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It’s getting harder and harder to keep track of all the companies and people the right-wing culture warriors have decided to boycott.
The last time we checked in on this loud minority, they were yelling at Maxim magazine for featuring “plus size” model Ashley Graham on their cover as their pick for the sexiest woman alive.
Today the perpetually offended right-wingers are railing against another woman on another magazine cover. This time it’s trans singer Kim Petras, who graces (or disgraces, if you’re a bigot) the cover of the latest Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue along with three other women.
Naturally, there are calls for a boycott:
These calls come a day after conservative consumer culture warriors demanded another boycott, this one directed at a beer brand–Miller Light–for an ad from March that … was too respectful of women?
In case you’re keeping score, here are a few more companies that right-wingers are ostensibly boycotting.
- Anheuser-Busch (maker of Bud Light, now hated for sending a can of beer to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney with her face on it)
- Jack Daniels (had an ad with drag queens in it several years ago)
- Disney (features LGBTQ+ people in movies sometimes, along with people of color, at war with Florida governor Ron DeSantis over the Don’t Say Gay law)
- Keurig (pulled ads from Sean Hannity’s show on Fox)
- Kelloggs (issued special edition “made with pride” versions of cereal)
- Mars (because the green M&M is no longer sexy, or something like that)
- Hershey’s (something something trans influencer something)
- United Airlines (pledging to make pilot training more inclusive of women and people of color)
- Nike (for making Colin Kaepernick and Dylan Mulvaney spokespeople)
- Amazon (for supposedly banning books by right-wingers)
- The NFL (for not treating kneeling players harshly enough, and donating to social justice causes)
- Oreos (for supporting gay pride)
- Ben & Jerry’s (for being dirty hippies, or something)
- Starbucks (waging war on Christmas)
- Gillette (for making ads suggesting that toxic masculinity is bad)
There are many more. Indeed, back in February, an op-ed on the Fox News website listed no fewer than 51 companies for right-wingers to boycott for their alleged “wokeism,” including such names as Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Best Buy, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Lululemon, Macy’s, Target, Walmart, Chewy, Warby Parker, Coca-Cola, and PepsiCo. (Yes, they’re boycotting both sides in the soda war.)
Another list I found, which has apparently been floating around in some form since the Trump administration, listed some 400 companies and people for right-wingers to boycott, including such companies as (deep breath) Allied Van Lines, AT&T, Bank of America, Bath & Body Works, Bigelow Tea, Celebrity Cruises, Comcast, Delta Airlines, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Dow Chemical, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Funky Winkerbean (yes, the comic strip), General Motors, HBO, Hefty, Home Shopping Network, the Humane Society, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, IHOP, Land O’Lakes, Mexico (the whole country), Nieman Marcus, Proctor & Gamble, Ragu, Sears, Slimfast, Tinder, Vaseline, Volvo, Wayfair, and Yelp. And that’s just the tip of the boycott iceberg; check out the list to see some of the ridiculous reasons people are calling for boycotts.
At this point it would honestly be easier for conservative boycotters to carry around a list of the companies they aren’t supposed to be boycotting.
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@GSS Ex Noob:
Marvel Loki being bi is downright tame compared to some of what Norse myth Loki got up to.
Not to mention that Marvel Loki is currently taking the phrase go fuck yourself to a whole other level.
And yeah, Kamala’s cool.
The thing that bugs me about people complaining about She-Hulk is the humour, people saying she ripped off her fourth-wall breaking asides from Deadpool.
No. Deadpool has only been doing that since about 97, 98.
She-Hulk had been doing it for a decade by then.
The outrage machine is getting desperate.
And here we go again.
A new campaign against my infrastructure, this time targeting my internet connectivity. At 8 o’clock sharp this morning, to within a few seconds (so this was definitely a human act, and a premeditated one, not some accident or spur-of-the-moment thing), someone switched it off. I then had to go through no fewer than 3 different Bell technicians before I got one who knew their job well enough to get it back up and running — whatever repair the first one made didn’t hold up past the five minute mark, and the second said “there, fixed it, it should be working again within 15 minutes” or words to that effect, said goodbye, and hung up, and 15 minutes later, nada. The third one got it kinda sorta working — it keeps randomly dropping out and it seems a bit slow and glitchy even the rest of the time.
Before anyone asks, yes, I have been paying the bill on time, and no, I have not violated their terms of service.
I hope I don’t have to remind anyone here that, given my present circumstances, cutting me off from the internet is tantamount to sentencing me to solitary for the duration, something that would constitute a war crime if it were done to anyone else’s citizens but our own but is for some reason allowed against a nation’s own citizens if they’ve been convicted of a crime, which I most definitely have not been.
Given its flaky behavior since the half-assed repair, and that the previous campaigns (power, and then just a couple of weeks ago water) consisted of multiple successive incidents and not just one, I must assume that my connectivity is under ongoing threat.
What should I do about this? I don’t want to be thrown in cyber-solitary and I also don’t want to be having sleepless nights worrying that I’m about to be, or might even wake up in that state, with little recourse. I do want this seemingly never-ending stream of undeserved and unprovoked bullshit to just frigging stop already, but I’ve no idea how to assert my right that it stop. I figure rich people handle anything similar by unleashing the lawyers, but I don’t have those kinds of funds, and besides, I’d have to be able to prove the identity of the guilty party before I could sue them anyway, and that would probably require hiring a private eye to track down the perp and get evidence, which would mean even more $$$$.
So, basically, what should a non-rich person do about something like this?
I never knew about this pic until just now. This is the Rolling Stones!
I am shocked that Mick Jagger, the person who gave us this, could ever be so camp.
@Alan: I’d seen that before, but then I’m older than you and my brother (a big Stones fan) is even older.
Okay, I can only handle so much of any kind of fustercluck at any given time, and real life has me running on fumes already, before having saddlebags loaded with rampant apophenia dumped onto the proverbial living room floor within the comments. I’m going to be taking a hiatus from the site for my own mental health, as a result.
@ Mediocrites
Sorry to hear life is giving you a bit of a kicking at the moment. I know words on the internet can’t really be of any practical help, but FWIW I feel for you. Hope things improve for you. To do one of those LinkedIn style quotes, do remember that you have a 100% track record of surviving whatever life throws at you. That makes you a pretty tough hombre.
Of course, so does everyone, until they don’t. 🙂
@ allandrel
Just taking the opportunity to get a few more clicks on my new channel. But to follow up from what we were chatting about. This is the Warhol Foundation trying to establish a copyright precedent. Backfired a bit. But went all the way to SCOTUS.
Double post for some reason.
@Alan
Fascinating, thanks! I’m always trying to get a better understanding about IP laws because it seems like any time there is an IP case in the news, I get surrounded by people incapable of understanding that patent, copyright, and trademark are different things.
@ allandrel
Cheers! One of the aims of the new channel is to try to explain IP law so that people can actually use it in a practical way. You know I am very much with the idea that people should be properly compensated for their labour. A lot of artists and other creatives aren’t. That’s partly the culture that they should be grateful for ‘exposure’; but also there can be this idea that access to the law is only for rich people; so they have to put up with being ripped off.
So I try to give practical advice people can use rather than all the bald letter law stuff. But sometimes, like with this one, it’s interesting just to delve into the theory a bit.
I was especially interested in this one as I think TWF can bully people at times. They protect their own IP fanatically; but then just rip off people. It’s like “you should be flattered”.
@Surplus –
Pick your battles? But that’s easier said than done, and sometimes you can’t do anything. Technology is frustrating, especially if you’re not rich.
Incoming rant: these past two weeks I was trying to get the unlock code for my chatr phone so that I can use the new Germany SIM card I already paid for. When I finally got the code (after contradictory information from the company), it wouldn’t actually work because I’d tried too many times. I spent about what, 8 hours trying to make things work, and now I’m back to square one.
So either I resign myself to having no calling ability and no data outside of wifi spots (doable, but potentially a problem if I get lost somewhere), or buy a cheap phone just for the SIM card for my remaining 4 weeks in Germany.
It is a bit frustrating that the program leaders didn’t include technical requirements when they asked everyone if they wanted the SIM cards. I guess they just assumed everyone else in the program has shiny new phones? My phone is from 2016 and the prof called it a “dinosaur” – okay, sure, it’s a 7-year-old dinosaur, but why get a new one if the old one works? Why are people expected to get new stuff all the time??
It’s not even that I’m poor. I earned like $11K last year, plus a $2K scholarship, and that should be enough to live on as a student even if I am recklessly going to Europe for a language class. It’s just that I can’t do this summer program and buy a bunch of new shit.
Eh, I’m lucky to be here at all, with my dinosaur phone and all. I shouldn’t complain. But dealing with tech companies is incredibly frustrating because so often you get nowhere and people assume you should have all the new shit, for reasons (capitalism).
There are, of course, multiple types of ‘IP law’, and they all get handled a little differently from each other, and differently in different jurisdictions.
The whole ‘brand confusion’ aspect is really more a matter of trademark law than copyright law. In fact very deliberately: the primary point of trademark law was to protect businesses from other operations trying to make cheap knock-offs while pretending to be the original business.
Granted, a lot of businesses like to sow confusion themselves as to what the actual boundaries are so they can push them.
Here’s my understanding of the basic categories of IP law:
It’s been several years since I took my one law course, admittedly, and some of this has probably changed since then, but those should be the basics. You can’t copyright a character or design, only the finished work; you can trademark a character’s name (if it’s unique to start with) and designs get their own category.
All businesses must report all ad campaigns for approval by the party. All ad campaigns that are not stamped with the party approval will be scheduled for disassembly. What?? No, this isn’t communist China. This is the freedom lovin, commie fightin United States of Merica.
@ jenora
One of the reasons action figure manufacturers tend to focus on the non human characters is they get more IP protection.
@Alan
I also recall a case – it was related to tariffs, rather than IP – where Toybiz got their X-Men action figures reclassified from being “dolls” (higher tariffs) to “toys” (lower tariffs). Their argument was the dolls were defined as representing “human figures” while toys included “nonhuman creatures,” and that as mutants, the X-Men characters were NOT humans, but nonhuman creatures. The judge ruled in Toy Biz’ favor.
Anyone familiar with the basic premise of the X-Men will, of course, see the sad irony in Toy Biz’ argument.
@Alan:
I was unfamiliar with that being much of a thing, but frankly, considering the law as written, I can easily see that as a consequence. Just like it’s a whole lot easier to get trademark protection if you completely make up previously unused words for names.
See, for example, Xerox, which is based on the fact that the original photocopying process they worked with was called xerography, after the Greek for ‘dry writing’, because there were no liquid chemicals involved (unlike previous mimeograph technology). ‘Xerox’ was just a previously unused but evocative and relatively easy to pronounce combination of letters, so it was a perfect business name and easily trademarked.
Figuring out ways to work with or around the laws can produce some interestingly creative work.
@ allandrel
I’m assuming an Amicus brief from Magneto that just says “I f***ing told you!”
@ jenora
If I just make a small (say 3 and 3/4 inches) sculpture of Harrison Ford, well so what? Artists can be inspired by whom they like. But if I do the same for Chewbacca I’m ripping off Stuart Freeborn.
Ironically, the Star Wars case is a really good primer on all this.
https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2008/1878.html
Xerox is another interesting example. It’s getting into that area like with Hoover and Tannoy where the brand name has become so synonymous with the generic product that it loses IP protection.
The dreaded pink tax strikes again!
Update for all 1 of you who cared about my internet issues: it’s been functioning normally (no further glitchy slower-than-normalness) for about 2 days now, and a tech who eventually looked at it apparently found no obvious problems. It seems like it was, in the end, self-correcting, or perhaps was fixable entirely by button-pushing back at HQ.
Now awaiting the dropping of the other shoe …
TIL that some of the RW is considering boycotting their most favoritest Chik Fil A, because one of them found out they hired a DEI officer (checks notes) 2 years ago.
And here I thought they were gonna boycott it over offering a vegan sandwich.
And apparently about to be fridged hard. https://thedirect.com/article/ms-marvel-death-fans
@Nequam
The general theory is that it is not a fridging, but another “let’s make the comics character more like their movie version” move.
The expectation is that she will be resurrected a have a new series just in time for The Marvels to hit theaters, and that the means of her resurrection will replace her existing Inhuman shape-shifting powers with mutant light-construct powers like her MCU version.
This would be almost a beat-for-beat repeat of what they did with Spider-Man in the early 2000’s to give him organic webshooters like in the Raimi films.
@Nequam: They have a vegan sammitch? Not even just vegetarian? Trying to make it so the “uppity” city folk have to eat there when they’re home visiting Meemaw?
I guess if you left the meat and dairy out of the salads, you could get by.