OK, Boomer

Here's a great little treatise chock full of insight.

From the comments:

Self care is also not arguing with people who are committed to misunderstanding you.

There are big problems with this kind of thing, of course, and they grow out of an evolutionary feature in our firmware - Pattern Seeking.

A million years ago, we had to start with sorting the world into easily recognizable binary chunks: The stuff that helps us versus the stuff that hurts us.

But then we had to figure out the duality thing.

• Fire helps us by keeping us warm and making our food easier to digest, but it can kill us too
• We have to have water to drink and to grow the plants we need to eat, but we can drown in it, and that's where the crocodiles live
• A flint knife is an excellent tool for acquiring and processing food, as well as being a deadly weapon that avails us the means to murder each other.

We dearly love sorting things. Oh how we do love it so.

But just as with water and fire and tools, the need to sort, in and of itself, can be both helpful and harmful.

We sort people according to physical traits, and we get racism
We sort people according to spiritual belief, and we get religious wars and genocide
We sort people according to their wealth, and we get class struggles and bloody revolution

So none of this is particularly new, but I need to write it down - to reiterate it to myself before it slips away.

Fast rewind to the early 20th century, when Bernays taps into Freudian concepts in order to synthesize a new kind of marketing, which of course turns out to be both a good tool to get the word out to people about good things, and an excellent weapon to divide and conquer.

A short course:

A bit longer:

And with each advancement in Mass Media, we've seen an amplifying effect of both the positive and the negative aspects of communications vis-à-vis news, advertising and propaganda.

What's new for me is the thought that so-called Artificial Intelligence (an oxymoron if ever there was one) has grown up so quickly and become so pervasive that the bad guys can run their scams in stealth mode so that by the time most of us become aware of what's being done to us, we figure it's too late to do anything about it.

(the 2016 election comes to mind - duh)

Anyway, Blunty's video popped a couple things into my brain.

First is the marketing/propaganda stuff: the slicing and dicing of demographics info to the point where micro-targeting gets so fucking granular as to make it possible to generate very specific hot-button items at very specific, and ever smaller sectors of the populace.

Second - growing out of the first (as usual) - is that there is practically no such thing as "shared experience" on any large scale that isn't being manufactured and custom fit to the biases that have also been manufactured and custom fit to us.

Divide-n-Conquer works. 

The practitioners are very good at it, and getting better as we go along.

for good or ill

the world is 

what we make it

If It's Tuesday

...it must be time for me to say, "Fuck you, NSA" - and also we should prob'ly figure out how to co-opt something.

So here it is:

That's a t-shirt you can buy at a joint called Red Bubble

I ♥ Capitalism.

The Turnaround

This is what I'm talkin' about.

The Turnaround is one of the great power tools in selling.  This is what it looks like when you apply it to politics:

Stay On Message

When Newt Gingrich imparts his wit and wisdom to us regarding OWS, and Rush Limbaugh points to 'rape, and property damage' in Zuccotti Park, remember one thing: it's not about any of that, so there's no need to defend against any of that. That's a typical ploy of someone who's trying to argue from a weak position.  They try to change the focus of the debate, and it works too damned often.

Ignore this bullshit - you can say straight out that it's not about any of that if you feel the need, but you must avoid helping them prop up their straw man.  If you take that particular bait, you'll end up sounding like you're trying to justify or rationalize criminal activities on the part of OWS protesters.

So pick a few of the points that are most important to you - points you think OWS represents to you - and stick to your guns.  BTW: these things don't have to have anything to do with any "Official OWS Statement".  Whatever you'd be protesting if you were organizing the thing is what you get to argue.  At it's heart, it's about free speech in a democracy, remember?


If you wanna try it, you can do a little sales-y thing called Isolating the Objection.  To wit: "So except for some bad actors, you agree with what OWS stands for - good - let's talk about the decline in wages over the last 35 years...; the dramatic rise in childhood poverty last year...; the fact that 52% of all Americans can expect to spend at least one year below the poverty level..."

You can also try a variation on The Turnaround:  "So we're agreed that illegal activity in any venue is immoral, and that it doesn't matter who the perpetrator is - so if it was a few very rich and powerful bankers committing crimes in Zuccotti Park, would you be arguing for or against holding them accountable?"

Ya Still Gotta Sell It

One of the problems with how "the left" has traditionally approached issues is their inability to sell the idea in a way that appeals to the people who have to be sold on the idea in order to support it.  The idea may be the best thing since perforated toilet paper, but if you can't sell it to the big squishy political middle, then it's not gonna happen.

Mike's First Law of Business:
No matter how good your company is; no matter how great your product or your service is - nothing good can happen for your company until somebody sells something.

Repubs and "conservatives" have been a lot better at coming up with catchy slogans and snappy jingles, and a sales patter that gets people standing in line for the crap they're selling.  Dems and "liberals" always seem to rely on lofty ideals and 30-point policy statements about why it's good for us to eat all the stuff that tastes bad.

I'm not saying change the message or abandon your principles; and I'm not saying water it down or sugar it up.  But you have to sell it better, and the way you do that is to make it appeal to the self interests of the prospective buyer.

If you have nothing but "do it 'cuz ya know ya oughta do it", then you're going to lose at the first sign of resistance because it's the easiest thing in the world to rationalize away anything you "oughta" do when it's inconvenient or it costs a little more than doing it some other way or not doing it at all.  And it's really easy for the opposition to paint you as a preachy know-it-all trying to tell people how to live.  And yes, I know the other side is trying to tell people how to live too, but if they're first to accuse you of that, then they win the point.

If you want action on Climate Change, then you sell it on the strength of doing business in a smarter, cheaper, more cost-effective way that does not require learning a whole new way of doing everything.  Revolutionary change may sound exciting and cool to you, but it scares the shit outa the people you're asking to make the changes - and who, BTW, have the power to squelch the idea before it even comes up in the next executive committee meeting.

One of the things Selling is about is getting the prospect to the point where he realizes that buying what you're selling is not just a good idea, it's actually what he had in mind all along.