When it comes to crafting winning political narratives, progressives have a natural advantage over conservatives. That’s because progressives have a free hand to project rosy visions of the future while conservatives must constantly defend against progressives’ distorted depictions of the past.
Two fundamental techniques undergird progressives’ success at narrative spinning. The first is skillful framing of the debate through investing heavily in public opinion making machinery. This disarms critics while giving lawmakers cover to vote for bills they’ve neither read nor understood. Thus framed, policies are judged only by their stated intentions, never their actual results. This allows politicians to promote new pieces of legislation named for their lofty objectives, even if the thousands of pages of vague and contradictory content deliver just the opposite.
The second is dodging all responsibility for failure. This is accomplished by blaming insufficient resources, the prior administration, the greedy 1 percent, sabotage by Republicans, or even the people’s obdurate failure to appreciate the progressive benefits conferred upon them. When the going gets tough, reality can be dismissed with a slogan. Forward!
Bill Frezza, “2013: The Year The Progressive Narrative Collided With Reality”, Forbes, 2013-12-30
January 2, 2014
QotD: Why progressive policy ideas get more media attention
November 20, 2013
Jacqueline Kennedy and the Camelot myth
Virginia Postrel on the legacy of Jacqueline Kennedy:
When she was 22, the future Jacqueline Kennedy won a Vogue contest with an essay in which she dreamed of being “a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century.” As first lady, she proved herself a genius at visual persuasion. She crafted her own image, refined her husband’s, re-created the White House’s, and even shaped America’s abroad.
Her most evocative and enduring image-making came when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, 50 years ago this week. She art-directed the funeral’s pageantry and then, in an interview with T.H. White for Life magazine, memorably linked her husband to one of the most powerful legends in the English-speaking world. Jackie created the myth of the Kennedy administration as Camelot: the lost golden age that proved ideals could become real.
The Arthurian legends traditionally operate as what the cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken calls “displaced meaning.” Every culture, he observes, maintains ideals that can never be fully realized in everyday life, from Christian charity to economic equality. Yet for all their empirical failings, such cultural ideals supply essential purpose and meaning, offering identity and hope. To preserve and transmit them, cultures develop images and stories that portray a distant world in which their ideals are realized — a paradise, a utopia, a golden age, a promised land, a world to come. Camelot is such a setting.
“When they are transported to a distant cultural domain,” McCracken writes, “ideals are made to seem practicable realities. What is otherwise unsubstantiated and potentially improbable in the present world is now validated, somehow ‘proven,’ by its existence in another, distant one.”
[…] The Kennedy administration ended with sudden violence from without, making Jackie’s analogy doubly potent. It suggested a parallel with a legendary Golden Age while simultaneously implying that, left to itself, this new Golden Age might have continued indefinitely. This Camelot was pure glamour: a frozen moment, its flaws and conflicts obscured.
Glamour invites projection. For 50 years, Americans of various persuasions have imagined their ideals embodied in a Camelot that might have been. Advocates of a vigorous Cold War foreign policy claim John Kennedy. So do their opposites. He did less for the civil-rights movement than his unglamorous successor, Lyndon Johnson, yet in imagination he would have done more. Above all, people imagine that somehow a living Kennedy would have prevented the tumult of the 1960s.
November 9, 2013
Virginia Postrel on the persistence of glamour
At the Daily Beast, Virginia Postrel argues that far from being dead, glamour is still a powerful force in our lives:
In a world that prizes transparency, honesty, and full disclosure, the very idea seems out of place. Glamour is an illusion that conceals flaws and distractions. It requires mystery and distance, lest too much information breaks the spell. How can its magic possibly survive in a world of tweeting slobs?
But glamour does in fact endure. It is far more persistent, pervasive, and powerful than we realize. We just have trouble recognizing it, because it has so many different incarnations, many of which have nothing to do with Hollywood or fashion.
Glamour isn’t just a style of dress or a synonym for celebrity. Like humor, it’s a form of communication that triggers a distinctive emotional response: a sensation of projection and longing. What we find glamorous, like what we find funny, depends on who we are.
One person who yearns to feel special finds glamour in the image of U.S. Marines as “the few, the proud,” while another dreams of getting into the city’s hottest club and yet another imagines matriculating at Harvard. For some people, a glamorous vacation means visiting a cosmopolitan capital with lots to do and see. For others, it means a tranquil beach or mountain cabin. The first group yearns for excitement, the second for rest. All of these things are glamorous — but to different people.
September 7, 2013
August 30, 2013
A profitable way to deal with annoying calls
At the BBC News website, Joe Kent profiles today’s hero in the ongoing battle against annoying telephone solicitations:
A man targeted by marketing companies is making money from cold calls with his own higher-rate phone number.
In November 2011 Lee Beaumont paid £10 plus VAT to set up his personal 0871 line — so to call him now costs 10p, from which he receives 7p.
The Leeds businessman told BBC Radio 4’s You and Yours programme that the line had so far made £300.
Phone Pay Plus, which regulates premium numbers, said it strongly discouraged people from adopting the idea.
Mr Beaumont came up with the plan when he grew sick of calls offering to help him reclaim payment protection insurance (PPI), or install solar panels.
He said: “I don’t use my normal Leeds number for anyone but my friends and family.”
Once he had set up the 0871 line, every time a bank, gas or electricity supplier asked him for his details online, he submitted it as his contact number.
He added he was “very honest” and the companies did ask why he had a such a number.
He told the programme he replied: “Because I’m getting annoyed with PPI phone calls when I’m trying to watch Coronation Street so I’d rather make 10p a minute.”
He said almost all of the companies he dealt with were happy to use it and if they refused he asked them to email.
August 9, 2013
The cult of Apple
In Wired, Brett T. Robinson talks about the similarities of the “Apple cult” to religious beliefs:
Technology ads provide parables and proverbs for navigating the complexities of the new technological order. They instruct the consumer on how to live the “good life” in the technological age.
Like all advertising, Apple’s ads perform a vital educational function in consumer society. The advertisements are allegorical, rhetorical attempts to domesticate foreign and abstract concepts, making them accessible and attractive to everyday adherents.
In fact, they resemble medieval morality plays in their personification of good (Mac) and evil (PC). As such, the ads contain a moral — or, more explicitly, they propose a morality customized for the conditions of the age.
Media technology has acquired a moral status because it has become part of the natural order of things. Luddites, those who have sworn off new technologies, are the new heretics and illiterates. Technology is an absolute. There is no turning back or imagining a different social order. Challenge is acceptable as long as it remains within the confines of the technological order. Apple may challenge Microsoft. Samsung may challenge Apple. But the order must not be challenged.
The impact of digital culture, then, is epistemic; it insinuates a moral system based on its own internal logic.
[…]
In the Apple story, the brand cult began offline, with users meeting in real, physical locations to swap programs and ideas. Now, the Apple community is more diffuse, concentrated in online discussion groups and support forums. However, Apple product launches and conferences remain sacred pilgrimages where Apple fans can congregate, camp, and live together for days at a time to revel in the communal joy of witnessing the transcendent moment of the new product launch.
The reverence once reserved for holy relics and liturgy has reemerged in the technology subculture. The shared experience of living in a highly technological era provides a universal ground for a pluralistic society. There may be many different devices, but only one Internet.
Technology has become the new taken-for-granted order that requires our fidelity. Obedience to the new order is expressed in the communication rituals that take place every day in the use of computers, music players, and smartphones — devices that bind individuals together. From the farthest satellite to the nearest cellphone, the mystical body of electricity connects us all. Personal technology has become “the very atmosphere and medium” through which we mediate our daily lives.
July 30, 2013
The economic inefficiency of “fair trade” goods
Tim Worstall applauds you for wanting to use some of your economic surplus to help out the poor and less fortunate producers of various goods in the developing world, but points out that the “fair trade” method is incredibly inefficient at funnelling any of that extra money to the original producers of your coffee or other “fair trade” goods:
However, you might want to have a little think about this in the lights of these quite astonishing numbers:
An interesting statistic is that in 2010, retail sales of fair-trade-labelled products totalled about $5.5 billion, with about $66 million premium — or about 1.2 percent of total retail sales — reaching the participating producers. There has to be a better way of helping poor farmers. Having only 1.2 cents out of every dollar spent on fair-trade products reach the target farmers is a hugely inefficient way of helping these people. If people wish to help these farmers there has to be charities out there that can transfer more than 1.2 cents per dollar to them.
It may well be that you are exercising your consumer choice as a way to make the world a better place. It’s just an incredibly inefficient method of doing so and thus you might want to reconsider that plan.
My own supposition is that the reason Fair Trade is so appallingly inefficient is the number of Interchangeable Emmas who have to be paid from that money supposedly going to producers. It takes very many poor coffee farmers’ incomes to pay for the PR bod advertising Fair Trade coffee from an office in central London. It might well be better to simply do as Madsen urges, and buy things made by poor people in poor countries. Then send the money saved by not paying the Emmas off to a charity of some minimal efficiency. Or even, if coffee farmers are really your thing, simply drink an extra cup or two a day and send the money by increasing demand for their production.
Update: In a marginally related item, Jonathan Katz explains why the policy of sending food to distant lands is less an attempt to ameliorate hunger than it is a corporate welfare policy to prop up US agribusiness:
The problem, says Christopher Barrett, an economist at Cornell University and one of the world’s leading experts on food aid, is that the U.S. has an entirely different goal when it comes to sponsoring humanitarian assistance. Feeding the hungry has never been its sole purpose.
Rather, the historical goal of food aid has been to stimulate U.S. businesses — the agriculture and shipping industries above all. Modern food aid was devised in the early days of the Cold War as a way to dispose of government-held surpluses, in order to regulate crop prices at home and create markets abroad. The main programs in the early days of food aid didn’t even give food away for free, rather selling it to foreign governments at a discount. “It just happened that this could get advertised as and provide humanitarian relief on occasion,” Barrett said.
Over time, things began to change. Surplus disposal became less important than other forms of domestic price control, and the cheaply sold food did not prove very effective in opening markets. When in the 1970s and 1980s, food donated during famine emergencies in Asia and Africa proved effective, free-food distributions took over as the dominant programs.
Today, the major players in food aid are nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as World Vision. But, because of how American laws are structured, domestic corporations still reap the much of the profit. Major U.S. agribusinesses can count on hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales to the government.
Shipping companies do even better. Federal law mandates that at least half of all U.S. food aid must be shipped aboard U.S.-flagged vessels. With shipping costs taking up nearly 40 percent of any food assistance funding, the law guarantees hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts for shipping companies. The winner of the Mozambique shipment was no exception: Sealift Inc. has grossed $203 million in government contracts since 2011, mostly from the Pentagon, according to data at USASpending.gov. This benefit is not lost on the shipping industry: The sector’s leading coalition, USA Maritime, spent $250,000 lobbying Congress on food aid and cargo-preference laws in 2011 and 2012.
July 14, 2013
Unwanted contact
At Samizdata, Natalie Solent had a rather strong reaction to an unwanted form of contact the other day:
Discussion point: the ethical issues surrounding unsolicited sales phone calls
Is it better to just hang them or should we draw and quarter first?
A few days on, and she’s a bit more philosophical about it:
Before being overwhelmed by phone-induced homicidal rage the other day, I had intended to discuss a subject that has been interesting me lately, namely how difficult it is to specify in advance rules for social interaction. More specifically, I was pondering how hard it is to lay down rules for dealing with unwanted contact. Cold calling is one form of that; what are traditionally described as “unwanted advances” are another.
The problem is that word “unwanted”. To say, as the organisational psychologist quoted in this article does, that “An unwanted advance is a form of injustice”, strikes me as unfair. We are not telepaths. Quite often the only way one can find out that unwanted contact is unwanted is to ask, that is, to initiate unwanted contact. On the other hand while we may not have telepathy, we most of us do have empathy to help us guess in advance when advances might be unwelcome. Phone sales companies know to the fifth decimal place exactly how likely their calls are to be welcome. They know that the first four of those decimal places are filled by zeros, scumbags that they are. Few men asking a woman out have quite such a large database of prior results upon which to draw. I’m glad I’m not a guy! That last breath before you open your mouth to begin the sentence that might get you rejected cruelly or rejected kindly must be painful.
June 30, 2013
“It’s very difficult to regulate greed”
Icewine is what originally put Canadian wine on the international map. Icewine is an expensive thing to produce, and therefore has drawn a lot of cheaters into the market:
Canada is tightening the rules for producing its popular icewine, a sweet dessert wine that is only made in cold climates, to crack down on fraudsters who sell mislabeled bottles that don’t make the grade.
In regulations published this week, the Canadian government said any bottle labeled and sold as icewine must be made only from grapes that have frozen on the vine.
[. . .]
Because the frozen grapes only yield a tiny amounts of sweet liquid, the dessert wine has a high cost and a high price. Grapes are left on the vine until the temperature falls to -8C (18F) over a prolonged period, and usually harvested overnight.
“It’s liquid gold,” said Paszkowski.
In China, where icewine has become hugely popular, a thriving counterfeit industry is flooding the market with wines that don’t live up to the label, he said.
“It’s very difficult to regulate greed,” said Paszkowski. “We’ve identified counterfeit icewines even in five-star restaurants and hotels.”
H/T to Elizabeth for the link.
June 17, 2013
Top this – wine corks meet screw-tops
BBC News looks at the latest attempt to blend the tradition of the wine bottle’s cork closure with the convenience of the twist-off screw top:
The unveiling this week of a new style of cork raises the question of why the traditional kind continues to dominate much of the wine world.
The Helix is opened with just a twist of the hand. No corkscrew is necessary as the top of the bottle has a thread inside.
The glass bottle and cork combination for wine is thought to have started in the 17th Century. But newer materials exist today that some argue are better suited for sealing a bottle than cork.
Screw caps and plastic corks have been embraced by producers fed up with wine becoming “corked” — the unpleasant musty taste, likened to wet dog, which is caused by tainted cork.
Influential US wine critic Robert Parker reckons that during the mid 1990s 7-10% of the wine he tasted was corked. In 2004 he predicted that by 2015 screw caps would dominate the wine industry.
The screw cap — generic name “Stelvin” after its biggest brand — advanced spectacularly in “New World” wine nations. By 2011, 90% of New Zealand wine was sealed this way.
But in Europe and the US the cork remains king.
It’s a little puzzling to some. Wine has become democratic and modern. There are prices and drinking styles to suit everyone. So why hasn’t the closure method evolved?
Portugal, where most of the world’s corks are harvested, has fought back against the chemical compound trichloroanisole (TCA), one of the most common causes of tainted corks.
But the screw cap not only avoids the problem of tainted cork, it forms a tighter seal. Most critics say that this guarantees a better flavour for all but the more expensive wines (which may age better with more oxygen).
“We prefer seals that ensure the wine is not going to be faulty,” says Ewan Murray, spokesman for the Wine Society. “Wines that are ready to drink young are always going to be fresher under a screw cap.”
April 6, 2013
An unusual hero for a modern TV show
Virginia Postrel briefly reviews a British show that just made its way across to North America:
When the British drama Mr. Selfridge debuted on PBS this week, American viewers saw two things rarely on display in contemporary popular culture: a businessman hero and, more remarkably, a version of commercial history that includes not just manufacturing but shopping.
The show, which is also streamed on PBS.org, stars Jeremy Piven as Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American-born founder of the London department store. In the first episode, he arrives in 1909, determined to shake up U.K. retailing with the techniques that made him a success as a partner at Chicago’s Marshall Field’s: showmanship, tons of advertising, and displays that let customers easily handle the merchandise. In the second, he puts perfumes and powder on display right by the store’s front door and introduces an affordable house fragrance concocted with new chemical processes.
Ambitions that an American drama might treat as self- centered greed become, in a British context, a bold strike against class privilege. “You show great potential,” Selfridge tells the talented shop girl Agnes Towler (played by Aisling Loftus), the show’s working-class heroine. “You remind me of myself when I started out — grasping for every chance, keen as mustard to learn. You love it, don’t you? The customers, the selling, the feeling of the merchandise under your hands …”
[. . .]
Yet like railroads and telegraphs, the department stores of the late 19th and early 20th century were socially and economically transformative institutions. They pioneered innovations ranging from inventory control and installment credit to ventilation systems, electric lighting and steel construction, along with new merchandising and advertising techniques. They brought together goods from all over the world and lit up city streets with their window displays. They significantly changed the role of women, giving them new career opportunities and respectable places to meet in public. They popularized bicycles, cosmetics, ready-to-wear clothing and electrical appliances. They even invented the ladies’ room.
October 29, 2012
Who actually benefits from the expansion of “self-service” retail?
In the Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan meets the modern grocery store checkout:
At the end of my visit to my town’s brand-new supermarket the other day, the cashier said she would be more than happy to help me self-check-out my purchases.
I said, “No, thank you, I would prefer that you do that.” She said, “Actually, we prefer that the customers get into the habit of checking out their groceries.” I said, “Actually, I would prefer to never get into that habit. I would prefer that you handle the entire operation. You are the cashier. You are the vicar of groceries. You, not I, work here. So earn your money and ring up my purchases. And then bag them. Please.”
Are we entering a dark, deeply un-American era when we literally have to do everything for ourselves?
Retailers love the idea of self-checkout and other forms of selling goods to customers with fewer staff members and more volunteer labour donated by the customers themselves. Some customers even prefer this, as it makes them feel more empowered about their retail experience. Bring your own bags (so we don’t need to provide you with bags we have to buy)! Pack your own bags (so we don’t have to hire as many checkout clerks)! But don’t fool yourself that the store is doing it “for the environment” or any other such catchy excuse: they’re on board with ideas like this because it’s more profitable for them.
October 25, 2012
The Apple cult as a modern religion
Do non-Apple fans sometimes think they’re talking to religious fanatics when they talk to Apple users? It’s a silly question, isn’t it? Of course they do, because Apple has become more and more a religious experience rather than a mere technology company:
[Kirsten Bell] wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that a stranger observing one of the launches could probably be forgiven for thinking they had stumbled into a religious revival meeting.
Bell now studies the culture of modern biomedical research, but is an expert on messianic religious movements in South Korea.
She said that an Apple product launch takes place in a building “littered with sacred symbols, especially the iconic Apple sign itself”.
Keynote speeches feature an Apple leader reawakened and renewing their faith in the core message and tenets of the brand/religion.
The tradition of not broadcasting launches in real time is akin to a religious event where it is forbidden to broadcast Sacred Ceremonies.
Instead scribes or its Tame Apple Press act like the writers of the gospels, “testifying to the wonders they behold” in a completely non objective way.
October 9, 2012
Gewirtz: The Windows 8 user interface
David Gewirtz is unimpressed with the Windows 8 user interface. To understate the case a wee bit:
… And that’s why, in pure analytical terms, one has to wonder what went through the (fill-in-the-blank) (fill-in-the-blank) misguided brains of Microsoft’s managers, analysts, and strategists when they decided to ditch the Start menu.
I finally decided to load the preview edition of Windows 8 and use it. And, despite the operating itself being a marvel of engineering, ease of use, speed, and underlyng functionality — I’m forced to say that it’s unusable for desktops out of the box. Un-frakin’-usable.
[. . .]
Microsoft, on the other hand, has decided that — rather than make some very minor interface nods to the billion or so users it has — it’s going to force everyone to change how they use their machines.
This is not change in a good way. It’d be as if Ford decided to yank out the typical comfortable interior of a car, and replace it with a motorcycle seat, handlebars, and control interface. One day, grandma would get up to go to work, get in her trusty Ford (which she’s been happily driving for decades) — and not know how to do anything!
Worse, since the motorcycle UI isn’t designed for the inside of a car, using it there would suck. People have tried it, and it’s amusing as an exercise, but it doesn’t really work.
Windows 8’s change to the Start menu is not amusing as an exercise. It’s an insult to all the billions of Windows users the world wide.
Here’s the thing. You get into Windows and it’s Metro. You click the desktop tile because you have real work to do — and you’re stuck. How do you launch apps? There’s no launcher or Start menu. If you don’t know to click in the corner of the screen, you ain’t doin’ nothin’. There’s no hint, no cue, no application, no Start menu. There’s nothing there, there.
September 20, 2012
Over-hyping the importance of the Richard III archaeological dig
At the History Today blog, Linda Porter points out that some of the breathless claims about the historical significance of the Leicester archaeological dig are rather overblown:
Major finds don’t come along very often and this would certainly be one of the most significant in the last hundred years. But the huge claims being made for it are not the sort that sit well with most historians. Assertions that, if DNA tests prove positive, this discovery ‘has the potential to rewrite history’ and is of ‘global importance’ make me sigh.
Historians have long known that the Tudor narratives on Richard III are propaganda. Shakespeare’s compelling villain may still resonate with the man on the street but has nothing to do with a measured analysis of the past and anyone with even a general interest in the late fifteenth century will be aware of this. And ‘global significance’? Cross the Channel and I’d be surprised if you found anyone outside the academic world who knew about Richard III and the saga of the Princes in the Tower. Those involved in the project, which appears to have been rigorously conducted from the archaeological perspective, clearly want headlines. As someone who has worked in public relations herself I congratulate them on a successful communications campaign — it has to be acknowledged that the Richard III Society is very good at this kind of thing — but wearing my historian’s hat extravagant claims make me uncomfortable.
