Jones has finally been banned from YouTube and Twitter. I guess those media do have limits. It’s too bad the limit seems to be set impossibly high, at peddling pedophile conspiracy theories and harassing the parents of murdered children.

But Jones was able to leap that high!

If Steve Jobs was an awful person, why should we expect that the Apple corporation is altruistic and good? The news is full of this shocking announcement that Apple has removed all of Alex Jones’ podcasts from the iTunes library.

In a statement Sunday evening to BuzzFeed News, Apple confirmed that it notified Jones of the decision to remove the five shows under its hate speech guidelines earlier this weekend. “Apple does not tolerate hate speech, and we have clear guidelines that creators and developers must follow to ensure we provide a safe environment for all of our users,” a company spokesperson said. “Podcasts that violate these guidelines are removed from our directory making them no longer searchable or available for download or streaming. We believe in representing a wide range of views, so long as people are respectful to those with differing opinions.”

The cynic in me is wondering why. It’s a no-brainer to me that people shouldn’t promote hateful lunacy like Jones’ ranting, but Apple was just fine with it for years when Jones and his crew were spouting deranged shit non-stop. I don’t believe that a corporation has suddenly grown a conscience, so there must be something more to it.

Again, cynical me speaks up and suggests that the haters, while a profitable market to cater to, have gotten out of hand and are alienating the non-haters, another profitable market. Apple is cracking down on the most prominent crackpot on their network to put on a show of “Hey, we’re good guys at heart”, while allowing the numerous littler Nazis to thrive.

…unless you think those vague guidelines are going to be enforced all across the board. I think not. Making an example of one particularly loud asshole will send a useful message to the less successful assholes that they’d better be careful not to disrupt the business, which is Apple’s only goal.

They’re worse. I don’t know whether the process of getting rich warps them, or only damaged people commit to getting rich.

Take Steve Jobs. We peons knew him as the intense guy in a turtleneck who’d come on stage twice a year to announce the latest cool expensive gadget from his company, but he also had a daughter, sort of. He was a reluctant father who seemed to accept his responsibilities grudgingly, and appeared to actively resent her. And now she has written a revealing book about what it was like to grow up with a cold, aloof father.

Preceding this excerpt, she’d heard that he was so rich that he’d trade in his shiny black Porsche if it got so much as a scratch.

For a long time I hoped that if I played one role, my father would take the corresponding role. I would be the beloved daughter; he would be the indulgent father. I decided that if I acted like other daughters did, he would join in the lark. We’d pretend together, and in pretending we’d make it real. If I had observed him as he was, or admitted to myself what I saw, I would have known that he would not do this, and that a game of pretend would disgust him.

Later that year, I would stay overnight at my father’s house on several Wednesdays while my mother took college classes in San Francisco. On those nights, we ate dinner, took a hot tub outside, and watched old movies. During the car rides to his house, he didn’t talk.

“Can I have it when you’re done?”I asked him one night, as we took a left at the leaning, crumbling white pillars that flanked the thin, bumpy road ending at his gate. I’d been thinking about it for a while but had only just built up the courage to ask.

“Can you have what?” he said.

“This car. Your Porsche.” I wondered where he put the extras. I pictured them in a shiny black line at the back of his land.

“Absolutely not,” he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’d made a mistake. I understood that perhaps it wasn’t true, the myth of the scratch: maybe he didn’t buy new ones. By that time I knew he was not generous with money, or food, or words; the idea of the Porsches had seemed like one glorious exception.

I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turned off the engine. Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me.

“You’re not getting anything,” he said. “You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.” Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.

If any of my children had asked anything like that (they’d have to ask for a beat-up old Honda instead of a Porsche), that is not the answer I would have given.

“Yes. You can have it. You can have everything. You’re getting it all — I’d give you the world if I could.”

That’s how human beings answer that kind of question.

It’s sad that Lisa Brennan-Jobs did not experience that, growing up.