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I’m loosely with @Tarnstellung: this response is disproportionate. That’s becayse it’s not about the actual offense. It’s about
ethics in games journalismthe ingroup successfully flexing in the culture war. You said it best yourself—the “usual suspects” had to fan the flames, or it never would have gotten off Insta.In the spirit of the thread…isn’t this kind of bad?
Compare the usual examples of cancel culture. An entertainer gets banished to the sixth circle of hell for a comment made in 1995. A guest speaker gets his gigs canceled because he was too charitable to the outgroup. Judging the exact deserts takes a distant back seat to defending the narrative.
Here the narrative is “Budweiser is a puppet of the woke.” The evidence for: a personalized can and cringey social media video. Oh, and a general sense that big corporations are the enemy. Which one of those points is doing all the work?
I don’t see much reason to be proud of people hitting all five of our “examples of waging the Culture War.” Of course, they weren’t really interested in convincing me. The fact that I don’t already parrot their lines means that I’m on the wrong team.
N.B.: I don’t exactly have skin in this game. Yuengling is the best of its bunch, but I’m more a Modelo guy. Please consider my sentiments on the subject to be as lukewarm as the average Bud.
Do people forget that mere days before the Mulvaney stuff dropped, the Culture War issue du jour was a Trans shooter killing kids at a Christian School?
Tempers were already burning extremely high on the Trans issue when Bud Light waltzed in. The response was not merely driven by Mulvaney, but by the rage felt over the incident in which the entire Cathedral functionally sided with the shooter.
Is this one of those "two screens" things? I don't recall seeing coverage siding with the shooter. Even in the more trans-centric spaces I visit, the most positive thing anyone had to say was nothing.
I predicted that it would be non-toxoplasma specifically because it was obviously awful and no one wants to back up a loser.
"The right exploits Nashville shooting to escalate anti-trans rhetoric"
(Try to imagine a headline that said "The Left exploits Nashville shooting to escalate anti-gun rhetoric" and whether that would make sense as a story lead.)
"Trans people already fighting for rights in Tennessee have a new fear in the wake of a tragedy"
Does it make sense, after a Trans shooter targets a Christian school, to emphasize that trans people should be more afraid?
Advocates fear an escalation of hate toward trans community after Nashville shooting
"Trans people face rhetoric, disinformation after shooting"
THAT one's a real interesting one for using the passive voice in such a creative manner.
"A Trans Day Of Vengeance Protest Was Canceled After Organizers Received A Threat Of Gun Violence Fueled By Right-Wing Anti-Trans Rhetoric"
I picked a cross-section of completely mainstream sources, I didn't even dig into the twitter content that was flying around at the time.
This was the media environment in the days after the shooting. You tell me, what screen were you watching?
Tell me, if you were only exposed to the aforementioned headlines, NONE of which tell you any information about the shooter's identity...
What group would you guess was victimized in the actual event?
Would it surprise you that the deaths of bunch of Christian children would result in an outpouring of support for the Trans community?
And here's the view from the other side:
"CBS News reportedly barring staff from using term 'transgender' to reference Nashville shooter"
"Transgender pastor compares treatment of 'marginalized' Nashville shooter to Jesus being crucified".
Thanks. I stand corrected. These headlines look like the ones from the Pulse shooting.
I will note that the Fox article has a link to exactly that:
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The response is switching between fundamentally interchangeable products. While people will claim that they love the taste or freshness or how cold it is the reality is that the American light adjunct lager sector of beer is a bunch of entirely fungible products differentiated primarily by branding. If a brand elects to move in the direction of being the brand that isn't for frat boys or is for trans people, I think it's proportionate and reasonable for some of their current redneck customer base to say, "I guess I'll have a Miller Lite then". The Kid Rock style "FUCK BUD LIGHT" response seems disproportionate to me, someone stating that they'll never have another Bud product seems disproportionate to me, but simply electing to grab the case of PBR instead of Bud doesn't really seem like some wild overreaction.
More broadly, I'd love for the norm to be "just make your beer and shut the fuck up about politics". I don't want my favored beverage makers to tell me how they support my 2A rights, or abortion, or back the blue, or that black lives matter, I just want them to ferment some grains, hop them appropriately, and put them in kegs and cans for me to enjoy.
See, this I can get on board with. Switching products for politics is a low, low bar. Grillpilling is a perfectly fine reason.
The performative outrage, the part where "people assumed it was so much bigger," that's what feels like a failure.
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I guess I see it the way certain people see riots: it's not a good use of time and a total waste of legitimate grievance, but there's a reason it's gotten to this point.
The boycott is the language of the "not unheard but definitely feel like certain people want them to be".
Yes, it's waging the culture war. And people do bad things in war. Usually because losing is considered so much worse.
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The Budweiser campaign came from the marketing department. They acted as though because it wasn't aimed at a particular audience it was private and separate from the things the company said to other audiences, but that's not actually true. And to the extent the campaign succeeded, it succeeded because people who were otherwise their customers refused to purchase their product.
In other words, it isn't cancellation for exactly the same reason that the Dixie Chicks wasn't cancellation. I doubt that your guest speaker got his gigs cancelled because offended audience members refused to pay to attend his speech.
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Replying to both you and @Tarnstellung here.
I'm not particularly anti-trans, but I am very anti-Bud Light, and very pro people exercising their power.
Bud Light is a piss-colored metaphor for the kind of corporate slop culture that I hate in all its forms. I hate that they put flags on the cans and advertise as America's beer while being owned by the Belgians. I hate the "out of touch bro" advertising themes they used for my childhood the way they glorify a male ideal of lazy stupidity, I hate the obligatory lukewarm "current thing" woke fakery even more. I hate the beer itself, it factually isn't very good, Yuengling and Lion's Head are both better, or very cheap, Lion's Head is modestly cheaper at my local beer distributor and has games under the bottle cap, its best attribute is that it is available. I hate the corporation slicing and dicing consumer groups to create market segments to convince that their piss-beer is a necessary accoutrement to their newly invented lifestyle. I hate that anyone cares enough about Bud fucking Light that they feel that their marketing is "claiming territory" in their identity.
I think the world would be a better place if people, rather than choking down the slop that ubiquitous and milquetoast corporations like AB Inbev serves, choose to actually try to get things they want. If the local brewery a mile from my house did pro LGBTQERTY_>?+} cans because the owner has a trans friend, I'd probably buy them if they made a porter. That's a real person expressing a real feeling. Bud Light marketing to trans fans is trying to redefine a lifestyle segment of the marketplace on a spreadsheet. Fuck em. I'd rather see the people stick it to the corporation.
In general, I don't think "Cancel Culture" as a concept can be applied unless you already had a legitimate claim on fame. Influencers, for example, have no claim on being canceled because they have no talent beyond people liking them. If your talent is people liking you, and people stop liking you, well sounds like you're shit out of luck, like a baseball player with the yips. Cancel Culture is more about someone like Woody Allen, where people will often say they love his work but hate him. Or people who want Kaepernick run out of the NFL, or people who want Deshaun Watson run out of the NFL. Being canceled means having talent and being banned from exercising that talent, not merely being disliked.
Bud Light has no legitimate claim on the being the best selling beer in the country. Its dominance is based purely on marketing and branding. Well, fuck up your marketing, fuck up your branding, fuck em. A world where Bud Light's customers do at least a little critical examination of what they consume will probably improve the world.
Bud Light Delenda Est.
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No. What you advocate would be tantamount to sitting back and letting your enemy seize your territories because fighting back makes you just as bad.
Bud Light and its customers were a Red Tribe icon, and then a defaced rainbow flag was planted in that to take it away from the Red Tribe. If a neighbouring country just stuck a flag in your province and crowed about how it was theirs now, would you not fight back? What about when they did it again in a different province? And again? And again? What sort of incentives would you be creating by refusing to react?
Add in the context of the even that happened mere days before the Bud Light ad dropped, which also targeted conservatives and ALSO stoked the trans issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Nashville_school_shooting
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Awhile back, Scott expressed cautious optimism that, were cancellation (although he didn't use that term) to become a bipartisan, symmetric weapon, it might lead to a sort of stalemate, wherein both sides agree to lay down their arms for the sake of a bit of peace and quiet.
That was in 2015. Hindsight is 20/20 so there's no sense in pointing out that his optimism was misplaced.
Nonetheless, whenever the right succeeds in pushing back against woke nonsense (even when the reaction is totally disproportionate to the perceived offense, as it probably is here), I can't help but feel a little glimmer of hope. Not because I want the right to win handily, but because I want Scott's prediction to come belatedly true. If the right can demonstrate that they are just as capable of overreacting to perceived slights as the woke left are, maybe that will result in a lowering of temperature across the board. But they have to actually demonstrate it: they have to put their money where their mouths are, it can't just be empty talk.
Or maybe this boycott will be a one-off, next quarter every McDonald's Happy Meal will include a copy of The Anti-Racist Unicorn, Tucker Carlson will grumble about it from his den, but McDonald's stock index won't budge. Who knows.
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Charitably, one could see the disproportionate response as a reaction to woke encroachment into every facet of life. Making it costly for corporations to push their politics down their consumers throats might deter some of the worst excesses. In this sense, it is not about proportionality. That it's disproportionate is the point. Pour encourager les autres.
Realistically, I have absolutely no illusions that the right absolutely does want to do what the progs are doing. Their objections to cancel culture are mainly that they're not the ones doing the cancelling.
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