Ok I'll bite, so if your company is based in Saudi Arabia you have to be okay with killing journalists because the charter was granted by the government?

I mean... you don't have to feel okay with it, but if you're paying taxes, you're certainly complicit in it on some level. Similar goes for Americans and the Iraq War.

In the old days, in some countries, we had a device for changing the government when it did stuff you didn't want to be complicit in. I think they called it an "election" ;-). Now, admittedly, even if I take a very broad array of American political parties, from the Greens to the Libertarians, their spectrum on foreign policy still ranges from bloody-stupid to fucking appalling, so I don't entirely blame actively anti-war Americans for the anti-war movement's failure to stop the war.

But that's because the democratic system has decayed to the point where, if you don't want today's fresh new war of choice, you're left choosing between two irrelevant third parties, one of whom puts forth a candidate who doesn't know where Aleppo is, and the other of whom are outright tankies on foreign policy and may be paid by Vladimir Putin.

Does knowing where Aleppo is help American citizens in any measurable way, shape, or form?

Yes, but I'm not going to debate this, because I'm already appalled that this comment got +3 while my remarks on the Bayesian brain theory in another thread were ignored.

#MakeHNTechnicalAgain

Yes, because some number of American citizens are in/near there in a dangerous situation in the employ of the US federal government.

Well if you're a Saudi citizen and you don't have much of a choice then clearly no, it's just the way things are, you don't choose where you're born. If you're a foreigner and go out of your way to open a company in Saudi Arabia then clearly yes.

Ok I’ll bite :)

Does Saudi Arabia have centuries of free enterprise, civil rights progress, government accountability, and not-a-monarchy?

What does any of that have to do with the previous question?

The premises of the grandparent was

> Corporate charters are granted by governments, from the people.

This is true for the USA, at least afaict as an European.

The same can't be said about Saudi Arabia, as sad as that might be.

Companies should not be relied on to make these decisions. If dealing with Saudi Arabia is immoral, that is a topic of diplomacy and the country should be possibly embargoed. What industries are allowed to do business there should be left up to a nations people to decide.