Your post essentially boils down to this: horrific and abominable labor practices can be excused for the sake of expediency/progress/low costs. Your concern or lack of it for the lives lost is touching. I would actually be more impressed with you if you admitted that you didn't care about those dead workers. But engaging in this intellectual dishonesty to justify what happened really is disgusting.
Really? Because
I think this slacktivism stance that I should tut-tut about how awful things are and that that someone who isn't me is a bad person for not moving heaven and earth to make it better (despite my complete ignorance of what that might actually entail) is horrifying. It gives you all the happy, sunshiney feeling of actually doing something without taking any effort or making any change. That's an excellent recipe for letting outrages continue unchallenged.
I do not defend these practices because they are in any way laudable. I do not defend them because I am vapid human trash who puts his need for new toys above human life. I defend them because they have become entrenched in the foundations of this world, and I recognize that making things better is going to be a process of small, aching, hard steps, and that a bunch of masturbatory liberal guilt about how someone in a job you know nothing about should employ means you yourself admit to having no conception of to "make things better" in a nonspecific way is singularly ineffective buck-passing that doesn't absolve you of one little bit of responsibility.
The funny thing is, if somebody asked me how to fix health care in America, for instance, I could give my ideal system immediately. With a minimum for research, I could provide examples where it's been employed, statistics on how much better it would be than the current system both in cost and in lives saved and improved, probably even a plan for how to transition over from the current system. And yet, you guys who care ever so much about the plight of these poor people, what do you offer? "They should have a union." Yeah, in a country with virtually no conception of civil rights. Steve Jobs surely burns in hell for not tearing down the government of the People's Republic of China. He was a rich guy, he could've done it if he really wanted to. "They should use a different factory." Well, where are these competing factories? What are their records on worker treatment? How much capacity do they have? Do they even exist at all?
"They should make it so the workers don't want to kill themselves anymore." Well, that's a fine benchmark, considering that even during the rash of suicides that prompted this, the rate of suicide among Foxconn employees was half that of the Chinese population as a whole. One might almost consider that they were notable not for their number, but their drama.
Hm. An interesting philosophical question. If a chinese factory worker hangs himself in his bathroom rather than jumping off his place of work and there's no accompanying scandal, is he still oppressed? Judging by the fact that we're talking about this in, of all places, a thread asking why people were sad for a couple days that a guy's own pancreas ate him alive, I'm gonna guess "No."
Maybe if this were in a thread about the new Kindle, I'd be more convinced that your views are deeply sincere rather than just jumping on a bandwagon so you can pretend it actually bothers you.
So, go on, you tell me again how little I care. Type it out on your yankee-built computer, assembled from the transistors on up by unionized americans, transmit the signals down the conflict-free copper wires to equally honestly-made TrekBBS servers, so I can read it on my computer which was carved from farmed wood by elves that get time-and-a-half. Because it's not like we're all complicit, and that it'll a long time and a lot of work from all of us, not just Tim Fucking Cook waving his magic wand, to change things. That's nonsense.
Explain why it's a negative.
Because it's a band-aid solution to a bigger problem; the mistreatment of workers.
I still don't understand how it's a negative. If your arm was chopped off, would you tell the paramedics not to bandage the wound, because what you really need is a new arm? That's true enough, but you'll bleed to death before you get it. Even if Apple strong-armed Foxconn into reorganizing into providing American-standard labor practices instantly, how long do you think it would take to implement? A day? A week? A year? What if somebody decides to kill themselves at a Foxconn factory in the meantime? What if somebody decides to do it afterward, because they were suicidal regardless of where they worked? Should we just let them fall?
Now, yes, if that was the only thing being done, I'd agree with you, but it's not and there's little reason to think that it is, aside from enough cynicism and distrust that you may as well believe the whole story, from the existence of China on up, is a fiction.
If you look at an earlier post of mine in this thread you'll see that I'm well aware that Foxconn deals with other companies. Also, my previous post mentioned "Foxconn's clients", did it not?
And yet you brought it up in a thread about Steve Jobs, out of the blue. Oddly enough, I can't remember the last time I saw Foxconn brought up on this board or any other without being explicitly tied to Apple or Steve Jobs. That's so weird, because it makes a systemic problem that'll take years of international activism, business dealings, and governmental wrangling to even begin to solve look like the fault of one evil son-of-a-bitch, and now that he's gone, everything will be fine.
There are others also. I won't back away from my belief that a human being is worth more than a computer.
So... where was the computer you're writing on now built? If it was homemade, where did the parts come from?
Yet again, you have assumed I am exclusively attacking what seems to be your favourite company.
I'm so sorry for assuming that based on the fact that you brought it up by funeral-trolling with all the propriety and relevance to the discussion at hand of the Westboro Baptists. That just made it look like you were trying to make yourself look like a better person than all the sheeple who were mourning a rich guy instead of the real victims, the Chinese people he, apparently, personally oppressed. Because you're deep like that, and care about world events, but can't name one company that could take over electronics manufacturing, one petition I should sign, one law I should support, one politician I can campaign for, one ethically-built computer I should buy to actually make a change for the better.
You give me a solution, a plan, even a decent concept, and I'll support it. This? This rending of garments and showing off how pious and humane you are by tragi-trolling... it doesn't impress me, any more than it would impress you if I walked up to you at dinner, said "I hope you're enjoying your meal. The cost could've fed a dozen hungry children right here in America," and then walked off, smug and self-satisfied about the difference I'd made.
