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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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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.