I do not breathe your politics
"Comment is free but facts are sacred." (C.P. Scott)
Thursday, October 27, 2005
Arnold's Neighbourhood
|
This cracks me up. Watch out for the bit at the very end.
posted by Michael at 10/27/2005 09:26:00 PM 0 comments |
Friday, October 07, 2005
A surprisingly forward marketing email
..kles.
101 CD, I love you, but you can darn well keep your wandering (albeit warm) hands off my musical cockles, thankyou very much.
posted by Michael at 10/07/2005 12:54:00 AM 0 comments |
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
More on the 'dark actors'
I ended a little rant about Ms Neo-con the other day by saying:
As an aside, the very compromised Ms Miller was the journalist who received the email Dr David Kelly wrote, warning of 'many dark actors playing games'. How painfully ironic.If this disturbs you as much as it disturbs me, this Robert George post on the quite glorious Huffington Post might interest you. I've never quite understood whether Dr Kelly was a hawk or a dove (certainly no chickenhawk). We tend to see him here as someone who was depressed about the lies surrounding the war buildup, who talked to a journalist and then had his career destroyed by the Blair machine, who, we tend to forget now, deliberately outed him as Gilligan's source. Gilligan, we construe, is skeptical about the evidence being used to justify a coming war. On the other hand, he's Judy Miller's source (though from what I can tell this dates back to the aluminium tubes, the chemical weapons, et cetera, which was his turf). Personal skepticism is not Miller's problem with the evidence. Public skepticism is - she's helping to fabricate it. However, when Kelly commits suicide, Miller doesn't seem to be bothered enough to report about it - indeed, she holds back the fact that she got the 'dark actors' email. Was he naive, or was he a player who got burned... I'm confused. posted by Michael at 10/05/2005 02:58:00 AM 0 comments |
Apology, schmapology
So, Tom at plasticbag.org got an 'apology' from someone in the loosely agglomerated marketing sludge that surrounds Cilit Bang, for the fake post that purported to be sharing in his happiness at contacting his dad, but really was just a link to a fake blog selling the cleaning product with the name that sounds like a BDSM practice.
He's leaving it, mostly, at that, and for that I applaud him, but as Harry Shearer might say, check out the apology, ladies and gentlemen. A work of public non-apology art. Let's go through it line by line:
We are writing to you in response to the Barry Scott posting on 30th September 2005. We're all aware that Barry Scott, the advertising character is a marketing creation and we have been responsible for raising his awareness.What follows will make us look bad, so here's a quick bit of marketing about us. The posting on 30th September was unplanned and an error of judgement and we unequivocally apologise for this. We recognise that it was inappropriate in context.We seem to be giving you the impression that we're responsible, but don't get too attached to that, because we're going to muddy it a little. The Barry Scott character has appeared in a number of spoof websites and weblogs, created by people unconnected to the Reckitt Benckiser brand.We can't really say we didn't do it, because we're apologising. We just want to make sure that when someone googles your blog, they see this careful misdirection. The weblog posting on your site was not endorsed by Reckitt Benckiser or any of the advertising agencies that are mentioned and was a one off error from which lessons have been learnt.It did originate from one of them, but we're trying to take your eye off that. We are sorry for any offence it has unwittingly caused.Now, this is really cute. We apologise for what it did. Not for the crass, stupid actions of the person who typed it. Because that would be like responsibility, and privately we're still joking about it when we snort a bit of Kate in the toilets. We would like to have an opportunity to apologise personally, if you would like to speak to us please do let us know the best way to reach you.We recognise that this utter horseshit isn't really impressing you, and we'd like a chance to privately eat crow before you write a Guardian article about it. Yours sincerely, The Cillit Bang teamI'm too ashamed to put my name below this. posted by Michael at 10/05/2005 01:18:00 AM 0 comments |
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
Goodnight, Gerald Wiley...
... Arkwright, Fletch, and Ronnie Barker.
We should light four candles.
Tonight, we'll be asking: "Should all married couples be frank and earnest, or should one of them be a woman..." posted by Michael at 10/04/2005 05:37:00 PM 0 comments |
Monday, October 03, 2005
Quote for the day
This book deals with epiphenomenalism, which has to do with consciousness as a mere accessory of physiological processes, whose presence or absence ...makes no difference... whatever are you doing?Audrey Hepburn, in Funny Face, via The Book Lovers by The Divine Comedy. posted by Michael at 10/03/2005 05:44:00 PM 0 comments |
The mendacious and alarming Dr John Reid
Two little glimpses into the chasm where Dr Reid's spine should be.
First, from a BBC article about a 'billeting' trip to Afghanistan:
And he rejected claims that the weekend bombings may have been retaliation from Islamic militants for the role played by Australia in the conflicts. The defence secretary said: "What about the first Bali bombing, when tourists were targeted, or the commuters on trains in Madrid, or in Tanzania, or Egypt, or two months ago in Turkey. "Those people and the people in New York and in London were all the innocent victims of indiscriminate attacks."Oh, COME ON, Dr Reid, don't be such an idiot. I accept that it's very hard to conclude with certainty that the second Bali bombing wouldn't have happened without Iraq; can you not accept that Iraq might just have worked them up enough to do it? You cannot conclude with certainty that the 7th and 21st of July bombings in London are to do with Iraq, even when one of the bombers tells us on video: "Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world"? I can understand that you share collective responsibility for the invasion and you are too cowardly to admit it, but this to me reads like an admonishment to an electorate for returning a Labour government given the opportunity not to; that is, continuing to support a government which did what it did (Afghanistan, Iraq). The true idiocy of your malignant statement is in suggesting that the Madrid bombings had nothing to do with Iraq. Tell us, Dr Reid - what else connects Britain, Spain and the USA in the eyes of Islamist terrorists? The bombing happened just before a general election. Are you telling us now that you think their support for Iraq was not a factor? If Iraq is not the reason those terrorists wanted to derail (an awful pun I have belatedly noticed but decided to leave) the Spanish general election, what was, Dr Reid? Secondly, he cemented his reputation as being New Labour's thug-in-chief with a joke at the expense of Walter Wolfgang, the 82-year-old Holocaust survivor whose one-word dissent was enough to get him ejected from the New Labour conference and prevented from returning by police exercising powers under the Terrorism Act: "Hi Walter, shout out if you are here - or maybe you shouldn't," said John Reid from the conference platform, his menacing Glasgow humour capturing the tone of a day that was half jocular, half threatening.The twistedness of this 'humour' chills me to the bone. I believe there is a case for a new tradition in the response of the public to politicians being interviewed by journalists. We should emulate the action of the man who, on seeing Dick Cheney building political capital in a devastated Louisiana neighbourhood, shouted: "Go fuck yourself, Mr Cheney". It is strongly worded yet politely framed heckle, so common that it cannot be considered obscene, and was widely reported in a surprisingly uncritical manner by news media obsessed with wardrobe malfunction. The genius of this heckler is that he knows that Mr Cheney cannot claim to be shocked or upset by it, because he is recorded as having said a similar thing to Senator Patrick Leahy, on the floor of the Senate itself. I am of course less sure that our defence secretary has used this expression, so there is a small chance that Dr Reid would be upset by this, were he confronted with it. But he can go fuck himself anyway. posted by Michael at 10/03/2005 03:32:00 AM 0 comments |
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Washington party games
|
This one's called 'pin the tail on the elephant in the living room'.
In the whole CIA name leak affair (The Plame Name Blame Game Shame), Judy Miller was sent to jail - by the grand jury at the special prosecutor's urging - for not revealing her source for an article she never wrote. Odd? Kinda.
Odder still: she insisted her source's waiver was not given freely. He (I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff), writes to her in the letters that his waiver was free all along and she knew it.
So what's really going on? Is it someone else she was protecting by avoiding testifying? Herself? Did she go to jail to avoid going to jail? She's still blustering about it being important for the freedom of the fourth estate, but it seems to me that she did nothing that the similarly threatened Matt Cooper did, except hype it up with a jail stay in the meantime.
Or, did she go to jail to protect the elephant in the living room? That is, is she protecting not herself, nor Libby, but Karl Rove, or John Bolton (who, coincidentally, visited her while she was in prison), or someone else in the White House who she worked with while writing all those demonstrably false stories on Iraqi WMDs?
I'm sure this is coincidental, but yesterday, US auditors at the GAO ruled that the US government had broken the law by buying propaganda in mainstream news, regarding the No Child Left Behind Act.
Could Miller's crappy, Chalabi-slanted articles on Iraqi WMD have also been paid for? Personally I think her meeting with Libby was employee/boss, not journalist/politician. I'm not sure we'll ever know, but if I was a journalist, I would not want Judy Miller standing up for journalistic processes.
As an aside, the very compromised Ms Miller was the journalist who received the email Dr David Kelly wrote, warning of 'many dark actors playing games'. How painfully ironic.
posted by Michael at 10/01/2005 10:33:00 PM 0 comments |
Cilit Bang, and evil marketing (2)
OK, so it turns out I have more to say on this. ('No surprises there', you groan.)
A followup comment from friend-of-friend urges caution:
"Should we not wait for the outcome of this investigation before pointing fingers? It does look like there is a distinct possibility that this post could have been created by someone who hates Cillit Bang - for personal or professional reasons. I agree that if it turns out Cillit Bang or one of its agents is behind this then they deserve all the negative Googlebombing they can get, but I'd rather wait and see before jumping to conclusions."Well, your faith in human nature is stronger than mine, and you are right not to want to jump to conclusions. However, the simplest explanation is usually the right one, and you are urging the violation of an important principle, by urging attribution to malice that which could be explained by crassness or stupidity. Think about the possible reasons for posting and the calculated outcomes: The first calculated outcome is: people reading this post will follow the link to the fake cilit bang blog, and see marketing messages, and register an impression of cleverness, or simple product exposure. Advertisers will try anything. They've already admitted they are running a viral campaign based around a blog. How will this work if the 'fake' blogger does not comment on other blogs? Believing this outcome only requires you to believe that the person doing the fake posting has no tact, little regard for feelings, or has spent all day posting similar things and simply slipped up. Simple human failings, in an industry dominated by market-leading, widespread, professional and deliberate crassness (as evinced by the Cilit Bang advert itself). That said, a contemptible failure to draw the line, somewhere, whether it was not picking his blog to comment on, or not embarking on the fake blog campaign itself. The second calculated outcome is from the malicious person angle: people reading this post on, after all, just a blog, will follow the link, see marketing messages, make a generally negative assumption about Cilit Bang marketing, and blog about it or tell their friends. That is, they will virally market that negative image. This requires two further steps than the above. It requires the assumption of malice: a destructive competitor, someone in the company who hates the individual who runs the CB account, or an aggrieved person who believes that nobody will take Reckitt's comprehensive denial seriously. It also assumes that people care enough to be pissed off, and is thus asking for more than outcome one. A marketing person should understand this. The third calculated outcome is the leftfield one. People following the link will see the CB faux blog, and assume it's just a friendly someone who wishes to remain pseudonymous. I can't discount that this happened and the person simply has not made a correction, but I also strongly feel that someone with real sentiments to share, would not attribute them to a fictional guy from an advert and hand over marketing clicks, unless they were certain it would be understood who was behind the pseudonym, or whimsy would be the normal response. As an aside, running a fake blog, and using fake blog postings on others' blogs to get people to read it, is still a contemptible marketing practice on the scale of junk faxing (siphoning, in this case, credibility, rather than printing costs), whether it is done on posts like "look, a bunny with a pancake on his head" or like "the first time I contacted the father who abandoned me." However, as you have surmised, I have a low opinion of manipulative stealth marketing, so, reminded of this by a friend, I will give the last words to the late Bill Hicks, who urged marketing people in his audience to: "Suck a tailpipe. Hang yourself. Borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy. Rid the world of your evil fucking presence. OK, back to the show. You know what bugs me though, is that everyone here who's in marketing is thinking the same thing, 'Oh cool, Bill's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a huge market.'" posted by Michael at 10/01/2005 08:15:00 PM 0 comments |