Arguments like this make me feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone. Who said anything about people existing? You know who else exists? Hunters. But would you want your beer can featuring hunters or guns on it? Maybe you would, but anti-hunting and anti-gun advocates would not, and they wouldn’t see it as just ‘recognizing that hunters exist’. They’d see it as a political campaign favoring a side they don’t support, and rightly so.
Astrologers also exist, but if I don’t want horoscopes on my beer can I’m not denying the existence of Astrologers or saying they don’t have a right to exist or make horoscopes for people.
The beer company has every right to put astrologers on their beer cans. Maybe they’ll improve their sales among the mentally challenged. But they should also expect to lose sales from the rational humanists and if they put a hunter or a gun on their can they should expect to get boycotted by anti-hunting advocates. And if they respond to the boycott, they’ll get punished by the people they were trying to ingratiate themselves to in the first place.
No one on the left would accept the excuse that the beer company was just ‘recognizing the existence of hunters’, and if you didn’t like horoscopes on your beer can you’d laugh at the claim that it’s because you want astrologers to no longer exist.
Better to just use your marketing to convince people to buy your watered-down ditch brew on its merits, or appeal to something universal, like 4th of July barbecues or Mom and apple pie. Politics has always been toxic, and we are heading towards peak toxicity. Companies who value their bottom line need to disconnect from political messaging or they can suffer the same fate as Disney, Target, But Lite and Gilette.
On the other side, I could add Elon Musk. He has become overtly political on Twitter, mostly in support of the right, and it’s caused him to lose a lot of customers. And if he pivots and starts courting the left, he’ll get slammed by the right. He should have stayed in the background or remained completely apolitical.
All your other examples make the point too. Anti-gun people are not at all shy about saying gun owners shouldn’t exist. Rational humanists aren’t exactly not saying that astrologists shouldn’t exist. Maybe they shouldn’t be snuffed out by the government, but being an astrologist is a choice, and i want them all to stop existing.
But while conservatives say they’re not against gay people, their actions often say otherwise. Like here.
I never said anything of the sort, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.
Are you suggesting there is absolutely no commonality left between political factions? Do gay people not enjoy a cold beer on a hot day? Or barbecue? Or puppies? Politics should ideally be a very small part of life. Activists try to make everything about politics, but we shouldn’t listen to them. We’ve got plenty of political noise already; we don’t have to add it to all the products we use.
This is really all it boils down to: wokeness. The right is against anything woke, which by definition, has no definition. So any time someone is bothered by something having the slightest whiff of diversity or inclusion (AKA non-white and/or non-straight), they can just reflexively tag it as “woke” (generic catch-all that it is) and decide to be offended. Bud Light made the mistake of trying to sell their product to a trans person, and therby acknowledged the existence of that kind of person, and its therefore “woke”. No one on the right was being called gay or any such thing - this is recreational outrage only, but as mentioned, it’s not much effort to switch light beers, so there was not much “sacrifice” made by the snowflakes in their protest. Easy lay-up in the culture war.
Sam, your post is clearly contemptuous of trans people, and implies that it’s appropriate to misgender them. This is not a part of civil discourse. Don’t do it again.
But that’s already — jeez, what you’re doing seems like, I dunno, the opposite of fighting the hypothetical; I’m not asking you to jump ahead to the Having Decided This Is A Good And Profitable Idea part of the hypothetical, I’m still at the point where we just now got pitched the idea and haven’t yet declared whether it strikes us as profitable.
Now, if you’re saying the answer would always be “yeah, it would be,” then I just wasted your time with the bit above, and I apologize; but I was asking if the answer in the hypothetical would, instead, be “well, it might be a good and profitable idea, but, y’know, it might lose us money.”
Bud Lite did. The tried to sell beer to queer people. That’s just acknowledging that we exist, and might like to buy some beer. That’s the sum total of the “political” message they sent. That’s the political message that you’re saying they should avoid: don’t acknowledge that queer people exist. Don’t include us in your marketing; don’t try to market to us. Pretend we don’t exist, or you’ll suffer a crippling boycott.
As for marketing to hunters or astrologists, yeah, I don’t give a shit about that. I’m as anti-gun as you’ll find in the US, and astrology is just about the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard of, but so what? People can believe dumb shit so long as it’s not hurting other people, and my issues with guns aren’t related to hunting anyway. I’m not going to boycott just because someone put a Libra sign on a bag of Doritos.
Now, put a guy in a KKK robe on there, and yeah, I’m not buying that shit. Because I do, in fact, think the KKK shouldn’t exist. Presumably, someone who was so outraged over a marketing campaign aimed at hunters or astrologists that they’d boycott over it feels the same about hunters or astrologists. Just like people boycotting Bud Lite think queer people shouldn’t exist. Which is the political issue you think companies should stay silent on.
And if not the US, at least leaving the more trans-hostile states. There’s a reason Minnesota passed a trans-sanctuary law.
Sure, few people explicitly say it’s about eradicating trans people (though do note what Michael Knowles said). But when you paint trans people as child molesters, it seems pretty clear. That’s the one group the right is willing to go violent on to eliminate.
Moving isn’t easy, so the fact trans people are willing to leave makes it pretty clear they don’t feel safe.