> The numbers have always been an irrelevant side issue.

Bullshit. Saying "the difference between 0% and 0.1% is immaterial" says something _fundamentally different_ than "the difference between 82% and 96.5% is immaterial", so which set of numbers you chose was what you were saying.

> accuse me of all this crap because I clarified what I was saying like I was asked to.

No, you have clarified nothing. You've been harping on about the evil of numbers -- which takes quite some gall, given that you were the one who introduced them in the first place -- and said nothing about why your thesis should be true. (i.e. why the numbers should be so low; it's the same thing.)

> And now you say I'm lying about what I was saying?

Not necessarily: Either lying, or just not understanding what you actually said. Because you've been pretending -- or genuinely thinking; I don't know which is worse -- this whole time that what you originally said, and are still saying here:

> a boycott that seems arbitrary will be overwhelmingly less effective than one that seems principled

...is obvious and correct and unquestionable. Which it isn't; at least you certainly haven't shown it to be true. Sure, it's true if the difference between their effectiveness is that between 0% and 0.1% -- but those numbers are just made up from nothing out of nowhere. Plug in 90% and 99% in stead, and what you're saying is that both are effective, not ineffective.

So, your original claim that a boycott that seems arbitrary will be overwhelmingly less effective than one that seems principled -- got anything to support that? What? You've had two weeks, and brought nothing but screeching protest at having your made-up illustrative numbers questioned. I'm saying it's BS; a boycott is a boycott and just as effective regardless of how "principled" people's motivations for participating in it are.

My counterclaim: It doesn't matter if people participate in the boycott even though they then "ought to" participate in other boycotts too in order to be "principled". Or, to put it in the terms you originally did, so what if an "unprincipled" boycott is only 79,9% effective vs 92.3% for a "principled" one? And now please DON'T try to keep gibbering about those numbers per se -- they're only interesting insofar as they are the actual claim. If you're still seeing them as a separate issue -- an existing "issue" at all, actually -- you're still confused. And it's getting harder and harder to believe that such monumental confusion can be genuine.

> then by all means disagree with that.

I'm still baffled at you not getting that that is exactly what I have been doing all this time.

And you have brought absolutely zero actual arguments for your original thesis. Again: WHY should the effectiveness of a boycott be dependent on your reasoning about its "level of principledness"? (Or, to put the exact same question in your own numerical terms: WHY should the effectiveness of a boycott be only 0.32% if it's "unprincipled", and not, say, 87.8%?)

ISTR bringing some arguments against it, but it's been weeks, so I'm not sure I can remember them. AFAICR, they went something like this (apologies if I'm making up new ones; though I suspect that's more than compensated by forgetting others):

1) A boycott is a boycott; sellers suffer when people refuse to buy their stuff. It doesn't matter to the seller if those same people then also "ought to" boycott other sellers, perhaps in wildly differing industries -- that doesn't affect their bottom line.

2) The seller has no way of knowing[1] whether any one person boycotting them is also boycotting the "correct" other sellers they "ought to" boycott in order to be "principled".

3) In fact, come to think of it (this may be new, or at least expanded from earlier hints), the less "principled" any single boycotter is, the more "principled" they may look to the seller: Som "ultra-principled" boycotter -- you? :-) -- might write them a personal letter, outlining their reasons and motivations, perhaps even explicitly mentioning (or at least giving clues to) what other causes they do or don't support. Or, you know, chat with staff going in and out of the corporate HQ they're picketing. Whereas the "just jumping on the bandwagon" types (whose "unprincipled" opinions you seem to think shouldn't count) just CL1XXOR H3R3 TO 5UPP0RT!!! on some campaign page, giving no clue as to the "level of principledness" that made them do so. But: So will a bunch of the "ultra-principled" ones, because they're just not the letter-writing type, or live on the other side of the continent from corporate HQ, or whatevs. Not knowing which is which, and giving the bandwagoneers the benefit of the doubt that after CL1XXORing that page they will at least be principled enough to actually abstain from buying their stuff (even though they're not boycotting all other "equally-evil" sellers too), what can the seller do but assume the worst -- that they're all pretty much genuine?

Refute any or all of those and you're actually discussing. So far you haven't been. (Or, sorry, if you have I must have missed it.)

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[1]: Short of hiring a poll firm to deep-interview a significant sample of boycotters about their ethical views and wider boycotting habits, I guess. Or cross-referencing all the "Likes" on the "Boycott Evil Corp X!" Facebook page with the Upvotes on the Disqus comments on the "Boycott Evil Corp Y!" Web page... Can't do that by user ID only; and a lot of them won't have the same profile pic either. Bit of a job in both cases; my guess would be pretty much nobody does either.