Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

I know it's sexist, but people in Aubrey Huff's twitter replies who assume he's a woman will always be a solid source of humor to me.

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/FlashyEachAngora-max-1mb.gif

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Thursday, June 18, 2020 3:34 AM (thirteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Do you have something to say tracer

https://thumbs.gfycat.com/HeavyAcclaimedChameleon-small.gif

D-40 i think the gif speaks for itself. imagine me giving you that look.

hudson yards represents a terrible moment in the development of NYC and I hope things go in a different direction

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Friday, June 19, 2020 12:35 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

My uncool conservative belief: Hudson Yards is awesome and good

what do you like abou it?

cancel eephus

1. no one gets "cancelled" on the uncool conservative beliefs thread -- unless someone makes a solid case for the uncool conservativeness of cancel culture
2. i am banning the use of the phrase "overton window" from this thread. fair warning.

even pushing back against an unpopular conservative opinion is not in the spirit of this thread imo

nah D-40's post is fine -- just no more overton windows

guys i was joking

<3

to be clear I wasn't pushing back w/ my question, just trying to tease out the reasoning

i try to force myself into an open mind for even the most controversial opionion but am stymied thinking of a single redeeming quality to Hudson Yards...so...help

It would make a good skate spot in a Tony Hawk game

I mean, The Shed has the potential to be interesting I guess? I never went.

I can see maybe as a looting site in general

It would make a good skate spot in a Tony Hawk game

― Evan

otm

That awful alien beehive of capital walkway thingy is such a perfect symbol of the whole thing

Good things about Hudson Yards: that spanish food mall has really delicious food and I can't think of an analogue for it anywhere else in New York. I like the big Muji (though I know there are several in New York) I think the Hive is just plain beautiful to look at. It makes a nice "top" to the High Line. Reading about it before I went, I had a sense that it was some kind of Luxury Island cut off from New York proper but in person it seemed very much folded in with what was around it. I dunno, I just like it and really enjoyed visiting it!

I also like South Street Seaport fwiw

the point is to destroy as much as possible the conditions that turn people into rapists and murderers, of which cops and prisons are a major part of worldwide. it's hard to imagine at the moment from within, it feels almost impossible but I know how stifled my imagination is

tbh my preferred solution would be to shoot them

this post from new ilxor "Left" in the Abolish the Police thread echoes the initial spirit of this thread, just wanted to ... bring that up

i think the european internet regulations are pretty dumb. it's like if my mother, who is terrified of her computer and dutifully 'removes cookies' every time she visits a site, wrote the policy. rhetorically it seems that they think they're taking down the big tech giants, yet they are more powerful than ever, and now we have to click 'accept cookies' every time we open a page

neither uncool nor conservative imo? the fact the regulators consulted with apparently zero actually experimental internet operators means their attempt at technocratic liberalism is actually conservative and dumb

“experienced” not “experimental” derp

many xps eephus fair enough

neither uncool nor conservative imo? the fact the regulators consulted with apparently zero actually experimental internet operators means their attempt at technocratic liberalism is actually conservative and dumb

― El Tomboto, Saturday, June 20, 2020 9:08 PM (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

dang

#tombotted

Pat Sajak seems like a nice guy

(that's my conservative opinion)

https://assholeoftheday.us/post/86444324475/pat-sajak-asshole-of-the-day-for-may-21-2014-by

idk if it's a belief per se but i'm always questioning the efficacy of boycotts

My parents have been boycotting Nestle for 40 years.

probably a lot of us learned in school about the montgomery bus boycott, which was effective. part of the bowdlerization of the civil rights movement's legacy, though, is inculcating widespread ignorance about _what_ made it effective and why.

i know i've been, in the past, very critical of the historical narratives espoused by wikipedia, but i gotta say, when it comes at least to dr. king and his legacy, i've found their writing to be vastly superior to the crap I learned in school. in school, when they talked about the legacy of the bus boycott, they sure as fuck didn't start by saying "White backlash against the court victory was quick, brutal, and, in the short-term, effective.[47][48]", for instance. nobody told me about the baton rouge boycott, or about claudette colvin, or _any_ of this shit. i suspect a bunch of other people who like to talk about "boycotts" were taught the same bullshit i was, and are living what they were taught.

i'm not fucking "boycotting" chick-fil-a. i don't walk five miles to work every day to avoid eating at chick-fil-a. i just don't fucking eat there, and chick-fil-a seems to do just fucking fine with their chicken sandwiches despite that.

Boycotts also serve many purposes. Many people question the efficacy of boycotts because "these companies are too rich, you won't hurt their bottom line or make them go bankrupt", but that's not the goal. The goal is social change. Merely shuttering every problematic company doesn't help, as others rise in their wake. (Though, yes, it can be satisfying to get a local business run by an unrepentant White Nationalist asshole shuttered for good, as a secondary goal).

The thing about boycotts is they function on both an individual level and a collective level. If I choose not to spend my money intentionally at Chic-Fil-A, I know they won't give a fuck, but I'll feel better about not giving them money.

But on the collective level, boycotts do still work often because of the shell game that is the stock market. If a publicly traded major corporation winds up in several news cycles due to a boycott and accusations of problematic behavior, the CEO is under pressure by their Board of Directors, their shareholders, etc to put the fire out quickly and prevent huge losses for their investors.

For instance, the United "dragging" incident with David Dao. When those viral videos hit the news and people called for a boycott, United's CEO bungled the initial public statement, and their stock price temporarily dropped 4% (a 770 million dollar loss). So he was pressured to take a second crack at the statement and publicly apologized, but the CEO was also punished by being denied a promotion to Chairman as a direct result.

Did United suffer financially? LOL, of fucking course not. After the second effort, their stocks rebounded, they didn't see any real loss in their customer base. But it triggered changes to the local airport's security measures, and companies were so spooked about being dragged through the media, that the number of bumped flights for the remainder of the year dipped to their lowest totals in over 20+ years. Other airlines also changed their bump flight policy to be more amenable to customers, increasing the financial rewards, and Southwest ceased overbooking of flights.

So it does work - not always, and not perfectly, but they can enact change. But it has to be publicly visible. Nobody's going to notice a boycott that spreads via word of mouth only and has no media support. Another area where boycotters fail is letting up after the initial action. Its easy to feign cultural changes within a company to reverse stock losses, then go back to the same shitty behavior from earlier. Those who are boycotting need to keep pressure on the company to maintain those changes.

wow i'm glad my uncool conservative belief inspired these good posts, thanks y'all

honestly it caused me to rethink my own thoughts on boycotts!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/02/mark-zuckerberg-advertisers-boycott-facebook-back-soon-enough

Aka too big to boycott.

when you're as omnipresent as Amazon or Facebook, the efforts definitely prove themselves more difficult, if not impossible.

as good of a place to post this as any, i guess. you know when someone on fox news says something particular shameful and there's news that some major corporations are pulling their advertising for the show? how long do they keep their no-advertising pledge? where do they shift their advertising dollars to? is there any way to know if the same major corporation, a few months later, starts advertising during the same shameful fox news show?

i don't think i've ever seen a piece of news along the lines of "4 months after pulling their advertisements from the fucker carlson show due to his airing of white supremacy rants every single episode for several years in a row, johnson & johnson has quietly started advertising during his show again, sources say..." but does that mean that it never happens? fuck no. i expect that it happens all of the time. but how do you track that?

like a lot of people i'd guess, sometimes i think about about a mass boycott of egregious corporate brands. but it's hard to figure out which evil corporations are the most evil in the first place! the very first thing is the endlessly complex parent company structures and partial holdings and investments all of these companies have in each other. there's the advertising side of it i just mentioned above. there are labor rights abuses and environmental crimes, on and on. it's so fucking complex.

but at the end of the day, what i would like is just to have a giant database, the Shit List, that people can contribute to and update, etc etc.

but then, to go to brad's potentially uncool conservative belief, there's also the fact that you can do all of that, but also...i want a macbook pro. you know? fuck

I hope this graphic helps clarify things

https://i.imgur.com/pnMMj.jpg

i feel like the endpoint of all that is "shop local!", which is much more simple advice to follow. but the problem is that shop local doesn't really translate well to a protest or movement, or result in any lasting change to the overall corporate stranglehold on broader "consumer" behavior

plus, all those small businesses in the graphic employ a bunch of people. someone working for Nestle isn't going to boycott Kellogg's. they're all in that shit together

(btw, clearly i have no point. just trying to air out my own weird relationship with the efficacy of boycotts!)

i suppose another angle is that boycotts work, but only when they involve other people that have tons of money and are influential, like investors

https://sports.yahoo.com/after-investors-call-for-name-change-nike-appears-to-wipe-redskins-off-its-website-014246135.html

#onethread

The thing about boycotts is they function on both an individual level and a collective level. If I choose not to spend my money intentionally at Chic-Fil-A, I know they won't give a fuck, but I'll feel better about not giving them money.

― I hear that sometimes Satan wants to defund police (Neanderthal)

i think you make a good point about the difference between individual action and collective action. one of the foundational principles of enlightenment rational democracy is preference for individual action and hostility towards collective action - see for instance george washington's frankly bizarre and ludicrous idea that "faction" would be the ruin of these great united states.

i believe that boycotting can be effective on a collective level and choosing to avoid purchasing a product can be effective on an individual level, but that neither are clear-cut moral goods.

i haven't ever seen "the good place" but i've read about it and know of its invocation of chick-fil-a as a particular contemporary moral dilemma. my concern is that ineffective individual action - and this is, i can't cite it, but i have read about studies of charitable behavior. people take a token ineffective individual step and then they're less likely to participate in an actually effective collective step because they're already "doing their part".

and to be fair to the "doing their part" people, it's not like not buying chicken sandwiches from a corporation that has a corporate policy of wanting to eradicate people like me from the earth is even a straightforward moral decision, either. "the good place" is right, their chicken sandwiches are _delicious_. (in a cruel irony, this is in large part because they brine their chicken in pickle juice, which is _particularly_ attractive to many people taking spironolactone, the most prescribed antiandrogen in the united states.) the moral calculus here is fucked up; there's a decent argument to be made that, for an individual person who enjoys chick-fil-a's chicken sandwiches, refraining from eating those sandwiches hurts that individual more than it hurts chick-fil-a. some fuckin' tragedy of the commons shit there, or something.

the other issue is that boycotts are more effective the more financial input you have into the product or company you are boycotting. simple enough. which means that in a system predicated on gross financial inequality and widespread poverty of meaningful economic choices, the odds are stacked against the effectiveness of a boycott undertaken purely by consumers. for most people, their most valuable inputs into the system are not their money, of which they have comparatively little, but their labor. which is why, of course, organized capital has spent so much effort into discrediting and destroying the organized labor movement and indeed the very idea of collective action itself since, well, the dawn of organized labor.

i feel like the endpoint of all that is "shop local!", which is much more simple advice to follow. but the problem is that shop local doesn't really translate well to a protest or movement, or result in any lasting change to the overall corporate stranglehold on broader "consumer" behavior

― time is running out to pitch in $5 (Karl Malone), Friday, July 3, 2020 12:05 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

One thing I struggle with is that, having worked growing up as a cook in local bars and restaurants, many times local businesses are owned by absolute abusive lunatics who don't even have even the patina of corporate HR to check any of their behavior

Also many times people in service/hourly jobs at, say, Applebee's might have some semblance of health care, possibility of advancement and a higher hourly wage

One example that I read about which hadn't occurred to me is the craft beer movement is seen as progressive but the "bad" bigger companies are generally union shops with benefits and surrogacy workplace standards

I mean I guarantee like half of the Trump people you see freaking out on camera are local businesses owners