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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023

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I'm realizing slowly but surely

Oh come on! Your whole shtick here from the start, including your username, was "it's all just incompetence and mundane market forces, guys!"

I'm realizing slowly but surely that most of what is afflicting Disney isn't ideology itself but sheer incompetence of people that run the company, they just get to use the ideology as a shield for their inability.

The ideology creates incompetence though. One of the culture war fronts was woke culture's hostility to meritocracy.

and bad media analyst company like Parrot Analytics using social media "engagement" as a success metric not the sentiment. So Disney can shove ideology to pump the ESG numbers

It's almost like this is exactly what ESG was specifically designed for.

It's not incompetence at all. Disney has portions of the company which are basically money printers, and this money is deliberately used in service of pushing the ideology of the woke culture warriors controlling the company.

Where does it make money? They are in discussions on selling theme parks outside of the US, toy licensing is cratering because the action figures are collecting dust on the shelves, they picked a fight with the UK over the terms of Disney+ streaming (which is not profitable btw) and the box office keeps on bombing.

https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/app/uploads/2023/02/2022-Annual-Report.pdf

Starting page 67. Revenue of $82.7 billion, net income of $3.5 billion. They are making money hand over fist.

Why did they layoff staff then? https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/disney-layoffs-end-7000-1235629809/ to make more money so they can fund more activism?

Why did they layoff staff then?

presumably their costs were greater than loss of profits

(or it was a bad idea but some manager benefitted personally)

Yeah but the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't what was on the books in 2022 but what is going to be on the books now. We don't know how the annual report for 2023 is going to look like but if the headlines and layoffs are any indication it is not going to be as good as 2022.

The point you are making is that you have nothing and are ignoring actual hard evidence in favor of vague indications from the press.

But it doesn't prove that they use profits from one part to funnel over to other parts of the organization to push "the message" at a loss! The vague indications show that some of the decisions are coming back to bite them, this is me trying to think differently and if the annual report next year show that I was wrong. So be it!