I’ve never been to the US lol
Part of my family lives in Russia and there have been many moral quandaries with respect to continuing to live there and working in an economy increasingly oriented towards producing murder. Some chose to stay, some left; I don’t think any choice is for me to judge from a position of superiority.
Alright, if you feel this way. I don’t feel like I’m shielding anything, rather I am speaking to my life experience as a trans person living in a country that forbade my existence and thus rid me of opportunity to work and survive in a way that would align with my moral convictions. Is it a false equivalence to imagine that I am not unique and other people struggle with similar contradictions, albeit probably for different reasons?
No need to be rude, I don’t even disagree with you. Just feel like discussions around this and similar issues tend to go Hegelian and ignore the materialist component of Marxian dialectics, specifically the privilege inherent in boycott, to the point where it feels like the neoliberal “freedom” to work wherever you want is being treated as real.
This feels like a rather privileged take. While it is morally correct to do so, adults typically don’t live their lives doing morally correct things all the time. As an example, I think not paying taxes to the US government is also morally correct since taxpayer money goes to support Ukraine and Israel, among other things. When are all US-based hexbear users quitting their jobs?
Why is intellectual property in quotes and what is the point I am missing? When did anyone say intellectual property is not real? I genuinely do not understand your response, sorry.
As far as I know, the reality is that patents are harmful to innovation, especially digital innovation, and antithetical to social ownership of the means of production, especially in our age of knowledge economy. China is leading in innovation today but, as comrade blobjim pointed out at the beginning of this thread, this has nothing to do with patents – and I am now also claiming that giving in to the pressures of the global capital and accepting patents as a necessity and a yardstick of success will prove to be stifling to innovation. In light of all of this, I look at the OP and don’t see a reason to be triumphant.
Intellectual property is theft. Does the OP expect us to cheer at how good China is at being capitalist?
I would agree with you in a vacuum but I understand that every person has their specific circumstances. Are you prepared to say that airline pilots are freely able to choose where and how to work in any country of the world? I am not, and it goes even more so for flight attendants, which were also a part of this conversation.
I’d like to give another example too. As a Jewish person, I’ve always had and still have the option to repatriate to Israel, escape the dangerous, dehumanising, genocidal towards me environment I am in right now and receive appropriate healthcare from IDF that I will never be able to afford where I am right now. I never took and will never take this option because of my moral convictions and views but saying that it was an “easy question to answer” for me is ignorant of my life experience. The “easy question to answer” in the comment I responded to initially is the reason I responded.