For people of a certain age, the political behavior of businesses these days is utterly nonsensical. Once upon a time it was understood that the point of a business was to make money.
To do this, businesses were usually utterly apolitical and insofar as their officers or owners took political positions, they were purely based on what was good for their business.
The notion of purposely striking a controversial position was simply absurd. Whenever anti-capitalist extremists threatened a boycott, the company public relations department would usually offer a tepid response and reiterate that they sell to everyone.
All that's gone away. Now you have major retailers falling over themselves to piss off core customers. The whole "get woke, go broke" syndrome is an actual thing.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in entertainment.
Hollywood has always leaned to the left, but it had enough common sense to also produce products for middle America. For every "Murphy Brown," there were two or three detective shows, or apolitical sitcoms.
The same was true of movies. Hollywood has always had a fetish for "niche" or "prestige" films that raked in awards and got praise from the wine and croissants crowd, but the understanding was that these were diversions. The studios knew that they still needed mass-appeal movies to pay the bills.
No longer. The television industry recently witnessed two otherwise inexplicable acts: the cancellation of Last Man Standing and the resurrection and immediate execution of the rebooted Roseanne.
Both of these shows performed well. That is to say, they found an audience and made money.
And in both cases, the network executives decided they didn't want that money.
Better to take a financial loss that make a show that icky people might like.
The situation in the movie industry is even worse. Disney paid something like four billion dollars for Star Wars and they are systematically dismantling both the franchise and its fan base.
Who does that? Who makes a major investment and then blows it up? It's like Gomez Addams trying (and failing) to lose money in the stock market.
Apparently the shareholders are starting to notice and while Disney and the other megacorps still have a lot of cash to burn, they're reaching the point where the bottom line is starting to be affected.
The key thing to remember in dealing with progressives is that they will never sacrifice the slightest convenience for their beliefs. The richer they are, the more this holds true. The saps in the aspiring middle class will put up with composting, but not the elites. Even the fixation on fair trade, organic or whatever food is based on the fact that they can afford it. It's just another form of conspicuous consumption.
Star Wars as a franchise is dead in the water and the executives that killed it are completely unrepentant. It's the money men who will force the changes.
Never forget that Harvey Weinstein was above all things a guy who made money. Hollywood is famously tolerant of pervs, but they're not going to whore their daughters out for pennies.
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