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Comment by djur | Hacker News Reader

Even Paul himself uses the word in a way that sure seems inconsistent with his definition:

"Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been permanently damaged by it."

Bud Light sent Dylan Mulvaney promotional cans of beer to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of her web series about her transition. Mulvaney had been a target of right-wing activists for some time, and those activists drove the boycott. This was just a particularly effective example of a long line of right-wing campaigns against companies that associate with trans celebrities. How does "woke" fit into this except from the perspective that "woke" just means being on one side of the culture war?

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why is a beer a platform for pushing some individual's personal choices?

why should it be used to push any sort of political messaging?

why shouldn't bud light owners reject a brand that pushes those political messages?

The premise here is that the existence of trans people is inherently political, but in any case, Graham didn't define "woke" as "political", he defined it as "an aggressively performative focus on social justice". How does that describe sending beer cans to a social media influencer?

you keep moving the goal posts. im asking why its difficult to accept a poor marketing messaging that triggers the consumer base leads to bad sales as demonstrated by Bud Light's decision to feature a transvestite on their beer cans, promotional material.

If anything, djur is attempting to keep the discussion on topic. The question is whether Paul Graham is correct to claim that Bud Light did indeed "venture too far into wokeness". Whether or not boycotts are legitimate in capitalism is a separate matter.

P.S. Seeing that you are still posting in this thread, I'm keen to find out whether you can support your asssertions as per my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42708660

Right. All of the people trying to say "yes, of course supporting trans people are woke" are proving my point: the rational, classical-liberal case Graham claims to be making against "wokeness" is such a thin layer over culture war politics that even Graham can't keep it from leaking. I don't know if Graham himself has anything against trans people -- he might be one of the people under the misapprehension that Bud Light was slapping Mulvaney on all their cans and that the boycott was an organic movement of turned-off consumers. But the people he's allying with certainly do.

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