About That Memory Thing

Knowing more about Acquired Memory and Altered Memory gets me a little closer to understanding small pieces of how advertising and propaganda work on our little simian brains to produce something of a cult-like adherence to a particular brand of ideology.

Dr Elizabeth Loftus on the Thinking Atheist podcast:



Now if I could find someone who's published a study telling me I'm really not so crazy thinking I can make a solid link from all that memory stuff to things like the Etch-A-Sketch effect, I might have something.

The search for intelligent life (inside my own head) continues.

An Ad

Beware Of Images

Beware Of Images

Say No To Shitty Ad Practices

I've recently bailed on 2 of my favorite sites - Addicting Info and Little Green Footballs - because their ads got way too pushy and intrusive.

Don't get me wrong, ya gotta pay for things, and these websites don't stay in the Content Business for very long unless somebody ponies up.  

So I'm good with just about everything, but not when (eg) MacKeeper pops up and freezes my browser so I can't do anything if I don't click on their OK button.  Go fuck yourself with a pine cone, MacKeeper.

I'll go back to those sites eventually - I suppose - but for now, this is just one more of my little protests.

Teach The World To Sing

The Message Manipulators seem to be bent on stripping away the soul from all of us by reducing everything to a transaction and creating a world of de-humanizing commercialism.

I've been part of that.  I was with them for a long time.  No more.  And never again.

But there are times when my eternally insistent skepticism (which always teeters on the brink of The Cynical Abyss) is tested.  

Wouldn't it be nice if this was more than just another attempt to co-opt something that should be a lot more meaningful than making us smell less like humans. (not that there's anything wrong with smelling better - just sayin')

hat tip = Facebook friend MH

Darwin Implied

I'm not the only one who was left wondering if the the Xtianist Radicals would get their dander up over the Carnival ad yesterday, but Ken Ham's the only one I've heard anybody even refer to.  So OK - maybe we just have to wait a while longer for the obligatory outrage to build(?)  

Addicting Info beat me to the blog.



The problem is that JFK got the facts wrong when he tried to make the biology connection between humans and the sea, so of course that makes the whole Darwin thing just some atheist bullshit.

Addicting Info posted this as a follow up:

Whoa, Dude

I hope I'm not the only one who thinks it's a tiny bit over the top (or weird, or even creepy) that companies are running TV Ad Trailers - teasers for the ads they plan on running during the Super Bowl.

I Hope Not

These 2 movies are not bad.  Some decent values statements, and some really good Movie Moments.

I only wish I could shake the creepy feeling that they're really just 2-hour ads for companies with piles of money so ridiculously gigundous that they can produce feature-length infomercials, and get us to pay twelve bucks a head for the privilege of absorbing their Corporate Branding Messages.

Meanwhile, Back At The Planet

I hate it when I get to thinking there's more truth being spoken by fictional characters on a TV show than by anybody in any position of authority anywhere here in These United States of Opinion-As-Reality.

At the same time, I wonder if this is just to see if anybody's listening. 

And I wonder if this little vignette is simply a plot device in Aaron Sorkin's devious little brain. 

And what if it's only an attempt to illustrate his other point about Crowd Sourcing and the dangers of instant reactions due to the immediacy of social media driving the mob, which is masquerading as "true democracy"?

And I wonder if the whole thing is so twisty-turny that it spins off into the infinite numbers of universes where everything that can happen does happen, and all you have to do to make it real is to say it's real.

And what about the very very very very real shit hitting the fan because of Climate Disruption?

and and and - fuck, I hate my brain sometimes.

The Daddy State Update

I posted a thing about George Lakoff a few days back.  

Here's some stuff from a short interview with George Lakoff:

You write, "remember that voters vote their identity and their values, which need not coincide with their self-interest." I remember writing a commentary on a poor congressional district, let's say about 98 percent white, in Kentucky. Most of the residents were on food stamps, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid - or all of them. However, they have voted in recent elections by landslide majorities to re-elect a congressman who opposes food stamps and supports cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Can you elaborate on how this can occur?

A single moral worldview dominates conservative policies in every domain of life - family, personal identity, sex, religion, sports, education, the market, foreign policy and politics - what I’ve called strict father morality. Your moral worldview is central to how you understand your life.

In a strict father family, the father is in charge and is assumed to know right from wrong, to have moral as well as physical authority. He is supposed to protect the family, support the family, set the rules, enforce the rules, maintain respect, govern sexuality and reproduction, and teach his kids right from wrong, that is, to grow up with the same moral system. His word defines what is right and is law; no backtalk. Disobedience is punished, painfully, so that children learn not to disobey. Via physical discipline, they learn internal discipline, which is how they become moral beings. With discipline they can become prosperous.

If you are not prosperous, you are not disciplined enough, not taking enough personal responsibility and deserve your poverty. At the center is the principle of personal responsibility and moral hierarchy: those who are more moral (in this sense of morality) should rule: God over man, man over nature, parents over children, the rich over the poor, Western culture over non-Western culture, America over other countries, men over women, straights over gays, Christians over non-Christians, etc.

On conservative religion, God is a strict father; in sports, coaches are strict with their athletes; in classrooms, teachers should be strict with students; in business, employers rule over employees; in the market, the market should decide - the market itself is the strict father, deciding that those who have financial discipline deserve their wealth, and others deserve their poverty; and in politics, this moral system itself should rule.

Conservatives can be poor, but they can still be kings in their own castles - strict fathers at home, in their personal identity: in their religion, in their sex lives, in the sports they love. Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth.

Drug It Up

By now we all know it, but it's good to keep it in mind - It's not really a war on drugs.  It's more of a war on the drugs that aren't controlled by Bayer and Glaxo and Pfizer - or any of the other big houses.

It's also good to remember that Coin-Operated Politicians have been put in place by the Big Bux Donors to ensure the flow of money out of our pockets, into theirs.

Todays' Ad

Ya wanna fuck up your own car and/or your own life, OK.  But it's not just you.  How come the rest of us have to risk our lives and our property and pay more for our insurance just because you can't figure out that you're not entitled to do whatever the fuck you want while everybody else gets to accommodate your spoiled little 1st world princeling ass?

Today's Marketing Genius

From the 70s - of course.  Look for them wherever fine novelties and Pet Rocks are sold.

hat tip = Mock Paper Scissors

Feed A Child

Reaction to this ad has become what I have to consider an almost perfect snapshot of what's wrong with our "conversations" whenever we try to talk about any of the increasing number of Elephants In The Room.





The point is that way too many pets get way better treatment than way too many kids, and maybe we could do some tiny little thing to change that just a tiny bit(?)  Maybe we could just think about it?  Seems pretty simple.  But to hear some of the reaction, you'd think the ad was actually advocating in favor of keeping children as pets - or that black kids are dogs - or that - what exactly!?!

Seriously, when did everybody get so fuckin' stoopid?

Check out the Feed A Child website, or make a contribution of 20 Rand (SA only) by texting "child" to 40014.

You can make a contribution from elsewhere using PayPal.

Oops

Once upon a time, you could count on your marketing department to be able to "prove" any conclusion management had already reached.

When the board at BP needed to feel reassured that the company could avoid being tagged as a major contributor to the death of an entire geographical region and the resultant slow implosion of several local economies, they went to their marketing geniuses and we got all those great commercials on TV about "Disaster? What disaster? Everything's great here."  It doesn't matter what's really going on because you're "controlling" the message, so nobody's going to see the real problems because Big Oil owns a majority stake in the politicians in the Gulf States and the money they're able to spend on media makes it easier for people (who desperately need to believe it's all OK) to believe it's all OK, in spite of some small voices to the contrary.

Variations on that little scenario have played out quite often over the years.

Things have been changing a bit though.  Social Media is the way to go now.  You can save many millions of dollars (paying me a few hundred K instead) by putting up a Facebook page and letting Twitter carry your message virally to millions more consumers than TV or even that old-fashioned Inter Tubes thing could ever imagine.

But "control" is an illusion, and what frequently happens on Social Media proves it.  What you get might be very much the opposite of what you were probably expecting and/or hoping for, and it can come as a very rude surprise when you start to understand that you can't cherry pick the feedback.

Mitch McConnell found that out not too long ago (eg).  And now the New York Police Dept is finding out too.  NYPD decided they were in need of a little PR boost, and believing (as all authoritarian organizations do) that the undeserving masses must surely be grateful to us  - or at least respect us for our abilities to crush their puny skulls at the slightest provocation - they went along with the Social Media suggestion by asking their fans to tweet their favorites pictures of the noble NYPD in action.

Here's a quick sampling of what came in by the thousands before they could shut the account down - prob'ly not quite what they had in mind:

Cuz It Works

Mostly, there's a buncha smart people running the businesses that run the world.  And mostly, these smart people make smart decisions, and (again, mostly) they decide to spend something like half a trillion dollars every year on advertising.  We think that's about right, but nobody's real sure anymore because the outfits doing the spending stopped talking about it openly several years ago, and the outfits that try to keep track of it have come to understand that the information is pretty valuable, so if you wanna know about such things, you get to pay for it (it's all about "The Analytics", dontcha know).  So the rest of us - well, we're just kinda shooting in the dark.

Anyway, smart people spend a fuckload of money on advertising - because it works.

Not Much Has Changed

Your opponents don't stop doing what's working as long as it keeps working, and it keeps working until your side does something to make it stop working.



(from Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story)

The night is filled with terrors.  The darkness holds everything we fear.  There's a dark and dangerous side to populism.  Come to the dark side.  Dark is evil and ugly. White is godly and clean.  Cockroaches flourish in the darkness while flowers thrive in the sunlight.  Black is bad - White is good.

As long as we continue to allow this medieval associative bullshit to persist, we will never be rid of the assholes who manipulate those associations for less than honorable purposes.

WWJD?

If Jesus worked in advertising or PR:



I'm not convinced Jesus was a real guy.  It makes more sense for me to go along with the idea that "he" was an amalgam - pieced together from a lot of old stories about heroes and newer notions of how maybe we could do things a little differently; that instead of always reacting in a knee-jerk way of meeting force with force, we should at least consider just being kinda relaxed and groovy.  I certainly prefer the Hippie Jesus of peace and love to the Badass Jesus that gets pimped at us constantly by One Million Moms - or Several-Dozen-Screaming-Twatwaffle-Goons - or whatever wacko faction du jour happens to have found something that offends them after deliberately going miles out of their way to find something that offends them.

Flipping The Message

A while back, Cadillac ran this ad aimed at the Douche Bucket demographic:




Here's an Answer Ad from Ford:



The world is what we make it, kids.

Stay In School(?)