Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2012

Help combat RRSHS (Relative Risk Scary Headline Syndrome)

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:38

Timandra Harkness on the latest “scare the shit out of people with blatant propaganda” campaign in Britain:

To put that another way, the campaign is suggesting that if 48,000 women all drank two large glasses of wine every night (it doesn’t specify for how long — a year, 20 years — this is a health campaign after all, so why would we need to see proper research citations?), then out of those assiduous drinkers an extra two would die in a year because they drank more than the government guidelines suggest.

It’s a classic case of RRSHS — Relative Risk Scary Headline Syndrome. Why bore people with a sober assessment of how likely something is to kill them when you can scream a terrifying figure at them instead? So what if they’re far more likely to die of something else?

And in fact, moderate drinking offers significant protection against heart disease, which kills one in three of us. ‘Apparently, two large glasses of wine, or more, a day could make me half as likely to die from a heart attack’, the plasticine figure could truthfully have said.

RRSHS is a variant of the “science by press release” variant of junk science.

Update: Tim Worstall loses his cool over the statistical lies being bandied around in this particular Nanny campaign:

    Prime Minister David Cameron is known to have sympathy with the idea of minimum pricing, which medics say could save nearly 10,000 lives per year if set at 50p per unit.

Gosh, that’s amazing.

    Alcohol related deaths in the UK rose to 9,031 in 2008, up from 8,724 the previous year.

Rilly? A slight rise in the cost of cheap booze will save more lives per year than are lost to all booze?

Hey, why not put it up to £50 a unit and we’ll all live forever?

Forgive me the crudity but I’ve really had it with cunts lying to get their bandwagons rolling.

And in the comments, “PJH” says:

One wonders, of course, if these figures are created in the same way as alcohol related admissions to hospitals.

“30% of this death was due to alcohol, 10% of that teetotaller’s death was due to alcohol, 14.243245% of that other death…”

January 9, 2012

What is really meant by the term “Deliberative democracy”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Frank Furedi explains the intent of “consultations”, “public conversations”, and “deliberative democracy” — which are neither conversations nor democratic in nature:

In these situations, ‘consultation’ is turned into a tool of management masquerading as genuine deliberation. The demand for deliberation always comes from above, and the terms of these ‘public conversations’ are always set by professional consultants. The process of deliberation depends on ‘procedures, techniques and methods’ worked out by experts. The exercise itself is overseen by professional facilitators, whose rules are really designed to assist in the observation and management of the participants. These phoney conversations are not forums where the participants interact as equals — rather, skilled facilitators are employed to create the right kind of environment and desirable outcomes. One writer sings the praises of ‘citizens’ juries’ — a common form of deliberative democracy — by saying that such juries rely on ‘trained moderators’ who ensure ‘fair proceedings’. With zero self-consciousness, the writers endorses such a highly manipulative environment as being superior to ‘liberal institutions’, which apparently only encourage passivity amongst citizens. What we have is a pretence of deliberation and a reality of manipulation.

Deliberative democracy is neither deliberative nor democratic. Rather, it is about promoting propaganda through the pretence of having an open conversation. However, when it comes to manipulating the public imagination, ‘deliberative polling’ beats deliberative democracy to the finishing line. Deliberative polling stage-manages an allegedly open discussion on a controversial issue in order subliminally to alter people’s views and convictions. According to one of the advocates of deliberative polling, the beauty of this exercise is that ‘many participants changed their voting intentions as a result of the dialogue’. The author, Carne Ross, offers a scenario where, prior to an exercise in deliberative polling, 40 per cent of people surveyed said they would vote for mainstream centrist parties, 22 per cent for socialists, nine per cent for centrist liberals and eight per cent for greens. However, by carefully finessing the wording of the choices available to the participants, the deliberative manipulators successfully increased the number of participants who wanted to ‘emphasise the fight against climate change’ from 49 to 61 per cent.

Deliberative democrats are not shy about acknowledging that their support for conversational forums is contingent upon the participants reaching the ‘right’ decisions. Deliberative democracy is often promoted on the basis that it provides an environment conducive to changing people’s minds and having them adopt the ethos of the forum’s organisers. Deliberation is the preferred method of communication, because it can be a useful tool for transmitting the outlook of the organisers. To ensure that this objective is achieved, the group’s interpersonal dynamic is carefully controlled. To prevent the spontaneous emergence of informal group leaders, ‘most moderators are alert to the manner in which deliberations can be dominated by confident and outspoken individuals’, assures one assessment of deliberative democracy. It appears that deliberative democracy works best when ‘confident and outspoken individuals’ are put in their place.

The depiction of an exercise in brainwashing as a new form of democracy shows that political rhetoric is just that these days — empty rhetoric. It is a sign of the times that a procedure that could have come straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four can be presented as an enlightened alternative to representative democracy. The assumption that the professional facilitator has the moral authority to determine how people should think and emote speaks volumes about the patronising attitude of today’s ‘deliberators’.

December 7, 2011

Beijing’s “smog blog” at the US Embassy

Filed under: China, Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

The official line is that the smog in Beijing is merely inconvenient, while the US Embassy’s Twitter account sends out regular readings that conflict with the official story:

It was a contest over smog that was being fought across two social networks in two completely different languages between two contenders separated by the world’s biggest firewall. At stake was the authority to define “unhealthy air” and, as a result, to shape public perceptions and expectations.

On one side was an automated air quality monitoring station set up by the US embassy in Beijing that issues hourly updates via Twitter on the @beijingair account. It states the date, time, pollutions readings for ozone and PM2.5 and a terse English summary of the health implications. At 8am, it read “very unhealthy” — an improvement on the “hazardous” level of the previous day and the alarming “beyond index” of last Friday.

On the other side was the personal microblog of Du Shaozhong, the deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Administration, who has taken his passionate defence of the city’s policies onto China’s most influential website, Sina Weibo. One of his most recent posts read: “It is understandable if people hate bad weather, but venting your emotions is not helpful.”

October 11, 2011

The famous British wartime poster that was never used

Filed under: Britain, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:33

There’s a fascinating story posted at The Awl discussing the trademark battle over the famous “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster from the British Ministry of Information during World War 2. The most interesting part of the article, in my opinion, is that the poster was never used during the war:

The Keep Calm and Carry On poster was designed and produced by the British government in 1939 in advance of the war, but it was never displayed in a single English tube station or tobacconists or newsagents. Not one ordinary citizen ever saw it in the street before or during the war.

Of the 2.5 million posters originally printed, only a handful survived the war; all the rest were pulped. Exactly two copies are known to have made it into private hands. One of these is owned by Wartime Posters of Warrington, Cheshire. The other is Stuart Manley’s.

A very few more are held in government museums, such as the Imperial War Museum, whose website observes, “And remember the most important wartime tip of all: Keep Calm and Carry On.” Haha, not even! Hardly anyone had ever seen that thing before 2001!!

[. . .]

Early in 1939, it was clear that war was all but inevitable. The precursor organization to the Ministry of Information swung quietly into gear at that time, and began work on five million posters to plaster all over the place and improve citizen morale. Not everybody was on board with crafting public messaging before it was clear how things were going to shake out, but the dissenters were overruled and the project went forward.

But the war didn’t begin the way they expected. The period from late 1939 to early May of 1940 was known as the Phoney War because the Germans had invaded Poland with such a lot of Blitzkrieg that everyone in Britain and France expected pretty much the same thing for themselves. But that did not happen, and wags took to calling this period the Sitzkrieg and so on, and that went on until the Germans marched into France and the Low Countries. It took until autumn of 1940 for the London Blitz to begin.

Meanwhile, Sitzkrieg or no, the MoI was lumbering onward. The first two posters produced in 1939 were: “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory” and “Freedom is in Peril: Defend It With All Your Might.” Two and a half million of the third were printed. They read, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and these last were held back in anticipation of the rain of bombs that was expected the moment war broke out. They were meant for a crisis that didn’t in the event occur. For that and a few other reasons, the British public never saw them.

September 22, 2011

Telegraph: The great euro swindle

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

This is an interesting summary of the path to the Euro, and how some predicted the current situation at the very start of the project:

The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.

Meanwhile, the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted. [. . .]

The central historical error of the modern Financial Times concerns the euro. The FT flung itself headlong into the pro-euro camp, embracing the cause with an almost religious passion. Doubts were dismissed. Here is the paper’s Lex column on January 8, 2001, on the subject of Greek entry to the eurozone: “With Greece now trading in euros,” reflected Lex, “few will mourn the death of the drachma. Membership of the eurozone offers the prospect of long-term economic stability.” The FT offered a similarly warm welcome to Ireland.

The paper waged a vendetta against those who warned that the euro would not work. Its chief political columnist, Philip Stephens, consistently mocked the Eurosceptics. “Immaturity is the kind explanation,” sneered Stephens as Tory leader William Hague came out against the single currency.

[. . .]

Now let’s turn to the BBC. In our Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, Guilty Men, we expose in detail how the BBC betrayed its charter commitment and became a partisan player in a great national debate — all the more insidious because of its pretence at neutrality.

For example, in the nine weeks leading to July 21, 2000, when the argument over the euro was at its height, the Today programme featured 121 speakers on the topic. Some 87 were pro-euro compared with 34 who were anti. BBC broadcasters tended to present the pro-euro position itself as centre ground, thus defining even moderately Eurosceptic voices as extreme.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

September 3, 2011

US troops allegedly handcuffed and executed children in 2006

Filed under: Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:05

Wikileaks may have been sitting on a particularly disturbing report:

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks suggests that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

The unclassified cable, which was posted on WikiLeaks’ website last week, contained questions from a United Nations investigator about the incident, which had angered local Iraqi officials, who demanded some kind of action from their government. U.S. officials denied at the time that anything inappropriate had occurred.

But Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a communication to American officials dated 12 days after the March 15, 2006, incident that autopsies performed in the Iraqi city of Tikrit showed that all the dead had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Among the dead were four women and five children. The children were all 5 years old or younger.

Claims of American troops committing atrocities were very common, but few of them appear to have been anything other than Al Qaeda propaganda exercises. This may well be another case of this, but the initial investigation implied otherwise:

The original incident report was signed by an Iraqi police colonel and made even more noteworthy because U.S.-trained Iraqi police, including Brig. Gen. Issa al Juboori, who led the coordination centre, were willing to speak about the investigation on the record even though it was critical of American forces.

Throughout the early investigation, U.S. military spokesmen said that an Al Qaeda in Iraq suspect had been seized from a first-floor room after a fierce fight that had left the house he was hiding in a pile of rubble.

But the diplomatic cable provides a different sequence of events and lends credence to townspeople’s claims that American forces destroyed the house after its residents had been shot.

August 31, 2011

O’Neill: Winston Smith is working overtime in NATO’s “Ministry of Truth”

Filed under: Africa, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

I guess you could say that Brendan O’Neill wasn’t a fan of the NATO intervention in Libya:

Not since Winston Smith found himself in the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984, rewriting old newspaper articles on behalf of Big Brother, has there been such an overnight perversion of history as there has been in relation to NATO’s intervention in Libya. Now that the rebels have taken Tripoli, NATO’s bombing campaign is being presented to us as an adroit intervention, which was designed to achieve precisely the glorious scenes we’re watching on our TV screens. In truth, it was an incoherent act of clueless militarism, which is only now being repackaged, in true Minitrue fashion, as an initiative that ‘played an indispensable role in the liberation of Tripoli’.

Normally it takes a few years for history to be rewritten; with Libya it happened in days. No sooner had rebel soldiers arrived at Gaddafi’s compound than the NATO campaign launched in March was being rewritten as a cogent assault. Commentators desperate to resuscitate the idea of ‘humanitarian intervention’, and NATO leaders determined to crib some benefits from their Libya venture, took to their lecterns to tell us that their aims had been achieved and they had ‘salvaged the principle of liberal interventionism from the geopolitical dustbin’. In order to sustain these bizarre claims, they’ve had to put the real truth about NATO’s campaign into a memory hole and invent a whole new ‘truth’.

Over the past few days every aspect of NATO’s bombing campaign has been, as Winston Smith might put it, ‘falsified’. Since everybody now seems to have forgotten the events of just five months ago, it is worth reminding ourselves of the true character of NATO’s intervention in Libya. It was incoherent from the get-go, overseen by a continually fraying and deeply divided Western ‘alliance’ and with no serious war aim beyond being seen to bomb an evil dictator. It was cowardly, where all alliance members wanted to appear to be Doing Something while actually doing as little as possible. This was especially true of the US, which stayed firmly on the backseat of the anti-Gaddafi alliance. And it was reckless, revealing that military action detached from strategy, unanchored by end goals, can easily spin out of control.

July 14, 2011

Canadian withdrawal from Afghanistan being spun as a Taliban victory

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:15

To the surprise of nobody, the Taliban is claiming a clear win in driving the Canadian infidels out of Afghanistan:

During nine years of operations in Afghanistan, 157 Canadian troops died (87 percent because of the Taliban.) For most of that time, Canada suffered, proportionately, twice as many dead in Afghanistan as the United States. During this period, the U.S. had ten times as many troops in Afghanistan. The U.S. also has ten times the population of Canada, so the 3,000 Canadians are making the same scale of effort, but suffering more losses in the process. But most of those losses were not from “fighting the Taliban,” but from mines in the road. Back in early 2007, 81 percent of Canadian deaths were from IEDs (roadside bombs). But that declined as Canadian troops received more bomb resistant armored vehicles.

Since the Taliban couldn’t cope with Canadian troops in head-to-head combat, they devoted much of their roadside bombing effort against the Canadians. But in the last year, the Taliban were only able to kill four Canadian troops. Still, the constant Taliban propaganda about how killing even a few Canadian troops would eventually force the Canadians to withdraw, is believed by most Afghans. Canada decided to withdraw all their troops from Afghanistan back in 2008, and more American troops have moved in to replace them.

It’s ironic that the reason the government of the day originally committed troops to the Afghanistan campaign was that they thought it would be “safer” than being involved in Iraq. Rather than being seen to support George Bush, the Canadian contingent was sent to a “less tainted” operation instead. The party that sent the troops in the first place lost few opportunities to call for them to leave, once the current government was in power.

June 11, 2011

China finally admits to (some) problems at the Three Gorges megadam

Filed under: China, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:47

It’s been “officially” a wonderful thing with absolutely no negative attributes for so long that it’s almost refreshing that the Chinese government is finally admitting it’s not all good news around the massive Three Gorges dam and reservoir:

In private, officials have worried about the project for some time and occasionally their doubts have surfaced in the official media. But the government itself has refused to acknowledge them. When the project was approved by the rubber-stamp parliament in 1992, debate was stifled by the oppressive political atmosphere of the time, following the Tiananmen Square massacre three years earlier. Last July, with the dam facing its biggest flood crest since completion in 2006, officials hinted that they might have overstated its ability to control flooding. On May 18th, with the dam again in the spotlight because of the drought, a cabinet meeting chaired by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, went further in acknowledging drawbacks.

Having called the dam “hugely beneficial overall”, the cabinet’s statement said there were problems relating to the resettlement of 1.4m people, to the environment and to the “prevention of geological disasters” that urgently needed addressing. The dam, it said, had had “a certain impact” on navigation, irrigation and water-supply downstream. Some of these problems had been forecast at the design stage or spotted during construction. But they had been “difficult to resolve effectively because of limitations imposed by conditions at the time.” It did not elaborate.

March 2, 2011

Why “Buy American” or “Buy Canadian” campaigns are bad economics

Filed under: Economics, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:26

Daniel Ikenson takes ABC to task for their misleading propaganda against international trade:

Back in the “golden age” of 1960, when imports were oddities to marvel over in a disdainful way, the per-capita U.S. income was $2,914. In 2009, with imports ubiquitous, per-capita income was $46,411. (Economic Report of the President, 2010, Tables B-1 and B-34). In real, inflation-adjusted terms, even with a U.S. population increase from 181 million to 307 million, per-capita incomes in 2009 were almost triple what they were in 1960 ($42,277 vs. $15,669 in 2005 dollars — ERP, 2010, Tables B-2 and B-34). Oh, if only we could replicate the relative poverty, the limited consumer choices, the inefficient production processes, the massive trade barriers that compelled Americans to buy American, and the uneconomic work rules and wages commanded by once-powerful private sector labor unions. In 1960, before real economic liberalization spawned cultural and social liberalization, Diane Sawyer would never have dreamed of being a network news anchor, if she even dared to entertain the concept of working outside of the home. How can she pine for such an era?

It’s frustrating that so much research refuting the myth of manufacturing decline and supporting the conclusion that U.S. manufacturing is thriving — and is in fact leading the world in terms of value of output — is simply neglected by a media that is more committed to scaring than informing. Today Americans are less likely to find in their homes products manufactured in the United States because U.S. manufacturers have moved on to producing higher value products. American manufacturing isn’t focused on products that consumers find in retail stores, like furniture, hand tools, sporting goods, flatware, draperies, carpeting and clothes. American factories produce more value than any other country’s factories by focusing on producing the highest value products: pharmaceuticals, chemicals, airplanes, sophisticated componentry, technical textiles, and other items often sold directly to other businesses.

I and others have been making these points for several years, as U.S. manufacturing continues to thrive in every metric . . . except employment. Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 and has been on a downward trajectory ever since. But that is the point that eludes ABC and everyone else who thinks U.S. manufacturing’s best days are in the past. Making more with less is the goal! That’s how an economy grows! The political imperative of “putting people back to work” regardless of the economic value of that work — remember the so-called stimulus? — spits in the face of economics. The fact that Americans are unemployed speaks to a mismatch of skills demanded and skills available, as well as to a business and regulatory environment that dissuades investment and hiring.

October 27, 2010

The AK-47, the Soviet Union’s most successful export

Filed under: History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:56

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to this article about the Avtomat Kalashnikov 47:

In his new book, The Gun: The AK-47 and the Evolution of War, out Oct. 12, New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers traces the origins of modern assault rifles — particularly Avtomat Kalashnikov 47, or the AK-47 — and analyzes how they’ve changed warfare. Popular Mechanics spoke to the author about how and why the AK-47 was developed and why it has had even more of an impact than nuclear weapons.

[. . .]

Q During the course of your research, did you get to meet or talk to Mikhail Kalashnikov?

A I met General Kalashnikov several times. He was a fascinating man and a very complicated figure — a master of navigating the Soviet system and its aftermath. He is often portrayed as a poor and simple peasant who, through sheer inventive genius, designed the world’s most successful automatic arm. But this is an almost absurd distillation, the carefully spun fable of Soviet propaganda mills. He’s actually something much richer: a small part of an enormous machine and a most useful and interesting lens with which to look at decades of often dreary and sometimes terrifying Soviet life. He’s also charming, beguiling, clever, funny and both intensely proud and publicly humble at the same time. The legends around him are insufficient at best and grossly inaccurate at worst. He’s quite a man and a challenging character to render.

Q Why is so much about the development of the AK-47 still shrouded in secrecy?

A After the weapon was fielded, the Soviet Union invested heavily in an official version of its creation. This was not long after the purges, when many prominent Soviet citizens and public figures had been liquidated. A new crop of heroes was being put forward by the Kremlin and the Communist Party. Mikhail Kalashnikov fit this movement perfectly — he was, by the official telling, the quintessential proletariat success story, a wounded vet with limited education and almost no training who conceived of this weapon and relentlessly conjured it into existence. The truth was more complicated. But this party-approved version was endlessly repeated in official channels, and one result of the propaganda was that many other participants in the weapon’s design were sidelined and kept silent. One important figure was even arrested, charged with anti-revolutionary activity and sentenced to hard labor. After the Soviet Union collapsed, some of these other men and their accounts began to circulate. But the archives have never fully been opened, and the myths have hardened into something that can feel like fact. We do know much more than we used to, but the full story, in crisp detail, remains elusive, and the Communist version still stands in many circles. Propaganda is a pernicious thing, and the Kalashnikov tale is an example of just how effective it can be.

October 12, 2010

Toronto’s election gets interesting

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

The race for the post of mayor of Toronto was supposed to be a dignified procession to the installation of George Smitherman, former provincial cabinet minister. The vote was expected to be a mere formality, as the assent of the right-thinking people in the downtown core was assured. Somehow, though, they forgot about having given the vote to the hillbillies and hockey hackers of the uncouth far-distant suburbs. Those unwashed hicks apparently supported some gaffe-prone character with lots of media-friendly damage already on tape and ready to roll.

Unbelievably, the release of the damaging material seemed not only not to cause a drop in support, it seemed to increase his support. At that point, the gloves came off (one assumes), as these signs were put up along University Avenue overnight:

Not my photo, they’d already been taken down before I got to that stretch of University this morning. Photo courtesy of 680 News.

October 4, 2010

The moral blindness of the 10:10 campaign

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:20

Eric S. Raymond watched the eye-opening propaganda piece from the 10:10 campaign:

I believe it was the historian Robert Conquest who said that every organization eventually behaves as though it is run by a secret cabal of its enemies. I have seldom seen any more convincing evidence of this than the “No Pressure” video released by the anti-global-warming activist campaign 10:10.

[. . .]

The reaction from AGW skeptics was no surprise; many fulminated that the mask had slipped, and this video is the agenda of environmental fascism writ large. Thoughtcrime brings death! Conform! Obey! Or die . . . and the survivors get pieces of their friends spattered all over them as a warning. I think we open a more interesting inquiry by taking the 10:10 campaign at their word. They thought they were being funny.

[. . .]

There’s a mind-boggling disconnect from the feelings of ordinary human beings implied here, a kind of moral and emotional incompetence. It’s as though the 10:10 campaigners were so anesthetized by the secretions of their own zealotry that they became incapable of understanding how anyone not living deep inside their reality-tunnel would react.

[. . .]

To update Lewis, your garden-variety power-mad monster might commit the atrocities in this video, but only because they are not funny — because they spread fear or demonstrate power and ruthlessness. The kind of idealism that aims to be “tormenting us for our own good” may be what is required before you think blowing up schoolchildren with the push of a button is funny.

As many have commented, how could this video possibly have been professionally written, directed, acted, filmed, and edited with nobody actually noticing how awful it was? Were they all so morally sure of the righteousness of their cause that the didn’t recognize (or care) how most people would react to their casual — even cheerful — butchery?

October 1, 2010

“No pressure” . . . BOOM!

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

I have to imagine that this little propaganda number was put together by the anti side rather than the pro side:

You don’t agree with this program? No pressure . . . we’ll blow up your kids. James Delingpole thinks it’s great (but not for the cause it supposedly represents):

But with this new monstrosity, truly the great Richard Curtis has excelled himself. It’s so bad, it makes his previous shimmering masterpieces of emetica – Love Actually, The Girl In The Cafe, The Boat That Rocked – look like Battleship Potemkin. It makes the Vicar of Dibley look like a collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. It’s so deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful it makes you wish that the man could be given a ticker tape parade in every major capital city, in gratitude for the devastating damage he has (unwittingly) wrought on the eco-fascist cause.

Update: Apparently, James isn’t the only one who thinks this is sending exactly the wrong message — the campaign is trying to recall the clip:

That, at any rate, is what they keep trying to do — cancelling it whenever it appears on You Tube, pulling it from their campaign website and so on.

Unfortunately their efforts are being frustrated by people on the sceptical side of the climate debate, who keep peskily insisting on reposting the video where everyone can view it. And rightly so. With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

I don’t think any of us will ever be able to look at another Richard Curtis movie in quite the same way ever again. It may even be that we will now never, ever be able to enjoy another episode of the Vicar of Dibley, because all we’ll be able to think about is Dawn French with a Panzerfaust beneath her cassock ready to blast off the heads of any members of her congregation who don’t believe in Man Made Global Warming. What a sad day this is for us all.

Update, the second: Iowahawk thinks this may well be a great subject for a Harvard Business School case study. Using the principles of “new journalism”, he carefully recreates the situation, constructing dialogue to fit the theme:

London, sometime earlier this year: The 10:10 Project, a nonprofit NGO focused on reducing carbon, convenes a high level meeting in their posh modern conference room. After reviewing PowerPoint on the results of their latest government grant proposals and white-liberal-guilt fund raising campaigns, the 10:10 marketing team reports that previous communication efforts have not been proceeding as expected.

“Perhaps what we need is a fresh new campaign,” offers one of the conferees. “Something different, provocative… something edgy. Something that will really get our message across.” This is greeted with great excitement. The finance director pours through spreadsheets and identifies a budget source. An executive screening committee is appointed who develop timelines and begin scheduling meetings with London’s top agencies and independent film production firms.

Several weeks later, after sitting through a half dozen agency presentations that have yet to meet their standards, 10:10′s highly paid executive brain trust arrives at a meeting at the sleek offices of London’s hottest agency Splodey, Youngblood, Gutz & Bones. After introductions, small talk, and pastries, SYG&B’s creative director — winner of 5 British Clio awards — strolls confidently to the television monitor at the front of the room and walks the 10:10 clients through a scene-by-scene video storyboard pitching a new promotional mini-movie that will solve their communication dilemma. The smoothness of the presentation masks the hundreds of late night man-hours and debating the SYG&B creative department spent in crafting it — but it was worth it.

“Brilliant!” exclaims the 10:10 executive committee chair, to the enthusiastic nods of his colleagues. “Add one more exploding child, and I think we have a winner.”

Read the whole thing, as they say.

September 2, 2010

If not the founder, at least a notable contributor

Filed under: History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

John Pilger pays “tribute” to one of the more persuasive contributors to both militarism and commercialism of the 20th century:

Edward Bernays, the American nephew of Sigmund Freud, is said to have invented modern propaganda. During the first world war, he was one of a group of influential liberals who mounted a secret government campaign to persuade reluctant Americans to send an army to the bloodbath in Europe. In his book, Propaganda, published in 1928, Bernays wrote that the “intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses was an important element in democratic society” and that the manipulators “constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power in our country.” Instead of propaganda, he coined the euphemism “public relations.”

The American tobacco industry hired Bernays to convince women they should smoke in public. By associating smoking with women’s liberation, he made cigarettes “torches of freedom.” In 1954, he conjured a communist menace in Guatemala as an excuse for overthrowing the democratically-elected government, whose social reforms were threatening the United Fruit company’s monopoly of the banana trade. He called it a “liberation.”

Bernays was no rabid right-winger. He was an elitist liberal who believed that “engineering public consent” was for the greater good. This was achieved by the creation of “false realities” which then became “news events.”

Propaganda definitely existed before Bernays, but he may have been the one who codified and systematized the “science”.

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