Moonbats at Apple Downgrade Terms “Husband” and “Wife” on iPhone

Introduction

Maybe it was just a few extra keystrokes a few times too many.  Maybe it was having to make those keystrokes not just in test versions of the Apple iPhone operating system, iOS, but in the standard version on my wife’s iPhone.  Maybe I simply got up on the wrong side of my shallow depression in the winter grass today.  Whatever the reason, I’m about to raise a stink.  And it ain’t my usual stinky feral dog-coat stink.

Experimental

Lets’ do some science.  This is pretty convincing.

Pull out your iPhone

Go to Contacts

Begin to add a contact (hit the + sign)

Scroll down to “add related name” and click it

Whatever “type” comes up (like “mother”), click on the type

You will see a list.

Results

This will likely be close to the list you will see.  This is what I see.

mother
father
parent
brother
sister
child
friend
spouse
partner
assistant
manager
other

Add Custom Label

If you have already created a custom label, like “husband” or “wife”, it will appear below the item “Add Custom Label” that you used to create it.

(Dear Apple political monitors – please pass this note on to your technological slavs I MEAN slaves (this is a joke about the original slaves being “white”) that they need to NOT automatically turn on capitalization at the beginning of the custom label, thus matching all the lower-case labels.  Just a helpful bit of user feedback which is strangely necessary after Apple went rabidly PC and lost its innovative edge, and something which Apple ALWAYS used to catch.  Just sayin’.)

That’s it.  You have just finished the “Results” section.

Discussion of Results

You will note that, for 1%-ers like Tim Cook, the helpful label of “assistant” is there.  You will also note that, for schmoes like Dilbert, Alice, Asok, you and me – and even Wally – the regretful but still helpful label of “manager” is there.  But for all of us marrieds, INCLUDING TIM COOK, there is neither “husband” nor “wife”, but instead, only the oddly annoying “spouse”.

Now – I am under the distinct impression that these terms – husband and wife – used to be there.  In fact, I don’t recall being annoyed with their absence until quite recently, so I am rather sure about this.

So allow me to do a Jeffersonian W. T. F.

Discussion

Obviously the traditional terms “husband” and “wife” are no longer provided by Apple.  Almost as obviously – those terms used to be there.  Clearly, the terms were removed.  And if my wolf ears are perking up properly, I’m pretty sure it was AFTER Apple started getting visibly political, and maybe even AFTER the Sea Island conspiracy against Donald Trump and his supporters, of which I happen to be one.

In any case, I can imagine that there are multiple ways that Apple might justify this apparently idiotic move.  Some of those ways will be direct defenses which admit the action.  Others will be specious claims that avoid the truth, and provide false rationales.  We know how the left operates.

Let’s just look at all of their bogus defenses in advance.  I will lump them all under the term “Specious Claims”, since even the direct defenses are specious, too.

Specious Claim Number One: “Husband and wife are homophobic terms.”

Husband and wife are clearly not racist, but they do have something to do with sex, and therefore the next-in-line, all-purpose defense to be mustered is presumably the badly-coined term “homophobia”.  So let’s look at that one more closely.

You probably know gays and lesbians.  I know that I certainly do.  Maybe Tim Cook does, too.  Now, for some reason – I’m not exactly sure why – I rarely hear any lesbian refer to her “wife”.  Maybe that’s just a regionalism, here in the Agro-American sector of Rustbeltistan.  “Partner” seems to be the big one.  However, almost every married gay I know – including some of the very first to get married in America – calls his husband his husband.  I had gotten quite used to that, to be honest.

So NO.  This is not helping gays and lesbians.  Unless “helping” is taking on the usual proggie-comm definition, where “helpful” is not determined by those who are “helped”.

Specious Claim Number Two: “Husband and wife are transphobic terms.”

“Transphobia” is newer, less familiar, and thus the specious leftist excuse du jour.  But it works no better.  In fact, let me dispatch this quickly with a single question.  How is a “trans person” who desires to call their spouse a “husband” or “wife”, any different from a gay person who wants to call his or her husband his or her husband?  Is one somehow more entitled to annoying presumptive patronization than the other?

Specious Claim Number Three: “Adding husband and wife would make the list too long, or in some other way be onerous to Apple.”

Adding one term to the convenience list doesn’t seem like a valid argument in Apple User Convenience World, still allegedly ruled by the Ghost of Steve Jobs, when EVERY Apple iPhone user who wants to use “husband” or “wife” has to add the terms, and that simply has to be a LOT of users.  And a lot more effort than – at most – a few hundred bytes in the entire OS.

While there is a counterargument that “spouse” cannot be deleted, and thus TWO more items have to be added, I counter that the terms “husband” and “wife” are far more useful than “assistant” and “manager”, to say nothing of “other” – particularly the latter when the great feature “Add custom label” exists.

A “great feature?”  There you go, Google/Snopes.  Your “debunking” page which says that I actually complimented Apple will now work, technically, although it will still be evil.

But now for the biggie, which is where things actually get “sciencey”.

Specious Claim Number Four: “Testing did not reveal any need to include the terms.”

I will admit to having inside data on this one.  I myself, as one of many Apple testers, did not say anything about “husband” and “wife” being MIA.  Some of this was due to the great new feature of “Add custom label”, which allows for a workaround of adding the terms by hand, which I very much wanted to test.  And Apple certainly got a lot of testing by leaving out the terms, I am quite sure.  Cunning, cunning, cunning.  But then – interestingly – they never added the terms back in the version rolled out to the public.

More cunning.  Much more cunning.

Now I said there was another reason, but let me put that off for a moment, and get back to Apple leaving out the “test-provoking” absent terms, after their job as absent terms was over.

In a way which can be deeply satisfying only to those of us who study the academically forbidden “conspiracy theory” of cultural Marxism, this is a beautiful example of how cultural Marxism pulls off some of its sneakiest works.  That capability being through the “look Ma, no hands” method of steering a larger-scale goal through a series of smaller, plausibly deniable wickets, none of which overtly reference or obviously imply the larger goal.

Which in this case, is effectively to gently de-legitimize the terms “husband” and “wife”.

They say that “the Devil is in the details”, but in a Feynmanesque way, we must be sure to look at the other end of the universe, too.  The Devil is just as much in the big picture, when the big picture is what’s to be hidden or denied.

Thus we are led to the final defense – the idea that nobody (like me) complained about the terms being absent, and thus they could be left out without consequence.

Almost everybody can see that this is flawed reasoning, by simple common sense, although not everybody can articulate the explanation, which is vast and subtle.  But let’s try – on at least two points.

We already saw that testing/observation itself disturbed the scenario (rather beautiful, that), but let’s ignore even that point, and assume that every test user who received positive internal feedback by adding “husband” and/or “wife” as a kind of built-in test, was not influenced in any way to not then report what seemed like an intentional omission as a bug, and thus not assuming at that moment that Apple knew what it was doing, and might add the terms back later (sorry if I keep repeating this point, but I want everybody to get it).

No.  There is ANOTHER reason that I, personally, and I’m sure most other testers who missed the terms “husband” and “wife”, did not submit bug reports for the missing terms.  The “second reason” of my own sloth in filing a bug report, that I referred to earlier.

That reason is PC conditioning, of which I was fully conscious at the time, in a kind of blessed state of introspection, if not mindfulness.  In fact, there is even further proof of this point by the very fact that I am BREAKING PC conditioning to make this blog post – that I am using my Blog Amplifier to send this message to Apple, and am not including it in actual feedback, which would surely be ignored, as anyone who has EVEN PARTIALLY BROKEN PC conditioning can attest.

There is a companion to “virtue signaling”, and that is “sin self-silencing”.  The problem is, the “sins” are not even sins in my book.  In fact, I can almost be sure of the fact that more people would WANT the terms “husband” and “wife” added, than would oppose their addition.  That those people would be, in fact, the voices I would respect the most.  And yet the radical left, which controls our media from a minority status, can still silence me by yelling at everybody.  Why?  Because the effect isn’t even conscious.  It all operates swiftly, silently, and assuredly, at a subconscious level.

There is a saying that “PC kills”, but I love to extend that by saying “PC kills, but before it kills, it makes dumb and crazy.”

The likely failure of sufficient users to report the absence of “husband” and “wife” as a bug is a perfect example of how people simply don’t speak up, when PC creeps from where it once was to where it now is.  How it dumbs us all down, and leads to a kind of mass psychosis, where larger truths are simply not spoken.

This is, in the small, the same reason that so many people could be media-molested into not supporting (or not openly supporting) Donald Trump, when every logical reason said he was their ideal candidate.  However, by the same token, Donald Trump understood this, and played a cunning game of springing cultural Marxist traps long before he was supposed to walk into them.  If not an actual genius, a brilliant tactician.  Personally, I am betting on both.

And thus, as an eager student of this Donald Trump, I am now doing the same thing, badly but (non-josh) earnestly, by leap-frogging Apple’s cultural Marxist machinery.

Conclusions

I will not claim that I am the first to spot Apple’s cunning little ploy to “spouse” us all.  Just because Google/Snopes does not report anything that I could find on this point, and just because the derivative search engine DuckDuckGo does not report anything, does not mean that others have not attempted to report this small shot fired at us in the information culture wars.  However, I have the added advantage of having a small readership in wonderful places, such as a certain Last Refuge, and thus I hope that the point will spread.

Who knows?  Apple may take certain bug reports only BECAUSE those channels are being unintentionally observed.  That, too, is rather beautiful.