Unless your ethics extend no farther than your own family, then no it’s not, it’s exactly the same issue, just slightly attenuated.*
What’s different is the gist of your argument. Do you admit that the whole “innocent until proven guilty” is totally irrelevant to this scenario, then, and that’s why you’ve moved to making a different argument?
Of course he may be. The chance of his innocence should be evaluated by anyone deciding whether to attend DragonCon–that is, what are the chances that their money will go toward protecting a rapist?
Probably. If they’ve looked at the evidence and concluded this guy is probably a rapist, and that he’ll probably use his position with the organization to stay on the streets, then yeah, they’re no better than the Pope.
After posting, I noticed your comment about not letting your 14-year-old sleep with any strange man. That comment is either irrelevant, as I first assumed, or renders your whole paragraph irrelevant. If it’s the latter, swap in a relevant paragraph, ferchrissakes, say, asking whether you’d let your 14-year-old go on a scouting trip led by this guy, or whether you’d let him take private music lessons from this guy, or whether you’d let him game at this guy’s store, or something.
I guess what I’m really having trouble understanding is what the boycott is supposed to accomplish here?
From what I can tell from my weekend research, Dragon*con has already done everything they LEGALLY can do to get this guy dis-associated with them. (I say nothing about the timelieness or incentive for that happening, just that it has happened).
He’s in jail right now, waiting for a hearing on a bail violation, and then prosecution on his original charges which he’s avoided so far due to clever use of funds and application of lawyers.
IF the convention has already removed him from managerial oversight, taken him off of the planning loop, and all he remains is a shareholder, what on earth is a boycott supposed to accomplish? They can’t change the law to deny him his share earnings, they can’t buy him out unless he’s willing, and they can’t even dissolve the corporation while they’re in conflict with their shareholders!
If Dragoncon dies, he loses his income that let him pay lawyers to keep him out of jail and prowling the streets for young boys for so many years. That’s why to boycott.
I’m all for preventing crimes, but really - doesn’t that seem just a BIT excessive? Punishing the convention by killing it, because a legal structure prevents them from kicking out their shareholders.
God forbid you find out anything bad about Apple’s shareholders!
Indeed. “Boycott” may not be the right word for this action, inasmuch as boycotts are generally designed to change behavior, and this is simply designed to starve the man’s legal defense fund. But that’s a perfectly legitimate aim.
Look at it this way: imagine that I owned a share of a local business, and also that I supported Westboro Baptist Church by purchasing plane tickets for them to heckle funerals. Imagine I made my plans and my economics crystal clear: for every 200 meals eaten at this restaurant, my share of the profits would be enough to purchase a single plane ticket. Every 1000 meals eaten would be enough to ensure that one additional funeral could be heckled.
The food’s tasty.
How often would you eat at this restaurant? If others chose not to eat there, would you understand?
Me, I’d never eat at such a restaurant. I don’t want my money going even indirectly toward something I find repugnant, and when I find out about such a connection, I change my spending habits accordingly.
Similarly, if I found out that part of my ticket price were going toward keeping a child molester on the streets, and that if the child molester were deprived of funds to pay expensive lawyers he might be locked up, I’d go to GenCon instead.
I don’t go in for guilt by financial/legal entanglement, no.
If the RESTAURANT itself were being horrid, then I wouldn’t patronize it - thus my lack of Chik-fil-a edibles. Perhaps if a Westboro church-member were EMPLOYED by the business, I can see avoiding them, due to my disagreement about their hiring practices.
In total contrast, organizations do not have ANY control over the individual choices of their **shareholders **in regards to the income that they make, and I don’t feel that punishing an organization for the actions of a single individual (as repugnant as those actions are) is an ethical stance I would be willing to take.
Really, how do you patronize ANY businesses? Do you honestly stop doing business with every place when you find out that some of their shareholders are horrible people?
Not my problem, not going myself, nor do I care if you attend. His latest escapade should cook his goose pretty good, I suspect. But what I cited is the reasoning, that and expressing distaste for the man. Both strike me as fine reasons for not attending if you feel like it.
I can see that - and it’s a totally valid reason to choose not to attend. If it is something that really bothers you, then sure - don’t go, and encourage others to stay away also.
I just wondered how it was being seen as a “boycott” when as far as I can tell (remember, I’m just going by internet-fu here) people aren’t pushing for the organization to change or DO anything - just an attempt to make the whole con lay down and die in order to cut off financial support to this nasty piece of humanity.
I’m not arguing that it’s a worthy goal (as far as I can see and tell) to deprive this waste-of-skin of the income he needs to continue to mount his legal defenses. But, do bear in mind that, in doing so, a “boycotter” will also be hurting the rest of the DragonCon organizations. If DragonCon goes out of business, the dude loses his gravy train…but the (apparently innocent) other owners of the convention get hurt in the process.