@GotThumbs: Envious? Moi?
Your solution to childishness seems to be to act like some teenagers think they have to - do anything to be popular, even if that means you end up surrounded by vapid arseholes and become one yourself. To continue the teenage analogy with your argument, it is therefore perfectly OK for someone whom you thought a friend to betray what you thought were confidences on the basis that only a fool would not blab such juicy gossip and, anyway, you didn't say you didn't want anyone to know this one time.
As a teenager, I was bemused at the notion of popularity and the idea that personality faults seemed to be more forgiveable to some if you had improbable hair. Just because Daddy could afford to take you skiing every winter with anyone prepared to brown nose you didn't make you an intrinsically better person.
As an adult, I'm bemused that being able to play the tax and political lobbying game well makes you a successful capitalist and it's all down to your sense/ability, while being able to play the welfare game well makes you a dole scum scrounger who should be shot and it's all down to your substandard feral genes.
I'm at neither extreme. I hope that I have a reasonably adult sense of fairness. This whole letter versus the spirit of the law type argument is akin to a certain kind of notice that I see cropping up from time to time like "no goats allowed in the public bar" or "do not use this drill as a toothpick" where you just know that someone has acted like a dick in the past and used the "it doesn't say not to anywhere" defence. Do we really need to explain to companies how not to be a dick? Is there an adult way of doing so without them throwing a hissy fit? What's the international politics version of stopping the car and telling them to walk home?
There's a rather wonderful opening to a Poul Anderson novella that's rather apposite here:
"Crime is entirely a matter of degree. If you shoot your neighbour in order to steal his property, you are a murderer and a thief, subject to enslavement. If, however, you gather a band of lusty fellows in the name of honour and glory, knock off a couple of million people, take their planet, and hit up the survivors for taxes, you are a great conqueror, a hero, a statesman, and your name goes down in the history books."