Today's Brando

It's the Benjamins.

Over the last 60 years, we've seen an acceleration in the shift from buying the product to buying the brand.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the good sense or intelligence of the American consumer.

Get The Swag

Amazon

Today In Fashion

In the last dozen years or so, it seems like a bajillion middle-aged middle-class American men (guys with more money than either common sense or hair) grew goatees and started riding Harleys - evidence of how fucked up and phony we can get in our obsessive pursuit of a personal identity driven by the whims of fashion and imposed from the outside by marketeers bean-counters and peer pressure instead of reflection study and insight.

Or maybe I'm just feeling the effects of having binge-watched way too much Mad Men over the weekend, trying to catch myself up on a part of Cultura Americanus Vulgaris.

Anyway, along comes this - via KWTX:

WACO: (May 17, 2015) Rival motorcycle gangs turned a local restaurant into a shooting gallery Sunday afternoon and when the gunfire was over, nine people were dead and 18 were injured.

Early Monday, law enforcement had turned their attention to the risk of additional bike gang members looking to retaliate, and initiate further violence in the Waco area.

Sunday afternoon, Waco Police, assisted by Department of Public Safety troopers, police officers from several cities and deputies from the McLennan County Sheriff's Office were surrounding the Twin Peaks Restaurant, in the Central Texas Market Place after several people were reported shot during a rival motorcycle gang fight, Waco police Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said.

Police initially said three gangs were involved, but later said factions from at least five gangs took part in the melee.

Police and troopers were in the parking lot trying to secure the area and protect citizens when a fight broke out inside the restaurant and spilled into the parking lot.

Swanton said the fight quickly escalated from fists and feet to chains, clubs and knives, then to gunfire.

Gang members were shooting at each other and officers at the scene fired their weapons, as well, Swanton said.

So - a few questions:

Assuming there're good-guy bikers with guns and bad-guy bikers with guns, which was which when the shooting started?

When the cops showed up, were they able to spot the good-guy bikers?  Or did they just assume everybody with a gun (but without a cop suit) was a bad guy who needed to be seen as a threat?

And when can we expect all you CosPlay Bikers to stand up and condemn the extremists in your midst?

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.

The Power Of Marketing

A slightly alternative view:

If you buy that new $2000 TV on sale at 20% off, you are not saving 400 bucks - you're spending 1600.

Smart Guy

If you want to get anything done - in business or in politics or in your daily existence or whatever - the first thing you do is jam as many smart guys as you can fit into any given space, and then shut up and listen.

Here're some bits from David McRaney:

Benjamin Franklin knew how to deal with haters, and in this episode we learn how he turned his haters into fans with what is now called The Benjamin Franklin Effect (read more about the effect here).

Listen as David McRaney reads an excerpt from his book, “You Are Now Less Dumb,” explaining the psychology behind the effect and how the act of spreading harm forms the attitude of hate, and the act of spreading kindness generates the attitude of camaraderie.

At the lowest level, behavior-into-attitude conversion begins with impression management theory which says you present to your peers the person you wish to be. You engage in something economists call signaling by buying and displaying to your peers the sorts of things which give you social capital. If you live in the Deep South you might buy a high-rise pickup and a set of truck nuts. If you live in San Francisco you might buy a Prius and a bike rack. Whatever are the easiest to obtain, loudest forms of the ideals you aspire to portray become the things you own, like bumper stickers signaling to the world you are in one group and not another. Those things then influence you to become the sort of person who owns them.

The Benjamin Franklin Effect:

The Misconception: You do nice things for the people you like and bad things to the people you hate.

The Truth: You grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm.

Why do I love my kids?  Aside from humans having evolved a genetic predisposition to love their children, it's at least partly because I do good things for them (I try anyway).

Why does it seem so many "conservatives" hate poor people?

I'm going to stop a little short, and not try to shoehorn everything into this one concept, but damn - this makes a lotta shit clearer for me.

Persuasion

Battle Of The Brands

One of Lee Camp's Moment of Clarity videos on YouTube

You Know Somebody's Thinking It

It's just bound to be the next big thing in marketing.

¢¢

My 2 cents (clever title, doncha think?):

Obama made the biggest, most horrifically horrible rhetorical error ever in the history of human language blah blah blah.

What he said (re California AG Kamala Harris):

"You have to be careful to, first of all, say she is brilliant and she is dedicated and she is tough, and she is exactly what you'd want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake.

“She also happens to be by far the best-looking attorney general in the country -- Kamala Harris is here. (Applause.) It's true. Come on. (Laughter.)

And she is a great friend and has just been a great supporter for many, many years.”

No, he didn't make a huge error - OK he did kinda, but the fuck up wasn't about saying Harris is attractive.  The remark does give an UberFemme like Joan Walsh a chance to smack the Prez which of course makes her think she gains some credibility by being a scold, and lets her put down a marker as Not An Obama-bot (this is correlative to Hippie-Punching).  But Obama's mistake was that he publicly acknowledged that Politics is very much about Sales and Marketing.  While you need to be selling a product or a service or some kind of content, packaging counts.

There are exceptions of course, but you don't really get anywhere just on brains and talent and hard work.  Not when it comes to the Beauty Pageant that American politics has become in the age of Visual Media.