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Bud light is a beer, not a religion or political party. I think that's my point, that people who are aligned along political, religious, or politico-religious lines try to establish non-political and non-religious entities like a beer brand as off limits to their political or religious opponents.
The comparison between making one commercial for bud light with a trans woman celebrity and putting a statue of George Bush on the largest mosque in Portland is kind of silly to me. They're not similar.
Corporate brands aren't anyone's territory other than their boards' or shareholders'.
I think it looks like a triumphalist blue flag to you because you experience trans and gay inclusion as a loss. This situation reminds gay and trans people that their existence, without accounting political speech, is experienced as political speech, whereas the opposite is not true. A conservative man can go to a pride parade, just like in the blog post you linked, and not be threatened. To experience hostility and attention, he needs to do something political, like wear a police uniform, or hold a TERFy sign.
You can say both sides are doing the same thing, retiring conformance in certain spaces, but the degree to which the conformance required invades someone's identity is different. That's what's being demonstrated. We have all seen conservative speakers accosted on college campuses or shoved at pride events, but these people were trying to be as deliberately offensive as possible. This is the other side, where conservatives are literally shooting cases of beer in effigy because a trans woman took a bubble bath with a bud light.
To you it looks like a sly tactic in a culture war. To me it's a reminder that people like you might see my existence as a tactic first and a personality second. There's a degree to which you think a republican drinking bud light in a garage is more authentic than a trans woman drinking one in a bubble bath.
hi. i guess i have a niche here of pointing out obvious things everyone else ignores. i'm over this whole debate, nothing's going to change, hopefully a lot of people will be a lot happier, a lot of people are going to kill themselves, or their parents and then themselves, or others and then get killed by cops. nobody's going to learn anything and in 40 years when people can hop in a chrysalis and pop out looking however they want we'll collectively pretend this period of superficial dynamism never happened. but man, i will never tolerate rhetorical duplicity.
i don't think you're lying to me, so i'll say you seem to misunderstand/not understand politicization, or how it is used in modern discourse.
"identity" (as diluted a term there has ever been) is what certain groups of people use to refer to certain aspects of themselves they argue inherently merit political considerations (rights). identity can thus very easily be and often is highly or maximally political.
"[nouns] exist, their existence isn't political" could hypothetically be a nonpolitical statement, but 99.9% of use cases in contemporary discussions are referring to the trans-identifying, and in that regard there is literally nothing you can say more political than "trans people exist, their existence isn't political."
i'm annoyed nobody pointed this out because i think you probably have a decent response, but everybody's accepted your framing so they're conceding 75% of the debate just like that. how fucking boring. i won't, that's my thing here apparently. their "existence" is not settled. in 40 years it won't be settled either, sorta, but it won't matter, it's just right now it matters. so right now, no. their identity is not given, it is political. their presence anywhere beyond private confines is political. the demand for "representation" is political, workplace and otherwise public accommodations tailored for them are political. a trans-identifying person being used to promote a beer is generally political, one being used to promote a beer of the deep red dominion is the most politicized speech it is possible to make. if there were any room to doubt intent we would have seen AB limit their selection for promoters from the many trans-identifying in this country who pass, who even strong ideologically opposed men would admit are congruent with traditional female beauty standards (or would if fairly tricked by blind samples). they did not. the selection of a person the majority of people would consider on their best day unattractive is an expression of an integral part of the structure of this political thought and settles this as deliberate political action.
you can argue this is a good thing. that yes, they are political, but this is all a vital part of the cause and is justified. just don't lie about it, or for you, don't unknowingly perpetuate rhetoric that was designed to be duplicitous.
Sure, everything is political, because everything can be framed in terms of power. But some things are more political, because they exert more power, and some things are less. Dylan Mulvaney making a beer ad is less political than the reaction to it, which is more political. It's not "the most politicized speech it is possibly to make". It's a man, or a woman, in a dress, or a bubble bath, drinking a Bud Light. There are many many things far more political. The essence of politics is the control of the state and its exclusive claim to legitimate violence in the enforcement of the law and its sovereignty. Miss Mulvaney's bubble bath is not near to any of those things.
I'm kind of surprised at people who think Bud Light is some sort of exclusively Republican domain. It's Bud Light, not the NRA.
I think you're failing to recognize Bud Light as a class marker, which is part of the discussion here. You may want to re-read Scott's writings about the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe.
Bud Light is a beer, not a class marker. I certainly don't want to read, let alone re-read, anything that discusses the "Red Tribe" and the "Blue Tribe".
As a practical matter, if you are going to participate in discussion in what is still essentially the free-floating descendant of the comments section of Scott Alexander's blog, it is probably worth being familiar with the classics just to be up to speed with what people are talking about. But in this particular context, (a) I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup is a fun read, and (b) it talks about exactly the sort of way in which what beer you drink can be a class or "tribe" marker.
I don't read the Christian Bible just to "get up to speed with what people are talking about". I'm not going to read the biblical writings of this place either.
I'm happy to be impractically ignorant of The Motte's jargon.
It's evident from context what people are talking about. I don't need a milquetoast unfunny blog to explain it.
You are of course not obligated to read anything to participate here. Overlooking the snark about "Biblical writings," though, if you started attacking Christians while having no idea of who this Jesus guy they keep mentioning is, you'd look rather ignorant and certainly not be very persuasive. Though I suppose you'd feel the same sense of smug superiority you are displaying now at being so self-evidently right that you don't even need to understand the terms people are using to look down on them.
There's other places to learn basic sociology than a blog no one's heard of.
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