Reveal Your Uncool Conservative Beliefs Here

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

Or no group has fought harder against minimum wage increases than local businesses

otm

this is why the ultimate political movement is..DIY

homegrown is a good thing

it's the political movement that you belong to, by yourself

you pretty much do it all yourself, that's the goal at least

boycott are alright but im not a fan of the genre of post that’s guilting ppl into researching the entire supply chain of every product they buy for ethics and internalize it’s violations

“Should everything be run by corporations because small business owners are assholes” is a dilemma that goes through my mind sometimes. But it’s the Sophie’s choice of capitalism so I try not to get too sucked into it.

"small business owner" is part of the mythos of entrepreneurial capitalism, like small business owners are all horatio alger types trying to get over through "hustle". and then we're all surprised when a lot of them turn out to be, uh, hustlers. see also: enormous factory farm/agribusiness conglomerates proudly trumpeting themselves as "family businesses" on their product labels.

like i'm just gonna go down to the farmer's market and buy some produce from this local independent family farmer who calls herself "volksmom" online

Indeed small business owners are often the most fully *bought in* on the ideology, whereas someone upper class may be aware of the unearned nature of their status

narcotics trafficking and organized crime, in general, tend to be family businesses. ... I think people need to re-think their assumptions about "family businesses"

small biz entrepreneurs actually work insanely hard ime, especially at the outset. my mom quit her job to open a small resto when i was in junior high and it was the most i’ve ever seen anyone work in my life. i work in academia and i hope/intend to never work that hard for a sustained period lol. probably a comparable workload to finance or workaholic execs of big corps in terms of hours per week. it was good that her employees didn’t have to work that hard, and once things were up-and-running she was definitely able to chill (took about a year) but even then she ended up selling it to her chef because it was too draining. imo whatever ideology small biz owners have is p well deserved from the amount of work it takes to get it off the ground, plus the risk they bear if it fails.

i don’t think capitalistic evilness has a straightforward relationship to firm size; there are better ways to make work conditions good than through policy interventions in firm size like breakups of mergers, which should be reserved for antitrust and other product market concerns. small business are on tighter margins + don’t benefit from economies of scale so tend to pay less, but also have face-to-face relationships with their employees which often makes it harder to exploit than in a giant faceless corp. also the division of labor in a big company arguably makes work more “alienated” if u think that concept is meaningful. on the other hand, larger firms are subject to more stringent labor regulations and more often unionized and have HR departments. a truly enormous firm can pay lower wages if it’s monopsonistic and although there’s some evidence that happens at the margin, overall wages are strongly positively correlated with firm size

i hate it when non-religious liberals post memes like this

https://i.imgur.com/8xEjMwx.jpg

"did you know that when you say 'all lives matter,' you're actually disagreeing with Jesus Christ himself? lol owned!"

being that I'm an atheist, I find it pointless in general to invoke a guy I don't believe in to win an argument, so I tend to find it pointless.

most of those religious-appeal memes are indeed crap

There’s definitely something about those memes that has an air of winning an argument with yourself. Insert any half-hearted invocation of religion, “conservative values” etc

when you finally do submit to yourself, though, what a feeling

Being's believing
-Psalms 73:7

also the division of labor in a big company arguably makes work more “alienated” if u think that concept is meaningful.

I feel like that's one of the most meaningful concepts actually. It is why I am sometimes skeptical of "big government" in that government bureaucracies are structured and function similarly to large corporations. The responsiveness to "customers" and "communities" tends to be greater for smaller entities where those who have decision-making powers have closer ties to those they serve. I have had equally Kafka-esque experiences with both large corporations and government agencies.

small biz entrepreneurs actually work insanely hard ime, especially at the outset.

otm -- I have seen others do it and I have done so personally ...

The way I see it, American capitalism has a largely fixed upper class and bourgeoise with a sort of quasi-meritocratic lottery system for others to make it into these classes. One of the ways you can do that is as a "small business owner," and it legitimately is *possible* for a person to win that game through a combination of intense hard work, talent, exploitation of the labor of others, and luck, but the product of that process is people who are extra-bought-in to the mythology of capitalism. Because they saw it work for them, so it must work.

There's a bit of desperation behind the small business push *against* minimum wage as a result. Because the odds are much more stacked against them, and the owners are very invested in the idea that they have to succeed, and tbh they generally are more threatened financially by minimum wage laws than large businesses due to scale. It's true that minimum wage probably hurts small business owners more. It's just that the underlying assumption is "I deserve for my business to succeed so I can escape my wretched status, therefore of course I should be able to exploit the wretched status of others." They would never overtly think of it that way, of course.

I think they overtly think of it that way

like maybe they don't think "exploit" but they honestly think "if I have to pay people more my business will fail!" and it's like fuck you it should fail if you can't succeed while paying people enough to live and thrive in the city they work in

my opinions on small business owners are on the record though

Sounds like they coincide with mine.

fuck you it should fail if you can't succeed while paying people enough to live and thrive in the city they work in

This is one of those catchy sentiments that I think gets the emphasis wrong. Because the whole point is that most people could not afford to pay others a living wage while also striving to break through to wealth with their small business, and those who could probably have family wealth. I mean, yeah, they are assholes, but their assholedom is just a product of our strive-or-die system.

Like how the fuck can anyone start a business from nothing and pay people a living wage the entire time unless they have significant capital?

And how is that different from any other country in the world?

I guess the exception is a business that can be gotten off the ground with only your own unpaid labor (or you and your partner) or whatever, and then you work a second job to pay for your food and housing. This is the ethic our society lionizes.

And how is that different from any other country in the world?

― The Fields o' Fat Henry (Tom D.), Monday, July 6, 2020 12:51 PM (thirty-three seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

Um, in other countries people have healthcare, a social safety net, etc.

And small business owners are still dicks.

you can't public policy your way out of dicks existing tbrr