Go ahead and name any one of your favorite things, I’ll Google for 5 minutes and tell you what kind of criminal you’re supporting.

Oh boy, here we go with this rote argument that happens every month, unrelentingly even though its a discussion that has played its course a million times at this point and almost always ends in the same place.

Your argument ultimately amasses to:

"Good or evil can be distilled in a way that is binary so either you're perfect and you're good or you fuck up and you're evil, so the layman that spends money may as well just give up on the notion of any attempt to ethically spend their dollar because its probably contributing to something that leans evil in some way."

Lets just speed up this argument and lets see if you have anything more interesting to say in the 'nth' reply down the road:

I'm going to say:

Sure, I love Counter-Strike! I think Valve makes excellent video games.

And then you're going to say

"DoNt U nO tHeY cReAtEd lOoTBoXeS aND cHiLd GaMbliNG"

And then I say,

sure, I hate that about Valve but it seems like you're conflating the issues of children gambling in a mature-rated video game with the issue of the money spend on an EA video game. Money that filters up to the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia that is actively engaged in literal modern slavery, literal imprisonment of women that have the audacity to post a picture on social media, literal murdering of the journalists that had attempted to report on the news stories.

And then you tell me,

"Okay but that phone you hold in your hand was probably made by child slavery. And that computer you use is the result of some low income factory worker that probably jumped off a building - all for a business that's headed by a company that thinks very little of women."

And then I say:

Yes, absolutely - there is no doubt suffering that resulted somewhere in the decisions I've made at some point for anything. But if your argument is that its all or nothing - either I subscribe to perfection across the entire spectrum of what I believe to be right and wrong, I may as well not bother. Well, in my opinion that argument is ignorant of the aggregate efforts of everyone picking and choosing fights that are sustainable in their own lives. As others have said before me, don't let perfection be the enemy of good. So while yes, sorry, I do have a family to feed and I will need my slave-labor produced phone to participate in the job that allows me to live a sustainable life - and I most certainly wish the circumstances of that downstream impact were different - unfortunately, litigating where every dollar in my life has gone, just isn't sustainable. However, while I may enjoy a Mass Effect game, I can certainly make the decision to not spend my dollar on a leisure activity because the organizations activities are gross to me and I would hope enough people who have that information arrive in their own mental mailbox, so to speak, may feel the same. And the aggregate of all of those people choosing to not play a video game, may have even just a marginally better outcome for someone else in the world, vice had the aggregate chose to buy the game. A game, by the way, who's writers we all may love explicitly because in their art, they express the ethics we all generally feel are important in matters of fiction and probably feel are important in non-fiction too.

And then we just go back and forth on what is essentially a difference in values that will never resolve itself because at a very fundamental, bare-metal level, we both subscribe to entirely different universes of what we feel to be the kind of ethics that our individual souls can sustain. And I imagine you want me to be more like you, in feeling that its not a big deal, just get over it just shut up and play Mass Effect without thinking about the human suffering that happens on the backend of your spent dollar, while its my personal belief that if all of us that purport to believe that these things ethical issues are horrifying and we all do our best to take best effort stabs at not contributing to human suffering when we see it, in ways that we feel are personally sustainable, then the world can be an incrementally better place.

But I'll say:

If Mass Effect is that "thing" that you just know you're going to play - okay, I actually do get it, believe it or not. But lets just acknowledge that's an imperfection and maybe you can offset your contribution to an organization like EA by donating to something like 'DAWN' (Democracy for the Arab World Now - founded by the now deceased Jamal Khashoggi) or perhaps 'Human Rights Watch' an organization that investigates and reports on human rights abuses - if deep down you do actually care but traditionally have felt like you cant do anything to personally make the outcomes any better. Or maybe you just don't care at all. Which whatever - you're just a dude on the internet and I'm just a dude on the internet and our lives may never intersect again. But if that's my reaction to you and your choice to play Mass Effect, I do think its a little sour to press the opposite direction that its generally hopeless and I shouldn't try to care so much about where my dollar goes, just because in my personal life, I feel incrementally more like it matters to me where my dollar goes.

Cool, so now we're all caught up. Lets see where this goes. But I hope this discussion doesn't devolve into you litigating a handful of sentences I expressed somewhere in these several paragraphs meant to generically express the same rote conversation that has been had a million times at this point. I mean, I typed this while sat on the toilet for the last 10 minutes so lets just get to some new, interesting portion of this conversation or lets not bother at all.

Deal? I'll check in the next time I need to take a shit.