So we can have Whites Only restaurants and neighborhoods again? Businesses who can refuse to serve gays and liberals and black people?
People can boycott for any reason. Businesses should be able to serve who they wish. Why should a business be forced to provide a good or service to a person who is dangerous, immoral, unethical, or some other undesirable trait?
With facial recognition cameras and large databases it wouldn’t be hard to add troublemakers to a do not serve list that has nothing to do with skin hue.
And aren’t you suppose to be fetching a cite?
Why would I do that when everything you write shows “When Republicans do it, it’s right, when Democrats do it, they’re wrong.”
Gloss over a history of civil rights violations that continue to this day and insist that people should just be able to refuse service to anyone and everything will be sunshine and daisy farts?
They do, except for a few protected categories (race, religion, ethnicity, etc.) with a history of being denied service to the point that many (black folks in particular) were unable to travel, get housing, and other vital services. I think getting rid of these protected categories would lead to a new explosion in sundown towns (which still exist to some degree, Vidor TX being the example I’m most personally familiar with), meaning huge swaths of the country could be once again off limits to many Americans, which is why these laws are still necessary.
But until the courts decide on a specific code or part of a code, we don’t know if it’s unconstitutional. I hope civil forfeiture is found unconstitutional soon, since it’s such a harmful practice, but until it is, it’s just a hope, not a fact.
So you’re predicting the future. Good luck – lots of people do that. Your certainty isn’t convincing to me. “The sky is falling!” is generally unpersuasive without very solid evidence.
Because this is way overblown. Are you talking about the Chinese dress? The vast majority of internet commenters and bloggers, liberals and conservatives, aren’t chiding the girl at all, and the few who are are being pretty damn gentle with their criticism. Maybe there’s an idiot or two saying idiotic things, but their idiocy is largely laughed at. There’s no outrage, faux or real, about this Chinese dress, aside from (possibly) a very few idiots with no influence. And gentle criticism and serious discussion about culture isn’t outrage or shaming.
I think it’s very likely that foreign powers are trying to take advantage of American idiots.
That communication is better now means ideas, good and bad, can spread faster and wider. This is just a fact, it’s not a good or bad thing, or a policy, or something that can be changed. Boycotts can spread faster – good and bad ones. So can other ideas, good or bad. There’s nothing we can do to restrict the development of comms technology.
I see no reason to believe that such an app or business practice wouldn’t be perfectly legal. Plenty of businesses refuse service to legitimately “troublesome” customers.
Businesses aren’t forced to serve “dangerous, immoral, unethical, or some other undesirable” customers, unless the “undesirable trait” is race, religion, etc.
Right. Total non-issue. So why all the drama about how people need to be able to do this thing they already do?
Except maybe that ‘rights of free association’ such as the right to exclude whoever you want from your business (ie, black people) have been used since forever as code for white supremacists to make laws against minorities and protect local bigotry.
Man, Chimera, I don’t really agree with octopus (beyond the trivially true statement that not every boycott or protest is a good thing, see also Christians throwing a fucking shitfit over red Starbucks coffee cups), but your interpretations of his posts in this thread have been consistently uncharitable and filled with straw, to the point where I feel the need to defend someone I really don’t particularly like. Seriously, dude. Cut it out, it’s bad and it’s lowering the level of the discourse.
If this didn’t happen, then there wouldn’t be any point to a boycott would there?
Shouldn’t you have to demonstrate that this is, in fact, a problem?
I’m pretty sure the horrors of boycotts will have to wait in line behind other right-wing predictions like how gay marriage will end the world… somehow.
(I was amused yesterday to see a Republican claim that gay marriage was only possible because Republicans got on board and made it happen. Oh history, your revision is purty.)
Businesses go political when they think there’s money in it, just like businesses sell puffy unicorn stickers or avocado toast when they think there’s money in it. Sucks to guess wrong.
Dude, the right of free association has been used as a tool to beat down minorities since this country was born. In 1957, the National Review used it like a weapon, proclaiming Blacks morally and intellectually inferior and declaring that people should be able to do business with the people they choose to do business with. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s Octopus’ strategy. If you’re not aware of how this works, then sure, I could sound like I’m picking on him over this. But this whole “we should be free to exclude troublemakers!” is just a dog whistle when people are already free to do exactly what he’s complaining about.
And I stand by what I said about his hypocrisy on the ‘when my side does it, it’s ok, but when your side does it, it’s wrong’ disingenuous attempts to smear democrats as being wrong because boycotts are evil.
Are you trying to equate those two. That, because a customer has the option to spend their money wherever they want it spent, that businesses should be likewise able to discriminate?
If I am a racist customer, I don’t have to frequent minority owned businesses. There is no rule or law or anything even close to even a strong suggestion that I should have to.
That doesn’t work the other way. If I am a racist business owner, I cannot turn away customers based on protected characteristics.
Interesting analogy. I cannot think of any similarities whatsoever between the two. It’s like you took two completely unrelated things, and simply claimed they were analogous.
Yeah, there’s nothing stopping that, other than the fact that such services have come out, on several occasions, and businesses had no interest in using them. There are also facebook groups where people talk about customers in their industry, sometimes acting as a bit of a blacklist.
But, I do like the cynical attitude that we’d be all up in arms about the hypothetical situation that an app was created, even though those apps have existed for at least the last 5-6 years, and there’s no outrage. Does the fact that the service that you think that we would be upset about existing exists make you rethink your words here at all?
What do you mean by “undesirable” there? In any case, sure, businesses can serve who they wish. I have a number of clients that I have asked not to come back, because they were rude to me or my employees, or because they bounced checks, or they had severe issues with keeping appointments. I’ve even let some of my clients go due to the behavior of their dog.
So, sure, there are plenty of reasons not to serve customers, and there is nothing stopping me from doing so.
I am curious as to what “undesirable” traits you would consider to be acceptable reasons for denying service.
Except that businesses are not in the busesses of trying to limit their customer base, so not many businesses use such things, even though they are available.
This stuff doesn’t directly impact me. I’m just surprised (not really) at the professional nitpickery employed to deflect from the big picture.
Your post had things that were factually and demonstrably wrong. Then you based your conclusions (the big picture) upon that incorrect information.
It’s not nitpickery to point out that your assumptions are based on falsehoods.
If all you have to respond to the complete underming of your argument on every level that you have presented is that it is “nitpickery”, then I think we are done, we can wrap up and go home now.
The basis of your argument, or at least part of it, was based on incorrect information – that businesses can’t discriminate against dangerous, disruptive, rude, etc., customers. They can and do, routinely.
Yeah, no one cares if one customer avoids a business. But a national boycott is damaging. The analogous situation of an industry blacklisting a customer so they are actually financially damaged doesn’t exist yet.
Yeah, that was called Jim Crow. Being able to refuse services to black people and denying them the ability to live in certain communities or even be there after dark seriously damaged black people’s lives.
Otherwise your point is laughable, as I have worked for companies when they decided that they didn’t want a specific person as a client anymore. Usually it’s the bad clients who cost more money than the company makes from them.
I worked for a Fortune 20 company when we blackballed a customer and told them they could never again purchase our products or get us to provide them with support and served them legal papers to stop them from calling the support line to abuse employees. It was rather impressive, actually.
So now that we’ve struck down both of your points on this little fantasy, do you have any other ways you think companies aren’t being allowed to deny services that should be allowed?
Of course it’s damaging, that’s the point. That’s a characteristic of a free society – corporations and business have to worry about the opinions of their consumers.
What’s laughable is your interpretation of basic English.
And the flip side should be true as well. People with wrong opinions should be deprived housing and food unless they can build it themselves. Wrong opinions have consequences.
If you want to try and make this happen, feel free.