That bear is NUTS.

[Miller]

@Kimstu

Amazing how all you free-market advocates keep complaining that people should exercise consumer pressure and appeal to public opinion instead of depending on government regulation and the courts, yadda yadda yadda yadda. And then when a group of consumers actually does that, and persuades a company voluntarily to discontinue a product in order to avoid negative publicity, you start whining about how people “don’t have the right not to be offended.”

Boy, that’s a heck of a lot of assumptions you’re carrying around with you there. Want some help with them?

Now, I can’t speak for all “free-market advocates.” But I think the whole point of the free market is that, so long as a product is safe and works as advertised, nobody has any business at all trying to force retailers to pull products from the market, or of depriving consumers of access to whatever product they want. I have no more brief for private censors than I do for public censors. You don’t like a product? Don’t buy it. You don’t like a TV show? Don’t watch it. You don’t like a book? Don’t read it. That’s the extent of your “right” to prevent a product from reaching the market. When someone takes it upon themselves to decide what I can and cannot have access to, because it somehow offends their morality, then I have a huge fucking problem with that.

'Course they don’t. But if they are offended, they have a perfect right to complain about it to the people who offended them. If they can persuade those people to change their policy, what’s wrong with that?

Because what if I want to own that bear? Why does their right to piss and whine about how some toy hurt their feelings trump my right to own that toy? I’m sick unto death of these self-appointed busy-bodies deciding what books I can read, what music I can listen to, what movies I can watch, because they find it offensive. Fuck them. What gives them the right to make that decision for me?