Comment by Trasmatta
2 days ago
So many apologists for Tim Apple over the past year, but I think this is just who he is. Gladly embracing fascism and authoritarianism.
2 days ago
So many apologists for Tim Apple over the past year, but I think this is just who he is. Gladly embracing fascism and authoritarianism.
Yea, Apple's decision to have its CEO embrace fascism has really destroyed a ton of my goodwill towards the company and I'm actively looking for alternatives, delaying further purchases, and encouraging others to do the same.
Doesn't help that they appear to have shot all of their UX designers into the sun judging by the most recent iOS and MacOS upgrades.
Don't forget that he did it for Trump's first admin too. Cooperation with the government seems to be an imperative beyond the CEO's control.
Very true. This is why Hitler was surrounded by so many people. They went where the power was. Even if it’s not “who he is”, it is who he became.
The nazis were prosecuted decades later. Tim Cook’s actions shouldn’t be magically forgotten once Trump is out of office.
This pattern has historical precedent. Adolf Hitler’s inner circle included people like Albert Speer, a trained architect who was not an early ideologue but aligned himself with power as the regime consolidated control. Speer benefited professionally, became Minister of Armaments, and later claimed political detachment. These claims were rejected at Nuremberg, where he was convicted for his role in the Nazi state.
The fact that alignment can be opportunistic rather than ideological did not absolve responsibility then, and it should not automatically do so now. Accountability is not erased simply because a political era ends.
There's a big difference between being a party member actually in a government position (war related, no less), and being a businessman surviving under that regime. You're not only making an absurd comparison, you're calling for punishment for somebody who hasn't even remotely broken any laws. Can't you see you're being authoritarian?
Law and morality are not the same thing. The apologism for Apple on HN is comically and selectively gymnastics. I think the biggest shame here is the brand identity for a corporation that many of you have self deluded into adopting. Even now the voices that tell you to stop bootlicking them and warning against them get shouted down.
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Somehow I doubt Tim Cook would have trouble surviving if he did not choose to bend the knee.
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> Even if it’s not “who he is”
We are what we do.
Capitalists only care about capital. Witness how fast the DEI stuff was jettisoned once it was determined to be unprofitable under the current administration.
DEI programs were (largely) incentivized by one political faction in the United States primarily via legal rather than market mechanisms, and in response to this a rival political faction explicitly ran on undoing those legal mechanisms to disincentivize DEI programs.
Of course one of the ways the government can enact policy is by making something cheap or expensive for firms participating in capitalism to do, which incentivizes their behavior; but characterizing DEI programs as something that corporations jettisoned because it was determined to be "unprofitable under the current administration" ignores the fact that the current administration explicitly promised to end DEI programs in a political campaign in a democracy and then won an election.
Here’s to the crazy ones
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