alt Hacker News>if you are boycotting the company despite living on the opposite side of the world
If I'm living at the opposite side of the world and my money was indirectly influencing Swedish politics then I'm doing Sweden a service by discontinuing my payment. After all the only thing I'm doing is reduce the power of corporations in a democratic process, I literally cannot take any Swedish vote away. That's exactly what you asked for.
> If you have political concerns, engage by voting, starting your own party or advocating for your cause
I do all of that, I'm an active member of a European political party and engaged far beyond just voting. But I'm also not going to stop to make sure my money as far as I can control it does not go into the pockets of millionaires who single handedly decided to bankroll 70% of the funding of a party that runs on ethnic hate. That is money in politics. If there was no money in politics, these people wouldn't be able to spread their hate. All of these parties on our continent are funded and supported by oligarchs across the world.
> But I'm also not going to stop to make sure my money as far as I can control it does not go into the pockets of millionaires who single handedly decided to bankroll 70% of the funding of a party that runs on ethnic hate.
My view is: its not your money that goes to a party you dislike, its Berntssons; money doesn't stink, and it's not your responsibility how some fraction of it is spent after you paid someone for a completely unrelated purpose.
You basically try to avoid a second order effect (Örebropartiet getting money) by leaning on an inherently anti-liberal mechanism (applying pressure via workplace).
You might think the end justifies the means here, but I strongly disagree; legitimizing discrimination at the workplace based on political beliefs is in my view much worse than anything that Örebropartiet could ever achieve.
You are obviously completely free to do business with whoever you want, but if you are advocating for boycott here (=> pro corporate censorship) you are directly doing more damage to liberalism in my view than some swedish local party ever could.
I'm confident in this view because I'm certain that politically motivated workplace discrimination is/was/would have been absolutely horrible for tons of people that turned out "right" (=> secularists, feminists, LGBT advocates, ...). Nothing that could be realistically achieved by such boycott appears even close to worth the trade to me.
Crucially, almost everyone ever believes his own moral compass to be "correct", but many turn out (somewhat) "wrong" decades or centuries later. So allowing more avenues to force views on others is always a risky proposition because those avenues are not just accesible to people that you believe to be "right"-- you also open them to people that you know to be wrong (i.e. rightwingers that want to get you fired for being an anti-nationalist traitor or w/e).