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Notes -
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/companies-starbucks-mcdonalds-face-controversy-amid-israel-hamas/story?id=104219615
Meanwhile, https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2023/11/14/indonesians-boycott-mcdonalds-starbucks-over-support-for-israel
So, the Starbucks union posted pro-Palestinian messages on social media, as is their right to do. Starbucks in response distances itself from its union — not even to support Israel, but simply to stay out of it altogether. McDonald’s franchises are independently owned and operated, so McDonald’s in Israel gives free food to the IDF, and McDonald’s in Indonesia and other Muslim countries gives aid to Palestine instead.
And for just doing business as businesses do, https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/propalestine-vandals-who-targeted-starbucks-and-maccas-in-melbourne-dubbed-extremists/news-story/6f6c50b4316aa4426b90702d5ccf1c91?amp
I mean, I could at least see the Chick-fil-A boycott making sense. You eating at Chick-fil-A benefits the CEO and private owner of the company, so you want to stop giving money to that guy even if that might end up hurting others employed by Chick-fil-A who don’t share such views.
Or the Hogwarts Legacy boycott, where an argument could be made that even pirating the game gives cultural clout to the Harry Potter brand, and therefore you should avoid the game altogether if you dislike JK Rowling enough. I mean, I disagree, but I can at least see where that is coming from. You don’t want to benefit people you dislike, even if it also benefits others who you have nothing against at all.
This, though? This isn’t even hurting “the right people.” What? Am I missing a potential steel man here, or are these protestors not even bothering to pretend like what they’re doing has any rational basis beyond pure tribalism anymore?
To attempt to steel man: as a business owner, the choice to adopt the branding of a franchise is because that branding has value and you expect to make more money from taking up the branding than from not. As a protestor, if you see your enemies using that branding (or its proceeds) to wage war against you, you want to disarm them of that weapon. So you attack anyone who takes up that branding, decreasing the value of the brand and incentivizing those who benefit from the brand to band together to prevent it from being used as a weapon against you and so maintain its value. The large bulk of franchisers care far more about making money than either Israel or Palestine, so there's an effective lever.
If you're an Indonesian franchise owner, you end up giving resources to the Good Team and pressuring global to prevent the giving of resources to the Bad Team. Worst case scenario, if the costs of boycotts and vandalism outweigh the value of the franchise, you defranchise. If you're global, you pressure your international franchises not to publically give resources to the Bad Team, enforcing that as much as the costs of enforcement don't outweigh the cost of losing Indonesian franchises.
It makes perfect sense, assuming that the boycotters and vandals have done a rigorous, informed analysis of every agent's costs.
Ah thank you! This is just what I was looking for, even if I don’t personally believe that they “have done a rigorous, informed analysis of every agent's costs.”
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But it certainly isn't their right to use Starbucks branding in their controversial political statement. They aren't Starbucks and can't use Starbucks IP without permission. Which is what the lawsuit is about.
Their use may well be illegal, but copyright law is a lot more complicated than 'they can't use Starbucks IP without permission'.
Copyright law is in general meant to prevent customer confusion (eg preventing people from believing knockoffs are authentic). Since it seems like a lot of people were confused here, it may well be copyright violation; although I don't know whether confusing political protestors about what a brand says, rather than confusing customers about what a brand is selling, is a central covered case. Maybe it is.
That's trademarks, not copyright.
True, trademark is what applies here.
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That is an important distinction and worth up holding. The underlying issue is that the economic logic of copyright leads to an awkward compromise. Copyright terms long enough to liberate the Artist from the tyranny of the day job, but not so long as subject the Artist to the tyranny of the copyright office. (Where there's a hit, there's a rip!). Meanwhile the economic logic of trademarks suggests that they should be eternal.
The culture war aspect is that copyright eternalists love the term "intellectual property" because it fudges the distinction. They hope to use the unlimited life of trademarks as an argument for eternal copyright because they are "the same kind of thing".
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I know quite a few Muslims who refuse to drink Starbucks for this reason. There are a lot of collages of Jewish-founded or run businesses that float around on WhatsApp etc in the Arab/Muslim world.
In a deracinated, secularizing world in which the core Islamic territory is increasingly divided in two by the Saudi/Iranian Sunni/Shia proxy conflict, Palestine is literally the sole unifying cause for the global ummah, they can’t really agree on anything else.
This also explains Muslim radicalization about it, it’s the only cause that a traditionalist 75 year old grandfather who prays five times a day and his 21 year old feminist art student granddaughter who doesn’t even wear hijab can agree on with similar zeal. For many Westernized Muslims, a combination of generic POC-‘anticolonial’ activism in general and Palestine advocacy specifically is what being a Muslim means to them.
(That’s not unique to Muslims, of course, plenty of progressive Christians and Jews do similar things, but it is important to remember in these discussions.)
I find it so hard to want to support the the Palestinian cause even if they have legitimate grievances, because their tactics are so deplorable--the deliberate use of violence and martyrdom and their citizens as fodder to invoke sympathy from the Western masses. It's like an extreme version of performance art or theatrics.
I don't think we should conflate Hamas with all Palestinians.
Take a look at this: https://www.awrad.org/en/article/10719/Wartime-Poll-Results-of-an-Opinion-Poll-Among-Palestinians-in-the-West-Bank-and-Gaza-Strip
See the tables of results. The press release doesn't mention the objectionable bits.
68% of Palestinians "extremely support" the October 7 terror. Only 7% oppose it.
Edit: 68% of those in WB. 59.3% overall. 46.6% in GS for "extremely support".
But for WB + GS overall you have 75% who support or extremely support the terror.
Yeah, 68% in the West Bank. Those in Gaza sit at 46%.
Secondly, the poll in question doesn't appear to differentiate between the violent attack on the 7th and the civilian casualties. This makes it a weighing game for the pollee - how much do they support the fight for independence vs. condemning attacks against innocent Israelis? W/o knowing this, we cannot know what people are saying they support.
Even in Gaza only 21% oppose it. 64% support or strongly support.
I don't think you can say that the attack on 07.10 was both a military attack and a terror attack as two separate things. The killing and capturing of civilians was the main objective. Most of the killed were civilians. They knocked out some military posts to have free rein. And they paraded corpses and hostages in the streets of Gaza and shared videos of the butchery.
The point I'm getting at is that we don't know what the Palestinians think of killing civilians because that policy is inherently bundled with Hamas' actions as a group enacting violence to remove Israel from the land. If a socialist in WW2 were to support the US/UK against the Nazis, your logic would have this person counted as a capitalist since they aren't rejecting the violence.
Secondly, you can find videos of a great many things. For example, a video with dozens or even hundreds of rioters burning a building down in the name of their cause. That video doesn't necessarily tell you what the supporters of the cause think as a whole.
The logic wouldn't say that they are a capitalist, the logic would say that they are a supporter of the kind of violence that the US/UK uses against the Nazis. Likewise, Palestinians are mostly supporters of the kind of violence Hamas uses, which is killing civilians.
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They are currently being bombed, though. That tends to cause people to circle the wagons. At present I very much doubt any Palestinians will say no to anything that sounds even remotely anti-Israeli.
June 2023, 1200+ adults in Gaza Strip: https://www.pcpsr.org/sites/default/files/Poll%2088%20English%20full%20text%20June%202023.pdf
Page 25.
70% support or strongly support killing civilians inside Israel.
Sure?
It's not news to me that the Palestinians hate the Israelis. Even well before October 7, I am confident that it would be suicidal to walk down the street in Gaza City wearing a kippah, or bearing any sign of either Jewish or Israeli identity. The Palestinians have never liked or empathised with the Israelis.
I expect anti-Israeli feeling to have only intensified as a result of October 7 and the aftermath - so these sets of figures don't surprise me.
If it's not news to you, why did you try to argue that the results in the first poll was due to the current retaliatory bombing?
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Well, Hamas does that stuff. Hamas is not that popular among Palestinian civilians, and there are plenty of other peaceful orgs pushing their cause.
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Seems to be working quite well unfortunatly. A lot of the low information people around me support Palestine. Somewhat trivial to be pushed to neutral though but it requires 1 on 1 persuasions.
Really? A lot of the low information people around me seem to have settled into ‘Jews control the world anyways, just make your peace with it already, the Palestinians are all terrorists’.
I don’t believe you.
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Melbourne has always been a hotbed of leftwing political activism. The area of the city where the vandalism took place is close to the State Library of Victoria; a site used regularly for political protests.
It's also just up the road from Flinders St Station (the largest train station in the city and the hub of the rail network) and Fed Square. The corner of Flinders and Swanston streets is another extremely popular site for protests, and marching from Flinders St Station up to the State Library is very much the 'default' protest route here. The Macca's they hit is practically next to the station.
This isn't justifying anything - just that if I heard that protesters or rioters vandalised anything in Melbourne, yep, that is where it would happen.
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I'm not sure I'd call it a "hotbed", but Melbourne definitely is the most left-wing city in Australia (the inner city is the only safe Greens seat in the country, and most of the rest is Labour). And yes, the SLoV is a common protest site, though not all of them are CW-loaded (that's where I went for the PauseAI protest, for instance).
AFAIK Canberra's more left wing, such as being the only region to actually Vote Yes at the last referendum... but I guess it's more of a Labor-voting Left Wing than a radical one.
Only 75% of Victorians live in Melbourne; nearly 100% of Australian Capital Territorians live in Canberra (the population figure for Canberra on Wikipedia is actually higher than that for the ACT, due to being somewhat more recent). Haven't run the exact numbers but I think Melbourne by itself voted Yes (also, a significant chunk of the No areas still vote Labour - they're leftist in the unionist/socialist sense).
But yes, I did forget Canberra.
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I guess the steelman would be 'here we are, talking about how much they care about Israel/Palestine and the lengths they'll go to to express those feelings. That's pretty much what they wanted people to do.'
Basically, the point of protest and civil disobedience and rioting and etc. is rarely to hurt the specific proximal people you are immediately hurting with your actions. The point is to leverage that hurting into attention and publicity and public discussion of the things you care about, and to recruit everyone hearing about your actions to help you create a sense of pressure on those in power to do something about it.
Basically, 'there's no such thing as bad publicity'.
(Note I don't personally think this is a good justification, but it's the best steelman I can think of)
yup. case in point the The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act , which will go down as the most polarizing proposed legislation ever, getting zero Republican votes
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Steel manning perhaps isn't the most appropriate response here. The people committing these actions are not careful intellectuals thinking in steel men. We are not debating college professors.
A better approach is to try to imagine and inhabit the emotional state that leads to these actions.
Specifically, the intoxicated perma berserk mental state of holy war. The serene vision of dominance and power, of divine righteousness, of inevitable victory. The crusader mindset.
You are right! You are powerful! The heathens will fall before you! The kingdom of god shall rise, and with it, you!
The reason for vandalizing a Starbucks or McDonalds is to exercise power. To revel in wrathful indulgence. To show that the will of god is in fact supreme over the heathen merchants.
Ultimately, they are breaking the rules, they are doing something to someone against their will, and they are getting away with it. This is almost worth doing for its own sake, a flimsy nonsensical political pretext pushes it into viability.
It's not entirely-obvious that they will get away with it; we don't have as much of an anti-police movement here in Oz (lack of a racial component helps a lot with that), and my understanding is that this kind of mass vandalism is not normal. There could well be some arrests (particularly if the protestors weren't masked; security cameras are a thing).
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If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. All of the franchises share a reputation for taste, service, cleanliness, etc, and they also share a reputation for supporting political groups. Don't like being lumped in with activist franchises? Get the HQ to cancel their agreement and maintain stricter message discipline.
Doesn't help in the Starbucks union case
I think it works better for a corporation and its union than for a pair of franchises.
If a consumer wanted to display their displeasure at the actions of a certain union, what could they do? They could write strongly-worded letters, protest in the streets...or take their business elsewhere. Yes, there is a nominally adversarial relationship between the corporation and the union, but their interests are so strongly intertwined that hurting one almost inevitably hurts the other.
Buying a Toyota to stick it to the UAW is valid, and boycotting Starbucks to stick it to their union is valid as well.
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