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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Ordinarily I wouldn't post personal Reddit drama here, but the thread is slow and I'm mad.

Here is a post that I saw on /r/baseball:

Anthony Bass promoting anti-LGBTQ propaganda on his Instagram

You probably noticed that the thread is locked with a moderator message: "The trolls are flooding in, and the conversation has run its course at this point. Friendly reminder to love your neighbor, and that it's not intolerant to oppose bigotry. Everyone have a nice holiday Monday!"

This message was posted only a few minutes after I was permanantly banned from /r/baseball for comments in that very thread! In fact, I believe they are referring to me as one of the "trolls flooding in". Lets take a look under the hood to see what counts as perma-ban and threadlock-worthy comments.

First, the actual article in question. Anthony Bass is a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays. He posted an Instagram story saying Christians should boycott Target and Bud Light. That's it. That's the "anti-LGBTQ propaganda". I posted a top-level comment in the thread sarcastically making this point.

“”””Propaganda””””. Dude just told people not to but Bud Light or shop at Target. This place has lost the plot.

Is this a high-effort comment? No, but if you are familiar with the sports subs at all then you know that this type of low-effort sarcasm is all over the place. That's the posting culture there. I also got involved in another comment thread.

JaysRaineman73 -18 points 2 hours ago: "Who the fuck cares. So tired of this shit. I only care about how he plays on the field. If he’s not abusing or hurting anyone, it’s irrelevant."

realparkingbrake 11 points 2 hours ago: "On what planet does denying people the same rights as everyone else not qualify as abusing or hurting them?"

QuantumFreakonomics -4 points 2 hours ago: "What rights do they not have? Name them? How is he hurting anyone? How does asking people to not purchase products from a specific mega-corp hurt anyone? Am I hurting people every time I go to Walmart and not Target? Please, I’m begging you. Actually think about the things you are saying. Don’t just parrot the same irrelevant lines you’ve seen other people use."

PuppyPunter21 4 points an hour ago: "Well, if any players live in Florida, they have recently passed quite a few laws targeted against them. The continued promotion of these types of boycotts encites more hate. Covid caused more hate towards Asians, Kayne West promoted more antisemitism. Ignoring it isn't a solution."

QuantumFreakonomics 3 points an hour ago: " 'Well, if any players live in Florida, they have recently passed quite a few laws targeted against them.' What rights did these laws take away? The right to have teachers come out in front of their students? I had never heard of that "right" before a few years ago. 'The continued promotion of these types of boycotts encites more hate. Covid caused more hate towards Asians' Is your position that someone shouldn't be allowed to talk about an issue if it could possibly cause someone else to hate another group? I don't see how that is a workable position at all. Should we not have instituted Covid restrictions or even complained about covid in order to prevent Asian hate? 'Ignoring it isn't a solution.' Why not? People speaking their mind on public issues is the bedrock of Democracy. Some of those people are going to say things you don't like. A democracy where certain issues are not free to be discussed is not much of a democracy at all.

This was the extent of my participation in the thread. I did not expect my comments to be particularly well-received by the Reddit population, but I felt that I pointed out enough legitimate issues that I would be safe from accusations of trolling. I was wrong.

Here is the modmail message I received informing me of my permanent ban, along with the brief conversation we had before they muted me with their absolute power.1 For reference, here are the /r/baseball rules. Would an honest reading of these rules give you any reason at all to think that anything I posted would not be allowed, much less permaban worthy? You would have to be steeped in internet leftist culture to understand that, "Trolling, threatening, harassing, or inciting violence towards individuals or groups will not be tolerated. Racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant language in both comments and submissions will be removed." means that pointed questions against the progressive consensus will get you tossed out.

I understand why so many subreddits are complete circlejerks now. It's not about echo-chambers and voting dynamics. They literally just banned everyone who disagreed.

1. Here is the source they cited for their "62%" figure. I'll let you decide for yourself whether this poll is applicable

As an aside, here's one thing I noticed about the Bud Light boycott: A lot of people here have pointed out that the similarities among major brands of light beer have made it a relatively easy thing to boycott since alternatives are readily available. I was already inclined to agree with this sentiment, precisely because it underscores why this boycott hasn't seemed to have much of an effect in my neck of the woods. A lot of products are popular by default, and they're usually the products that are marketed by major brands and have a ton of advertising. You don't need to know a lot about soft drinks to know that Coke is popular and that most people will find it an acceptable beverage; if you're having a party and serve Coke and someone doesn't like it, they'll at least understand why you chose it in a way they wouldn't if Cheerwine was the only option. In certain areas Bud Light is like this for beer; it's not so much a choice but the lack of a choice. Drinking Bud Light is staring into the void.

But where I live, in Western PA, it isn't. Among light beers, Miller Lite is clearly number one, followed by a tie between Coors Light and IC Light, the local option. Bud Light is a distant fourth, at least according to my own totally unscientific observations. Actually, fourth might be too generous as Busch Light is pretty common and Keystone and Natty are the go-tos for poor college students. What this means for Bud Light is that drinking it around here is a conscious choice. You don't select it by default, you select it because you've tried the other options and prefer Bud. This means three things. First, the boycott is more something that is on the news than something people are actively participating in, since they never drank Bud Light anyway. Hence, there seems to be little social pressure to jump on the boycott bandwagon, since there is none. Second, Bud Light drinking here is more of a personal thing than a cultural thing. Drinking Bud Light never signaled anything about you other than that you liked Bud Light, so there's no cultural associations with continuing to drink it despite the boycott. Finally, it's much harder to switch to a competitor because drinking Bud Light means having consciously rejected the competitors in the past; you're less inclined to switch if it's a beer you know you don't like.

So I still see people, even those I know or suspect to be conservative, drinking Bud Light in numbers roughly equivalent to what I saw before. As one conservative friend told me today: "I've drinking this beer since I was sixteen. I'm not going to stop just because some guy wants to wear a dress."

What about Yuengling? I seem to recall that company having some sort of association with the right wing, though I can't remember the details.

deleted

You love to see it. I hope you're enjoying the beer, beyond drinking from America's oldest brewery still family owned, by Republicans who voted Trump at that. It's the ideal substitute.

And while yuengling lager and black and tan are quite different from a mass market light beer, they also produce Flight, which is a Michelob ultra competitor. 95 calories and easy drinking.

They did. Dick Yuengling invited Trump to speak at the brewery during the 2016 campaign, which underscored his history of working to prevent his employees from unionizing. Several members of my own family said they were going to permanently boycott Yuengling for this. That boycott lasted only a few weeks, though Yuengling is a unique beer that isn't easily replaceable by competitors. I mean what exactly are its competitors anyway? The closest national brand I can think of is Michelob Amber Bock, and you don't really see that much anymore. Dos Equis Amber, maybe?

I've drinking this beer since I was sixteen.

Which is why they think the brand is in decline. The older drinkers who've been drinking it for years are sticking with it, but they're not getting the new younger drinkers (for various reasons). That's why the influencer disaster. I've tried to find the demographics of Mulvaney's audience but that seems to be commercial information that isn't readily available. So I'm going to assume it's majorly women in the age range 18-30 (or so).

They want the 18 year girls to start drinking Bud Light, so by extension the association with "I'm a guy who has been drinking this since I was 16 and I'm 30/40/however old now" is unfavourable. Young drinkers are not going to be wooed by a dad beer, so this is why they tried to use Mulvaney to make it hip'n'happening.

Your friend may continue to drink it, but he's not the market they're trying to attract now. The (unfortunate) head of marketing for Bud Light in this interview, from around the 25th minute, about what she wanted to do. Evolve and Elevate. Representation. Inclusivity. The words that came back to haunt her:

"(And) we had this hangover. I mean Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humour and it was really important that we had another approach".

Good find on (at least one) of the original sources this and another interview are the ones I'd seen passed around in the early days of the controversy but most of the links/mirrors have since been scrubbed. Clearly the lady realized that she was giving proverbial ammunition to her opponents and sought to deny them the easy reload.

The problem is I have a tiny modicum of sympathy for her. Bud Light is (or was) the Number One brand, but it was in a slow, easy, steady decline: younger drinkers aren't drinking, or if they're drinking, they're not drinking beer, or if they are drinking beer, they're not drinking the old familiar "dad drinks that" brands.

So she was handed the job of "revitalise the brand and get young people drinking it" and being a modern woman who is in marketing she immediately went "we must be diverse and inclusive!" and then picked the single most terrible choice ever for the brand. The only way to make it worse would be a historical revamp about "hey, did you know that Bud was Adolf Hitler's favourite beer? and he should know because Germans love beer!" 🤦‍♀️

As others have pointed out, there's ways to do this that can pivot slowly away from the traditional market to bring in younger, more progressive drinkers. But not by some gay guy doing a performance-art drag act who, when he smiles, has a face that - in the words of an Irish saying - has a mouth like a hake.

Comparison photo of hake heads here.

I actually have a fair bit of sympathy but she was still monumentaly stupid and as the poster in the hallway outside my office reads...

"The penalty for stupidity is death"

If anything she got off lightly.