Monday, March 26, 2012

You Fail!

Holy crap, now that is a failure.

As you very likely have heard by now, the National Organization for Marriage--a national organization opposed to civil marriage rights for gay people (I've mentioned groups like this using misleading language before; it's kinda their thing)--is rather upset with everybody's favorite coffee chain, Starbucks. Actually, I hate coffee and probably live in one of the few places in the United States where there aren't any Starbucks locations that I can get to easily, but everybody else's favorite coffee place.

Why? Oh, well they seem to have just noticed that Starbucks has an official stance in support of gay marriage rights, in addition to making a point of treating gay employees equally. Very nice.

At the recent Starbucks shareholders meeting, a few people associated with NoM asked some pretty stupid-sounding questions.
"By not intentionally offending certain customers, don't you think you're offending other customers? I mean, I'm just worried about the effect on the company... I mean, somebody could boycott! I'm talking about myself."
It was something like that, but I'm quoting from memory here. The video is hilarious; they answer that the decision was "not something that was difficult for us," and the applause is pretty dramatic in response. Oddly, NoM posted the video to YouTube themselves. I have no idea why they thought that would be a good idea.

In any case, NoM is of the opinion that businesses that disagree with them should remain neutral and shut up and therefore must be boycotted, while businesses that do agree with them are proud and strong and how dare you boycott them you're just bigoted against Christians. No seriously.
Like Chik-fil-a (I just wanted to post that link, really).


Anyway, the really awesome thing here?
They created a petition, a Twitter account called @DumpStarbucks, and a facebook page for people to scold Starbucks and to promise to boycott.
Over the next few days, a petition, a Twitter account called @PumpStarbucks, and a facebook thing of some kind (when facebook started getting more complicated, I never really bothered figuring all that stuff out) for the sole purpose of letting people tell Starbucks that they support them and don't think they should buckle under the pressure (which probably was never a concern, but it's still nice to voice that support, y'know?).

So, take a guess as to which side is more popular? If you guessed "The petition to pressure Starbucks!" than you would be incredibly wrong.
The "Dump Starbucks" petition has, at this time, 20,707 pledges according to their site.
The "Thank You" card petition has, at this time, 264,353 signatures according to their site and has to keep resetting their goal (currently set at 300,000--it was 250,000 when I started writing this [less significant than it sounds because I've been working on several other things during that time and it's been more than a few hours, but still really amazing]).

Oh, and I've seen several gay rights supporters who've talked about all the fake names they've put on the Dump Starbucks petition and how hilarious that is. Seems to me like that just makes them look better and is dumb, but it is noteworthy that at least a few of those signatures aren't real. I mean, I get why Jeremy Hooper at Good As You posted about a fake entry--he was pointing out how easy it was to inflate the numbers and that the supporters didn't even have to give a valid e-mail address (or anything resembling one, as he demonstrated).
It's the "Ha ha I added 20 more signatures to their petition! That'll help us comment on how pathetic it is!" that I don't get.

But I digress... More interesting here is an apparent sudden jump in the numbers on the Dump Starbucks petition. Now I wasn't paying close enough attention to notice it personally, but I've seen it on a few other blogs. I wouldn't exactly testify to this in court, but it looks pretty reliable--and it's not like these people never lie (I don't think I've ever read anything from them that wasn't both obviously and almost incredibly dishonest).
What seems to have happened is they got signatures at a slowly increasing rate for a while, as normal, suddenly nearly doubled their signatures all at one, and then went back to the previous normal-sounding rate. Basically, sounds entirely fraudulent.

And really, when you start a boycott that's 10% as popular as people saying "lolno" and the company's stock goes up, y'gotta be pretty desperate to get some sigs.

A while ago, I had a singing audition in which I had trouble following the piano, missed my starting note, got nervous, and never found the rhythm of the song. It was the worst singing I've ever performed, and worse than any I'd ever heard. I had waited hours and hours--and driven an hour--for this audition that I had utterly, utterly blown.
I left there saying "Well, at least I know I will never again fail at anything as badly as I did here tonight."
I have now discovered that it actually is possible for a worst failure than that audition--but I'm pretty sure we've actually hit the limit this time!

3 comments:

  1. Oh, and I wrote this post using "Written? Kitten!"

    Thanks to the fabulous EveryRoadisanOption for bringing it to my attention.

    ReplyDelete
  2. one question for you though, what do you define as a right? I personally argue that marriage is not a right, it is a privilege granted to individuals by the government and there are many many restrictions in place. It is licensed by the state, you can't marry your cousin or multiple people so we see it has restrictions and boundaries that are set by the state and so therefore in my opinion it is not a right. I view rights as things that are either 1 God given (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness(agency to act or to do with my own stuff as I wish)) Over the years we have added rights by law in order to further protect those basic rights, such as freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, the right to be free from slavery, and so on. Marriage doesn't really hold the same idea in my mind. It is something that is necessary to secure our society as the family is the basic unit of society, but I still do not see it as protecting my life liberty or my pursuit of happiness as defined. I don't have the right to drive a car. There are restrictions for that.
    I'm interested in your response, I look forward to a civil discussion of political thought with you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Marriage itself isn't specifically a right--there could be no laws about it at all. Equal treatment under the law, however, is a right.

      What does this have to do with the post, though?

      Delete