Amazon bows to UAE pressure to restrict LGBT search results

Yes, if you want to be humane, don't play the game. I don't know how to make that clearer. You don't get to ignore morality just because you want to make more money. Yes, your would-be competitors are playing the game and being immoral, and we should consider them lesser for it.

Pretending that companies aren't made up of individual people all making constant choices is a very very useful thing for people in companies that want to have their cake and eat it to.

If you sign off on "do bad thing so the company keeps making money" then you should quite literally be ostracized. Your competition only gets to benefit from those horrible things because people like you keep telling us it's a bad thing to expect companies to do better.

>Probably a reaction 'what they do in the bedroom' being made literally illegal for a long period of time.

This can be used to justify anything. Muslims and Jews used to be persecuted in catholic spain for a very long time since the 1400s, should muslims make periodic month-long parades where they play the quran loudly and cosplay as 14th century muslim warriors ? should Spain be forced to host them ?

"I was harmed in the past" is suspiciously similar to what a lot of abusers and opportunistic psychopaths say to justify their actions and get their way.

>with the expected goal being to ward off further persecution in the future.

How does that work ? Some people despise your existence, so you... shove your existence in their faces and in their streets even more ? To what end ? own them ? stick your tongue out ? rub your legal or social victory in their face ? This is just plain revenge, you can just call it "owning the haters", no need to add any kind of moral decorations on top that isn't there.

This would make you more honest, and also open your eyes to some effects you're not currently seeing with the overly moralistic framework, such as that the "owning" might be overly broad and end up making people who previously had no problem with the group in question gradually resent it more and more as it intrude further into their life year after year.

Regardless of its purpose or morality, is this strategy even successful ? was it used in the past by any minority that successfully evaded the majority's wrath because of it ? if anything, majorities hate proud minorities even more. Is there any coherent defense of it that lays out how exactly is obnoxiously marching in the streets supposed to make people accept you more than they currently do ?

>You are saying that the Arab countries do this because they want to love or respect these people?

Obviously bad faith, GP never mentioned the arab countries, they were talking about how western countries screaming about "bowing down" is hypocrisy, since they themselves do an aweful lot of making people, most of the time their own citizens, bow down when they could leave them alone. So if your house is made of glass, keep away from the stones. UAE is threatening a corporation to enforce an ideology, that is aweful, Oh gee, I wonder what that style reminds me of.

Preach only what you would do for others if the positions were reversed. Do not ask what you don't give.

>I don't think this is the difficult stuff at all.

I also think all my opinions are extremly based and uncontroversial in the slightest, all my enemies are just dumb and evil, they are making it up, they are not genuinely disagreeing.

Come on. This is the oldest trick in the book.

What good is free speeach if you're just going to relegate it to 'the difficult stuff', defined as whatever you say is the difficult stuff ? This is just like how authoritarian regimes say they are not impriosning 'genuine opposition', just the bad people who pretend to be dissidents but actually want to destabilize the country. But, mystery of mysteries, there never seems to be any 'genuine opposition' who are not harrased and imprisoned, it always turns out that all oppositions in those countries are of the bad kind. Almost as if selectiely defining exceptions to free speech is some tool authoritarians use to silence people without giving up the moral high ground.

We disagree... about what I expect?

> There are huge differences between Amazon not selling porn due to local laws and Amazon restricting LGBTQ searches due to local laws.

Except for the fact that you agree with one ('cos it's "a good thing") and disagree with the other ('cos it's "a bad thing"), what are these differences?

> some people made the call to continue making a buck by empowering a homophobic and dangerous group.

For an LGBT person, it's better to be in the US than in the UAE [0][1].

If you want that to change in the short run, you're out of luck — it's not realistic to assume it will change soon.

If you want that to change in the long run, the way to do that is to have more contact (including trade) with the UAE.

[0] Mind you, it's better still to be LGBT in the UAE than in Afghanistan or Iran!

[1] For a sick child from a poor family who needs lots and lots of healthcare, it's the opposite.