Hack is the word and hack is the flesh, where the wingnuts squawk along the slag-heaps of the blogs: Althouse and her Meade.
To witless! This is a ripe one...
Apple's repression of free speech: excluding an inPhone app that displays a disapproved-of opinion.
This blathering is to do with how Apple has refused to allow an app whose producers claim can Cure Gays of the Gay.
Now, if you are of balanced mind, your immediate response to the concept of an iPhone app that will make gay people straight is to think to yourself, well, that's fucking weird.
Especially if you know of or bother to look into the "Exodus" people who created the app, of whom the absolute kindest adjectives that could be imagined would be "distasteful" and "nuts."
Oh, but let's let Althouse talk, because momma, that's where the fun is:
As a speech gatekeeper, Apple should embrace free-speech values and go with viewpoint neutrality. It has made a terrible, embarrassing mistake, both because it is wrong to censor and because it will now have a hell of a time deciding which pressure groups to respond to and what counts as offensive enough to censor.
If your fingers are itching to type out the news that the constitutional right to free speech only protects you from government censorship, settle down. Free speech values extend beyond what you can get a court to enforce. I am arguing directly to Apple, as a matter of good policy and good values. Obviously, Apple cares about good values and responds, in its conception of good policy, when it is persuaded by arguments about good policy and good values: That's why it engaged in censorship! I'm arguing on the other side of the Change.org petition.
This is vintage Althouse bullshit.
If you for even for a second buy into the idea that a Jesus-themed brainwashing program can "cure" homosexuals, you're a hideous bigot. On the most elementary level, "freedom" ought to mean being who you are. And if you think iPhone apps are relevant here, holy shit.
But that's nothing insofar as how the Exodus app is utter quackery. There is no science, no medicine -- just horseshit.
The Exodus loonies are making an explicit claim that homosexuality is a disease that can be cured. This is nuts -- there is no science to support this.
It's quackery, and it's hideous. "Viewpoint neutrality"?
The "other side" here is "God hates fags."
Althouse is engaging in special pleading to shore up her crazy right wing credentials, and that's the charitable explanation:
"I think Apple should give equal time to clearly preposterous, clinically dangerous, wholly mendacious bigot lies -- as a matter of basic fairness!"
Uh... huzzah?
Hee hee Althouse, you dingaling shit.
(Because it's perhaps germane, here's the real reason Altmouse ultimately went. To do parody engagingly and consistently, you need to find some spark of humane affection for the target. You can be wicked, sure, and that's a lot of the fun, but you can't be brutal, and yes, there is a difference.
As passive-aggressive and nasty as Altmouse could get, Altmouse was always sort of a likeable nut...
And Althouse was not. Althouse was brutal. In the end, she was just not funny, laugh at her as much as she had coming.
Altmouse nailed a lot of truths about Althouse, but Altmouse could never capture the core viciousness.)