
 Corporations and Emotions - wglb
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/05/30/Feelings-About-Companies
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billswift
Many people will emotionally latch on to anything for a thrill - hate this,
love that; it is all as meaningless as the sitcoms they devour.

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madair
Meaningless? Hmmm. It may not always be 100% rational (as nothing is), but
meaningless?

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gyardley
Perhaps 'inconsequential' is the right word? If you're still buying identical
products from identical companies, your feelings about BP don't matter much.

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madair
That sounds like an alternate form of the everyone is doing it argument.

If, short of living in a cave, one can mostly only take symbolic action, then
symbolic is what I take. But what's not symbolic is the effect of my action on
me, it actually affects my life, as in it causes me to miss out on a nice iPad
because I'd rather not support the symbolic position that Apple has as cult
leader riding on the backs of the poor factory workers. Sure any toy I buy is
likely to have the same baggage, but not every toy is a symbol of do-gooders
everywhere, and so I'll deal with the symbol with my symbolic gesture, by
making the effect non-symbolic for me.

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jayruy
Tim Bray is obviously an extremely smart man, but I think he's misguided on
this.

Sure we all need to look inwards from time to time, but many of us already do
that. Maybe they did just "draw the short straw", but that doesn't exonerate
them from blame.

In fact, it's the very opposite: holding BP as an example, showing Oil
companies that the populace will not take ecological disasters lying down, and
that they will result in a massive dilution of shareholder value, is what will
put pressure on other Oil companies to revisit their failsafe procedures.

