Sunday, November 20, 2011

Steve Jobs, and those who buy his products, are assholes

Matt Taibbi satirizes our complicity in enabling child labor abuse by making consumer choices to buy the products of the asshole who created them. Here are some excerpts from his 11/16/11 blog post:

“Steve Jobs...was undeniably a pathologically driven and totally ruthless corporate competitor who would have screwed his own mother out of her last penny, who took credit for inventions that were not entirely his own, and engaged in serial underhanded mistreatment of colleagues and employees alike, all in the name of bringing us handy gadgets at cheap prices.


“With Jobs the issue of slave labor also comes screamingly into question, a fact that stands in nauseating juxtaposition to Apple's cheerfully childlike design and brand identity. There's something even more disgusting about those toylike buttonless gizmos with their kiddie coloring, pushed on TV by timelessly presexual teen-muppet Justin Long, when you consider...that many of those Crayoloid devices were literally assembled by children. But we consume the fruits of international child labor a hundred times a day, and most of us know it and regularly walk right on into Wal-Marts and Targets to buy piles of cheap kiddie-stitched or kiddie-assembled stuff anyway.

“We generally agreed that Jobs’s nearly undeniable assholism – particularly in the area of using child labor – made all of us accomplices in his crime. One proposal we considered was parceling out some of Jobs’s asshole points to all of his customers – for instance, if the court gave Jobs 5000 points on a scale of 10,000, each of his customers would be given 500 points of their own.”

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