The choices we make, especially about those with whom we enrich via our business and custom and, increasingly, even attention, matter more than most people realize when it comes to shaping the future of our world. It’s one of the few actually-powerful options still retained by most of the general public, increasingly rare in our modern western world.
It’s quite important that we know who we’re dealing with and to whom we pay money. A good example of the result of ignoring this is the fact that the now-largest hosting provider in the world are also the CIA’s sysadmins.
Doing business blindly with vendors is to pass the steering wheel to someone else, and abdicates a critical individual responsibility.
If you find it irrelevant, you’re free to ignore it, but many people (in my estimation) do not, and I believe we all benefit from having better information about markets, whether it results in endorsement or avoidance. Informed decisions are good decisions.
I think that perhaps the idea that we should split society into shunning factions and the idea that we should care about where we shop (or browse) are entirely separate concepts that aren’t related.
I love how you assume that he's a Washington Post fan or something like that, if the mere idea of "take in account who's the owner of a media outlet" makes you seethe like this maybe you should rethink what content you're consuming.
It's not very healthy to be so politically infatutated, that too with one ideology. You will change, either with age or circumstances and then find yourself having missed certain oppurtunities because you don't find someone politically aligned with you.
eh... There is a place for your argument, and of course I would agree with you in many cases. But that doesn't mean we should give up on checking our vendor backgrounds entirely. Although OP has not provided a source for these donations, I think we should consider this point. It does not have to be a binary, but it seems like people don't even want to have the spectrum any more. Make a judgement based on your personal morality but it seems like you are advocating not having a personal morality at all.
The choices we make, especially about those with whom we enrich via our business and custom and, increasingly, even attention, matter more than most people realize when it comes to shaping the future of our world. It’s one of the few actually-powerful options still retained by most of the general public, increasingly rare in our modern western world.
It’s quite important that we know who we’re dealing with and to whom we pay money. A good example of the result of ignoring this is the fact that the now-largest hosting provider in the world are also the CIA’s sysadmins.
Doing business blindly with vendors is to pass the steering wheel to someone else, and abdicates a critical individual responsibility.
If you find it irrelevant, you’re free to ignore it, but many people (in my estimation) do not, and I believe we all benefit from having better information about markets, whether it results in endorsement or avoidance. Informed decisions are good decisions.