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