They (WalMart management) employ some basic editorial choices about what products they will or will not sell. If that is "censorship", then every single news outlet in the world engages in it, as not EVERY reporter's story hits the front page.
...And they use their market power to enforce these editorial choices. Censorship. If they were a milk bar down the road in some place with a dozen milk bars, it wouldn't matter. But you can't separate their actions from the reality of their institutional make-up and place in the economy.
Your analogy with journalism actually makes my point quite well: if some rich fellow bought up the majority of news outlets, and then made "editorial choices" about which stories will and will not run, most people would consider it censorship.
If he was xeroxing some newsletter from his basement, it'd be a different matter. That's the core of our disagreement - you think it's appropriate to treat a company like WalMart by the same standards you would treat a local milk bar (or News Limited by the same standards you would treat a dude with a photocopier in his basement, presumably), but these institutions are fundamentally different. The owners of WalMart are well aware of this, and it's actually the reason they engage in some of the behaviour that they engage in. It's always strange to me that their defenders are not similarly aware of it.
Wikipedia:
"Censorship is the suppression of speech or deletion of communicative material which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the government or media organizations as determined by a censor."
Wiktionary:
"The use of state or group power to control freedom of expression, such as passing laws to prevent media from being published or propagated."
Those are just two I grabbed in less than three minutes. There are others that could be broader, in the sense that you understand "censorship", but none I read would reasonably include the exclusion of a dedicated porn app on a device that otherwise has no problem showing porn through other means (except Flash, of course
)
Both those definitions encompass what I was talking about, "state or group power", "government or media organizations"; but your comparison was: "
Have a government official "question" you about the wording of a private email you sent to a friend while in country, or about a site you visited online one night--maybe even detain you or formally arrest you for it. Then you'll understand how many light years away this issue is from true censorship." These situations are not included under the definitions in Wikipedia or Wiktionary - it's exactly what i said, a police state, not an example of censorship. And it's pertinent, because, as you go on to say, the whole reason you're annoyed at this thread relates to that comparison.
Well, it's great you joined just this month to complain about something like this.
Actually i joined that month because i got an iPhone plan that month, and found some useful information here, while searching for problems i had in setting everything up. I am not now, nor have i ever been, a troll.
(If i'm annoying you or putting you out by continuing this argument, you are free to stop. It cane be a timesuck to engage in these internet debates - i know that, i havent been here for a few weeks because ive been busy, and wouldn't take it as some sign of victory if someone stopped posting and the thread died. I keep replying because i feel i have something to say that isn't just repeating myself, and you clearly feel the same. I'm not just trying to flood the place with words.)
I think a person like that would laugh in your face if you were in the same room with them, making the case that Steve Jobs was committing "censorship" against iPhone users by making the access of porn slightly less convenient.
I completely agree that a person like that would have far more serious problems. In fact, the people who live like that make pretty much every piece of hardware we're using to communicate with right now. I'll be the first to say that complaints about Apple should run first and foremost to their use of sweatshop labour in China (actually, i think i did say this in my first post, and will below in response to another point you raise).
But i also agree with the Stallman et al. crowd, who say that, while they acknowledge their causes are not *the* most fundamental problems in the world, they are still problems worth talking about. This all runs back to the basic fact that Apple are trying to sell a closed-off vision of computing (one being enforced by the system of laws that protect proprietary software, so hey, it looks like the government has a role in there somewhere after all), and it's legitimate to have a problem with that, but simultaneously recognise that there are also more serious, life-and-death problems in the world. These are not mutually exclusive positions.
No one HAS to work in a sweat shop. And from what I've read, FoxConn's wages are relatively competitive within the Chinese context. If you want $50/hour technicians in the US making your iPhone, don't complain when it costs $4,000 with a ten year contract.
I would be happy to pay a reasonable price for something if it meant that the person making it got a reasonable wage and working conditions. (that's why i am active in union issues.)
FoxConn's wages are "relatively competitive" within China because Chinese wages are utterly atrocious. And this relates to your comment that "No one HAS to work in a sweat shop" - well, yes they do, if they want "relatively competitive" wages. FoxConn workers are fairly obviously mistreated, the fact that the companies around them all do the same thing (and occasionally worse) doesn't absolve anybody, neither does the fact that they could be even worse off in any of the other horrible jobs with horrible conditions around them. The fact that Apple assembly line workers get a stool to sit on doesn't make it any better that they work terrible hours under terrible conditions at wages so low that it'd take them four months of not-spending to earn enough to buy one of the thousands of items that fly past their eyes every week on the assembly line (750 yuan/month; 3000 yuan for an iPhone).
Who, pray tell, has Apple "murdered" and what "mayhem" have they stirred up? Man, the hyperbole machine is in high gear.
Actualy, i said "pseudo-libertarian fantasy utopia" would feature murder and mayhem, not Apple. I was making a sideways reference to the history of capitalist libertarianism, which has sponsored quite literal murder and mayhem across much of the third world (and some of the first).
And i wasn't using "murder and mayhem" as hyperbole, i mean, literally, Augusto Pinochet filled a stadium with leftists and systematically shot them in the head to remove public opposition for a capitalist-libertarian policy package. Suharto massacred something like 500,000-1,000,000 for the same reason; iirc estimates vary. Just two of the most famous single massacres. There's a general pattern of people "dissappearing" at the hands of police and military, in the name of rooting out communism; and hey - sometimes in the name of communism, too, of course - but the effect is the same. It's all just about squashing public/worker/employee opposition to whatever you want to do.
Squashing such opposition is an absolute neccesity for setting up low-wage, high-profit, business-friendly utopias. That's why international outsourcing exists in relatively non-repressive countries like my own - i mean, seriously, shipping massive amounts of goods long distances by sea and air is *not* an economical approach unless you're saving massively in production costs. Which leads me to:
WalMart and Steve Jobs. Might as well be Stalin and Hitler.
Funny that: Most big businesses had a great relationship with Hitler, didn't they? I seem to recall that most big businesses did, because the Nazi's "Charter of Labour" destroyed trade unionism, kept wages down and mandated for businessmen to have full executive control over their companies. Neither WalMart nor Apple where around back then, afaik, but i'm sure they would have had similar attitudes toward Hitler as other businesses.
I don't know about Stalin, but Steve Jobs and WalMart both make out pretty well as long as their subcontracted sweatshops remain in a country controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. I know Mao had his differences with Stalin, and the CCP's no longer Maoist, but the police state is the same, and that's the key thing, isn't it?
United Fruit loved the Guatemalan dictator Cabrera. Coca Cola's pretty happy with Uribe - who, while democratically elected, runs a pretty powerful police state. Most technology companies benefited from Mobutu Sese Seko. Jeez, that's just a couple of the most famous examples. A proper list would make up a whole book. WalMart benefits from products made under the conditions created by the dictatorship in China, but they also liked the military junta in Burma, and import products from Bangladesh and Honduras - those places sure are beacons of democracy.
I know you were only making a rhetorical point, but the fact is, military, police, and political repression is excellent for business - and there's a well-supported factual/historical/political/economic relationship between the two. Repressive states keep wages down (wages are generally the biggest expense in production in almost every industry), costs of production then go down, profit margins can rise. This isn't a conspiracy theory - it's just good business. (The ultimate test case is those countries that set up "export processing zones"/"free trade zones"/whatever you want to call them - all these "zones" became havens of abuse and repression, and rested upon this repression to make themselves attractive to business. Where repression was lighter, as in Namibia's EPZ, employees became able to fight for and win (to some degree) better conditions - and suddenly the EPZ was less attractive.)
And no firm that pays a decent wage can compete with those savings
And that last point is exactly why boycotts
do not work, in the long run, as a solution to all the issues under discussion here. You wrote:
That's how boycotts work. I remember the Nestle boycott in the late 70's ... After a few years, Nestle caved in 1984 and stopped marketing formula to the 3rd World.
While they ran a boycott of Nestle, did they also boycott Cadburys? Did people stop eating chocolate? Nestle might have stopped marketing powdered milk as a breast milk replacement, but they haven't stopped exploiting harvesters who work for low wages under poor conditions. The Fair Trade movement might be able to do something along these lines, but they are increasingly becoming just another part of the marketplace, with a specific "value-added"; and, in fact, have sold out to some degree (by allowing certain proportions of non-fair-trade ingredients into products labelled "fair trade") - the less ethical operations are capturing the more ethical ones, not the other way around.
Need i even mention how macabre it is to tolerate the existence of two competing products, one that contains some horrifying ethical issue (let's say it's made of baby brains), and another that doesn't (brain-free), and to claim that the appropriate way to distinguish between them is not with voting or any action as a citizen, but with
your purchasing choices?
While people where boycotting Shell for massive human rights abuses in Nigeria (oh hey - there's another friendly relationship between a big business and a police state - their interests simply run together), did they also boycott every other oil company - for exactly the same behaviour in less high-profile third-world nations? Did everyone stop running their cars and heating their homes?
If i convinced you that hardware companies simply behave badly in third world countries because it is in their interests to do so, would you boycott every peice of hardware that wasn't made by decently compensated, decently treated workers? That would mean that you would stop using computers or mobile phones at all.
The point of this whole line of thought was that we were arguing over the degree to which "buying" is like "voting". The simple facts of the way business operates make boycotts unhelpful as a general strategy.
The earlier point you made flows neatly on from this, so i put it here, out of order:
BTW, not every product you buy is from a huge, evil multinational corporation. When you buy locally, you are supporting local small businesses. That support is like a vote in that you could have cast your money to a bigger firm and you chose not to.
Many of my local small businesses actually still do things i am utterly opposed to.
I live in a big city. All of my small local businesses exploit recent immigrants and foreign students at low wages under poor conditions. Farms in the state where i live commonly do the same thing when they hire fruit-pickers. Am i to not eat to engage in this boycott?
Boycotts, and voting with your dollar, pre-suppose the existence of some ethical alternative. But the fact is that systematic problems (like the relative lack of power of employees versus employers, or the fact that even if a business does become more ethical, it can be out-competed by firms with lower wage costs etc...) simply remove truly ethical alternatives from the marketplace over time.
No, i don't think boycotts make the case for some similarity between purchasing and voting
at all.
In the much more minor issue at hand, Apple is using it's market share to hurt Macromedia, and to censor the available range of products (apps) by asserting full ideological and content control (hence "censorship") over a specific niche marketplace. It would be just lovely if an exact free software alternative to the iPhone existed and we all had access to it/knew about it/could easily switch to it, but the issue is, why should we tolerate them behaving this way
in the first place? That question is not addressed by boycotts.
