d> In heaven's name, why? Black people, women and animals in
d> factories suffer genuine hardship.
So, too, I suggest, do the WA state prisoners -- most of whom, if WA is like TX, are people of color -- who are paid a miserly wage (maybe $1.00 an hour?) to package all of MS's software products. I certainly consider them to be exploited persons, and I can't in good conscience give my $$ to a corporation that's actively exploiting them, when I have other choices I can make. But apparently the willingness to act based on my own moral reasoning, in conversation with members of my local community, makes me, per Carrol Cox's strange universe, *politically reactionary*. Oh well.
I guess it's okay to bash the Chinese companies for using slave labor but not okay to bash MS for doing the same thing?
d> on a
d> global scale, they are completely insignificant doers of harm.
Even if that's the case, and it probably is, I don't feel constrained, *when I have perfectly useful alternatives*, which is what this thread was supposed to be about, to only respond morally to the *worst* doers of harm. Using alternatives to MS software *and* being an antiracist or anti-imperialist aren't mutually exclusive, after all.
d> And when compared to Eric Raymond and gang, they're not even
d> particularly annoying.
Eric Raymond is perhaps the most *annoying* human being on the planet, but that's rather irrelevant to the moral argument about choosing less harmful alternatives when they're available.
Best, Kendall Clark