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So, I will make no secret that I'm rolling my eyes at all of that marketing stuff that goes up every year. But I've been thinking, it doesn't have to be so superficial and pointless. Maybe there's some rare exception out there that took the opportunity to say or do something meaningful.

Did you come across a company or organisation lately that use the occasion to take some stance beyond feelgood buzzwords or implement a policy internally or in their area of operations that is of at least some importance?

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[-] Denali@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago

Why are we still pretending like brand visibility isn't important. Yes it's pandering to make you want to spend money, yes it's all "virtue signalling" bullshit - but it still goes to show they value and want our business. Many brands decided not to do anything remotely showing support for us this year and that should be worrying, yes they didn't do anything in the first place and obviously didn't have our back, but they still showed some form of representation for us and helped push us into the public so we don't have to hide. It's so ridiculous seeing young queer anticapitalists actively shit on the only goodwill rep we had in mainstream venues. They might not have meant anything to you but they sure as hell were good rep for normalization more than just bitching about how much you hate it on the internet.

[-] raccoona_nongrata@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Well said. People have gotten kind of turned around in regard to corporate pride support.

The idea that you can criticize a company for being insincere or hypocritical in its values should be thought of as separate to general support acceptance by companies of pride and the societal impact it has. The general support is always an overall good thing in comparison to the alternative.

What I think happened somewhere along the line was people were made to conflate the two, the discussion became framed in such a way that it was implicitly accepted that you couldn't criticize the insincereity without also taking the position that companies can't have values and shouldn't take positions on social issues.

But that last concept is actually quite a far-right sort of notion. You see people using the same argument for why it's ok for companies to externalize their costs and do things like use slave labor etc. "A company can't be moral or have values, it's only there to make profit." is a lie that has been trojan-horsed into the discussion about pride.

Companies do function to make profit, yes, but they are still made up of human beings who can and should be held morally accountable for the actions of the corporations. And profit can still be made without being immoral, perhaps not as much as easily, but mugging a person and stealing from them is also technically "easy" but we still consider it wrong, even if that mugger needs, generally, to make money to live.

The far-right excels at this kind of political framing of debate and public discussion. So much so that often times they get center or even left leaning people unwityingly adopting their terminology and the underlying implications that support their worldview. I don't think the center/left has done a good job of combatting or even understanding how framing is effecting our political discourse.

[-] agrammatic@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

For clarity, I refer to an emphasised line in OP where I very clearly write that it occurred to me that it doesn't have to be meaningless and that I'm looking for examples where the better-case scenario happened.

[-] raccoona_nongrata@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Yea, I was broadly agreeing with your statement and expanding upon it, not so much challenging it.

The general idea I was going for is that even those who are anti-capitalist could benefit from acknowledging some of the nuance that has been lost in the discussion of corporate pride. Anti-capitalist sensibilities have been disingenuously co-opted to get people arguing against their own best interests (in the context of pride and lgbt acceptance).

The benefit of companies adopting pride is holistic, regardless of insincerity by some.

I could be confused myself though, and maybe misinterpreted some of what you were getting at.

this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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