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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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@ surplus
Well I guess your just fucked then. Stop whining.
When I was a kid we had a B&W 425 line TV that could only get BBC1 and ITV. BBC2 was only transmitted on 625 lines. So I only got to see that if we visited my posh cousin’s.
Maybe that’s why I still don’t have a TV to this day.
But when they moved to digital broadcasting and were closing down the old analogue system, it was a concern that people would have to buy new kit. Either a digital ready TV, or a set top converter box. So the broadcasters agreed to keep the analogue system going for a number of years so people would have time to adjust.
Ironically, the old analogue frequencies are now used for 5G phone signals. So it amuses me when people worry about how they give you covid or whatever. We managed pretty well for the 50 years when it was just TV.
@ .45
Oh yeah, I loved the original V. I agree with you though that the star child ending was a bit out of left field. But the nazi analogies were very blatant. Which I think was a good thing. Are you familiar with a British film project It Happened Here? I think V has a very similar vibe; not least with one of the main characters being a holocaust survivor.
And yeah, been doing a lot of YouTube stuff recently. I prefer just talking about art law topics; but with a background in media law I get wheeled out a lot when people want to talk about high profile court cases.
@.45,
Babylon 5 also had a major arc about an authoritarian takeover, which like V was not subtle.
@Alan
It Happened Here! Wonderful example of independent film making, not to mention perseverance. We got it on DVD a few years back. Mr. Parasol was quite miffed when the first DVD went missing during delivery, but the replacement copy showed up in a decent time frame. Chilling story, especially Pauline’s numb expression by the final scenes.
@Allandrel
And like The Handmaid’s Tale, everything the authoritarians did in an SF setting was rooted in real life examples. Because history may not repeat, but it rhymes.
I think I need to rewatch “And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place” for the pleasure of re-hearing the sermon about who the enemy really is … and of course the vigorous gospel singing.
Elaine the witch
IIn case it is still relevant I wrote about a couple of different experiences I have had over someone who was dying not wanting to tell others about what was going on, it’s at the bottom of ““Pride Month Is A Cynical Exercise In State-Enforced Homosexuality” declares Federalist writer who doesn’t know what words mean” if it would stil be helpful.
There isn’t anything practical I can do for you (ocean in the way and all that), but I have been thinking about you.
@Victorious Parasol:
Of course, you can go back further than that. We were talking about Heinlein before, and his novella “If This Goes On—” (later included as part of Revolt in 2100) was written back in 1940, with its backstory involving a theocratic takeover of the U.S. by fundamentalist Christians following the 2012 election of preacher Nehemiah Scudder to the presidency and the suspension of any further elections.
The patterns of fascism and authoritarianism (especially religious authoritarianism because they can claim their authority comes from an even higher one) have been out there for anybody to see for a long time now. You just have to look at the history of many churches, and if there’s one thing the U.S. has in droves, it’s various splinter sects that started as personality cults. (Both the Latter Day Saints and the Millerites which eventually became part of the Seventh Day Adventists were started in the ‘Burned-over District‘ in western New York in the early 1800s, each by one man, and they’ve survived to this day.)
@Elaine: We would miss you. Since your problems are caused by real things, not angry bullshit you made up to excuse your own lazy behavior, please feel free to come to us for help. Virtual hug. 🤗❤
@Jenora: Absolutely right about “If This Goes On –“
@Vicky P: That is EXCELLENT news! I hope he’s enjoying Satan’s warm embrace. But him just ceasing to exist is fine with me.
@Jenora
Oh, yes! “If This Goes On–” is a classic for a reason.
Not getting them when I used to; being expected to do (or pay) more.
You indicated that having no internet wouldn’t be the equivalent of solitary confinement for you, thereby implying as much.
@Surplus,
But you didn’t used to get the Disney+ original programs. You got (and continue to get) broadcast tv programs. A category of things that does not, and never has, included Disney+ original programs.
This is another perfect example of why people here keep calling you entitled. You are convinced that if you have had one thing a certain way, you are entitled to all new, similar things in the exact same way forever and always, and have insisted here that a new thing not being available to you in tthe exact same way as the older thing is somehow stealing that new thing from you.
It doesn’t work that way. It has NEVER worked that way. When a broadcast tv show that I loved was canceled, and would no longer produced new episodes and was not being re-run, no one had taken anything from me.
When a video game series that I enjoyed that had been available on a console that I owned made the jump to a different console that I did not own, and could not afford, I did not declare that the new installments had been “stolen” from me.
This is because I do not view something as belonging to me just because I want it, or think tthat it was “promised to me” just because I used to have something similar. Because I understand the concept of “different things are different” and “new things are not always the same as old things.”
For.
Fuck’s.
Sake.
I indicated that having no internet wouldn’t be the equvalent of solitary confinement for me for the same reasons that I might indicate that getting caught in the rain would not be the same as being waterboarded for me. Or that not being able to eat my preferred dish for dinner would not be the same as being forcibly starved.
I “indicated” as much because I understand that the two things are not remotely comparable. Because they are so incomparable that the idea had never even occurred to me. And because I am not a self-absorbed, overly dramatic jackass who is convinced that suffering a major inconvenience is the same as being tortured.
Rain isn’t the same as waterboarding.
Total social deprivation is the same as total social deprivation.
All this talk about allegorical TV and movies is reminding me of a short film I saw in one of my high school social studies classes back in the early 1980s. I forget the name of it, but it was made by an Eastern European (I think) immigrant to the US who was very shocked to see how little the average American even knew about how and why their government was run the way it was. He made this film as a warning about where that ignorance could lead to if not corrected.
The story is set in an elementary school classroom, so the kids involved are around 6-8 years old, ten at the extreme oldest. The US just lost the war with an unnamed authoritarian country, the not!Soviet Union. The frightened kids are getting a new younger school teacher sent from this new government to replace their old teacher (grandmother age, who is scared herself that she’s going to meet an unpleasant fate once she leaves that classroom to the new teacher).
The new teacher, a middle aged woman with a vague Eastern European accent, not only calms the children down, but turns their loyalty from the USA to the unnamed country, even convincing the kid whose father was taken away to a reeducation camp that his father really did need to go there to learn the ‘new way’ of living and that he’d come back better than before.
The scary part was that the new teacher did all that in 20 minutes without threatening the children in the slightest. The scarier part for the viewers was the realization that the methods she used to do all that would actually work quite well with that age group. Especially ones who were never taught to think about why things were the way they were, and thus couldn’t come up with a mental defense to the new teacher’s manipulations.
Supposedly there’s another version of that film in existence with the same basic plot and ending, but set in a high school instead, and thus using a different set of manipulation methods by the not!Soviet teacher to get the desired result. I have no idea if it really exists, but it would be an interesting contrast to the first film if it did, I think.
@ Surplus to Requirements
You have indicated you are able to walk to nearby shops, you can clearly read, etc, etc. The whole “Fortnite servers are down, there is literally nothing else in the world to do!!!” act is not very convincing. You have the ability to do more than stare at the wall. (Unless of course you are literally suffering from psychological issues that prevent you from doing basically anything outside of a specific routine or whatever, in which case you should probably be honest about that instead of pulling out “It doesn’t match the couch” type arguments.)
I mean, you are coming across as someone who has the chance to go do something to help with their problems, but refuses to even consider anything that isn’t conveniently prepackaged and delivered to your living room. Hell, I recall your father buying a computer for you and because it wasn’t 100% set up and sorted out immediately, you were on here accusing the man who spent his entire life taking care of you even into adulthood of suddenly deciding he hated you and abandoning you to the wolves for what sounded like issues he probably wasn’t even aware of until you told him.
I feel like if I Western Unioned you three thousand dollars (not going to happen, in case it is unclear), you’d be on here bitching about how I sent it to you on a weekend and none of the local places to pick up the money are open, the fact you have to walk somewhere to pick it up, etc, etc. You’d probably suspect me to be part of the grand conspiracy to ruin your life by throwing off your groove.
If I would be satisfied if the only social contact I had was answering questions like “debit or credit?” and “would you like fries with that?”, then that might suffice.
I wouldn’t be.
(Though even then I’d be stuck alone for all but one or two days a week.)
The suggestions I’ve gotten simply won’t work in my present situation.
Anything involving physical travel would be limited to one or two times a week, or would break the bank.
Moving somewhere where there’s more going on would break the bank.
Most of the suggestions I’ve received over the years here would require either much more stamina than I had even in the before times or else a much larger transportation budget than I can afford.
Many of the rest were actually tried, and didn’t work. (Remember “HealthCareConnect?”)
The only thing left, really, is the “get therapy” suggestion, which has two problems.
One of those is, you guessed it, money. I don’t think I have health insurance that covers that (and if I do, they did a piss-poor job of communicating that to me!), and when the topic has come up in fictional but meant-to-be-realistic settings the prices quoted have been in the hundreds-of-dollars-an-hour range. Seeing one once a week would be as financially devastating to me as my rent doubling. There were cheaper online options mentioned, but those are obviously a privacy catastrophy waiting to happen.
Oops, no, it already happened.
The other, more fundamental problem with the therapy suggestion is that I see no way that a therapist could conjure up a doubling of my income, make my utilities reliable again, make HealthCareConnect actually work, or anything of the sort, and I very much doubt that you do either, which means that the suggestion is not intended to improve my quality of life but to cause me to become more tolerant of the same old shitty conditions … in other words, to knuckle under. It amounts to a claim that I don’t deserve better, that I should not only keep taking my regular servings of shit but that I should like it.
That, in turn, sounds an awful lot like what a right-winger would say. (Though they might also add a useless suggestion to “get a job” or something.)
@ surplus
I actually think there is a perfect job for you.
You’re a great writer, and you know a lot about some really interesting stuff. You also have pretty strong opinions. That’s a great combo for article writing.
There’s a lot of content needs filling out there; so there are myriad opportunities. Now a lot of the online places in the Buzzfeed mode pay peanuts. So I wouldn’t suggest that to you. But what about the more specialised journals and magazines? Even with the print ones you submit copy online. And you have all the equipment and facilities you need already!
One of my mates bums around the world just churning out copy for those magazines you see at the supermarket checkout. She thinks about topics whilst she’s lazing on a beach, then does a few hours in the evening banging out copy. Even if she’s only getting 50 quid for an article, she can get knock out half a dozen in a couple of hours.
It’s not exactly high art, but it keeps her in negronis.
To go hand in hand with Alan’s suggestion, Surplus, your science fiction story you posted here a while back was legit one of the best I’ve read in years. And the last I knew, Tor Books is accepting submissions.
https://www.tor.com/submissions-guidelines
Likewise, I don’t know how well script submissions to Simon Whistler’s plethora of YouTube channels pay out, but I can see writing for some of those channels being right up your alley as well.
To continue on what Alan and Mediocrites said, that little SF story could be published right now as-is as a flash fiction story. I have no idea what the pay rates are for those, or if anyone prints them on anything besides webpages, but you should at least get a look-see from the editors, even if they decide not to publish it at this time. If you’re not already aware of them, the Science Fiction / Fantasy Writers Association (https://www.sfwa.org/) looks like a good place to start. The stuff available for non-members seems to be a good intro on how to break into the business and avoid the common pitfalls and scams out there. Plus they have a publishers listing saying what each of them are in the market for and what they pay.
If you ever do decide to flesh that little story out into a longer work, here are a few worldbuilding questions to consider answering to help develop that world. Like, does that future have no media analysts at all around who could have decoded what the aliens sent humanity and figured out what they were saying? If so, then why wasn’t that interpretation more widely known? Were there other interpretations that were more popular or was it actively suppressed for some reason. Did the aliens not include any images that could have been interpreted as ‘you are staying under house arrest until you guys grow up and get your violent tendencies under control!’
Those are far from the only questions that could be asked about your setting, but they should be a decent start for thinking about things.
@various:
Thank you for those suggestions.
However, I’m presently in the position of the dog in the old proverb who is carrying a hunk of meat, sees that reflected in a pool of water, grabs for it, and ends up dropping what it had and having nothing.
In particular, I’m not totally sure what the rules are for my disability money if I develop some sort of additional income, but I expect they’d claw part or all of it back out of my benefits. I’d also have a complicated reporting form to fill out every month and send in, with potentially severe consequences if I missed a month or got anything wrong on it. (Plus another, yearly one for taxes.) I’m not very confident of being able to manage those requirements reliably enough to avoid those potential consequences, and regardless it would be a bunch of added work, made worse because all of these would be irregular, unpredictable sources of income, not something where I could just fill all the relevant forms out with the same repetitive shit each and every time and turn that into a habit as ingrained as writing each month’s rent cheque.
Best case scenario, I get a bit of supplemental spending cash but a bunch of obligations along with it, with risks if I don’t prove able to reliably meet those obligations. More likely, I’m running faster on the treadmill and still staying in the same place. Worst case I end up with nothing but an irregular, unpredictable, and probably overall reduced income, and after a few months of that it’s sayonara, shelter, and at most seven months after that it’s sayonara, Surplus.
Basically, I doubt any job could be worth the effort and risks unless it paid at minimum double my current disability income, was secure and predictable, and I was able to perform it reliably enough to satisfy the boss, rather than ending up missing deadlines and such, or quickly burning out on it.
As I understand it, no writing gigs (fiction or non-) meet those criteria unless you are already a famous author.
Truth be told, I think I sort of need to be sheltered, in a manner of speaking, with predictable and regular enough, well, everything that I can turn all obligations into rote habits. Otherwise I end up very stressed trying to juggle and keep track of everything and am pretty much guaranteed to drop one of the balls sooner or later. If that ball is a hobby-related thing of some sort that is one thing, but if it’s a job where other people are counting on me, or worse it’s something life-critical like being able to pay the rent or afford food, then I don’t think I can trust myself with that responsibility. I mean, even my meals and shopping lists are very predictable, so I don’t have to mentally keep track of a thousand different SKUs, remember what goes with what and whether I have enough of some things to make a meal rather than possibly having half of what I need for meal A, 3/4 of what I need for meal B, 1/6 of what I need for meal C, etc. and unable to make any of them; to say nothing of having a lot of expiration dates to keep track of. Frankly, it astonishes me that most people have no difficulty managing that sort of thing.
If I were to do anything remotely like going into self-employment I’d need to hire an accountant or assistant or some such to do most of the tracking-stuff and management type tasks, making sure bills were paid and forms filled out and nothing got overlooked and just generally handling the bureaucratic side of things, especially interfacing with external bureaucracies, and yet I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to afford an assistant, since I’m not even sure I’d be able to cover just my own expenses from something like that, let alone two people’s expenses. And of course non-self-employment jobs are incompatible with my sleep disorder and probably also with my social skills issues.
Best case scenario, trying to get any kind of paid work (gig or regular-9-to-5) for me would be a tightrope walk with, at best, a very frayed net and maybe none at all. Worst case scenario, closer to jumping out of a plane without a parachute. (Why not just quit and reapply for disability if things aren’t working out or the financial situation gets worse instead of better? Well, for starters, I doubt the disability payments would be instant-on, and what would I do for income in the meantime? Second, I am terrible at that sort of bureaucratic stuff, and I’m not even sure I could do it — I wasn’t the one who set it up originally, I had parental help for that! And third, I have a sneaking suspicion that applying for disability and having any chance of being accepted might require a doctor’s note … and I don’t have a doctor anymore.)
There’s also a future-proofing issue. The lowest bidder for that sort of work is, or soon will be, ChatGPT. Maybe even also for the fiction writing.
I’d still try it if I had absolute income security and no risk of going to jail for filling out a form wrong. If there was a guaranteed basic income here, I’d have nothing to lose income-wise and the only potential legal minefield would be the once-a-year tax filing. Sadly, we don’t have a guaranteed basic income here, despite my having on at least one occasion actually voted for it, or for a party that was promising to implement it.
(And even that one yearly tax filing would be pretty scary. Picture being nervous for a must-pass exam in a subject you’re iffy in, but which was a mandatory course. Except this exam requires a full 100% for a pass, not a measly 50. And if you don’t pass, you don’t merely have to repeat a semester. You go to prison. And it’s not just four years in a row of passing it and then you’re done, it’s every year for your whole adult life clear through until retirement…)
@Surplus
Your response here is a good example of what a lot of us have been talking about.
People point out the inaccuracy of one of your dramatic pronouncements of suffering, and you insist that those points “don’t count” because… you don’t want them to?
People point out ways that you could improve your financial situation, and you insist that they won’t work because it MIGHT interfere with benefits. You straight-up admit that you don’t know what the restrictions are, but rather than try to find out you instead spin up a narrative where you end up worse off than you were before or “going to jail for filling out a form wrong” in order to justify doing nothing.
Or you could simply look up what your program’s restrictions are. You can probably even do that without a phone call. I don’t know what Canada’s programs are like, which is why I’m suggesting that you research them, but the program that I am on in the USA has pretty clear guidelines on what I can earn and what effects surpassing those limits would have.
They even had a program that provided me with job placement training and assistance, which led directly to the part-time, work-from-home position that I have led for the last four years. It isn’t a “regular 9-5 job,” just 5-10 hours a week doing data entry, but that small supplment makes a drastic difference in my life without jeopardizing the benefits that I need to Not Die.
And I was able to do this because I inquired about what my earning restrictions were rather than dismissing the possibility out of hand. Getting that job was a lot of effort – it took months – but it was worth it.
Not that you’ll listen, because Being Hard Done By seems to be your entire identity, and actually improving your situation would threaten that.
@Surplus, (or more realistically, a
@ Any of y’all with execdysf issues who like technology to help patch brain gaps)
as far as remembering what’s available or needed for meals, I use a phone app called AnyList. My 2 main lists are Freezer Inventory and Basic Groceries. (I intended to make a pantry inventory, but instead if I’m using the last or next-to-last of something, I add it to Basic Grocery). It can tie into recipes, but I haven’t used that. My partner uses iphones and I’m Android, and I pay so we can synch, but it’s fully functional as a free app.
(no SKUs needed, but i often add custom commentary like the fake chicken patties in the green boxes are better, or if I need the cream cheese for baking (must be Philadelphia brand) or bagels (whipped is fine).)
I also use a “Spin the Wheel” app, which I’ve loaded with things I can make from what’s currently/usually on hand, and I plan to make another list/wheel that starts with those meals and adds ones where I need to defrost the meat first or start a crockpot. It can help with decision paralysis.
Some facebook groups like “Jenn has ADHD” and “executive dysfunction hacks and tips” are really useful for me, both in seeing how others handle issues or that I am not alone with some weirdnesses.
@Allandrel
Kind of like how a lot of incels will reject sex from a girl that’s interested in them because being involuntary virgins is their whole personality.
It’s a shame so many of those things are Facebook groups these days, thus locking out FB refuseniks entirely and making it impossible to so much as browse them to see what the fuss is about without associating your RL identity with the group, and thus with a diagnosis (accurate or otherwise), in a manner that will be visible to at least Facebook itself. So much for medical privacy, and this with conditions that are highly stigmatized too.
It’s like sometime in the early 21st century society forgot what the second “A” in “AA” stood for, and why.