I wonder if the people signing this would also boycott anything run or owned by Middle Eastern royalty where laws that Card promotes both exist and are enforced.
On the one side you can retreat to the woods and live off of roots and berries trying not to do any direct harm. But then, depending on your privilege, you leave on the table so many opportunities to steer the ship of society in a less harmful direction.
Or, at the other end of the spectrum you can yield all reaponsibility for your direct actions, instead throwing yourself into the wheeling and dealing of systems of harm, trying to invest what privilege you have to gain leverage so that you can make a bigger difference, focusing only on some theoretical calculus of your global influence, measuring yourself by your imagined net global effect.
Or, more likely, you pick something in between. In the end, we all make a personal decision about what we are willing to sacrifice.
I often use oil, even though I know it's harmful, because I think my boycott of it would cost the world more than it would gain. I could be wrong, but that's my best guess based on my (flawed) understanding of my self and my world.
And I may boycott Ender's Game and I do not think that's hypocritical. It's just an acknowledgement that there are limits to our power and we must choose our battles.
We must not imagine for a second that a personal boycott is a significant political/moral act to anyone but ourselves. I agree, you must do what you can, but the movie is a trivial point at best. Your posting on this forum is more significant than, probably, the entire boycott issue.
A penny saved is penny earned. And that penny can now be used for so much other than supporting bigots.
To illustrate - since I was a teenager I realized that the war on drugs was manifestly wrong. I chose not to participate in any aspect of the war on drugs as best I could. When I was fresh out of college, most forms of employment required a drug test. So I did it, reluctantly, but I felt I could stand on my principles as a pauper or compromise and live a reasonable life.
But once I had FU money in the bank, I felt that it was my obligation to refuse all future drug testing because the cost to me is now practically nil. Since I can pick and choose the jobs I take, it is my moral obligation to never compromise again.
A corollary to this approach is that anyone who shares my ideals and chooses to give up the comfort of an easy life for those ideals deserves an enormous amount of respect because whatever character flaws they may have, they are "walking the talk" more than I was willing to.
If I were to encounter an employer willing to make an exception to their policy for me, I would have to consider the greater implications. I might accept such a job as long as I remained free to tell anyone and everyone that an exception had been made so as to undermine the policy going forwards. Maybe. Hasn't happened yet.
Gay marriage is legal in the US, and rightly so. Neither Orson Scott Card nor middle-eastern oil will change that.
Oh please. Ender's Game is a classic. The rest of his work is worse, and the recent Shadow stuff is execrable.
I also liked his A Planet Called Treason
The only criteria is:
They must be primarily known for sci-fi
They must be alive today
I'll start with:
* William Gibson * Ursula K. LeGuin * Charlie Stross * Margaret Atwood
Anyone else care to add to the list?
If it weren't for the "alive" requirement, I'd include Iain M. Banks. :-( Regardless, I highly recommend anything Banks has written over anything of Card's.
If we're willing to include fantasy...
* Brandon Sanderson * Patrick Rothfuss * George R. R. Martin * Terry Pratchett * Mira Grant * Jim Butcher
This just from a brief glance over my most-recent on Goodreads. There is lots and lots of good Sci-Fi and Fantasy out there, and I'd be willing to argue any of these authors over Card in terms of quality. (Though -- to be fair -- I was monumentally unimpressed with Card even before I knew his politics.)
A few of the authors on my list have politics I disagree with as well, but they at least are much less obnoxious and hateful about it.
(On the other hand, American natural gas and Canadian tar sands may break us free from dependence on the Saudis and their deplorable political and social system.)
http://www.amazon.com/Sleeping-Devil-Washington-Saudi-Crude/...
[NB: From what I can tell the author, Bob Baer, is fairly credible - he is a former CIA field officer with a lot of experience in the Middle East.]
edit: While we're on the subject of sci-fi and capitalism; I highly recommend Bruce Sterling's latest book, the Zenith Angle: http://www.amazon.com/The-Zenith-Angle-Bruce-Sterling/dp/034...
http://www.snopes.com/politics/gasoline/saudigas.asp
People boycott in America for political reasons all the time. I don't particularly care about this boycott, but I'm not going to ridicule them for exercising their right to free association. If they don't want their money going to a bigot, that's their prerogative. If a person wants to boycott Chick Filet because of their stance on gay marriage, Heinz Ketchup because John Kerry's wife owns it, or any other good or service where someone their money will go to political views they do not support, then that is their Constitutional right.
It's also your right to ridicule them, but maybe you should try and come up with some concrete examples instead of just flinging random, unsupported assumptions about moral inconsistencies you think they exhibit.
One problem I see is that so many times, beliefs are also linked to hatred. There's really no place for hatred when two parties are trying to practice tolerance.
Using another picked on minority, I don't consider a "casual" neo-nazi skinhead and a dedicated one to be on particularly different levels. They both disgust me fairly equally (if for no other reason, then because the former incubate and insulate the later.)