It's still hypocritical that Americans are quick to boycott a restaurant chain because of the CEO's political views yet there's never a serious outcry to sanction any of our oil buddies in the Middle East who stone and hang homosexuals on a regular basis.

The Chick-fil-A counterboycott was actually bigger than the CFA boycott. Moreover, it wasn't just his political views- Chick-fil-A actually donates some of its profits to groups that use them to campaign against not only gay marriage in the US but gay human rights around the world. You can actually trace some of the money going to promote Uganda's infamous "Kill the Gays" bill (and toward seminars which promote anti-gay violence and persecution in African countries) to Chick-fil-A patties.

The media narrative here was more than a little bit oversimplified- it's not like Mozilla where the CEO was homophobic; the company as a whole actually ends up giving money to causes some people do not want to support. The rational way to handle that (if you don't want to give your money to those causes) is a boycott.

That's not a fair analogy. What we're talking about is more like demanding someone apologize for insulting you while somebody else nearby is getting brutally beaten to death.

It was a reductio ad absurdum. Even in your new reframed analogy, you're claiming that something bad doens't matter because something worse exists. Moreover, the US doesn't have the power to change Saudi Arabian society in the near future- what would we do, nuke them for being bigots?

Surely you're joking? Illegal immigrants taking jobs at under minimum wage does nothing but damage the economy, it also hurts the common U.S worker by lowering the bar. Why hire some one at a decent rate when you can just pick up a couple illegals instead? Not to mention it's appalling that so many businesses get away with the abuse.

On the contrary, they earn less and produce more. That's what creates growth in a capitalist economy- more production for less investment. They also create jobs through consumption.

As far as the jobs issue goes, that's also being done by the companies that are illegally hiring illegal immigrants (you need certain documentation to work in the US) and then using their leverage to prevent the government from enforcing these laws.

Why hire some one at a decent rate when you can just pick up a couple illegals instead? That's exactly how unskilled labor is supposed to operate in a capitalist society- you go for the cheapest person. It's not the illegals that are producing this system of perverse incentives, and it's not their fault that they want to work.

As for drug possession, it hurts the users for one. But if that alone doesn't matter to you then it's also an economical burden. Drugs due serious medical damage and usually addicts can't pay for their own medical bills because all the money went to drugs. So that means tax-payers/government has to spend great resources healing these drug users of their self-inflicted damage.

That's an oversimplified narrative. Drug users are far from economically unproductive. I go to college with some of the smart people my age in the United States (we're talking about the best computer scientists and engineers, people who go on to make amazing things) and they do more drugs in a month than most people do in their entire lives.

Drugs due serious medical damage and usually addicts can't pay for their own medical bills because all the money went to drugs.

That's true for crack cocaine, which is more or less working that way (and inflicting its damage on poor, primarily black communities). That's not true for LSD, marijuana, or the other common culprits. You literally cannot overdose on marijuana.

Tobacco and alcohol are the far greater culprits than either of these two. In any case, the damage they do is more or less negligible.

There are enough unpreventable diseases that we need to devote resources into curing without having thousands of cases of self-inflicted illness going around.

People who generally overdose on drugs are either in poverty, come from a bad background, or mentally ill. It's not the drug possession that fucks up their lives, and it's not lack of drug possession that will solve it.