Saturday, May 31, 2008

Comment of the Day: 2008-05-31

On a blog post noting the weapons-grade stupidity that is the whole Michelle-Malkin-Dunkin-Donuts thing, I saw this:

At this rate we’ll soon have soundbites from the far right along the lines of:

“Breaking News: Obama staffers caught using Arabic numbers in secret internal documents!”
-- mensley

(h/t: Phil Plait, whose thoughts on the matter are worth reading, even if his sense of humor has momentarily vanished (and who can blame him?))

2 comments:

Eponym said...

I think Phil has it right, as a tactical matter. Malkin's ability to create mischief like this is proportional to her ability to affect the bottom line of a business she targets. If giving in to her bullying has no greater cost than ignoring her, she's reduced to null effect.

bjkeefe said...

Not sure if I understand you, but it seems to me that you're saying it could be a sensible business decision to give in to her, irrespective of the craziness of her demands, if the numbers work out right. In this case, then, Dunkin Donuts would figure that they're going to lose more business by alienating people who read Malkin with approval than by alienating those of us in the reality-based community.

If I understand you correctly, then I disagree. This would be a typical example of a business thinking too much about the short-term and not enough about the long term. I could easily imagine a scenario where, had they either ignored Malkin or (better, to my way of thinking) publicly rejected her call, they would see a downturn in sales for a week or a month. After that, Malkin would be off waging jihad on somebody else, most people would have forgotten all about it, and sales would recover.

Some people, like me, might even be encouraged to support DD during this time, had they stood up for rationality and against xenophobia.

As it is, I wonder how much of a long-term problem they might face. I certainly won't forget how they handled this.

Now, you might say, isn't it the same thing? Wouldn't the decay of resentment over time work the same for people like me and people like Malkinites? Perhaps. But I think that a vague notion of "DD approves of terrorists" is less sticky than is one like "DD won't stand up for basic American principles," just because one idea is so much more far-fetched than the other to the canonical "average person."

Could be I'm just rationalizing my own extremism and tendency to bear a grudge, though. In any case, I won't be going to Dunkin Donuts for a while.

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