Sure, hate capitalism all you want, but it’s the system we live in, and it’s what enables the guy to be a linguist instead of having to hunt and farm and house himself.
This tribe has barely 16,000 people registered as tribal members, total.
Do you really think the number of books they’re asking for is truly obscene? With barely 16,000 people, it’s not like they have a metric fuckton of kids who are going to need access to these books to learn about their own history.
Is that really going to impact his ability to take care of himself?
This is like those jokers who act like Naomi Klein literally naming her book and making the thesis “This Changes Everything” and that we have to get rid of capitalism and reject it wholesale to prevent total collapse wasn’t out of line for not at the very least also releasing a free, digital copy of the book, if it really “changes everything.” Just like these people, they’re never willing to put their money where their fucking mouth is. She wouldn’t have lost print sales because a free digital copy existed.
Same here, he could just give them DRM’d digital copies of his book (reducing the cost of reproducing them to almost zero) and fuck off already instead of acting like this is going to be a massive impact on his ability to sell the book. What do they want a hundred books? Oh no! Fuck me, what a joke.
Finally, it’s not a single guy, it’s a “non-profit consortium” and if you look into them, Executive Pay makes up 13% of their total budget. Maybe they could just not pay the fucking CEO so much and then maybe they could actually pay their fucking linguist and give away books to Standing Rock kids.
Their revenue is $898K and their operating budget is $931K which to me sounds like a lot of fucking white people who don’t know how to budget for shit.
EDIT: They could also not be spending money on these lawsuits. This is a deliberate choice to spend more money saying “No” than they would have spent saying “Yes.” That is a perfect encapsulation of selfish dumb white people shit. They’d rather spend more money on PR and lawsuits and fucking up other people’s lives than what it costs to do the right thing to begin with.