You need to be a Feast of Fun Plus+ member to access this.
Join now
or Log in – it's easy!
The hilarious Brian Sweeney joins us as we take you backstage of our excellent visit with the amazing drag queen Sharon Needles. Plus, the feud between Madonna and Lady Gaga escalates and a pair of turtles divorce after 115 years of living together.
Tags: boycotts, Brian Sweeney, Carrie Underwood, lady gaga, madonna, turtles
Fausto Fernós is the host of iTunes’ #1 LGBT talk show, the Feast of Fun podcast, which he produces and hosts with his partner, Marc Felion.
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Fausto Fernós created the Feast of Fools in 1998 as wacky artists variety show in Chicago, Illinois. Feast of Fun grew out of an audio blog to promote the live show into the world’s most downloaded talk show aimed for gay people.
When he’s not blogging, recording or sleeping, Fausto can be found at the gym or appreciating the beauty found in nature.
An angry mob has formed online to confront and condemn Amy and Samy Bouzaglatell over...
4 Comments 8262 Online Visits
Facebook Shares
FOF #1761 – The Rich Cultural Legacy of Madonna – 03.15.13
FOF #1754 – Macho Macho Man – 03.06.13
FOF #1739 – Send in the Clowns – 02.11.13
FOF #1724 – Trends and Predictions 2013 – 01.21.13
Comments
Yeah, boycotts don’t work. Protests do. Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt didn’t successfully overthrow their governments with boycotts. Boycotts make the elites laugh, because they know, one way or another, they’re going to get your money. Protests make the elites nervous, because if enough people stop doing what they normally do to make themselves and their grievances seen and heard, it can be very disruptive to the flow of money and to political allegiances.
Rosa Parks wasn’t boycotting the buses. She was sitting where she wasn’t supposed to (sit in). That’s a form of protest, and she led other to follow suit. It’s the numbers that win political change through protest. Boycotts could theoretically work, if you could get the numbers. The threshold is higher for boycotts than protests. If you could convince everyone, literally everyone, to stop buying gas from Exxon, you could maybe put them out of business or shrink them down to the size you could drown them in the bathtub (FUCK YOU NORQUIST), but you would never convince everyone. Even if you did, people would just buy more gas from Chevron and Shell, making them bigger and more ‘evil’.
That said, not all protests work.
Rosa’s protest sparked a boycott. Its success is well documented.
Yeah, I’m aware, but again, was it the bus boycott or was it Rosa Parks’ activism, MLK’s activism, and Malcolm X’s activism that made the black civil rights movement successful? The boycott was just a small piece of a much larger protest movement.
Not all boycotts are failures (but show me a contemporary example of equal success). Not all protests are successful (Occupy has failed to turn out the numbers this spring that they had last Fall). It’s the numbers of activists that make them succeed or fail and the threshold is higher for boycotts.
Re-imagine Stonewall. Should we have boycotted bars? How would that have resulted in a situation where we could go out to bars and freely associate with other gay men? We (my gay forebears, bless them) rioted and demonstrated that we would not be treated as criminals or second-class citizens.
Well, the boycott created integration in the bus system. Was it the end of segregation, no, but it was a pivotal moment. Another example, the gays boycotted orange juice and Florida ditched Anita Bryant as a spokesperson.
I’ve seen too many threads online where people, who when presented with boycotts that actually work, simply ignore them and say “boycotts don’t work.” It’s a peculiar peccadillo that comes up a lot online. Like gun control or abortion, it won’t ever be decided.
One last thing though, people run for office knowing they won’t win but they run anyway so that they can push an particular agenda, so, please think of boycotts the same way- even if they dont seem to win, they still get their point across.
That is all I will say on this subject.
I agree protests do work. If the East Germans had not protested peacefully and demanded democracy like in the West and a reunification with West Germany at the end of the 1980s, probably West and East Germany would have not been reunited right away after the fall of the iron curtain.
What we need to today is a protest against the financial elite. Not only banks like occupy Wall Street did but the whole financial elite and business/economic leaders who take advantage of our society and who benefit from the growing income inequality.
Viva la Revolución!
Ugh. Over Brian Sweeny.
Me too. You need to pay attention to the awesome Brian SweenEy.
Now, that guy is cool.
I actually meant to say Brian SoWeeny :/
Oh, I fucking hate that asshole.
I’ve ennjoyed hearing the two shows with Brian!
When do you finally force feminize Brian Sweeney?