their respective balance sheets.
Political correctness is overwhelmingly understood reflexively as a liberal phenomenon because liberals use politically correctness-directed dollar voting routinely, ruthlessly, and effectively to produce liberal results from dollar denominated institutions fueled by both liberals and conservatives alike while conservatives too often simply watch and gnash their teeth.
However, in recent decades a new dimension, social media, has been made available for those who may not be interested in voting directly in either the political or economic realms with either of their respective currencies. Sometimes this third dimension does in fact overlap with the political or economic or both and thus influence the respective voting in those dimensions, but in those cases where it in fact does not it still serves the useful purpose of providing a safe place to warehouse those who might otherwise be tempted to act either politically or economically.
Those whose interests may not be realized either politically or economically, then, will still have this third dimension in which to enjoy them.
I should add that in this third dimension there may be ends in addition to merely warehousing the populace there that is also neither publicly political nor publicly economic. Here is one such example. There is no reason to believe any of these events narrated below actually occurred. I have [bold bracketed] those ends being served by this narrative other than public politics, public economics, or simple warehousing:
DeleteUPDATE: I had a 30-minute phone conversation today with a prominent Christian physician who works at one of the great medical institutions in the world, here in the US. He reached out to me through a mutual friend to say to me how important it is to raise the alarm about what’s happening on this front, and to start networking and building institutions to help us get through what is to come.
[“This is what I think you mean with the Benedict Option,” he said, correctly. “You need to write that book] so somebody can give the public a clear understanding of where we are, how we got here, and what we’re going to have to do to get through what’s coming.”
We were talking on background, so I don’t feel comfortable relating specific details of our discussion here. He gave me a lot of deeply concerning information about what’s happening in the medical world around this and related culture-war issues. He said he’s been watching it unfold for some time now, and he’s been trying to make people understand that Christians in this country are facing something unprecedented in US history.
One of the things he sees coming, and coming fast: the inability of many professionals, and not only in the medical field, to work unless they sign off on things they cannot in good conscience accept. “We’re going to see jobs lost and retirements lost,” he said.
In his institution, said the doctor, every single one of his colleagues believes that on LGBT issues, Christians who hold to the orthodox view are no better than segregationists. This cultural attitude is sooner or later going to be absorbed into the law.
“The thing is,” he said, “these are all very nice people.” The implication here is that this is all going to be carried out by decent, educated folks with tender consciences.
[“Your Walker Percy] foresaw it all,” he said. “We need to pay attention to him”
steve says:
DeleteApril 9, 2015 at 8:23 pm
Let me note that as practicing physician of very many years, as vice-chair of an academic department and as someone who still practices in rural America, your physical friend is probably wrong. You are sufficiently vague that I cannot tell.
steve says:
Yes, Steve, it's been my experience as well that pathological liars tend to lie pathologically and compulsively, particularly when the temptation to utilize non-falsifiable information is always available, no matter how ostensibly sacrosanct their apparent mission.
Keith, I'm confused by that last comment. That second "steve says" shouldn't be there, right? I'm guessing that the italicized comment comes from a doctor named Steve, and the non-italic commentary on it is yours, right?
DeleteAnd yes, I agree 100%.
I have no idea whether Dreher made up his uber-prominent physician in world-famous hospital. (How come it's never just some ordinary doctor in a community hospital in rural Tennessee?) I do think some scary stuff is coming down the pike. But no, I don't think it has yet reached such dire, apocalyptic proportions. Not at the Fortune 500 place where I work, certainly: Its policies may be PC, but it is headquartered in the Bible Belt, and the countless Christians who work here certainly feel completely free to express their religious beliefs. (Not to mention their penchant for leaving little flyers and invites to church services in the break room.)
That second "steve says" shouldn't be there, right?
ReplyDeleteRight. That was simply an erroneous double posting on my part of the first one I link coded. In the unitalicized text I am obviously answering Steve rhetorically.
Oh, I'm not even saying there may not even be some scary stuff out there exactly of the sort being described.
What I am saying is that, in the absence of evidence that what I quoted came from a real human being other than Dreher, Dreher is a compulsive pathological liar who uses the pose of "journalism" ("on background"; "sources") together with anonymous accounts within a closed, hermit kingdom of pacified readership to script with his own hand narratives that directly and impossibly just happen to endorse his personal commercial projects.
If one saw a 6-year-old child blatantly lying repeatedly the way I'm accusing Dreher of compulsively and pathologically lying, one would ask why its parents hadn't put it in professional treatment of some sort. But Dreher can't help himself, because the lying is too easy, the blog and other readers too timidly gullible, the payoff too immediate and useful, and because he knows no one can prove the negative that it wasn't actually written by someone else and just coincidentally managed to endorse not just one, but two Dreher projects simultaneously.
The same reason Christians and conservatives should be wary of buying into these unverifiable narratives no matter how delicious the apparent endorsement of our values and sentiments might make us feel at first blush is the same reason given some time ago for not building one's house on a foundation of sand, because one never knows when it will all just wash away. In practical terms, if and when the Dreher lie is in fact exposed and collapses and one has built a social or political claim upon it, it's that much harder to keep one's credibility from washing out on the tide with the accompanying Dreher debris.
There is also another, more subtle, more unsavory thing at play here. Not everyone who reads these fictional Dreherisms and who has an outside venue in which to comment on them is necessarily timid or gullible. Some percentage almost certainly recognizes them to be improbable lies tendered in the name of Christianity in order to venally serve Dreher, but it becomes cynically and symbiotically useful for them to pretend to accept the fiction nonetheless for any number of reasons, to maintain access, to maintain a relationship with a higher-caste Christian blogging voice, to see their own commercial projects promoted by him one day, too*, etc.
*What does Dreher's whole out-of-left-field gushing endorsement of Charles S. Featherstone telegraph to the world? Why, that if you suck up to Dreher, he just might promote your work heavily on TAC, too. And, particularly if you're in Dreher's new, more academy-centric cirvles these days, you almost certainly have a work of some sort languishing somewhere, if only as a dream in your mind.
To address your post, absolutely - Dreher is being a phony. The least he can do is divest himself of his Apple products.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm with you on the unnamed sources issue. These people could easily be entirely fictitious. I'm somewhat new to Dreher so I don't have a basis to call him a liar. But I think that when you are speaking on a serious matter of public policy, calling up a blogger/writer and not signing your name to your comments is irresponsible behavior at the very least.
That said, Dreher is not wrong in pointing out that being anti-SSM is socially isolating in today's marketplace. What he doesn't seem to understand is that maybe, just maybe, it's wrong to let the marketplace dictate everything.
Last but not least, Dreher is a buffoon who doesn't understand religious liberties. He goes on and on about gay wedding cakes and other ephemera. He doesn't seem to understand that selling a product is not a religious issue, and that there's loads of case law on this subject, and his words are meaningless.
Again, I'm no Dreher expert, but I don't think he's ever said a word about the fact that California now has legalized more than two parent families, which will open a HUGE can of worms in family law, as this spreads across the country, and it will. This is a much more momentous issue than gay wedding cakes, but it's not sexy enough, so he doesn't mention it.
https://verdict.justia.com/2013/10/15/california-allows-children-two-legal-parents
I don't know if he is a liar. I do know he is a blithering idiot.
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DeleteYou can see the mountains of Starhill, Louisiana, where Rod is from, in this picture below casually captioned "Starhill, Louisiana" in the post linked here.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/image-554x600.jpg
What a beautiful landscape! And what beautiful food! It makes one really want to go there for his Walker Percy Weekend, maybe even picnic on that very same spot captioned "Starhill, Louisiana". Maybe eat some of that same delicious boudin from the other photo captioned "Starhill, Louisiana". Where both the views and the food are rustic and beautifully French.
Because if anyone would know what the view from "Starhill, Louisiana" looks like, it would be Rod. And one can even see now how it got its name: so high, it practically touches the stars. Down there in southern Louisiana. So magical. So mystical. That clinches it. I'm making my travel plans today. I hope I'm not disappointed in the view from "Starhill, Louisiana" once I get there.
Lol!! Love it. Louisiana is as flat as the proverbial pancake, as I'm sure you know well. When we lived in Natchitoches, we used to go sometimes to a local state-parkish thingie whose name escapes me, which purported to be the highest elevation in the state. IIRC it was about 300 feet or so above sea level. I will have to look it up.
DeleteActually about 500 feet above sea level. I was off by 200 feet. Lol.
DeleteThe muppet show continues, now in meta.
ReplyDeleteMeta-muppet master Mahdi Rod Dreher, the Expected One, introduces anonymous muppet "Nick" to further fluff his Benedict Option. I'm referring to Nick as a second order meta-muppet because anonymous and unlikely to exist Nick is now quoting anonymous and unlikely to exist Kingsfield, our first order Mahdi muppet.
Producing these additional meta-layers of muppetry adds a needed three-dimensionality to what would otherwise just be the Mahdi plaintively entreating people to buy his book.
But now, with Nick and who knows who else to come, it's muppets all the way down.
I can't see Animal or Gonzo ever succumbing to the Benedict Option. Kermit, maybe, if he can run the show.
DeleteWe'll be up in the hecklers' balcony with Statler and Waldorf. As always.
There are a couple of interesting things I ran across today that go along with this weird phenomenon of meta-muppetry as I'm calling it, i.e., the image of Dreher with his hand up a Nick puppet which in turn has its own puppet hand up the original Kingsfield puppet.
DeleteThe first thing that might throw some light on how these situations can persist and thrive comes from commenter John L., who says
I also don’t understand why you have almost no actual conservative commenters on your blog in a magazine called the ‘American Conservative’. It is very odd.
That's easy, John L. Many conservatives, although sadly some high profile ones I've criticized, understand that Dreher's only a faux-conservative, only a placeholding conservative acceptable to liberals in the same way a gay man is an acceptable escort to the prom for your sister: neither will cause any harm because both are there for other reasons.
But the second thing is really more interesting and comes from Bret Stephens in the WSJ. If you don't have a subscription, you'll have to paste "Hillary and the Liberal Way of Lying" into Google and get there that way.
Sometime in the 1990s I began to understand the Clinton way of lying, and why it was so successful. To you and me, the Clinton lies were statements demonstrably at variance with the truth, and therefore wrong and shameful. But to the initiated they were an invitation to an intoxicating secret knowledge.
What was this knowledge? That the lying was for the greater good, usually to fend off some form of Republican malevolence. What was so intoxicating? That the initiated were smart enough to see through it all. Why be scandalized when they could be amused? Why moralize when they could collude?
It always works. We are hardly a month past Hillary Clinton’s Server-gate press conference, in which she served up whoppers faster than a Burger King burger flipper—lies large and small, venial and potentially criminal, and all of them quickly found out. Emails to Bill, who never emails? The convenience of one device, despite having more than one device?
It doesn’t matter. Now Mrs. Clinton is running for president, and only a simpleton would fail to appreciate that the higher mendacity is a recommendation for the highest office. In the right hands, the thinking goes, lying can be a positive good—as political moisturizer and diplomatic lubricant.
***
What the Clintons pioneered—the brazen lie, coyly delivered and knowingly accepted—has become something more than the M.O. of one power couple. It has become the liberal way of lying.
Accepting Rod's sock puppet narratives at face value, then, is the price of admission into the Kingdom of the Mahdi of the Benedict Option. Why not allow yourself to be intoxicated? Of course you're smart enough to see through it all. But why be scandalized when you could be amused? Why moralize when you could collude?
It's probably immodest of me to suggest that the emergence of Nick and the wholesale rewrites of the Benedict Option into basically 'why not just keep doing what you're doing right now and don't call it anything bombastic at all ("but buy my book anyway!")' has been prompted by the systematic criticisms everyone here has been offering but I'd like to think so just the same.
Perverting politics and religion to narcisstic ends through phony, unverifiable pseudofactual narratives of the sort Clinton and Dreher traffic in shouldn't be a part of the conservative tool kit, IMO, no matter how desperate things might seem at any given moment.
although sadly NOT some
DeleteOnly DreRod could make Christ's Passion and Resurrection about himself...He wrote about reciting the psalms for about two hours in a dark Church like this is the first time this has ever happened...DreRod has no sense of history beyond his own nose.
ReplyDeleteLOL. Ted over at Opus Publicum made a similar point. I can;t bring myself to go to the links in question, though.
DeleteThis touches on something I've been thinking about lately -- related to the American Convert Phenomenon, including conversion to Convertodoxy.
My older son recently wrote a report for his Cultural Anthropology class about a talk given by a visiting prof on the Eastern Religions Fad of the '60s and '70s. (As a Baby Boomer who attended a hippie-dippie liberal arts collage, I remember this fad well.) Anyway, this visiting prof has apparently studied several hippie-vintage communes that formed, back in the day, expressly for the study and living out of Eastern religions, primarily Zen, I believe.
The prof noted that these young (well, they were young *then* :D) converts to Eastern Stuff distinguished between mysticism and spirituality. Mysticism was Good; spirituality (as they defined it) was Bad, because it was standard-garden-variety American individualism with a religious veneer.
However, in the case of every single one of these Zen-Whatever communes, the dominant ethos became...you guessed it, American individualism with a religious veneer. The devotees talked a lot about mysticism and communalism and related stuff, but they actually *lived* like typical American Baptists or Presbyterians or what have you, just with an Eastern tinge.
OK, I am not expressing this well. I will have to re-read my son's report, because it was very specific and much better expressed than my rehash of it. But anyway, the bottom line is: I think something similar is going on with Dreher. He thinks he's this pious mystical-schmystical Eastern saint-in-training, but he's really just a plain old American narcissist.
Now, Rod is just like Flannery O'Connor.
ReplyDelete