FWIW, you are legally required to pay your taxes, and there are going to be serious consequences to your life and your family's life if you don't; the moral decisions in that situation are much more difficult. However, Apple obviously is not and never was legally required to build a centralized App Store... hell: it isn't even clear that that it is legal that they did it, and these arguments are still playing out in court!
And, certainly, no one is legally required to put copious effort into defending the thing Apple did which directly and predictably leads to these results (which are not new or surprising). Even if Apple is, now, legally required to remove this app (and I don't know if they even are: many companies are just cowing to political, not legal, pressure), they carefully and intentionally set themselves up to be in that position.
FWIW, this much should at least be pretty obvious: if you go far far far out of your way to do something that no one required you to do to defend something that pretty clearly leads to a specific result, you are certainly MORE complicit in the results of that action than if you take an action that you are required to do at gunpoint and which only very indirectly and at very low impact causes the result (to the point where I don't even think the analogy of the Nurenberg Defense applies... but, I guess you aren't claiming to understand it well).
Like, I dunno... it just feels like such an ingenuous argument to try to claim that paying taxes -- of which only a very small percentage could possibly be claimed to cause this specific problem, particularly so as this exact same issue happens with iPhones in other countries (such as China, where Apple has become a very clear patsy to the regime and "complicit" barely scratches the surface of their involvement anymore) -- is somehow similar to actively defending the existence of a bottleneck on information and access to software that has time and again been used for censorship and authoritarian control.
Well to start with no one requires anyone to get a job and pay taxes. You could just as well live off food banks and take as much money from government. Knowing that the government does this, one need not give them any money any longer. You could spend down your balance and start eating from the food bank.
It's a pretty active act to go earn money that you then fully know (completely ahead of time) that you are giving to an immoral government. Especially when you know you can draw out of that government instead.
I think what is pretty obvious is that everyone has a story where they're somehow not villains but the guy epsilon more involved in the subject is 100% the villain.
Well, I'm only taking the notion of complicity to its logical conclusion. I disagree with the premise and a valid way to argue that is to show it reaches absurdity.
It's obvious what's actually happening. It's not so surprising that Apple-haters believe that Apple is complicit in everything. They'd say that about anything Apple. The fact that the argument concludes in 'bottom' is evidence.
Most people have their taxes withheld directly from their pay by their employer, and don't get the option to not pay their taxes, because the government gets the money before they do.
Because I have no interest in attracting the apocalyptic ire that is the Internal Revenue Service. You don't fuck with the organization that took down Al Capone or that even the _Joker_ is deathly afraid of.
It’s simply not that easy to do, nor is it the best approach per se, as it’s wrought with foot guns everywhere. Frankly it’s a big risk from a number of angles, one of the most obvious is such a movement being co-opted by special interests
Unironically it's because liberals actually like paying taxes. Every state and local school board tax increase passes where I live because it's a bunch of pot smoking hippies who unironically believe in wealth redistribution through progressive taxation.
Well, it's a wealth distribution from adults in a community to kids in the community, but a very good one that almost always benefits the whole community.
I do get what you're saying, but at the risk of being overly pedantic, this doesn't really make sense as written.
Usually "wealth redistribution" implies actual money or other liquid or semi-liquid assets being transferred from one group to another, and the kids in the community aren't receiving any of the money being put into school taxes.
I suppose one could argue that school taxes are wealth redistribution from the community to the _teachers and staff_. As someone who counts quite a few teachers among my friends and family, I wholeheartedly support this redistribution of wealth.
