Boycotting Things That Don't Bother Us Too Much

An interesting couple of weeks in the boycotting community.

First up when World Vision in the US changed their employment policy to allow married couples of the same sex-chromosomal configuration.  Mass boycotting broke out. With the result that several thousand children no longer had sponsors.

When the charity reversed its decision, the people who'd boycotted the charity presumably went cheerfully off to Walmart in their gas guzzling SUVs with the satisfaction of a job well done. And carried on paying their taxes to the legislatures that are legalising these marriages in the first place.

By the way, World Vision in the UK don't have this policy. And they're just up the road. Mess with them, you mess with me.

Meanwhile, in a reverse world, the CEO of Mozilla had to resign because he has previously given money to a campaign against same sex marriage. Causing boycotts of their browser. He caused a boycott because he supported a campaign against something that was illegal in, frankly, the whole world 30 years ago.

Now I'm not saying that he was right or wrong (though I reckon he was wrong) but I don't think that getting people the boot because they have a completely legal belief, and exercise their right to free speech, is a great way for us all to live in a democratic world. And I don't think that hurting children in the developing world is a sensible way to express that legally held belief.

But I am suitably impressed by the way it's possible to change policies by boycotting things that we don't actually need.  You think about it - it wasn't the good ol' boys and hockey mums suffering from the World Vision boycott. And nobody apart from the most extreme geek is gonna suffer for switching from Firefox to Chrome. Blimey, Brendan Eich was only in the job a fortnight. I've had Firefox routine updates take longer than that to download.

And so, because we've got this immense and yet free power in our hands, we of the Beaker Folk are henceforth boycotting the following:
■ Aqua Libra (for being trendy in the 80s)
■ Carrefour (for being French, and selling live shellfish. Ugh.)
■ Fitzrovia Cycles (For using a blasphemous joke in their Christmas advertising)
■ Acdo (because it's old fashioned and we don't know where to buy it)
■ The Sun (because we don't read it) but not Sky Sports (because Liverpool might win the Title)
■ Chessington World of Adventure
■ Harlington railway station (because someone pulled out onto the Flitwick road in front of me coming out of Harlington once)
■ Lymeswold cheese (because it was a fake cheese, and it will be a bit off by now)
■ The Mormons (because they give an impossible-to-live-up-to ideal of the whiteness of human teeth).

That will teach them.