Right, sorry, I should have said “gender-neutral marketing of a children’s potato toy” rather than “gender-neutral version”. I didn’t mean to imply that I thought the Potato Head toy itself had been changed or replaced.
Nice!
Is that what happened in the Dr. Suess or Aunt Jemima or Potato Head case? Seems to me those decisions all came from the top. You know CEOs and CFOs and board members are all capable of deciding what they will and won’t stand for. I haven’t seen evidence that any of this had to do with an outraged mob.
And I’d like to break down that mob into its individual components, because we in the Pit are often compared to a kind of mob (or hive, as it were) but anyone really observing the situation can see that in any given “mob” there are a small number of people screaming “eat shit and die!” and a bunch of other people saying, “my opinion is that this is wrong/problematic/whatever.” So before long, the mob concept falls apart and is shown to be what it really is - a bunch of people expressing their individual opinions.
That said, I will never understand the outsize influence random Twitter users have on business decisions. They are almost never representative of the majority. My best theory is that the people making those business decisions are in ideological alignment with the Twitter “mob.” It makes no sense whatsoever that the CEO of Potato Head would be “scared.” Scared of what?
I wouldn’t be so quick to a dismiss the agency of businesses when they make these decisions.
So, they cannot accept any input from anyone at all. They must come to their conclusions tabula rasa style.
Yes, but it’s a stupid thing to be worried about. The fact that people are not calling for WAP to be cancelled isn’t hypocrisy, it’s consistent with the fact that we weren’t calling for Suess to be cancelled either.
Lol. I am beginning to understand the problems the mods have coming up with detailed and specific rules.
There are some paradoxes that seem unavoidable.
We should thank @octopus for bringing WAP to our attention because without him I’m sure none of us would be aware of it, and its use of the word niggah, such controversial word usage simply never gets the attention they so richly deserve.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=wap+reaction+ben+shapiro
I won’t link to a list of videos dealing with ‘nigga’ since I don’t want to kill any of the boards overtaxed capybaras and hampsters.
Keep me out of your racist mouth, asshole. I’m not your “son”, fuck off with that pseudo-friendly bullshit.
Only because shitstains like you keep calling up that dog, motherfucker.
The one digging up the rotting horse corpse to bait traps with is a fine one to talk.
That’s irrelevant. What matters is that you know other posters don’t think that.
Seriously, how stupid do you think we all are.
Yeah, I always know when one of you racist trolls is on the ropes, asshole. Desperately flailing around to change the subject… but you do know flailing at them only pisses bees off, right?
BUZZZZZZ
It’s feedback that is in the public. It was also new. People thought that twitter represented the views of the public more than they actually do. Now that people are starting to realize that twitter only reflects the views of the most vocal parts of the public, and not the public as a whole, they will likely take it less into account.
Look, if you and your right-wing mob would put down the torches and pitchforks every time a corporation decides to be just a tiny bit less shitty, we’d have a lot more liberty in this nation. But nope: instead, your mob starts screeching and losing your everloving hivemind every single goddamned time. I’m a little sick of your attempt to rule by intimidation and mob violence.
(There, is that how it’s done? Is that how you totally misinterpret verbal criticism and recast it as dangerous violence?)
You think traditional is racist, son. Now go snark.
There is real violence though. It’s usually reserved for historical monuments, guest speakers at a university, and getting some free shoes and electronics and not for smashing a printing press or a potato head mold. Yet.
Sure, soooo traditional you use it all the time.
I can see the bait, sho’ nuff. My, that chicken on that fishin’ line looks mighty tasty, Mistah Octoputz, sah…
Yeah, there’s real violence. Every time you join the criticism of corporate decisions, you’re lifting your spear-tipped flag along with QAnon Shaman and attacking our democracy.
I mean, that’s bullshit, but it’s exactly the same sort of bullshit you’re engaging in.
Let’s be clear here: there were people calling for WAP (and Cardi B) to be banned. The problem is, these were the same right wing sources who also decry cancel culture.
It’s a dirty song, but it was written and performed by women to celebrate women and their sexuality. It’s only bad for children in the same way a rated R movie might be.
It’s also a complete distraction from the original topic. This is yet another tactic. Get people talking about something else when you are losing. The thing is, you’re usually supposed to change the battle to one you can win.
That’s what I’m talking about. You see normal words like traditional, male, female, jungle and claim they are intrinsically problematic. It’s complete nonsense. You’re well read. And in many threads you have good information. But when it comes to certain topics you’ve jumped the shark.
Maybe, I come across equally nutty with regards to pro-liberty and pro-freedom of speech. I’m sure someone will let me know. 
Lies. I’ve never claimed that of any of those words, and you can’t find a single quote of me doing so.
Lies from a racist lying motherfucker. Nothing surprising there.
And fuck this noise : “well read” - going to call me “articulate” next, asshole?
He was hoping someone would take the bait. Nobody did. <insert sad octopus picture here>
The core of the conservative argument against governmental regulation has always been that companies can be trusted to self-regulate, and that free market pressures will guide them to self-regulate appropriately.
That was fine when companies wanted to organize executive prayer groups, despite the fact that it softly discriminated against non-Christian executives. It was fine when companies wanted to refuse to sell the services that they sold to everyone else to gay people. It was fine when they wanted to restrict the health care services that their employees could access through company provided insurance.
But they didn’t recognize that even conservative businesses have a liberal customer base and that base guides their free market decisions.
On Valentines Day, I saw a new TV commercial for the first time. It was a sort of soft commercial about love, and it ended with a young black woman and a young white woman in a romantic clinch, feeding each other ice cream as they gazed lovingly into each other’s eyes.
It made me smile, but I didn’t catch the name of the company that ran the commercial. Then I saw it again and my jaw dropped because it was a commercial for e-Harmony. E-Harmony, the company that fought tooth and nail against offering matchmaking services to gay couples less than ten years ago.
If conservatives want to boycott this or other businesses, they have my blessing. It’s a fundamental tenet of free markets that if you don’t like what they are doing on any level, you can take your business elsewhere.
It’s just hysterical that the degree of hypocrisy is so deep that conservatives feel it’s wrong for the government to mandate that restaurant waiters wash their hands, but they feel the government should be able to mandate that a company sell a product or service that they find offensive.
I’m against literary censorship and I’ve objected to many efforts to censor or cancel works geared towards adults, such as the opera Klinghoffer. My adult brain can handle a work that portrays a terrorist sympathetically without decaying my moral center. I don’t want every work in the literary sphere to read like an after-school special, I like works with off-center or unusual perspectives.
At the same time, I respect the free market rights of arts organizations to decline to produce a work that might invite controversy.
But I agree with the decision not to continue to publish the Mulberry Street book - which is the only one of the six works I’m familiar with. That is because not only is the book geared towards children, it’s geared towards children with the intent of training up their sense of humor by pointing out the kinds of incongruities and absurdities that are funny.
That’s what makes the book especially cringeworthy to the modern audience. Do you really want your kid seeing an Asian man at the mall food court and saying “That Chinaman is funny, but why isn’t he eating with sticks?”
You can shake your tiny fist at the sky and rail against political correctness all you want, but my question is “Why do you hate free markets?” It leads me to think that all your conservative positions were hypocrisy all the way down, nothing more than cover for hate and discrimination.
So, you guys can keep on railing about the “liberal media”. It’s just an extension of the same conspiracy theory you’ve been pushing for years, the one at the heart of your little conspiracy theory. It won’t be long before someone stops saying “globalist” and “liberal media” and says the quiet part out loud.
Hint: it begins with the letter “J”.
We aren’t. At all. Nobody was protesting Dr. Seuss before this. Nobody was protesting Mr. Potatohead before this. Nobody was protesting Aunt Jemima. These were all zero-interest issues for the left. Fuck, I’m still not even sure why we’re supposed to have cancelled Mr. Potatohead. No left wing media outlets were giving these issues any coverage. There were no boycotts running. The level of “concern” on these issues was, at most, “people being snarky on Twitter” - and in some of them, it wasn’t even that.
Meanwhile, Kevin McCarthy is taking time out of governing in the middle of a pandemic to read Green Eggs and Ham on camera. And somehow, you think it’s the left that’s obsessed.
Exactly. No one cares about Dr. Seuss but the right. No one cares about Mr. Potato Head but the right. This stuff is only in the news because of nonsense from the right.
Ewwwww octopus, please do stop that. Yes, there absolutely is a longstanding well-established racist practice of white men calling adult nonwhite men “son”, “boy”, “kid” and similar, especially when they’re trying to be dismissive or patronizing.
Even if you don’t personally intend to sound racist when you use such an infantilizing expression to MrDibble, even if you would say “son” just as readily to a white male poster, it really does come across as gross and malicious because of the racist baggage.
I’m not claiming that I’m allowed to tell you what you can and can’t say to another poster, especially not in the Pit, but honestly, I don’t think this nomenclatural manure heap is a hill you want to die on.
Even “normal words” don’t exist in isolation. Not at all. Many words have long-established connotational cultural baggage that comes along for the ride whenever they are used, even if that particular user doesn’t deliberately intend any of those connotations.
Language users have a responsibility to be aware of the cultural baggage of words they use, and/or to accept the consequences of their ignorance when they unintentionally come across as insulting.
To be fair, there were some well-founded objections to Aunt Jemima and the brand’s history of racist caricatures, even if the most recent avatar was comparatively benign.
The new name is stupid though. Not sure what focus group let that one through.