Oilfield Rando is one of my favorite Twitter accounts to follow, and usually, I agree with him, but this time he is wrong, and it’s necessary to understand why.
Exactly. Conservatives don’t have the backbone of the American left, and the Wokification of sports will continue until they do. https://t.co/CMhvA0ITPh
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) April 2, 2021
Think I like saying this? I don’t.
But the left is committed enough to their ideology to riot for a year and destroy any businesses that cross them.
Conservatives couldn’t turn off ESPN for2 weeks if Kirk Herbstreit came to their house, sh*t on the floor and smacked their wife
— Oilfield Rando (@Oilfield_Rando) April 2, 2021
A few things.
First of all, I am not aware of a single Leftist boycott in the modern era that actually harmed a company in any way. Not one. If I’m wrong, point it out to me.
What the Left does is go on social media and shriek about wanting a boycott, but other than posting pictures of throwing away perfectly good Goya food, what did they accomplish? Nothing. In fact, Conservatives rushed out to support Goya and they made more money.
So don’t tell me the Left has the backbone to boycott to make their voices heard. They don’t. They have an amplified social media presence and that’s it.
Second, we have seen Conservative boycotts work, sort of. The financial damage done to Dick’s after they stopped selling ARs is proof of that.
The problem is this doesn’t work with Coca-Cola or MLB or the NBA or Hollywood.
If you remember correctly, during the GW Bush years, Hollywood made countless anti-War films that portrayed America as evil and our soldiers as either bloodthirsty killers or poor dumb hicks who signed up to be abused by the military because they were too stupid to know any better.
Every single one of these movies lost money. They were box office flops.
Who actually watched Stop-Loss? Nobody.
But Hollywood kept cranking them out because insulting America was more important than money.
These studios made their money back on popcorn fodder and their balance sheets were in the green at the end of the day.
And I hear what you are going to say “but don’t see the popcorn fodder too.”
You’re right, except it doesn’t matter.
Have you noticed just how much every popcorn fodder movie is the exact same piece of generic shit?
It’s because Hollywood no longer makes movies for America. They make movies for the global market and they need shallow characters with dialog that is easy to dub or subtitle in a foreign langue without much lost in translation.
Any American cultural references are lost. Any character depth is eliminated.
There are literally more people who watch movies in China than there are Americans.
India is getting up there.
Hollywood knows that if every American Republican, all 74 million Trump voters in 2020, never went to the theater again, never signed up for a streaming service ever again, never turned on the TV ever again, and just sat around watching old DVDs they already owned, that would make a rounding error difference on their balance sheets against the global market.
There are more NBA fans in China than there are total Americans.
MLB is trying to capture the same market.
Only football is still heavily US-dominated because football is uniquely American in culture.
So what that Coke or basketball insults American Conservatives.
They lose some sales in the US.
They make up for it in China because China loves it when American companies insult America, that is used as propaganda in China.
The Chinese government loves to throw Black Lives Matter back in our faces. It pulls our teeth on calling them out on their human rights atrocities.
We saw that just recently in the meeting in Alaska.
(Paraphrasing)
US: “Your treatment of the Uyghurs is bad.”
CCP: “You commit genocide against black people.”
US: “Touche.”
The more the NBA or MLB go woke, the more they get promoted in China.
I’ve said go Woke, go broke is an absolute law, it is locally, it’s not globally.
A vegan restaurant that charges men and white people more and tells Trump supporters they are not welcome will fail because half the local population won’t eat there.
A multinational corporation that does the same won’t notice because the percentage of potential customers who boycott against their total market presence is a drop in the bucket.
There is literally nothing that the average Conservative consumer, in their day-to-day purchases, can do to a global megacorporation that makes an iota of difference.
Politically, Conservatives need to run people who are willing to hurt these megacorporations.
Every product that they make in China needs to be seized at the border and destroyed.
I would love nothing more than to see every iPhone, iPad, Macbook, etc, unboxed, laid out on a shipping dock, and run over with a steamroller driving by a Customs agent like semi-autos in Australia.
Corporate executives need to be held criminally liable, as in prison time, for human rights abuses against workers overseas, including subcontractors. Take Mr. CEO, send him to Terre Haute for life, seize all of his assets and leave him destitute. Starve his children.
Put a 100% tax on all overseas corporate profits.
We need a Conservative Bane.
To say to people on the right “next time you go to a restaurant get water instead of Coke because of what Coke said about Georiga” is functionally useless.
It won’t change until the punishment for the Coke CEO for doing what he did is to throw him in a hole and seize all of his money because some of the sugar that went into a Coke bottling plant in Beijing came from a plantation that used forced labor in southern China.
It’s tough navigating all of this bullshit if you feel like boycotting anything. If I wanted to avoid everything that pissed me off, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy anything at all. To help, I’ve set up a simple rule to help me out. They (company, actor, athlete, etc), can have whatever views they want, but if they try to ram it down my throat, I’ll avoid them. If your movie preaches your bullshit ideal, I won’t watch. You want to paint BLM all of the court/field, and kneel during the anthem? I’ll pass.
Liam Neeson is apparently a hypocrite when it comes to guns, and he’s mentioned his anti gun views in a few interviews. But he’s not in front of congress or on TV lecturing me about it. And the characters he plays in movies kick ass with guns, and are entertaining, so I watch.
I’m not sure what you disagree with him about, other than suggesting leftist boycotts don’t work either? The companies are quick to bow before the leftist outrage mob, so maybe if it isn’t necessarily affecting a company’s bottom line, they are at least spurred to action to appease the lunatics. He’s dead on about conservatives not having nearly the impact or even the backbone. His example using ESPN is spot on.
I’ve got friends who are conservatives, some are Iraq war veterans, they love America, but they love football even more. They act outraged about the NFL’s utter disdain for this nation and the complete lack of respect the players show. Yet they sit, fixated and completely absorbed by football every time it’s on. Roger Goodell could draw up a pre-game ceremony where each player comes out onto the field and give the American flag a good old “bare-assing” and they’d still eat it up. 95% of conservatives would.
Companies have sales blips based on conservative boycotts, but blips they are. Dick’s sporting goods will be fine. Lots of people still need golf shirts and running pants.
This is the same laziness that keeps people from calling and writing their representatives about gun rights, keeps them from joining a gun rights organization or two, and keeps them on the couch watching football when they should be at the polling station. It’s a small minority that does all the heavy lifting on our side. Maybe it’s the same for the left? It sure doesn’t seem that way sometimes.
They aren’t bowing to the Leftist Outrage mobs- they are leading the Leftist Outrage mobs. We need to lose the idea that big business is neutral, or that big government and it are somehow in opposition to each other.
When you get to the higher reaches of big business, or education, or NGO’s, or lobbying, or media, or consulting, or government, it’s all the same group of people. The politicians have vested interest in companies, their spouses are major lobbyist, their children sit on the boards of NGO’s, others work in the media; former politicians become professors or sit on corporate boards, and on it goes, from role to role, like a wiggling mass of maggots.
“First of all, I am not aware of a single Leftist boycott in the modern era that actually harmed a company in any way. Not one. If I’m wrong, point it out to me.”
Memories Pizza
I’m not exactly sure if boycott is the word to describe what happened to them.
Harassed out of existence is more appropriate.
Harassing, demonstrating, threatening, vandalizing, doxxing, looting, and even destroying are typical tactics.
But the classic boycott hasn’t worked for the woke for a while now.
That’s the modern boycott.
It’s a boycott in the same way that legitimate businessmen Vinnie and Guido sell “insurance”.