![Brand Manager getting ready for Pride Month [Smooth Dunk]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/abf10137-2fee-4a37-805f-7b849fd33e37.jpeg){kind=link}
Transcript
8 panel comic
Panel 1: Yellow guy is working on a laptop in the background. In the foreground is a Brand Manager. Yellow Guy: “Sir, shall I put up our rainbow profile picture?”
Panel 2: Brand Manger snaps his head round and hisses “Cool your jets, Eugene. I’m checking the Profitometer”
Panel 3: Gonna do my best to explain this. We see The Profitometer. A huge machine that whirs and ticks. A digital display at the top of the machine reads “Supporting Pride equals”Beneath this display is a huge gauge with “Max Loss” on the left and “Max profit” on the right. There is a needle that is pointing exactly half way between the two extremes.
Panel 4: Close up on Brand Manager’s face. His teeth are gritted. Sweat trickles down his brow.
Panel 5: Close up on gauge. The needle remains exactly central
Panel 6: Close up on Brand Manager’s eyes. They are concentrating intensely. Also, more sweat.
Panel 7: Close up on the gauge. The needle clicks ONE DEGREE towards profit
Panel 8: Brand Manager screams like a football coach “GO GAY EUGENE”
This comic 🤝 The worst of the alt-right ghouls
Hating the pride month
The comic is about how companies are entirelly performative when they “support” causes.
And my point is that performative support is way better than open, unrepentant hostility.
Companies are also entire performative when they “support” the opposite cause.
As I see it the point of the cartoon is that you can’t trust them either way because they only give a shit about money.
PS: More broadly, changing one’s mind because of “known name/brand” is profoundly idiotic. For example why should anybody change their mind on transexuality because of what J.K. Rolling says?! Better have Principles than have superficial opinions that flop back and forth like a flag on the wind depending on what brands and celebs put out.
We really live in a fucked up society when people let themselves be guided in the Moral space by incredibly superficial branding or statements from famous people - those things are way too important for being influenced by anything other that actual Principles.
I don’t think it’s about hating pride month itself, rather how corporations make meaningless gestures based on profit margins. Example Target pulling LGBTQ+ merch a year or two ago because it being anti-DEI was in fashion. Or how Tesla used to boast being the most inclusive workplace, and now, well, yeah.
It goes to the adage, if someone (in this case, a corporation ) has to tell you they’re a good person… they probably aren’t.
That being true, having corpos doing pride month celebration in their own corporate way doesn’t hurt LGBTQ+ community more than corpos just existing. On the contrary, it helps with normalisation and mainstreamisation. Mocking corpos for doing it, however, hurts the community, because it gives chuds more ammunition. They want for corpos to stop slapping rainbows on everything more than you, and for the reasons you don’t want to know about.