sharke

I totally agree, my point was that the kind of people who think we should boycott such companies, remained largely silent when the same focus was put on Apple. 

sharke

SuperG

dubdisciple


political labels are funny. Most people I know pick the label they think sounds good, but typically violate the ever shifting core tenants of said position all the time. My ultra liberal tree hugging friend had no trouble finding an exception to her opposition to the death penalty for a particular child murderer. My former Glen Beck loving, tea partying boss is suddenly warming to aspects of Obamacare after receiving a huge medical bill. The massive levels of hypocrisy it takes to attempt 100% adherence to most ideologies is most likely to lead to eventual cognitive dissonance.

Methinks the right is seriously reconsidering the TP, I mean, sure they're reliable, but everybody else finds them distasteful, regular conservatives included. Obama's is policy-wise somewhere to the right of Reagan, and what to do? Be oppositional for opposition's sake? That won't work... 2016 is going to be hella interesting for both parties!

I don't find the TP "distasteful" at all. In fact in many respects they were very similar to Occupy Wall St, only without the Marxist BS, fighting with police, smelly shanty towns, rapes, murders etc. Of course the media did their best to portray them all as racist Christians who want to throw poor people onto a large bonfire etc. 

John T


You know, you couldn't have a better illustration of the jerkoff attitude that underlies this stuff than fwrend's stuff above suggesting everyone else in the store apart from him is a "kool aid drinker". Funny how he's in the same store with same products, but he's somehow smarter than everyone else. I'll tell you what runs it a close second though, and that's Sharke's claim to know for a fact that people en masse are indulging in some kind of political hypocrisy over Apple. Jaysus. Get over yourselves, chaps.

dubdisciple


@SuperG I was not talking about the publicized incidents. I was referring 100% to in person encounters. i have know way of knowing if my experience was typical nationwide and would to claim so. The circle of TP members I was regularly exposed to seemed to lean towards racism and other forms of fanaticism. In their defense, I don't think they had any clue they were racist, even when the members who did not participate in such things pointed out how their actions could be regarded as such. Anyways, I think I am going to abandon this thread because it is very off topic at this point and I apologize for that.

sharke

dubdisciple


@SuperG I was not talking about the publicized incidents. I was referring 100% to in person encounters. i have know way of knowing if my experience was typical nationwide and would to claim so. The circle of TP members I was regularly exposed to seemed to lean towards racism and other forms of fanaticism. In their defense, I don't think they had any clue they were racist, even when the members who did not participate in such things pointed out how their actions could be regarded as such. Anyways, I think I am going to abandon this thread because it is very off topic at this point and I apologize for that.

The trouble with accusations of "racism" is that everyone's definition of the word is so wildly different, it's impossible to take any unspecific accusation seriously. For some people, merely disliking a president who happens to be black is irrefutable evidence of racism. Alarm bells ring in my head when an accuser says something like "I don't think they were even aware that they were being racist." This is usually a sign that the "racist incident" in question was highly questionable. 

SuperG

sharke

dubdisciple


@SuperG I was not talking about the publicized incidents. I was referring 100% to in person encounters. i have know way of knowing if my experience was typical nationwide and would to claim so. The circle of TP members I was regularly exposed to seemed to lean towards racism and other forms of fanaticism. In their defense, I don't think they had any clue they were racist, even when the members who did not participate in such things pointed out how their actions could be regarded as such. Anyways, I think I am going to abandon this thread because it is very off topic at this point and I apologize for that.

The trouble with accusations of "racism" is that everyone's definition of the word is so wildly different, it's impossible to take any unspecific accusation seriously. For some people, merely disliking a president who happens to be black is irrefutable evidence of racism. Alarm bells ring in my head when an accuser says something like "I don't think they were even aware that they were being racist." This is usually a sign that the "racist incident" in question was highly questionable. 

Racism is just a variant of bigotry. It's a perverse, obstinate prejudice in the face of reason.


So of 'dislike', you have to judge it in the presence of reason. We could say, as an excuse, that the president being black is merely coincidental, but we can not take that at face value. It must past the test of reason. If past history, hypocrisy of ethic, or whatever is present, it is not reasonable.

I remember Michelle Bachmann's opinion on social security, and social program in general. She didn't think much of the program or those using it. Would her opinions be reasonable? What if it were discovered that her r husband was running a "pray-the-gay-away" program and had accepted medicaid funds as payment for services? Obviously, she and her husband have no problem accepting money from social funds. The reasonable thing to conclude is that she has a crude problem with honesty, and is bigoted too - and many like her are of the same religious bent.


If someone doesn't like Obama, so be it. Whether or not one is a racist merely depends on the reasonability of that dislike - it's no more simpler than that. 

slartabartfast

Apple Corp is now one of, if not THE largest single company in the world.

Oh my. How far this thread has fallen, and I have not yet gotten to the argument about how to define racism.

Apple is one of the smallest big cap corporations in the world. It has an extraordinarily small workforce (about 70K compared to Walmart 2.2M or Starbucks 149K), very little in the way of Apple owned production facilities, most of its distribution system is short term leased property (< 400 Apple Stores worldwide) and so on. If you judge size by any criterion except for "market capitalization" (i. e the aggregate current value of outstanding stock certificates) or revenue it is a pipsqueak. What it has is a reputation for being able to drain an extraordinary (some might say exorbitant) profit from designing a limited range of products that are in extremely high demand from consumers, which in turn makes it an exciting investment, so long as it can keep up the magic. If the magic fails, there are damn few assets its investors can claim. 

It has risen to the pinnacle of second highest market cap company without the natural monopoly, and deliberately anticompetitive business practices of Microsoft, by making toys and tools that are very popular, and selling into a market that is for the most part very wealthy. However they are still a massive underdog compared to MS on the basis of desktop computers OS. Apple does not make the list of top 5 computer manufacturers (Microsoft makes none), but to compare operating systems which they both make, Microsoft Windows is on about 92% of PCs while Apple OS is on <7%.

Apple can make you do what it wants you to do, not because it is so big, but because it has limited your ability to do what you want on its systems by design. If you want Apple, you play by Apple rules, use Apple supported/marketed applications, and hardware. In the past MS has at least paid lip service to the concept of a flexible system that will install on machines made by many manufacturer's and support software and hardware from many sources. This has had the (probably unintended) effect of fostering a massively innovative personal computer/software environment, with the result that we have seen enormous progress in this area. Now Microsoft has found its stock value has not kept up with Apple, and so they are taking on many of the trappings of Apple. Marketing software via the Microsoft Store (effectively charging rent on the developers of new Windows software) prohibiting unsigned drivers (rent on hardware development) etc. etc.

John T


The Alto was really, really astonishing, and very far ahead of its time. The research division thought it was the future, but apparently Xerox management never understood it and thought it was a waste of time, hence happy to show Apple whatever. The engineer who was asked to demonstrate the system to jobs nearly quit over it, as she could see what was obviously going to happen, ie: Apple would have the huge success with computers that Xerox shouldhave had. Jobs concurred with this himself. Can't remember the exact quote, but basically something like "Xerox would have owned the entire computer business permanently".

SuperG

rational objection to Obama as a person, his past, his ideological history, his policies etc

sharke

Totally agree. They only way someone could play the 'card' in the face of apparently rational, reasonable objections if is those objections were either:


a:  not true, or innaccurate, miscaracterized (i.e. ideological history - no claiming truth just because some
   partisan hack on fox news said it...)
b:  consistently held  (no flip-flopping)

The problem for conservatives is that Obama, policy-wise, is simply that he [Obama] has been more conservative in many if not more practices than past popular conservative politico's. That puts the onus on conservatives to be very precise and very clear about those objections - and it's a tough one that quite a few will never pass. The race card remains a valid conjecture and until either rational objection are presented (keeping in mind the context points above), or other non-rational objections are presented. Tough choices, eh?


(funny, a lot of right-wing politicos that could pass those tests were voted out of office, imho....)

One could simply say he'd never vote for a Democrat. That would reduce the argument to the reasonableness of that, at least until supporting arguments were made, and then the cycle of rationality begins again, ad infinitum.

SuperG

sharke

SuperG

rational objection to Obama as a person, his past, his ideological history, his policies etc

sharke

Totally agree. They only way someone could play the 'card' in the face of apparently rational, reasonable objections if is those objections were either:


a:  not true, or innaccurate, miscaracterized (i.e. ideological history - no claiming truth just because some
partisan hack on fox news said it...)
b:  consistently held  (no flip-flopping)

The problem for conservatives is that Obama, policy-wise, is simply that he [Obama] has been more conservative in many if not more practices than past popular conservative politico's. That puts the onus on conservatives to be very precise and very clear about those objections - and it's a tough one that quite a few will never pass. The race card remains a valid conjecture and until either rational objection are presented (keeping in mind the context points above), or other non-rational objections are presented. Tough choices, eh?


(funny, a lot of right-wing politicos that could pass those tests were voted out of office, imho....)

One could simply say he'd never vote for a Democrat. That would reduce the argument to the reasonableness of that, at least until supporting arguments were made, and then the cycle of rationality begins again, ad infinitum.

The trouble is, Obama's opponents have been very clear and precise about what it is they object to policy wise. And they still get called racists. 

That's an assertion that just won't stand - the preciseness of those arguments, along with those very qualifiers I pointed out, is extremely debatable.

Remember when the right was complaining about TARP limiting executive pay be reasoning that it's not the government's business to interfere in private business affairs? These would be the same kind of wingers that would recommend urine testing for unemployment recipients. Their plausable argument in the first case in negated by their contention in the latter. Their is, of course, somewhere a unifying argument for both these cases, but it may be something they are unwilling to admit. So it is possible that they may get tarred with incorrect conjecture, but then again, the fact that they are unwilling to expose their true line of reasoning is likely due to it's reprehensibility, could be seen as them as deserving the discomfiture. 

And in the end - it turns out Obama never enforced it - giving creedence to the argument that he is less liberal than some would believe.

As I said, there is no way one can make your argument stand unless it is qualified, and I'm not sure this is the place to go into that level of detail/debate. I don't mind a little politics now and then, but for here, topics like this ought to be merely glanced upon, and even then, *flat* assertions ought not be made without some easily understood qualification. 

i.e. 'Mitt Romney is an elitist' would be normally be a flat assertion, however, since nearly everyone has heard of his '47 percenter' tape (which backs the claim), this the statement isn't flat nor unqualified.