House of Eratosthenes

Gerard does not want a computer for Christmas. His work of art that tells you so, is treated appropriately like any other worthy gem, catalogued and buried deep in an archive to be hauled out for display on special occasions. Well today is December 22, so it out comes, complete with all the smartass comments his regulars have attached to the bottom of it in years past.

Blogsister Daphne‘s reply got me to thinking. Hasn’t anyone besides me noticed how incredibly smug Apple users are?

The answer, it turns out, is not-only-yes-but-you-bet-your-ass. I first tripped across this thing, which looked tempting, but it turned out to be a joke. A reasonably good joke, worth bookmarking. Less satisfying as a joke, than as a starting point from which to noodle out what’s going on. Hmmm…Apple users tend to be control freaks…but they don’t know, and don’t want to know, how their computers work. There’s something deep going on here. Perhaps we are all control freaks but there’s a different flavoring from person-to-person regarding the underlying control-freakishness.

That’s a story for another day, said Pooh.

That’s when I tripped across this…

Ah…itch scratched. Now I can enjoy Christmas.

He’s an Obama supporter, but he seems to have a brain in his head so that might change any week now. His blog is over here.

“He’s an Obama supporter, but he seems to have a brain in his head so that might change any week now. ”

I’ll just assume you didn’t look around his place…and you’re giving him too much credit on the “brains” departrment.
- tim | 12/22/2009 @ 13:36
Never had much opinion about Macs until about 10 years ago, when I started teaching software in Marin after having had a lot of success in SF teaching PC users business applications, from DOS through MSProject.

The gig ended, and I cast around for more work near where I lived in Sausalito. As soon as I started teaching in Marin, I was inundated by Mac users, and it took almost no time to discover they were all – liberals. “Why can’t I do it this way?” Because it doesn’t work like that. “But I wanna do it this way.” But it doesn’t work like that. “Why can’t they do it my way?” Sigh…

Macs are the perfect analogy for Leftism – Do It My Way, Click On This And…Something… Will Happen, They’re Better Because You’re Stupid, etcetcetc. One of my clients was Industrial Light and Magic (LucasFilms,) and I heard lots of great stories from the accounting folks about the wars they went through trying to convince The Enlightened that they in fact needed PCs to run business applications. Madness.

Macs may be great machines for what they do (graphics,) but somehow the idea that sometimes “up” means “up” has eluded them all these years. And the usual Hackintosh user (just keep clicking on stuff until …something…happens) seems still to be as opinionated, ill-informed, angry and defensive as any 0bama voter – but I repeat myself.

Just my opinion, of course, based on several thousand students I taught over a 5-year span…
- rob | 12/22/2009 @ 14:24
Small-tee, I’ll grant you the ability to detect bullshit in & of itself does not manifest intellect. But it does manifest something, the guy had three tests and he passed all three of them. Lots of other “smart” folks have shown a far greater proclivity to get distracted by this-or-that. So he’s got some grudging respect for me there…but I’ll admit what intrigues me more than impresses me, is this blind spot with regard to worshipping the Obama logo versus worshipping the Apple logo. He doesn’t seem to be aware of the connection. Hope I get the chance to chat with him personally and explore this myopia of his.

Rob, I’ll say this so Daphne doesn’t have to say it. She is as smarmy and smug as any Mac user there’s ever been, but the correlation breaks down in her case because she doesn’t have a liberal bone in her body. There are other exceptions as well.

Overall, though, you are absolutely right. See my comments about Obama logo versus Apple logo above. The freakish, creepy cultism takes on much the same tone and shape, in both cases, does it not?
- mkfreeberg | 12/22/2009 @ 16:38
In re the permeability of the Mac/PC Left/Right divide, of course I’ve known normal people that love ’em – Van der Leun has periodically weighed in on that side, I seem to recall. Nonetheless Macs are a notable occasion of the sin of I Don’t Wanna Discuss It Anymore Because You’re Just Wrong, even among the otherwise reasonable. Go figure.

Like you, I spect, my first profound disinterest in Macs stemmed from the cutesy-pie “they just do everything for you” nature of their earliest converts. By the time I started getting interested in the elegance of Relational Database Theory via Codd’s 12 Rules, the fact that a company which had unblushingly named “computers” Lisa and Snookums left me unsurprised that generations of “artists” thought that lists in Filemaker constituted a database. I guess they do, in the sense that the shoe box you throw all your receipts in constitutes a database – it only starts to get difficult at tax time, after all, and real artists employ accountants to do the searches anyway, ya know?

What’s maddening about Macs is that they either work or they don’t, and the cute little things respond to any attempts to find out what happened with “If you try to wift my cute widdow dwess and wook underneath, I’ll bite your fuckin hand off.” This of course has lead generations of True Believers to congratulate themselves on how “intuitive” using their Macs is, when in fact what they mean is that Macs just encourage you to keep pokin at shit until something works. As an analyst, of course, I find that less than amusing.

To invert your point about the guy in the vid, I suspect that anybody who attempts to deconstruct arguments based on observable truth – i.e. Conservatives, or as I like to put it, Normal People – will eventually start to get suspicious about the fact that their favorite computer was sold to ’em on the basis that All The Cool Kids Have One.

I can dream…
- rob | 12/22/2009 @ 19:18
And by the way, I forget – were you or anybody else on this rant a year ago? Frankly, it never occurred to me that the KosKids or 0 cultists in general would have ever bothered to learn how to run a PC. It seemed grindingly apparent from the beginning that all the “netroots” were Mac-heads. Didn’t anybody get after this in 2008?

And don’t Daphne, et al, feel a bit, ah, abashed at their solidarity with people who essentially believe that only a PC user would vote Republican?

Just wonderin…
- rob | 12/22/2009 @ 19:31
I like the newest crop of “parody” ads on YouTube, the ones that make fun of the Macintosh advertising. Some of them feature a third guy (or in some cases, a hot girl) named Linux. Alternatively, Linux either makes both of the other two look like fools, or gets laughed at by them simply for its comparatively tiny share of the OS market.

I kind of hate it when people simply “PC” instead of “Windows.” For one thing, the term “PC” was originally a trademark of IBM, not Microsoft, which is the real target of Mac users’ aggression. Today, PC is more or less a generic term for pretty much any desktop or laptop machine which isn’t made by Apple. Originally, these computers were called “PC clones,” a term which has been lost among the sands of time.

More to the point, however, it glosses over the fact that Microsoft Windows is FAR from the only operating system available to PC users. Yes, a high percentage of PCs (at least in the United States) do run Microsoft Windows, but there are also many which run any of the literally dozens of flavors of Linux, as well as a few die-hards who cling to antiquated OS’s like DOS, PC Windows, or even OS/2.

Call me a purist, but this has consistently annoyed me about both the Microsoft and Apple advertising campaigns which we’ve been seeing on TV for the past couple of years. (Notice the PC is always played by the stuffy-looking middle-aged guy, while the Mac is the young, hip, cool guy. Yeah, no subtle suggestion there, eh?)

On a side note, dontcha love that new one where Apple pokes fun at Windows 7? “It’s not gonna have any of the problems Windows XP had.” “It’s not going to have any of the problems Windows ME had. Trust me.” Blah, blah, blah.

The conversation immediately raises two questions in my mind: Why did Apple mention Windows ME, but not Windows 2000, a far longer-lived OS? Secondly, exactly what “problems with Windows XP” are they referring to? By all accounts, it’s been a pretty solid and popular operating system, widely used even after the release of Vista and now Windows 7.
- cylarz | 12/23/2009 @ 04:17
I am incredibly smug! Smarmy, too especially after a couple of toddies. Do you know why I like my Macs ( yes, I own more than one)? They’re easy.

I do three things on this computer: write, store photos and email. I’ve never had a single problem getting these simple tasks done on my mac.

I despised my previous, equally expensive pc’s, they were always crashing, getting sick, doing weird things that I didn’t want them to do – they were, to put it bluntly, a huge pain in the ass.

I have zero pretensions that I know jack shit about computers, software, programming, etc., etc., etc. I don’t want to know, I don’t want to take a class, I just want to turn it on and have it work. Kind of like my car. It’s a non-pretentious Ford Expedition and it works well, too.
- Daphne | 12/23/2009 @ 12:16

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Apple SmugnessTuesday, December 22nd, 2009

Apple Smugness
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009