Patagonia joins growing list of companies boycotting Facebook ads

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There are typically two factors that are used to critique clothing production, ethics and quality. Ethically production in China is fairly easy to do well assuming you're not objecting wholesale to giving money to the Chinese economy. Working conditions are normally fine and can be great.

In terms of quality, China is pretty good for a number of types of clothing. I don't know about activewear as we don't produce any, but for many categories at many price points they're basically as good as anywhere else. There are categories where they're not, regardless of how much you pay. I have a feeling that suits might have been one of these but not certain.

For very high end clothing, production in Europe, particularly Italy, is a good sign. For anything else there's no reason why China can't compete on quality for most categories.

Patagonia has been leading the way on ethical manufacturing for a long time. Easily since the late 1990s. They don't appear to be bargaining for rock-bottom price with their Chinese contractors -- they are asking for higher standards, both labor and environmental. According to their website, they have narrowed the list of contractors they work with so that they can monitor them better.

Also, as their website points out, it's important to not fetishize American clothes manufacturing as such. The American textile industry is much smaller than it once was, due to NAFTA and related agreements.

For a lot more, see: https://www.patagonia.com/stories/patagonia-clothing-made-wh...

Yes, they are spending their profits on it. And people like companies that do good things, so i'm sure it earns them some trust & brand loyalty. Does that mean it's ill intended?

A good company is one that aligns its own profitability with good causes. Part of that includes understanding how to gain publicity for being a genuinely responsible company.

You can live a life completely devoid of ethical behavior beyond following the law, and nobody will say a word or think anything of it. But as soon as you put any effort to being extra ethical, expect endless criticism. Dave Eggars, in one of my favorite books "You Shall Know Our Velocity", has a quote that sums this up nicely: "The inactive must justify their sloth by picking nits with those making an attempt".

Red state people don't enjoy fishing, climbing, skiing and hiking? Please.

The rest of your comment wilfully ignores the company structure (A public benefit corp), philosophy, history of transparency, and history of activism. Just one example -

>In June 2018, the company announced that it would donate the $10 million it received from President Trump's 2017 tax cuts to "groups committed to protecting air, land and water and finding solutions to the climate crisis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patagonia,_Inc.#Activism

>Ppl blindly supporting this are politically motivated, obviously.

Sounds like you're the one making politically motivated attacks not based on evidence.

Please don't bother cherry picking their mis-steps as "proof" that I'm wrong. Looking at the big picture, their track record of trying to make ethical, transparent choices speaks for itself.

Anyways, Patagonia is a pretty small company despite their nationwide reputation, and they've always put values first and hoped/assumed things would work out, their founder has written about this himself. If your business model isn't a cost cutting / race to the bottom one, then a lot of traditional logic about how businesses are run can end up never implemented in the first place.

i know this is a fighting word, but eco/conservation groups are a lot more intersectional and (in the US) bipartisan than you’d potentially expect.

If you don’t start firing the wrong customers you’ll enevitably start designing your products for them.

Like how trucks have become godawful expensive monstrosities because their primary customers are buying them for the image instead of actually needing to use them on a regular basis.

The left also mass report stuff they don't like as "hate speech" which automatically results in a ban.

Sorry, but the hate speech stuff is just a new way to censor stuff some people don't like and in the end it'll affect us all, no matter if left or right wing.

I can link a few tweets, but with millions of twitter messages a day, I can hardly link enough to be statistically relevant if you choose to believe the other way, and I don't have the energy to randomly sample twitter.

August Ames chose not to have sex with men who have sex with men. Because of this decision to do what she wants with her own body, she was harassed by people telling her to commit suicide for it.

She DID kill herself, and the people that told her to were not even banned.

https://www.spartareport.com/2017/12/leftists-bullied-august...

If I linked you threads of people like Tariq Nashad calling for racial violence against whites, my post would likely be flagged and I'd be banned for posting flamebait.

I don't think there's an explicit conspiracy but the forces are aligned such that they suppress content and naturally suppress criticism of suppression, and that creates an internet-wide false consensus.

I have not seen them censor the Black Egyptian or Black Moor hypotheses in spite of being associated with Black Supremacy and being "demonstrably false" which is a category of things the #StopHateForProfit campaigns are targeting.

In fairness I don't know what content ends up being blocked, maybe there is a way to see it. But I have seen particular efforts, such as the doctored video Donald Trump recently posted, to tag content as misleading but I have not seen this for the above. As you pointed out, they did the same for coronavirus. Perhaps some of this debate is just about the 'reach' of content but afaict the Black Egyptian disinformation is prevalent. I might be wrong, I don't know all the ins and outs of Twitter blocking.

The important part is the "pending meaningful action" - end of July is the minimum timing, which can extend if no meaningful action is taken.

The pressure on Facebook is not about the media spend of Patagonia, is being called out by them and taking a stand.

First, not all types of “damage” and “repair” completely annihilate each other with no lasting effects. Protected areas like national parks are a great example of that. Donating to a charity that plants trees does not just “undo” investments in old-growth logging companies.

Secondly, the economies of scale that your tobacco company investments contribute toward may overwhelm the economies of scale that your charity donations contribute toward.

Patagonia's stance against hate some merit to it, but it is in the end an illiberal stance, one which fails to acknowledge the concept that freedom of speech may be a broadly good thing. As society becomes more illiberal, the list of "hate" will grow broader and the list of approved politicians and causes will grow narrower. I am sure that there are a few on these pages who would be ever so thrilled to ban the entire Republican party from advertising entirely.

We have had similar episodes in this nation's history. The Red Scare comes to mind. The House Unamerican Activities committee set out to find the Communists and Russian agents who were infiltrating government and society at all levels. And there were, in truth, a lot of Russian agents who had infiltrated American government. And yet today we mostly do not talk about that, for instead, we must talk about how the HUAC, its blacklists which would ban people from industry, was a deranged exercise in paranoia, guilt-by-loose-association, and its own forms of hatred.

Today's cancel culture, in which Patagona's boycott is but the smallest plank, is the new HUAC. It differs in that it is not run by government and it is generally leaderless. It is the same in that there are a lot of things which are legitimately problems, and it finds some of them. It is the same in that it deploys abusive media and social-media attention on small-time nobodies, destroying their careers and their livelihoods, in an effort to create an atmosphere of fear and silence its opposition. And I can only hope that future generations will look back on us aghast and ask, "what the hell was wrong with these people?"