Category: editorial

What pro-Palestinian protestors can learn from the Beatles

In 1968 the Beatles released the song ‘Revolution’. This was at the height of that long-ago decade’s counterculture. The song satirized the growing excesses of late 1960s leftwing activism. 

The Beatles were no one’s idea of conservatives. But the group nevertheless recognized an iron law of all countercultural movements: they always go too far, and end up alienating the people they want to convince.

When this happens, “the movement” ends up preaching to no one but the choir. The movement becomes an echo chamber, and the rest of society simply tunes it out…or maybe tries to crush it.

‘Revolution’ is well worth listening to in its entirety, but I want to focus here on two lines only:

“If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao

You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow…”

In the 1960s, some leftwing college protestors did, indeed, carry pictures of Ho Chi Minh and Chairman Mao. They looked like complete tools, and ceased to be taken seriously by anyone but their fellow travelers.

Back to 2024.

This past weekend, a pro-Palestinian activist named Tarek Bazzi led an anti-Israel, anti-America protest in Dearborn, Michigan. Bazzi and his assembled comrades-in-arms were protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza, and US support for Israel. 

Bazzi not only quoted the late Ayatollah Khoemeini in glowing terms, he also led the crowd in a chant of “Death to America”.

Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have non-trivial historic claims to the land they’ve fought over for more than a century. (The conflict did not begin with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948; it began decades before that.) Neither side has a claim that is beyond dispute, and neither side can claim a complete moral high ground. Both sides have legitimate grievances against the other.

But the Palestinians have a unique ability to make themselves unsympathetic victims. The term “likable Palestinian spokesperson” would seem to be an oxymoron. Case-in-point: Representative Rashida Tlaib.

In 2001, Palestinian crowds in Jerusalem openly celebrated the 9/11 terror attacks. That was the moment in which I was sorely tempted to lose any interest in their fate.

But 9/11 was more than twenty years ago, you might say. Okay, fair enough. On October 7 of last year, Hamas, the elected governing authority of Gaza, launched its terror attacks on Israel.

You’ve already heard and seen the accounts of the massacres and the sexual violence that Hamas loosed on Israeli civilians. In the immediate wake of those attacks, there was a chorus of cries of “Allahu akbar!” in Gaza.

Then the payback came. Gaza stopped shouting “Allahu akbar!” and began shouting to the world, “Call off the Israelis! The jihad wasn’t supposed to go like this.”

You might argue, nevertheless, that the Israeli response has gone too far, and the retribution has been too indiscriminate. Those are American bombs, moreover, that are being dropped on Gaza.

All fair points. On October 7, I was ready to join the IDF myself, even though there’s not a Jewish bone in my body. Six months later, I’m far more open to “two wrongs don’t make a right” arguments.

This is why I can’t issue a blanket condemnation of the pro-Palestinian protestors who have made the news in recent months. They are not entirely wrong, even if they are wrong on many points. Even if they are endlessly obnoxious and tirelessly unpleasant.

But its one thing to be unlikable, it’s another thing to be stupid about it. When you shout “Death to America!” in the public square, you affirm all the worst things that Americans suspect about Muslims. “Death to America!” was the chant of the Iranian radicals of 1979, after all. Surely Tarek Bazzi and his pals know that.

Back to the Beatles and “Revolution”. If I may paraphrase the Fab Four:

“If you go shouting ‘Death to America’, every American who isn’t a radical crackpot is going to tune you out and hate your guts.”

Shout “Death to America” in the public square, and you’ve lost me. Palestinians might have celebrated 9/11. I didn’t. Nor did I celebrate San Bernardino (2015), the London Tube attacks (2005) or any of the many other Islamist terror attacks carried out in the West over the last 30-odd years.

The Israelis, for all their missteps and hamfistedness, at least understand that you don’t gain sympathy by doing your best to be repellant at every turn. Palestinians wishing to make their case in the West might find a lesson there.

-ET

Dulles International Airport and the dueling fools of DC

House Republicans have put forth a proposal to rename Dulles International Airport after former (and perhaps future) President Trump. The bill is meeting with the expected braying in the mainstream media.

As an American citizen, there are many issues that concern me at present…

Our government, and the clownish governments that rule the various countries of the rest of NATO, are rushing toward World War III with Russia. They are risking all our lives over the question of which flag flies over land that was long Russian territory, anyway.

The deficit continues to grow at an unsustainable rate. Washington is no longer burning through our money. It’s burning through the money of Americans who won’t be born before all presently living Americans are dead.

Biden has made us a laughingstock and a near-failed state with his mismanagement of the border. It’s become a cliché, but yes: the only border Biden cares about is the one between Ukraine and Russia.

Every week, a foolish new “woke” initiative spews from the White House. These range from forcing us to buy electric vehicles that no one wants, to declaring a special day of visibility for Americans who self-identify as cocker spaniels.

The country is a mess, to put it mildly.

Amid all of this, renaming Dulles International Airport after Donald Trump—or anyone, for that matter—would not even make the bottom tier of a thousand-item priority list.

There is no monopoly on foolishness in our government at present. The only real question is: which band of fools will bring about collapse first, if permitted free rein? The Democratic Party is doing its best to destroy us in any number of ways, but we ought not get cocky about the GOP. Case-in-point: this new initiative to rename Dulles International Airport, an item as unwanted as Joe Biden’s electric cars.

-ET

The case of the (fired) rapping teacher

In recent years, plenty of teachers have been guilty of classroom conduct that has more than merited their termination.

For example: a teacher in one California district encouraged her students to pledge their allegiance to the LGBTQ flag. She then made a TikTok video bragging about it.

That was too much even for the People’s Republic of California. The teacher was promptly fired. Good riddance.

Another teacher, this one in Dallas, squirted a water gun at an image of then-President Trump and repeatedly shouted, “Die!” Several students filmed the classroom spectacle, and the teacher was let go. Once again, I understand the logic involved.

But I cannot understand the logic whereby Detroit-area history teacher Dominque Brown was fired for her outside-the-classroom rap career.

Brown was recently named Teacher of the Year. I’ve seen some clips of her rap videos. And while rap isn’t my cup of tea, I can’t see anything morally reprehensible or corrupting in the content. From what I know of Detroit (I’ve been there many times) Brown’s students probably face much more unsavory influences in their day-to-day lives.

This raises the question of exactly what a teacher is, and whether or not teachers are entitled to private lives and side hustles.

As noted above, I’m at the head of the pitchfork mob when teachers inject their (usually far-left) personal ideology into the classroom. But outside the classroom is another matter, or it should be, within reasonable limits.

There have been numerous cases of teachers being suspended and fired for posting racy content on OnlyFans and similar autoporning sites. We could have a spirited debate about such a gray area. Teacher-as-porn-star is an idea that isn’t likely to catch on in the suburbs, even among the “woke mom” crowd.

But Dominque Brown was an amateur musician. Having watched clips of her music videos and interviews online, I can find nothing about the woman that offends me.

I grew up Roman Catholic, so I understand the concept of the clergy, and the full-time moral commitment that entails.

The education field is not the priesthood, even if it is admittedly different from other careers, ones that don’t involve daily contact with other people’s children.

Likewise, there should be some reasonable limits to what a teacher can do outside the classroom while remaining a teacher. (But most of those things are illegal, anyway.) Unless there is some crucial piece of evidence that I’m missing here, some very large shoe that has yet to drop, the firing of Domonique Brown strikes me as a bridge too far.

-ET

Autoporning and politics in Virginia, 2023

Susanna Gibson, a Democratic legislative candidate in Virginia, had an unconventional side hustle until recently. She and her husband live-streamed sex acts for tips on a site called Chaturbate.

This has raised all kinds of questions: about the legitimacy of sex work, about whether or not an individual who has participated in such can viably run for office, etc.

Allow me to give you my two cents.

I’ve always held that consensual sex work should be legal, so long as a.) it involves only consenting adults, and b.) it is done discretely enough so that uninterested parties can easily ignore it.

This would preclude brothels and sex shops in shopping malls. Of course.

On the other hand, I never understood the government’s persecution of Alexis Wright, the so-called “Zumba prostitute” in 2013. Wright was then a 29-year-old woman, selling her own sexual favors in the privacy of her own Zumba studio, to men who were mostly in their 40s. This was the ultimate victimless crime. Yet Wright spent six months in jail.

Susanna Gibson and her husband were not breaking any laws, however. One of the perverse contradictions in the law is that it’s legal to charge money for sex, so long as it’s done on camera for third-party consumption. Ergo, Gibson violated no law when strange men paid her to have sex on camera with a man (her husband, in this case). But if one of them had paid her to have sex with them off-camera, then a crime would have been committed. Go figure.

But no one—not even Gibson’s eventual Republican opponent—has proposed that she be jailed for her naked entrepreneurial endeavors. The issue is whether or not this should have a bearing on the viability of her campaign.

That’s a complicated one, because individual voters will ultimately decide for themselves. Historically, candidates have often dropped out of races in the wake of sex scandals.

Gary Hart, in the infamous “Monkey Business” photo (1987)

The oldest example I remember is that of Gary Hart, a Democratic hopeful for the presidential election of 1988. Hart dropped out after he was photographed with the much younger Donna Rice in the infamous “Monkey Business” photo of 1987.

Yes, that was a long time ago. Around 15 years ago, New York Governor Eliott Spitzer resigned after he was caught paying call girls for sex. I suppose that is vaguely analogous to Susanna Gibson’s peccadillo.

The problem is that what we do online, for a mass audience, is public information, ipso facto.

Consider this blog post. In the above paragraphs, I make the case that consensual, behind-closed-doors sex work should be legal for adults, both as sellers and buyers, under certain conditions. Had I not put that online, you wouldn’t know that I held such an opinion. My decision to put it online makes it no longer a “private” matter.

If I were to decide to run for office as a family-values Republican at some point, one of my opponents would surely dredge that up. And that would be fair game.

Susanna Gibson has accused her detractors of engaging in “the worst gutter politics” since her [paid] sex videos surfaced. Members of Gibson’s unpaid cheerleading squad in the media, meanwhile, have leveled charges of misogyny. (Were Gary Hart and Eliott Spitzer also victims of misogyny?)

But this ultimately comes down to a question of common sense, not sexual morality. Could Gibson not have foreseen this outcome?

Alexis Wright, the Zumba prostitute of a decade ago, was engaging in paid sex behind closed doors in a non-public setting. She had a reasonable expectation of privacy. So, arguably, did Eliott Spitzer, who paid for sex with high-class call girls in the closed enclaves of hotel rooms.

Susanna Gibson, on the other hand, had her paid sex in the very public arena of the Internet. By all indications, she made no effort to conceal her identity.

Yet now she’s crying foul because, lo and behold, someone saw those publicly distributed videos and said, “Hey, that’s a candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates!”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not painting anyone with a scarlet letter here. Whatever else we might say about Susanna Gibson, she is certainly not boring. When describing her open marriage arrangement, Gibson reportedly told her online viewers, “I’ve had three [men] in a day actually. Don’t tell my husband he was the third.”  As Bill Murray told a character in the 1981 movie Stripes, “I want to party with you, cowboy.”

But if I were a voter in Virginia, I would have my doubts about her qualifications. Not because of the sex, not because of the open marriage, and not because of the money….but because Susanna Gibson seems genuinely surprised that this all unfolded as it did.

That bespeaks an inability to anticipate the consequences of a given set of actions. Is that the kind of representative that any voter wants?

Voters in Virginia seemed to feel the same way. Gibson lost the election.

-ET

Participation trophies and organic chemistry

Maitland Jones Jr., an award-winning professor at NYU, was fired after a group of his students signed a petition alleging that his organic chemistry course was “too hard”.

I should begin with the usual disclaimer: I don’t know Maitland Jones, or the students who signed the petition. I never took his organic chemistry course. But that doesn’t mean I’m completely unfamiliar with the broader questions here.

In the academic year of 1987 to 1988, I took three semesters of organic chemistry at the University of Cincinnati. The reader might reasonably ask why I did this to myself.

During the previous summer, I had taken an intensive Biology 101 course, comprised of three parts: botany, zoology, and genetics.

I got A’s in all three sections of Biology 101. Botany and zoology were easy for me because I have always been good at memorizing large amounts of information that has no logical connections. (I’m good at foreign languages, for much the same reason.) I struggled a bit with the genetics portion of Biology 101, which requires more math-like problem-solving skills. But I still managed to pull off an A.

I was 19 years old at the time. With the typical logic of a 19-year-old, I concluded that I should go to medical school. I changed my undergrad major to premed, and began taking the math and science courses that comprised that academic track.

That’s how I crossed paths with organic chemistry. Organic chemistry was nothing like the Biology 101 course I had taken over the summer session. Biology 101 was aimed at more or less the entire student body. (I initially took it to satisfy my general studies science course requirement.) Organic chemistry was aimed at future heart surgeons and chemical engineers. Organic chemistry was the most difficult academic course I have ever taken, or attempted to take.

Organic chemistry is difficult because it requires the ability to memorize lots of information, as well as the ability to apply that information in the solution of complex problems. Organic chemistry is, in short, the ideal weed-out course for future heart surgeons and chemical engineers.

How did I do in organic chemistry? Not very well. I managed two gentlemanly Cs, and I dropped out the third semester.

My dropping out would have been no surprise to my professor. Nor was I alone. Plenty of other students dropped out, too.

Early in the course, I remember the professor saying, “Not everyone is cut out to be a doctor or a chemist. Organic chemistry is a course that lets you know if you’re capable of being a doctor or a chemist.”

That was 1987, long before the participation trophy, and back when a snowflake was nothing but a meteorological phenomenon. My experience with organic chemistry was harrowing, so far as “harrowing” can be used to describe the life of a college student. But in those days, disappointments, setbacks, and the occasional outright failure were considered to be ordinary aspects of the growing up experience. My organic chemistry professor did not care about my feelings or my self-esteem. He only cared if I could master the intricacies of stereochemistry, alkenes, and resonance.

The good news is that I was able to quickly identify a career that I would probably not be good at. Even more importantly, you, the reader, will never look up from an operating table, to see me standing over you with a scalpel.

If we have now reached the point where students can vote their professor out of a job because a course is too hard, then we’ve passed yet another Rubicon of surrender to the cult of feel-good political correctness.

A decade ago, many of us laughed at the concept of the participation trophy. But at the same time, many of us said: “What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that small gestures, small surrenders, have larger downstream consequences. A participation trophy is “no big deal” on an elementary school soccer field. At medical school, participation trophies can endanger lives, by enabling the less competent to attain degrees and certifications which they would never have acquired in saner times.

Are you planning on getting heart surgery down the road? You might want to get it now, before the present generation of premeds and medical students becomes the next generation of doctors.

-ET

The Apple Store business model is broken

Here’s what’s wrong…and how Apple can fix it.

This past week I took my 73 year-old father to the Apple Store in the Cincinnati area with the intent of purchasing at least one (and probably two) items. My dad was in the market for a new iPhone and a new laptop. 

We arrived twenty minutes before the store opened. A young Apple Store associate entered our information in a tablet before the store opened. (Like the government in Logan’s Run, Apple Stores seem to eliminate every member of their band over the age of thirty. I have never been waited on there by anyone much beyond that age.) 

Great! I thought. This is going to be fast! Whiz-bang efficiency!

But I was wrong. It wasn’t fast. 

To make a long story short, we spent 90 minutes waiting around the store. We stood. We paced. We looked at the few items that you can view without the help of a sales associate. (And there aren’t many of those.)

And then, finally, we gave up. We left without buying anything. At the time of our departure, we were told that we would be waited on in…about twenty minutes.

That was probably an optimistic assessment. I think it would have been more like an hour: There were around two dozen other customers waiting around for service, just like us. 

I saw several of them walk out in frustration, too.

Apple: great products, sucky retailing

I am a ten-year member of the Cult of Mac. 

I personally haven’t used anything but Apple products since 2010, when a final malware infection of my Dell PC, loaded with Windows XP, convinced me that enough was enough.  

So I bought an iMac. The rest, as they say, is history. Since then, I’ve owned two iMacs, two MacBooks, four iPods, and three iPhones. 

I’ve become an evangelist for Apple products. I’ve converted not only both my parents, but at least two or three of my friends. 

Apple products really are something special. But boy, those Apple Stores sure do suck.

And I’m not the only one who feels this way.

Widespread complaints

A May 2019 article in the LA Times is entitled, “How the Apple Store has fallen from grace”. Focusing on an Apple Store in Columbus, Ohio, the article could have been written about my recent visit to the Apple Store in Cincinnati: 

Web Smith’s recent experience at his local Apple store in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, has been an exercise in frustration.

There was the time he visited the Easton Town Center location to buy a laptop for his 11-year-old daughter and spent almost 20 minutes getting an employee to accept his credit card. In January, Smith was buying a monitor and kept asking store workers to check him out, but they couldn’t because they were Apple “Geniuses” handling tech support and not sales.

“It took me forever to get someone to sell me the product,” said Smith, who runs 2PM Inc., an e-commerce research and consulting firm. “It’s become harder to buy something, even when the place isn’t busy. Buying a product there used to be a revered thing. Now you don’t want to bother with the inconvenience.”

There are many similar stories in the media of late, as well as customer complaints on social media. 

Cult of Mac members still largely love their iMacs, MacBooks, iPhones, iPods, and Apple Watches. But they increasingly dread the next trip to the Apple Store.

So what went wrong? And what needs to be done? 

An obsolete concept of the pre-iPhone era

The first Apple Stores debuted in May 2001—going on twenty years ago. Back then, they showcased only the computers, which had a minuscule market share at the time, compared to PCs made by Dell and Gateway. 

iPods were added in October 2001, but these, too, were specialty products when they debuted. For geeks only. 

The real tipping point was the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, and the subsequent ubiquity of smartphones. 

In 2001, a relatively small percentage of the population owned an iMac or a MacBook. In 2019, 40% of us own iPhones. The iPhone is a mass-market product. But it’s still being retailed as if it were a specialty item.

And when you visit an Apple Store in 2019, you’ll find that 70% of the traffic to these upscale boutiques is iPhone-related. Many are there for routine password resets. 

This is traffic that was never imagined or accounted for in 2001, when the Apple Store concept was launched.

Zen over function

Apple Stores don’t look like ordinary electronics retails stores. Steve Jobs was a devotee of eastern Zen practices, and the Apple Store resembles a Japanese bonsai garden. There is an emphasis on minimalism, and lots of blank space. 

The downside of that is that you can’t do much to serve yourself, as you could in a Best Buy or a Walmart. 

You basically walk into the store, and an employee puts you into an electronic queue. Then you wait around. 

But you have a very clean, zen setting in which to wait. 

Uncomfortable stores

Speaking of those long waits….

Apple Stores do look nice. But they are not comfortable places to spend an hour waiting for a salesperson. Which is almost inevitable. 

There are few stools, and it’s clear that the stools were selected for their  sleekness, not their comfort. 

There aren’t any plush bean bags or sofas to sit on. Heavens no! That would detract from the zen.

Inefficient use of staff

Too many Apple Store employees are exclusively dedicated to crowd control—to herding you into virtual line. 

This is because you can’t serve yourself in an Apple Store. Go into a Best Buy, and there are clearly defined areas for looking at computers, at cell phones, at peripherals. There’s a line for service in every Best Buy. A line for returns. 

Normal retail, in other words. 

There are no clearly defined areas within the Apple Store. Customers are all milling about, most of them doing nothing but waiting to be attended on. 

Many of these customers are frustrated and growing impatient. They want to know how much longer they’ll have to wait. This means that at any given moment, at least a quarter of the Apple Store employees you see on the floor are directing this vast cattle drive. 

They aren’t selling any products, they aren’t helping any customers. They’re just managing the virtual line. 

That amounts to a big waste of the Apple Store’s manpower—and of the customers’ time.

Decline of staff quality

Apple stores were once staffed by highly knowledgeable sales personnel. That was in the days when the stores only carried computers, and hiring was very selective.

Those days are gone. Now that it’s all about selling a gazillion iPhones, Apple Store employees are no longer specialists. Despite the pretentious name “Genius Bar”, geniuses are in short supply on the sales floor nowadays. You’re going to be served by run-of-the-mill retail sales staff. And their expertise, helpfulness, and attitudes vary greatly.

Not enough stores

There are about a dozen AT&T stores within a twenty-minute drive of my house in suburban Cincinnati.

Guess how many Apple Store there are…

One. In the Cincinnati area, we are served by a single Apple Store at the Kenwood Towne Centre.

And for those readers in Los Angeles and New York, who maybe think that Cincinnati is a one-horse cow town: There are 2.1 million people in the Greater Cincinnati area. It’s the 29th largest metropolitan area in the United States. 

And we have one Apple Store.

There are only eight Apple Stores in all of Ohio, and a total population of 11 million. That means one Apple Store for every 1,375,000 Ohioans. 

But it could be worse: There are only three Apple Stores in the entire state of Wisconsin. Kentucky has only one Apple Store.

But there are only twenty-two Apple Stores in the entire State of New York. AT&T has more retail locations than that just in Cincinnati. 

No wonder the stores are packed. I made my aforementioned trip to the Kenwood Towne Center Apple Store with my dad on a Friday. Granted, Friday is typically a busier retail day than Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. But this was during the middle of October—not exactly a peak shopping season. The back-to-school rush is already over. The Christmas shopping blitz won’t begin for another six weeks. 

And at 9:40 in the morning—twenty minutes before opening time—there was already a crowd outside the Apple Store.

The Apple Store needs to be refocused on function rather than branding

As an Apple employee quoted by the LA Times notes, Apple Stores are “mostly an exercise in branding and no longer do a good job serving mission shoppers”.

The “mission shopper” is the shopper who goes into the store with a specific purchase in mind (versus someone who is still torn between a Mac and a PC, or an iPhone and an Android). 

These are customers who could largely serve themselves. If only that were possible. But due to the philosophy of the Apple Store, there is minimal “clutter” at these boutique shops. In other words, these are retail shops with minimal merchandise on display. 

Apple Stores need to become more like Best Buys: There should be clearly defined areas for looking at each category of merchandise, and clearly defined areas to wait for technical support. 

As I mentioned above, most of the traffic in the Apple Store seems to involve iPhone support. The iPhone customers definitely need their own area of the store. 

This probably means abandoning the whole boutique concept. At present, Apple Stores are small but mostly empty spaces in high-rent locations. That is, again, all very zen and cool-looking. But it doesn’t happen  to be a great way to purchase a new MacBook, or to get your iPhone unlocked when you’ve forgotten the passcode.

A broken model in terminal need of repair

 The Apple Store might have been a workable retail model in the pre-iPhone era, when Mac devotees really were an exclusive tribe. The Apple geeks of 2001, with their tattoos and soul patches, may have appreciated the gleaming but empty Apple Stores. 

But the Apple customer base has changed and expanded since 2001. When you factor in iPhones, Apple is now a mass-market brand. (And Apple now owns 13% of the home computer market.)

 Having become a mass-market brand, Apple needs to adopt the more efficient practices of a mass-market brand. 

That means dropping the boutique pretentiousness that makes Apple Stores great places to photograph, but horrible places to buy stuff. The hoi polloi of 2019 are not the rarified Apple geeks of 2001. 

We don’t want or need a zen experience. We just want to get quickly in and out of the Apple Store with minimal delays, like we can at every other retail shop.