From my pocket to his

Jim Burroway has an excellent post on the Orson Scott Card dispute over the movie Ender's Game. Boycotts may not work. An example of that is the National Organization for Marriage boycott of Starbucks that caused the stock price to rise. So we may not cause economic harm to the target. Even so, political statements by the artists (see Dixie Chicks in 2003) can have commercial consequences. Card has said some nasty stuff about us. So, Burroway concludes:

But when they sell it, we enter the land of commerce, and we are all free to decide whether we want to buy what they’re selling. And my money just won’t go from my pocket to Card’s. It’s as simple as that.

I got to thinking about the plot of Ender's Game as summarized by Wikipedia to answer the question why teenage Ender succeeded while well trained adult military men failed. A couple interlocking ideas:

* Ender didn't have a fully developed moral code and a fully developed understanding of consequences. This allowed him to be more ruthless than his superiors with less empathy for the victims.

* Ender was tricked. He was told it was a game, but it wasn't. Some people would blast away at bad guys in a video game but would not do the same with real people.

But it has been 35 years since I read the short version of the story and I'm relying on the accuracy of Wikipedia.