Moral Masturbation...

From the blogosphere’s biggest jerkoff, no less.

Roger L. Simon, much noted for his honest and plain dealing in business, is trying to chastise Google, Yahoo and Microsoft for doing business in China. Boy, there's a story:

News Flash! Pot Calls Kettle Black.

Even if this came from someone who could actually put forth moral bona fides without provoking derisive laughter from much of the blogosphere, this is simply another example of the political journalism's worst, most childish and ego-driven tendencies when it comes to dealing with the Real World.

Here’s The Moral Beacon of Hollywood on January 25 (and no, I ain’t linking that asshole):

What to do about the new Axis of Evil?

I'm talking about Yahoo, Microsoft and Google, of course, those three Internet mega-corporations who are actively cooperating with totalitarianism in China.

Google is the latest to prostrate itself before the new emperors. Timesonline sums it up:

Google today caved in to pressure from the Chinese Government by launching a localised version of its website that self-censors information deemed "subversive" by the Communist authorities.

The company, whose motto is "Don't be evil", has engineered its search facilities to restrict Chinese people from searching for information such as Tibetan independence or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

"In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on Google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy," the internet company said in a statement issued yesterday.

Okay, instead of boring everyone discussing the corporation's probable rationale ... we're working from within their system, etc., etc., as if they were an automobile or ball-bearing firm and not a media company involved with the dissemination (or in this case non-dissemination) of information and ideas ... I will cut to the proverbial chase. Since this is obviously a manifestation of corporate greed at its most unbridled, not to say cynically exploitive of (even, in a way, racist towards) the people of the most populace country on Earth, it's time to deal with Google in a manner that could actually affect the retrograde policy of the company. In other word, it's time for...

... a Google stock divestment campaign.

Everyone who cares about the free-flow of information, about democracy in China, in fact about democracy anywhere, should start selling their Google stock. This should begin most especially with those vast university endowments because academic institutions, of all places, should be most concerned with the censorship of ideas and information. Union pension plans as well should seek to divest as their members should be particularly appalled by the company's restrictive behavior. I could go on, but you certainly get the point. I welcome suggestions for how to mount this campaign in the comments below.

(Full disclosure: I do not own any Google stock, but would, I'm assuming, have the courage of my convictions, if I did.)

First of all, let’s note the final sentence of Roger’s tome:

Full disclosure: I do not own any Google stock, but would, I'm assuming, have the courage of my convictions, if I did.

Excuse my French, but just what the fuck does that mean? You assume you’d sell your Google stock if you had any? Man, that’s one motherfucker of a stand yer takin’ there, Raj...

Of course, knowing him as I do, I think I can parse those words and come up with what Raj actually means by having the “courage of my convictions”, which is this:

If I owned Google stock , I’d divest under the following conditions...
1) My broker thought it was going to tank soon, or
2) My broker had a better stock waiting in the wings, and
3) I had some losers in my portfolio that would cover any capital gains on the sale, or
4) I had sufficient tax loss carryforwards to cover the capital gains.

Morality is all well and good, but when it costs money... well, that’s something different, isn’t it?

Which brings me to my next point: Divestiture campaigns don’t work. Never have, never will. That's because morality is all well and good... except when it inconvenient and/or costs money. And inconvenience and loss of money are the necessary byproducts of a successful boycott.

I can state that maxim as God's Truth from personal experience. Back in the ‘70s, when Roger L. Simon was doing his fellow traveling in China, lending his own personal moral support to Mao and the Cultural Revolution in furtherance of his career and feeling of self-worth, I was a dope-smoking, long-haired college student helping launch the first successful (i.e.-adopted) divestiture campaign ever seen on a college campus in these United States of America.

It’s true.

One day our then Student President decided our fair university needed to take a moral stand on racial injustice, and with the help of a few of his friends in and out of the student government (which included my own true self), he wrote a resolution requiring Miami University to divest all investments in U.S. corporations doing business with South Africa. A brilliant soft sell by that same Student President got a remarkably clueless Board of Trustees to adopt the resolution and whammo!... within a week Miami University discovered they were going to have to liquidate the university’s entire stock portfolio. It seems that - surprise! - just about every company on the NYSE was doing business directly, or indirectly, with South Africa back then.

However, I doubt you’ll be surprised when I tell you that the resolution was unadopted less than a month later. That’s because when the Trustees discovered that they could not have their moral cake and eat it, too. They thought they could take a serious stand against injustice on the cheap. But things just don’t work out that way in the Real World. Carrying the courage of their convictions to the logical extreme of the resolution they had adopted would have cost the university tens of millions of dollars (at least). Morality was fine by them, but not at a cost of millions... When they discovered their mistake was assuming they could purchase a moral stand on the cheap, they undid the moral stand as quickly as they possibly could.

Of course we abhor racial injustice, but... well, we never imagined fighting it cost that much.

Yeah... Funny how that works.

I went through a similar situation with my beloved wife when she decided to quit eating meat. I had no problems with her doing so, but I am very much a carnivore and am quite unashamed of that fact. So when Muffy started giving me what-for about sanctioning the killing of poor, defenseless animals, I took as much as I could take and then opened the Book of Hurtful Truths and read from the Gospel of Dennis. What it said was this:

If you’re worried about the killing of poor, defenseless animals then I will give up the eating of charred flesh, we will get rid of our leather furniture, our leather shoes, our leather belts and your leather purses. And we are going to do that because that is the only way we can really be sure we aren’t causing the deaths of cows and chickens and piggys and whatnot. Dropping steaks and hot dogs isn’t going to get us where you think we need to be... we have to drop everything from hamburgers to hides. If we don't, we just fooling ourselves that we're doing the Right Thing.

Strangely enough, after only one reading of the hurtful truth from the Gospel of Dennis, the subject of my eating meat was never broached again.

As Jello would say, Give me convenience or give me death!

Funny how that works, too.

Similarly, the only way you can make a sanction against companies doing business with China work is to take it all the way. Understand?

All.The.Way.

Selling your stock in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft is nothing more than moral masturbation. It may feel good, but like any form of masturbation, it is about self-pleasuring... not producing results. It allows you to do something quick and easy, without consequence to you, and then walk away feeling good about yourself. What it doesn't do is convince either Washington or Wall Street that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are worthy of avoidance or sanction on the basis of their business ethics.

So, Raj, if you really want to hit China where it hurts... if you're really serious about this, you’ve to go all the way. All.The.Way. That means, for example:

If you have clothing made in China, you get rid of it... and you buy more expensive clothing made in a free country. Can’t find a fedora made in the U.S.A.? Tough shit; you go without. Wear a fucking beanie or something instead. You boycott the stores that import and sell Made In China clothing.

That Volvo you drove me to LAX in? If Ford does business in China, it's gone. If they put money in the hands of the same people who want Google and the rest of the “Axis of Evil” to assist them in restricting Free Speech (and Jesus, did you have to trot out a phrase that trite and hyperbolic?) then you don't have any other choice, do you?. Replace it with a Lexus hybrid? Not if Toyota does business in China, you don't. You boycott the manufacturers that build or sell in China.

And what about the Hollywood studios you sell your wares to? Any of them doing business in China? Any of them editing films to meet the political requirements of the Chinese government? Any of them dropping dollars in the hands of totalitarians? If so, you need to stop sending in those scripts... Right? You boycott the companies exporting to China.

What about publishing houses? Is the publishing house putting out Moses Wine novels selling in China? If they are... what are you gonna do about it? You quit doing business with those who do business with the Chinese.

Then there is that Sony laptop you use to write posts... runs on Microsoft software, doesn't it? Well, you wouldn't want to support a company that's part of your Axis of Evil by using their products, right?

Gee, all the sudden it's getting a bit scary, isn't it, Raj? Scary, inconvenient and expensive. Well, the bottom line is, to put it indelicately, this:

If you aren’t ready to take it All.The.Way., then you’re just another guy with his dick in his hand telling other people (a) you're wonderful, and (b) what they ought to be doing. In other words, you're jerking off.

It is that simple.

So you either need to Do What Needs To Be Done, irrespective of convenience and cost, or you need to Shut The Fuck Up. You go All.The.Way. or you don't go at all.

Period.

Because, funny enough, that's the way it works.

And understand, Old Pal, this isn’t about me being mean... It’s about me taking enough pity on you to remind you that Reasonable Adults - the type that have average mean incomes of $116,000 and who are “thought leaders” and “tipping point” thinkers - know bullshit when they hear it and empty posturing when they see it. Read your own comments section... there’s enough sarcasm there to poleax a steer.

I mean, Jesus, Raj, is this sort of cut-rate Sinclair Lewis moralizing your idea of new journalism? Or are you so lost in megalomaniacal delusion that you think this kind of thing coming from the likes of you is going to be taken seriously by anyone with half a clue as to how things work?

By the way, just to drive that point home, here’s last week’s chart on Google.

Up on the week by about 30 dollars, with volume tanking on the 25th.

Chew on that for a while, Morality-Boy. Me, I’m gonna go have a fucking steak.

Comments

[richard mcenroe]

Dennis, the problem with divestiture is that it's never been used properly.

Take, for example, the recent push for US and British universities to divest from Israel. This should be encouraged. And then those same universities should be compelled by the caring to invest all those recovered funds in the Palestinian territories.

The way I see it, if we can't get the lefties off campus on grounds of intellectual dishonesty and academic incompetence, just bankrupt the campuses out from under 'em...

[Jim]

"... the people of the most populace country on Earth"

Hope the mystery writer and media mogul wannabe Roger L. Simon isn't volunteering to tutor English to them billions and billions of Chinese.

[vaara]

Boycott China? No way, José. Not if means we won't have any more magnetic car ribbons!

[Rich]

Dennis,

If you were to go to the great Raj's web site, and glance at the left side of the page, you will see a small text box labeled "Search this site."

I'm sure that the search technology used doesn't involve anything from Google, Yahoo!, nor Microsoft. If it did, Raj would have to divest from his very own web page, wouldn't he?

[David N. Scott]

LOL. The sadness.

[Guesst]

It wasn't that long ago when Markos was wildly speculating that PjM might be funded by Communist China because 2/3 of their content was from Xinhua News Agency. I guess that answers that.

D, look at the investors--Chernick and Koshland, for starters. Hardly Chinaphobes.

[Jones]

Roger who?

[D. Edgren (the Merciless Infidel)]

Thanks for the "H," Dennis. Pete's a personal hero of mine, too.

D. Edgren

[lukery]

I love it - Fox News is all anti-google at the mo' as well - despite the fact that Murdoch has his very own, um, customised China-specific cable platform

[John]

Bravo sir, well spo...er, written.

[harry near indy]

i was gonna mention murdoch's links with china, but lukery put his first.

[Robert]

Hey, Dennis, Wolcott told me it would be fun and he was right. Nice work.

[Al of Alnot]

Thanks Dennis for your lively commentary and insights. My father the con artist would have appreciated your smarts and not tried to run any games on you. He had so many other easier marks to keep him busy.

[nova silverpill]

holy fuck, that was funny.

[Jeff T]

Dennis,

You forgot to mention Roger's self interest here. He's asking people to boycott the biggest competitor of his fledgling advertising network.

[Daveh]

Where was Mr Simon's moral outrage when in 1994, Rupert Murdoch's Star network removed the BBC's international news from its Chinese service because a program critical of late leader Mao Zedong offended the authorities.
Where was his call for full divestiture in Newscorp?
Could it be that in 1997 his book THE LOST COAST was published by HarperCollins- a Newscorp holding.

I guess you don't bite the hand with which you morally masturbate.

[paradoctor]

Calm down Dennis, you make a good point, but you shouldn't overdo it. Who ever goes all the way on anything except fanatics? And even they take the easy way out, sooner or later. The all-too-human instinct for hypocrisy cannot be denied.

I agree that self-interest rules. But we need each other; so the solution is _enlightened_ self-interest. The fact that people will do the right thing, up until it starts to hurt... well, live with it, dude! You want them to give more? All right, explain why it's worth the trouble, and maybe you've got a deal!

For instance, one of my favorite environmental groups is Ducks Unlimited; hunters who want to preserve wetlands so there will be more ducks for them to kill. How logical! How self-supporting! No altruism necessary. How (literally) ecological; the hunters regard themselves as part of the ecology!

The appeal to enlightened self-interest requires integrity and/or competence; qualities unfortunately rare in politics, especially lately.

BTW, one can make a case against meat on health grounds. Fat, viruses, prions... and the fact that Bush bosses the meat inspectors.

[Gods From Outer Space]

Lotsa good stuff here, but the "All the Way" premise is as unconvincing as ever.

[Robert Green]

agree with the previous posters. i would go further--the s africa divestiture program had a major galvanizing effect on the events of the day as they played out. because dennis you've forgotten one key component of any exercise--the appearance of a thing rather than the reality. divesting in S africa, however haphazardly and clumsily it was done, helped to bring to light the policies of that country to a large group of people who would otherwise have been indifferent. that had a real world effect which played itself out in supporting the ANC and botha in his halting moves towards reform.

pjm still sucks, though.

[DennisThePeasant]

Robert-

Tiananmen happened on TV in real time. There is no 'education of the public' component involved here. We, as well as our government, have made the conscious decision to coexist rather than confront. To assume a posture of moral outrage, on an arbitrary and high selective basis, over the practices of U.S. companies (acting with the blessing of the U.S. government) doing business with the government of China seems to be a less than completely public-minded enterprise. The fundamental questions have not been answered:

1) Why now?
2) Why those companies?

Until I have a convincing answer for each, I am free to assume that this is little more than Raj's version of Hearst's jingoistic calls for war on Spain.

Gods-

Of course it is extreme... and done so deliberately to show just how arbitrary and selective this divestiture movement really is. Raj wrote his post calling for YOU to divest yourself of Microsoft on a Sony laptop powered by Windows. It doesn't get much sillier than that.

[Adam]

Elizabeth Wood has a book on democratic transitions in El Salvador and South Africa that argues that, in fact, the threat of (and promulgation of) a divestment campaign made continuing the apartheid status quo more expensive, precipitating regime change. In other words, there is evidence that the divestment campaign brought about the 1990 change. Obviously, the end of the Cold War also explains quite a bit.

I'd welcome evidence to the contrary.

[Gods From Outer Space]

Gotcha, Dennis. And Simon is properly nailed.

All.The.Way. is loaded beyond description. I still think it's the wrong keynote here. I hope for effective tactics that are relatively cheap and convenient. Divesting myself of stocks I don't own satisfies half that criteria.

But seriously: when people don't know how to attain a goal, they're tempted to posit that going All the Way in terms of cost and inconvenience would do the trick. (I've tried this approach to various problems with mixed results.)

Which I don't want to believe you're doing. But you don't know what to do about China any more than I do. Moral half-measures aren't so bad, really.

[Dan Lewis]

You've got him all wrong. For Simon, it's not about the money, it is all about political change! Thought power!

So what Simon really wants is a grassroots movement of Google stock owners to cast off the metaphorical chains (dividends are chains) of their capitalist oppressors, who bow to Chinese censorship in exchange for their thirty bloodsoaked pieces of silver.

It's a revolution of the elite against a nefarious alliance between the capitalists and the Communists! Who will emerge triumphant?!

And failing to divest of Google will be a victory for the terrorists.

[Expletive Deleted]

WTF? Bashing on China? Who the fock do these people think have been buying up the ungodly debt generated by the Bushies? How about #2 on the Hit Parade of Foreign Holders of Federal Debt, sung to the tune of $252 BILLION US Dollars?

Link

[thebizofknowledge]

As someone who lived and worked in China for a time, I know that it's necessary to some extent to incorporate oneself into the culture there, but these companies may indeed be taking things too far by collaborating with the government.