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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to think about the cognitive dissonance that I might fall victim to as well as what I think I see in online discourse. Cognitive dissonance, but also binary thinking.

For example, if one were to compress a lot of the recent narrative we see, an alternative take on this news would be something like: "Apple supports far-right billionaire who gave Nazi salute and is transphobic". An alternative (gaslighting version) could be "Gay billionaire gives money to richest man on the planet who pushes Nazi propaganda".

If one is principled or a social justice advocate, should one then not decry (boycott) Apple and Tim Cook's actions? What about the shareholders of Apple? What about Apple employees?

And if you don't, is it because you don't really believe those accusations against said billionaire OR is that you would rather have your devices or your salary or your AAPL stock?

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Ironically I think most trump supporters already don't own apple products.

Not really that wild of a development with consideration to Trump's first administration.

> Not really that wild of a development with consideration to Trump's first administration.

But we can take it further. "Biden administration awards space contracts to world's richest man who pushes Nazi propaganda"

Somewhere, there's a flaw of logic OR a sense of hypocritical righteousness. Or maybe something else?

There's no other company to send satellites now, there's plenty of places to advertise.

> There's no other company to send satellites now, there's plenty of places to advertise.

There is only one company that can launch satellites? Even if that were true, your statement is a form my original comment is trying to dissect. The statement you made suggests that once a moral stand inconveniences even the most ardent moralist, they are likely to cave, or to put it more directly: "talk is cheap".

Nah, the government should definitely find other companies to do this job or invest in its own capacity to do it again, but comparing buying ads to deploying satellites makes no sense at all. One is a commodity and the other is a highly specialized business mostly propped up by government itself.

I prefer "Lawless trillionaire oligarchy with neuro-net connected robot militia takes control of the Americas. Thanks Obama".

You'll find lots of Apple users/developers on Mastodon and Bluesky who are speaking out about this (and the "Gulf of America" capitulation as well). Exactly what form of decrying do you require?

> You'll find lots of Apple users/developers on Mastodon and Bluesky who are speaking out about this (and the "Gulf of America" capitulation as well). Exactly what form of decrying do you require?

Complaining on social media sites (that one could argue are niche if you think about user numbers or share of advertising dollars or countless other metrics) is cheap and can be reasonably interpreted as loud but shallow moral outrage.

Perhaps they closed their accounts at the nazi bar. I'm still not sure what is required to pass your test.

> speaking out about this

Man, I can name the number of times Apple has fixed things on this basis with one hand.

The smart choice was to regulate Cook and Musk while we had the chance, but apparently that makes our corporations angry.

If you're being fair, an alternative take would be: "Apple supports ideologue who aligns with the majority of US citizens."

Why do you think he aligns with "the majority of US citizens", when Trump didn't get 50% of the votes?

> Why do you think he aligns with "the majority of US citizens", when Trump didn't get 50% of the votes?

Even though he only garnered 49.8% of the popular vote (77,302,580 votes), that is decidedly more than Harris’ 48.3% (75,017,613 votes)[1]

The remaining 1.85% of the popular vote went to various other presidential candidates (i.e. not Democrat or Republican)[2]

So technically you are correct that the majority of voters didn’t vote for him, but he did win a majority of the popular vote.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/results/president

[2] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2024

No, that's still not a majority of the popular vote, just a plurality.

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