Apple builds a virtual city on a hill

by philg

Within my Apple News app:

iPhone owners can make a difference, learn, give back, take action, and more! Let’s click and check the range of political opinion that Apple expects phone owners to want to learn about…

And scrolling…

There is nothing better than “grappling with … privilege” from the vantagepoint of a $1,400 iPhone 12 Pro Max!

Wouldn’t people have a lot more to donate “in support of Black lives and communities of color” if they kept their old phones and/or bought Google Pixel phones rather than Apple?

As part of this section, Apple also notes “Racism is a factor in health care, criminal justice, education, and other crucial election issues. Learn more about where the presidential candidates stand.” This leads to a Trump, who ripped Apple’s zero-tax rug out from under the company, versus Biden section:

Would resurrecting the ERA actually be a move in the direction of social justice? How could the federal government continue to have quotas for women-owned businesses, for example? Couldn’t people identifying as “men” or “not women” say that this program violated the ERA? The Biden-Harris campaign platform promises to direct billions of dollars to those who identify as “women”:

Biden will: Direct federal funding to women-owned businesses, including through his new historic $400 billion investment in additional federal purchases of products made by American workers, in his first term. This will be the largest mobilization of public investments in procurement, infrastructure, and R&D since WWII, and it will critically be designed to support small businesses and those owned by women and people of color. … Improve and expand the Small Business Administration programs that most effectively support women-owned businesses, especially those owned by women of color. Immediately after taking office in 2009, the Obama-Biden Administration started to make billions of dollars in capital available to women-owned businesses… Biden will build on this work and expand SBA programs that target women.

District courts struck down a bunch of stuff that Trump was trying to do because they found that his campaign rhetoric was evidence of wrongthink. Unless Presidents Biden and Harris can rip out the hard drives at archive.org, there will be a huge mountain of evidence that their intent for much of their agenda was motivated by a desire to help Americans with a particular gender ID, something that would then be prohibited by an adopted Equal Rights Amendment:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

(does the ERA itself need to be amended? It sounds as though it might be tainted with some gender binarism and transphobia)

Readers: Can we be redeemed merely by following Apple’s guide?

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11 thoughts on “Apple builds a virtual city on a hill”

  1. The thick skulls of the Deplorables must be cracked and broken, the soft skulls of the empathic sufferers must be squeezed, and a glorious new age will dawn!

    Xi Greets President of Harvard

    http://old.moe.gov.cn/publicfiles/business/htmlfiles/moe/moe_2861/201503/185152.html

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Education_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China

    “We actually do have an ideological frame[work],” Cullors said of her organization. “We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories.”

    It also expresses its appreciation for the work of the US Communist Party, “especially Black communists,” as well as its support for “the great work of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, Young Lords, Brown Berets, and the great revolutionary rainbow experiments of the 1970s,” Breitbart reported.

    https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/blm-co-founder-describes-herself-as-trained-marxist/

    • Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend, based on the historical Johann Georg Faust (c. 1480–1540). The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroads, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures.

  2. If Apple and everyone else who think they are fighting a good fight for BLM, equality, racism, et. al. would put 1/2 of this much effort on far more crushing issues such as the education and our failing school system, then none of this “soft” issues (i.e.: BLM, equality, racism, et. al.) would be issues any more.

    The level of illiterates we have in the US puts us at 3rd world level. THAT’s the real issue Apple and others need to step up to but they won’t because telling American’s we are illiterates is heartbreaking and demoralizing to our kids and families.

    • Our host said that they are building the most expensive school ever per student in Lincoln. Is that a step in the right direction?

      Everyone is also talking about the student debt crisis, which probably means too much money is spent on education. Meanwhile, in Germany, https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32821678

  3. Welcome to life in an endless electronic reeducation camp. The country has failed. And Trump made it worse.

  4. Matt Drudge is the best journalist America has had in the past 30 years – even though he doesn’t write anything, and he doesn’t do any journalism himself! He hasn’t shrunk from showing people that the President is a whacko and the Left wants everyone’s ass in a wringer. I can’t think of anyone of comparable importance who has been more honest with the American people.

    “Linguists explain the nuances”

    It’s always the linguists.

    https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/10/27_lakoff.shtml

    • It’s really right there in that 2003 article:

      “Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff.”

      This President took a WRECKING BALL to that, while the progressives listened very attentively to Lakoff and others for the past 17 years or so. And here we are today. Trump was never a Republican or a Conservative until it was convenient for him to put the label on himself, and he has lead the party down the path of self-destruction, because he doesn’t know anything. And that’s about it for my political commentary for 2020. I really don’t have much else to say.

  6. Does anybody actually read through all that poison? I thought they had to force this stuff on people in cages at work and school. No one sane would self select to indulge in it.

  7. Apple is the richest company in the world. Why don’t they donate iPhone 12 Pro Max phones to disadvantaged students of color in inner-city schools, to help close the STEM gap between the children of free-spending tiger parents and poor working parents holding several jobs? (And Apple should pay for the phone to be a Wi-Fi hotspot.) And why doesn’t Apple give free iPhone 12 Pro Max phones and MacBook Pro laptops to every student at historical Black colleges and universities like Howard, Tuskegee, etc.? If students learn how to program on Apple devices, then Apple will be able to hire more Black engineers, something that they claim to want… so why not? And don’t think that I’m only looking at Apple, many rich companies that have thrived because of systemic racism can do similar things, and I’m looking at you, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft….

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