Check out my new blog, My AI Obsession, and my latest post there, I Prompt the Body Electric
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.
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@ surplus
Well yes; and I get your frustration; but time marches on and society evolves.
We are perhaps heading towards a cashless society. Now I don’t use credit cards; just debit. But I must confess, I would genuinely be happy to have the relevant RFID implanted in my palm. I gather some hip girls already do that so they don’t have to spoil their outfits with handbags or pockets.
But the arguments about a cashless society remind me (well, what I’ve read, I obviously wasn’t around) of the same complaints about fiat currency. I can imagine how much distrust there was of money. “I promise to pay the bearer…” Yeah, right. I’ll just stick to bartering thank you very much. And why I have to pay for banks to be middleman; or use the government’s mandated way of purchasing things.
“Control the currency and the courts; let the rabble have the rest” as the saying goes.
Now, after an apocalypse I suspect hand axes will be more useful than Bitcoin. But here we are.
And as to your second point. There were lots of people making the point (mainly cinema owners admittedly) that why should you need to buy an expensive piece of equipment just to watch a tiny fuzzy black & white image, when for a few cents you could see something in widescreen technicolor. But again, here we are, the new technology caught on. remember for a while cinemas were really struggling; but now people seem to see cinema as a separate additional resource to complement their home viewing. In whatever form that takes; from TVs to tablets.
I’m not having a go at you; I get your point. I just don’t think new technologies and delivery systems have any obligation to be backwards compatible with the older way of viewing things.
Alan says it far better than me. I don’t think anyone here was disputing the fact that exclusive streaming services behind a paywall are relatively new and unfair. (If I have implied such, please at least let me know so I can see where I have erred. Or, to be petty here, you can also ignore me as you seem wont to do when I say or in this case repeat something that would appear to be a good counter argument to yours.)
No, what I am disputing is the idea that there is some sort of legally binding contract that companies are ignoring and if there is any meaningful way to address that. I am unaware of such a contract and even if it exists, when the giants play all we can do is get out of the way. Not fair, but life isn’t fair and gatekeeping what is acceptable as canon to exclude massive amounts of people’s favorite media isn’t going to sway many people to your side.
@Surplus
You remind me of this dude I knew in college who was very interested in plane crashes (or, at least, shows about them). The problem is, he watched so much about them that it severely altered how risky he perceived flying on a commercial plane to be. It’s hard for me to tell anymore how much of your woes are from actually not having the resources required to address them, and how much are from this sort of extreme, selective risk aversion.
The other thing is, you really do come off as entitled when you run into an issue and refuse to acknowledge the obvious reason for it. When you run NoScript and encounter a blank page, obviously it’s not actually a blank page. When you go to a blog whose updates are slowing down and find that nobody’s commenting anymore, obviously it’s because updates have slowed down. When you’re not subscribed to Disney+ and there’s MCU content you haven’t heard of, obviously it’s because the content is on Disney+. It’s very difficult to believe that these things actually have to be explained to you, multiple times even. So by framing these things the way you do, it really seems like you’re extremely sheltered and isolated (seemingly willfully), and/or you’re choosing to ignore reality when it’s inconvenient to you.
All that has mostly been explained already, but the thing for me is how both of these factors tie into your politics. You keep acting like you live in some kind of perfectly just society, and anything in reality that breaks that illusion is a massive personal affront that can and must be rectified immediately. The society you live in must be like the one in your head, and not like those other countries, “despotic regimes” as you put it elsewhere. These other countries are Bad and thus it is inappropriate to examine any cultural differences with our country, which is Good, or else it will become Bad as well. This logic seemingly does not care what those cultural differences might actually entail or if they even have anything to do what actually makes those countries bad. It’s such a pathetically simplistic way of seeing the world, little better than the thinly veiled racism that motivates the anti-China rhetoric of conservatives.
It really makes me wonder if anything about your claimed politics is real.
They have an obligation to be at least as accessible to at least the same people as their predecessors.
Saying “if you can’t afford to live in the bigger cities, then we’re taking away your TV” is impermissible. It’s a form of theft. Same with “if you have bad credit or no employment, we’re taking away your TV”. Taking something from someone requires a justification. A debt they defaulted on, say, so you’re repossessing the collateral, or a criminal conviction, or something. Just strolling in and hauling it away without anything of the kind, or anything resembling due process, is not “time marches on”, it is robbery pure and simple.
All of this is also sidestepping the real core point here, which is that it is misleading to market something as “TV” that is neither accessible to the same set of people as TV, nor even viewed on the same device or (in many cases) in the same room as TV. It’s like calling a jumbo jet at the airport “your car”. Call it that all you want, but it’s still not in your garage, you can’t just get off your couch, walk 20 steps, get in the “car”, and go, and it sure as hell won’t cost only a few dollars worth of fuel to go a couple of dozen blocks in it. It simply is not remotely the same thing, and calling it “your car” would be grossly misleading.
I said a social contract, not a legally binding one. If social contracts were legally binding we’d all have white collar salaried full benefits desk pilot jobs like it was still the 1970s, those of us with degrees, and the rest of us would be in unions rather than in food and shelter precarity. Perhaps after winning a giant class action lawsuit, rather than automatically, though.
@Surplus
No such obligation exists.
No such obligation has ever existed.
When TVs came out, producers of TV shows were under no obligation to release their creations as radio programs so that people would not have to buy a TV. And when radios came out, producers of radio programs were under no obligation to release print versions of their programs.
Are you really that entitled?
Oh. Apparently you are.
Not making content available through your preferred channel is not “taking it away,” because it was never yours. If every studio stopped producing content for broadcast TV, nobody would have taken anything away from you, they would have just stopped offering a product through a particular channel.
And putting TV behind a second paywall (beyond the cost of a TV and electricity) isn’t even new. Cable subscriptions have been around for decades, including premium cable.
NO ONE IS TAKING ANYTHING FROM YOU. No one is taking the Ms. Marvel show from you, because you never had it.
And once again, you’re engaging in this “me not getting what I want is punishing me without due process for a crime I haven’t committed” stuff.
Having to pay for things that you did not already have is not having those things taken from you. It is certainly not comparable to having property seized.
And while we’re at it, having an unreliable ISP is not “tantamount to being put in solitary confinement,” as you have repeatedly declared in the past. It is just one of the crappy results of capitalism, where companies provide only what service they can get away with.
And once again you’re harping on about a social contract that only exists in your head. There are lots of social contracts, many of which are not generally discussed but here’s the thing: people still knows about and recognizes them. They kind of would not work otherwise.
Which is what you keep running into when you make up rules of behavior, and then get angry when people who have never heard of your rules have the audacity to not follow them.
I keep being reminded of the Clans from Battletech, who isolated themselves from the rest of humanity (the Inner Sphere), developed their own culture where every conflict was solved by ritual combat, and then, after decades of secretly studying the Inner Sphere, invaded them and were utterly shocked when the people of the Inner Sphere, having never heard of the Clans’ ritual combat rules, dared to not follow those rules and use actual warfare to defend themselves.
@ Surplus to Requirements
You’re right about me applying legally binding there when you did not say that. I did conflate that as I recall you look into suing and asking people on here to help you decide on a course of action previously on other matters.
But yeah, your argument here revolves on unfairness, social contracts that apparently only exist in your head, and the dictionary definition of “TV”.
For the Three Hundredth time: Society is not obligated to follow your wants and needs. Would be nice, but for better or worse, the neurotypicals are the majority in our societies to varying degrees. The majority is considered the norm and catered to, woe to those who cannot find a way to fit in.
You are constantly beating your head on this particular wall as though you simply cannot process the very idea, so each time the issue arises you come in here swinging like it’s the first time it has happened. It has gotten a little old and people are losing patience. Sorry, but that’s the way I see it.
@ Allandral
I remember reading some of those books. As I recall that particular mindset was being used as an excuse for the genetically superior super Spartan types to lose against so called inferior opponents. “We send exactly what we need to win and no more! Wait, how come these guys sent ten times the troops needed and curbstomped us???” Vaguely reminiscent of Nazi sympathizers making up excuses for why they lost in WW2
A bit off topic because it’s not directly related to Surplus’s situation, but at one point I wondered if maybe some or all of the inequalities which exist could reasonably be framed as asymmetrical social contracts; one group/side gets rewarded for the contract being upheld, the other is mostly just not punished. (They may also get a minor reward, but that usually comes with a drawback which not everyone considers worth it.) Depending on the nature of the contract, it could potentially result in a situation where the “not punished” group/side is very motivated to police their own members, while the “rewarded” one tends to grow sloppy/lazy over time… with the end state being a lot of members in that group being rewarded despite not upholding the contract and a lot of members of the “not punished” one being punished despite upholding it. The contract collapses, both sides blame the other, the “not punished” side demands renegotiation, the “rewarded” side demands renewal, bad stuff happens, etc.
This never went beyond idle speculation, so I never worked out if there’s something to it or if it’s a superficial observation which is a bit too much of a stretch.
@ snowberry
I’d be really interested if you were to develop that thought.
If you do, one thing that might be relevant is an axiom in general contract law.
That is: “Consideration must be sufficient but need not be adequate”.
That’s legalese for the idea that for a legally binding contract to come into force, there must be a mutual exchange. A mere gift isn’t enforceable. So each side must give something to the other. That doesn’t have to be cash, or even physical goods. In a work contract it’s your labour that is your consideration. It can even be agreeing not to do something. A common example being, here’s some cash if you don’t sue me; or of course, non disclosure agreements.
But it doesn’t have to be an equal exchange. You can’t get out of a contract just because it’s a bad bargain. Hence why we have ‘peppercorn’ rents. Just letting someone occupy a property does not necessarily create a lease. So the tenant gives the landlord a peppercorn. That’s satisfactory consideration, so there’s a binding lease agreement now.
You also see this a lot with option agreements. Where someone has an option, but not obligation, to do something in the future. To stop the offeror reneging on that, the offeree will pay a quid.
But that might feed into your imbalance point.
@ an impish pepper
I’m quite into that. I love mentour pilot’s breakdown of accidents. But I actually find them really reassuring. How many unrelated things have to go wrong before there’s a problem; and how robust modern aircraft are. Air crashes have a 90% survival rate.
I also love walking.
As it happens there’s a really great book on walks to crash sites.
But I do sometimes take that on flights.
This is a site on one of my semi regular hikes. I find it really poignant. But I like that people take the time to go there and leave flowers and the like.
The plane’s next stop was to be Gibraltar; so I love how the stone is reminiscent of the Rock. And I also find it moving that 4,000 years or more since we first started doing it, we still commemorate people through standing stones.
There’s a theory in archeology that wooden posts celebrated the living (like woodhenge) and stones represented the dead. I can totally go for that. However fleeting your time on earth, once you’re remembered in stone you’re immortal.
*Deep breath before diving in*
The part most people have been responding hostilely to is the fact you have been in a confrontational pose about the subject of Ms. Marvel from the outset.
An approach that I use elseweb, that gets more understanding responses than insisting something doesn’t exist because I can’t afford to watch it (my budget is also ludicrously tight, and I don’t even have a television. You’ve seen more of SHIELD than I have. My D&D group flipped coins to see whether we’d go see Honor Amongst Thieves or John Wick 4, because seeing one movie every four months is still more than we can afford) is “is that new? I haven’t seen anything past Endgame except for Wakanda Forever yet, and I’m afraid to look it up because I’m trying to avoid spoilers. Without spoilers, can you give me an idea how much of the show involves stuff I haven’t seen yet, and how important is watching the show going to be for me to understand where the movies are heading from here?”
The BBC charter contains a provision that viewers must not be required to spend any money to “complete the story”.
So, to take Doctor Who as an example, expanded universe material exists of course; not least because the BBC doesn’t own the IP in every aspect of Dr Who. And the broadcast show can make passing reference to elements from the extraneous material. But only in the form of throwaway background material.
The idea being you can garner all the material to understand the narrative and who all the characters are, just by solely watching the TV show itself.
Of course that doesn’t affect canon. As one writer put it: “All Doctor Who material is canon; even the TV show”
They also weren’t marketing their creations as “radio programs”.
The fact of the matter is, this is a third medium, as distinct from cinema and TV as the latter two are from each other. Calling something from that medium a “TV show” is as misleading as calling a TV show a “radio program” would have been, back in the day, even given that it was, technically, being broadcast using radio waves.
True enough, but it is also possible to pay for those, including premium cable, without taking out a loan. Other payment options exist for them, which broadens the set of people to whom it’s available.
Replace “what I want” with “what was promised me” and you might be getting fairly close to the mark.
Notably, when the MCU started out, you didn’t need to live in a $2000/month+ zip code or have a credit card to watch it all. The working and lower middle classes were included. Changing that in mid-stream is a dick move, at a bare minimum of badness.
That’s easy for someone to say who has any sort of a meatspace social life and ready access to affordable transportation.
You seem confused. The people being suddenly shut out are being discriminated against on the basis of income (and to a lesser degree geography, but that’s mainly determined by income), not neuroatypicality. And by “discriminated against” I don’t mean “waah they’re charging too much!”; I doubt the price is much different than adding a channel package on cable. I mean actually discriminated against, in that people who could afford the up front fee (and could, in particular, add a cable package) are being shut out if they can’t also afford to pay rents in the four figures and/or if they have poor credit.
If you charge $3 for, say, an ice cream cone, and anyone who has three bucks can have one, that’s one thing. If you refuse to let someone who does have $3 have it because you don’t like the neighborhood in which they live, or their credit status (even though they’re willing to pay up front), or their skin color, or etc., then that is discrimination and it is wrong. And if you used to provide ice cream to anyone who came through the doors with enough cash in their pocket, but now you start calling several of the flavors “exclusive” and demanding that people prove they have six figure salaries to be allowed to purchase these particular flavors, regardless of whether they can in fact afford the stated sticker price (which is still only a couple of bucks), then that’s really really shitty of you.
As would I.
Ironically cable TV has a better claim on the name television than the broadest medium.
The word was originally coined for a hypothesised way of sending pictures along telegraph or telephone lines.
A number of people objected to the word because it’s half greek and half latin. But then again so is automobile; and they seem to have caught on too.
@Alan: I looked at that book and thought, “That is SO British”. Y’all can anorak about anything, even better than America does. But I’m glad people are respectful and caring about the crash sites. We clean ours up ASAP and pretend they never happened, except for 9/11 and some utterly lost old warplanes in remote areas. Mr. xn also would watch the airplane crash TV shows till the cows came home after I went to bed.
I looked at my bottle of Malabar pepper the other day and thought “I could rent an entire medieval county for this!”
Also, too true about “Doctor Who”. I’ve only ever watched the shows, not the endless novels and audio programmes and comics and… Somehow I manage just by having managed to watch all remaining episodes of the old ones and always the new ones, even if it takes years or decades. When that (or my memory) fails, the Doctor Who wiki catches me up and as you say, it’s going to be changed next time RTD, Moffat, or JN-T gets a wild hare.
@Mediocrates: I wish I could give you guys free movie tickets, but then I wish someone would give me some as well. SO expensive.
@Allandrel and @.45: applause
I’m extremely neurotypical and yet I get screwed over by capitalism every day. Most especially in the stupid amount of medical care/meds Mr. xn and I use, which we still have to pay a ton for even with insurance, which also costs about $400/month for both of us even to have a chance of seeing a doctor. Doesn’t include the entire cost of meds, office visits, hospital stays, and ambulances, all of which are charged at US market rate. Last time Mr. xn had to spend 2 nights in the hospital, there was an ER fee, plus we still owed about $800 — and that’s on Medicare. And we have good insurance other people envy. Many of my non-neurotypical friends have good jobs and really good insurance that I envy.
I read about all the fancy-pants shows on TV, but I don’t get to see most of them. I don’t have premium cable like HBO or Showtime, and also can’t afford Apple TV, Hulu, Paramount+ or any of the other myriad streaming services. I only have Disney+ because my BFFs are Disneyacs and give us a 1 year subscription every Christmas, no other gifts.
Also, I somehow manage to keep up with what’s on, because there’s this thing called The Internet, upon which much TV show information lives, and also this thing called Wikipedia which will summarize everything I know I’m never going to see and don’t care about spoilers for. If it might be crucial to the next TV show/movie but I didn’t have the bucks to see it, Wiki gets me up to speed, along with the thousands of articles that tell you “What you need to know about X before you see Y.”
I could whine and bitch about how I’m “owed” a pony, but I never had one so it’s not been “stolen” from me. I did whine about it from ages 8-13, but I outgrew that. I was very annoyed since I knew Mom had a pony at that age, but I grew up and realized that her dad was rich and mine had scraped to get up to solidly middle-class, and we still didn’t have the money for horses and their equipment. Also, her dad owned a farm very close to town where the pony could live rent-free and we lived in the tract-house burbs.
This stomping of feet at how objective reality is only a problem for you alone that MUST!!! be fixed just for you, plus the childish petulant ranting and extreme sense of entitlement is something usually only seen in MAGAts, incels, MRAs and others of that ilk. I guess it qualifies one to run as a Republican/Tory.
@ surplus
They don’t call it tv show. They call it streaming. Because you stream it on Disney+.
@ Surplus to Requirements
Oh, I’m confused? Heh.
Who promised you what when and where? You bought cable or whatever, I wouldn’t know, I don’t have the money to spend on that kind of thing, but don’t have the money to spend on streaming, and somehow that’s the Mouse’s fault because at some point they pinky promised they would always provide the same shows on all forms of media? Yeah, sure, sounds legit.
That sounds like the way it is working, except you skipped the part where you don’t have the $3 and are jumping down people’s throats for mentioning the latest flavor you didn’t know existed.
And just so you know, ice cream places do in fact change their flavors, call soft serve “ice cream”, move their stores, stop delivering to certain neighborhoods, etc. It isn’t motivated by discrimination in most cases, but for money. I don’t think I have to address the idea that Disney or whatever has added a clause stipulating a six figure income before one can sign up.
And that’s easy for someone to say with access to the internet and all kinds of modern conveniences.
I mean, seriously, does it mean anything at all to you that whenever you go off like this you cannot find anyone who actually supports your view? Ever hear the expression “If you have a problem with everyone, maybe you are the problem?” What do you get out of this except the satisfaction of driving another person or two away? If you didn’t keep this up over the course of years here, I’d say you are a troll picking molehills to turn into mountains and debate to the fucking death.
@ Alan Robertshaw
Hey, I have been meaning to look up the blog entry where you mentioned V to answer you, but time is short, so I’ll do it here: I rather liked the old show too, though as someone else mentioned, the whole thing with the miracle child didn’t thrill me, even as a kid. Speaking of, even as a relatively uneducated youngster, I did get the Nazi references, Brownshirts and all that. (Kind of hard to miss the part with the Jewish man going on about “the showers with no water”.)
Also, I do believe I ran across you on YouTube earlier. I didn’t really look at the video, seeing as I have little interest in the legal proceedings around Harry and Megan there, but I was a little amused to go “Hey, I think that’s Alan”
@Surplus: You were only promised those things in your own head, by your own childish ego. Your personal head-canon of what words mean is just that — in your entitled, petulant head and not reality. Exactly like the targets of this blog!
You were only promised “peace, order, and good government” and even that fails, but at least no schoolchildren get murdered weekly, nor are you completely without the potential for getting healthcare, even if it’s a massive hassle. Heck, your neighboring country hasn’t even invaded you, and you know damn well they have the capability to. I mean, I think it’d be keen if Vancouver belonged to us, and some of my friends say the same about Toronto, but then I think it would be keen if I didn’t have to pay Federal taxes to keep the freeloading red states afloat and passing all these stupid laws that hurt many people I know. Should we have let them go in the 1860s? No, because slavery. Should Reconstruction have gone farther? Damn right.
I still find plenty of good stuff to watch on free, over the air network TV, which is actually most of my viewing on any device. As it is, my TV hours go down massively between May and October (So I read more). There’s more entertaining stuff out there for free than I’ll ever be able to watch even if I gave up the rest of my life to nothing but that and my eyeballs went square. And I don’t even consider “reality” shows entertaining.
I got news for you; TV used to be entirely B&W too, and I’m almost old enough to remember that. Nobody whined and stomped their feet saying it wasn’t “really TV” if it was in color, nor that it wasn’t “really” TV when it started coming from basic cable, which you had to pay for. Just like no one said talkies weren’t “really” movies, or Technicolor and Cinemascope didn’t make them not “real” films, or that they ceased to remain movies when theatrical films were aired on TV or came to Blockbuster.
I’ve got a cousin in her 80s named “Gay”. Yes, she’s tired of the jokes, but she’s not telling homosexuals they can’t call themselves that, nor insisting it’s not a valid definition of the word nowadays. She just kinda wishes her parents had named her something else, but there wasn’t any way for them to know in the Midwest 1940s.
Do you secretly whine about the right-wingers since subconsciously you realize your attitude is exactly like theirs?
Defining words to mean only what they meant in your white male childhood? Insisting everything is a pure duality, 100% like the RW says the chromosomes and organs you’re born with only come in 2 types and that can never ever change despite what your brain says? You say it isn’t TV if it doesn’t come in free via antenna. Exactly like what MAGAts say about gender. I think a famous rabbi supposedly said something similar about motes vs. beams in eyes.
You’re free to live in your own world, even though it obviously makes you unhappy. (I suspect you wouldn’t be happy even if you were a millionaire. You’d just be whining about the perks billionaires get.)
You’re NOT free to insist on outdated terms based on nothing but your own whims, nor inflict abuse on and ignore people who are trying to help. Over and over, which is the alleged definition of you-know-what. That’s damn well a violation of the social contact of any society.
Maybe try reading a newer dictionary?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/television
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/television
And even the US has toll-free mental health numbers, so I know Canada must. Maybe they can help you with your paranoia and entitlement, if you can bear to give up your petulance.
I normally just read books, that I get free from the library and the library based all that I can get free books and audiobooks from.
And @ surplus,
get a grip man. Maybe if you dealt with your issues instead of being like this, you’d have a friend that would share their Disney+ with you. I use my friend’s and I (along with like 7 other people she’s given it to) all have our own profile.
Works great. I got so emotionally distant and numb that I started at the gun safe for like 20 minutes wondering how had it would hurt. But instead I put on Brave and made myself cry so hard all the blood vessels in my eyes have broke.
Of course they haven’t added an explicit clause. But if you don’t have such an income, you can’t afford to live anywhere where the internet speeds are good enough for quality streaming. Thus moving something from antenna or cable to streaming effectively excludes people below that income bracket.
Wouldn’t help, for the reasons outlined above. Having my “TV” look all blocky, or constantly stuttering and pausing, isn’t my idea of a good time.
@Elaine the witch
I’m sorry to hear that you were in such a bad place emotionally. I hope you’re much, much better now.
Like you, I find that art of all kinds (movies, literature, music, paintings, and so on) can be very therapeutic. In my opinion, it’s an ancient type of therapy that is still relevant to modern people.
@Surplus
I was going to point out that other options also exist for streaming services such as Disney+ and Netflix, but then I remembered that I already have pointed this out, and your responses have been to ignore it or to respond with hostility and verbal abuse, insisting that those don’t count due to more rules that only exist in your head.
But then, that is how you react every time that people respond to your demands for advice and solutions with advice and solutions. I have seen you complain here that any solution that was not literally “no cost, no time, no effort, and completely effective” was utterly useless to you.
Have you wondered why multiple people have said that you act entitled?
When did Marvel or Disney promise you anything?
So much of this is indistinguishable from the incel rants that David digs up for us here. This conviction that you are somehow owed the things you want, and that not getting them, or even being expected to do anything in exchange for them, is some terrible oppression..
And what makes you so certain that I have those things?
Oh right, because you are absolutely convinced that everyone else has everything on Easy Mode, and that you are the only person in the world who encounters hurdles and problems.
Again, see: the incel rants that get featured on this blog.
I know I could try to engage in some Suffering Olympics, but that would run into the same brick wall of your preconceptions as every attempt to help you meets.
@GSS ex-noob
Reminds me of a vox-pop bit from A Bit of Fry & Laurie, where an old lady explains:
Surplus, please just stop. Your rants and your refusal to adjust your perspective, at the advice of multiple people over a long period of time, is really bringing the atmosphere down around here. I mostly lurk now but it’s disappointing to see the comments hijacked over and over by the most recent screed of what’s upsetting you and the arguments that follow. We’re a community here and we are trying to read/discuss the topics at hand. That is the purpose of the blog. We’re not your sounding board and definitely not responsible for finding perfect solutions to your problems. It wouldn’t be so bad if you just didn’t fight people every step of the way.
To everyone else, maybe it’s best we just don’t engage with Surplus any more. I’m so tired of the neverending saga.
Speaking of right-wingers being miserable … Pat Robertson is dead.
A miserable, petty-minded, greedy man who used religion as a weapon and as a way to get rich off the backs of the poor and the fearful. Now he’s dead. Good.