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Comment by postalcoder | Hacker News Reader

Disney is not the same company it was 20 years ago.

2025 Disney encourages children to gamble and gives Pat McAfee significant visibility.

Disney is the same company as it was 20 years ago. In fact, it's the same company as it was 100 years ago. They only care about profit. They do just enough brand management to preserve the profit motive.

Amen. Blaming Disney for bad content is like blaming politicians.

Who asked for the content? Who elected the politicians?

**[Jiminy] crickets**

Garbage in, garbage out, as someone wise once said

Fwiw I think the all US presidents since Clinton were elected on a non interventionist/pacifist campaign. Blaming the voters when every one of them (less so with Biden) violated those promises is a bit unfair, if you still believe in democracy.

Almost every one of them was elected again, often by wider margins (the only exception losing to another one of them) after deatroying any illusion innthat direction you might argue was produced by their campaign positions, so I don't think you can absolved the American electorate here, even if one agrees that their campaign before taking office met your description.

The parent's claim is effortlessly debunked.

Bush sure wasn't anti-interventionist for the second term after entering the Iraq War 2.0. Even Obama campaigned to persist the "necessary" Afghanistan war.

Blaming the voters seems completely sensible when they reelected W in 2004. The man's Vice President was Dick freakin' Cheney. You can't seriously tell me the people voted for pacifism and got screwed over.

I don't recall George W. Bush ever actually promising to stay out of wars and interventions. It's been standard for the two parties to criticize each-other on grounds of doing interventionism badly or going too far towards one extreme regarding foreign policy, but nobody has run as a real pacifist or isolationist because they would lose in a landslide. It especially doesn't help that pacifism and isolationism are associated with activist fringes in both parties who often lean into crank theories or make friends publicly with adversarial states.

We can acknowledge that people are terrible, while also wanting people not to cater to the lowest common denominator.

You appear to be lost.

Who said and where's the "false dichotomy" you allude to in the discussion above?

I read your comment as saying that we should blame the people who create the demand for Disney's products, and the voters who elect the politicians, instead of Disney and the politicians. Not so?

No, comparative blame is fair for all parties.

The context is messy, but my comment's in the context of rejecting blame on Disney alone for "losing their way" when they have had the same way (read: $$$) as before and they're delivering products people want.

Yes, perhaps if we deflated Disney’s moral rot by a diversified basket of other morally-rotted goods, I suppose we’d be able to conclude that Disney is perhaps the same company.

Outside that effort, I see a company once famous for its prudishness now unafraid of shame.

Companies can have additional motives to profit, and they’re more likely to when control is concentrated just because individual people have multiple desires.

This was certainly the case with early Disney because Walt Disney was a megalomaniac utopian. I don’t think the original Epcot plans ever had a reasonable chance of being profitable, but Walt pushed them because he believed he was the saviour of urbanism in America.

To be fair to Walt Disney, he cared about a lot beyond profit and believed in advancing technology and society in a way modern corporate leaders absolutely do not. He was no saint but he's a far cry from modern CEO's.

To be fair, Walt Disney partnered with his brother Roy Disney, and they co-founded and ran the Walt Disney Company (and the iterations before it). These iterations of the Disney Company were never just Walt Disney.

Yes, but if you watch any documentaries about early Disney and listen to those people talk everything was about Walt's vision even after death they would ask "What would Walt want or do?" He was a figure whose influence and vision is on another level in American History (both good and bad) and early Disney was Walt no matter who was in charge on paper or even if Walt was still alive. That only started to change under Eisner. Roy was the one who kept Walt grounded so ambition shrunk but they stayed the course Walt set.

Walt grew up in an era when there was still a sense that wealth and power brought with it strong moral obligations to serve the community and nation. We lost that somewhere along the way.

We lost that when it was found that losing that was even more profitable.

I think that, given the times, we might rate him a little bit above "no saint". Perhaps slightly below or at par with the norms of his time, which we could now look back on as the peak of some rather nasty tendencies in society.

https://www.vulture.com/2013/12/walt-disney-anti-semitism-ra...

He also normalized and romanticized the American Expansion and displacement of Native Americans. He's a very complicated and flawed figured who irrevocably changed the course of this nation. Even Walt recognized that Walt Disney the man and Walt Disney the icon were two different people, and he was flawed in ways as a man the icon who appeared weekly in everyone's living room was not.

I firmly disagree and think this shallow take dishonors a pretty great man. While not perfect, Disney gave us the bedrock of American children's culture which has been a soft tool for the US for generations. Not to mention technology and other advancements. I'm not a Disney nut, but the man was one-of-a-kind and an impressive industrialist who instilled a great culture of innovation and a deep love of children and play. All things I value.

> While not perfect

Yep, Disney was also a leading producer of racist tropes and content during Jim Crow. Historical clips of Mickey Mouse characters putting on minstrel shows with blackface alongside other racist stereotypes like crows can easily be found online[0]. Not to mention Song of the South[1], a film Disney produced based on Uncle Remus stories following slaves who happily live on a Georgia plantation. Disney has, of course, done their best to scrub these entries from history, but they played a major role in depicting racist tropes to kids for decades.

0: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/b5j4T9E8PuE

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South

Don't forget the Native Americans in Peter Pan!

We all acknowledge that Walt Disney was a flawed person, I don't think anybody here disagrees. To me, what sets him apart from other corporate leaders isn't Walt's moral character, but rather his ambition to influence the direction of humanities development, both culturally and technologically. He was about a lot more than just making number go up.

One could argue that the company reoriented itself so purely towards children's art and kitsch because they needed to get themselves into a market segment where they could completely sanitize their output of these kinds of embarrassments.

But their robotics division though

What has Pat Mcafee got to do with anything, is he somehow a controversial figure now?

I think its just that people either love him or hate him and it seems like OP is part of the latter group

I don’t have an opinion on him, despite the suggestiveness of my comment. He’s more illustrative of a spirit that Disney at a time did not have an appetite for.

But this was also just a short-lived political environment as well, where companies pretended to care about the current thing because it was politically expedient. How long did it take for them to do a 180? I mean they didn't believe in any of that stuff even a little.

Pat Mcafee catching strays (He has had his show for ~6 years) but Screamin' A Smith gets a pass?

Your bias is showing.

Stephen A Smith has done as much to harm ESPN's brand than any other figure. Please don't assume my biases from whom I failed to mention – I could have used SAS instead of Pat and my point would have been the same.

Perhaps I should have expected that the conversation would get pulled this way but it's not where I wanted it to go.

Sorry, my point was SAS has been on the network for at least what, 15 years? And he isn’t knowledgeable about anything but the NBA.

PM is probably the nicest guy on the network. I get why people hate him, but rarely does he talk shit about people.

If anything, SAS paved the way for PM.

That was why I said you’re biased. Or you just don’t know the network very well.

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