Thanks @jute and @Hanover 8-)

Yes, the most powerful country in the world is now being run by a frantic rodent, and there's no point trying to stop him - which was kind of my point.

>:O Yes, just like Clinton will win by 4-5% points X-) — Agustino

Yeah, she only won by two (and I got her percentage on the nose, incidentally). Donald got about 2 more than I bargained for (a gift from the FBI), which made the difference. So, I was out by a cumulative two points, which was always going to be either nothing or everything in the end. At least I stuck my neck out and made a specific prediction. Anyway, this is happening before your eyes. If you're incapable of being embarrassed by it, so much the worse for you. Judging by Trump's favourability ratings, most Americans aren't.



Is there much more you can do with a chimpanzee that's rampaging through your house than throw him some bananas and hope he eventually gets bored? I don't know. What kind of resistance do you suggest?

Progressives hardly need resist the Trump clown show. It's doing a better job of destroying itself than any of its opponents could. Sometimes the only way to teach a baby not to eat its own shit is to let it try some and see what it tastes like.

(Y)

Each forum has its own standards and they're welcome to 'em. I've seen nothing from you here that would warrant you being put on our ban radar.

My two cents: It's perfectly legitimate to give blunt advice to someone who starts a discussion based on their personal life. It's up to them to decide whether its helpful or not. What's not warranted is making this about those giving the advice. Posters are going to be themselves and that's they way it should be.

On the matter at hand, I agree with @The Great Whatever: Don't go into philosophy if you expect it to solve any major life problems for you. And I would think, judging by my limited knowledge of your personality, you wouldn't be self-motivated enough to do what it takes to make it in academia anyway (I know I'm not). If you want to build up your confidence, I'd suggest you try teaching English as a foreign language or something along those lines. Travel. See a bit of the world. At least put yourself outside your comfort zone at some point, or life will inevitably do it for you and probably in a much more unpleasant way than if you had planned it.

Baden, I used to teach scriptwriting in a department using the McKee model. It's like all good writing structures in my opinion: great to learn as long as you don't finally become a prisoner of it — mcdoodle

Yeah, I found it very interesting looking at movies through his theoretical lens. Also, helped me understand some things about my own writing in general.

Are you writing scripts yourself? — mcdoodle

Not yet, but thinking about it.

Robert McKee - Story

What makes a Hollywood baby more than its bathwater? Roll up, roll up...

Welcome dc. Good to see another former PF reg row ashore. (Y)

And a bit late, but welcome too @TimeLine.

if any one us wants to see ourselves as not enchained to simplistic psychological profiling, then we have to also ditch the idea of ourselves as passive receptacles of ads that inexorably hit their mark. — csalisbury

More germane for me would be to ditch the idea that we are unified individuals and take the analysis from there. There is a part of us, at least, that is passive and receptive and that's what ads aim for.

(and I'd add that I'm more liberal than conservative - I'm just suspicious of the grand visions of both) — csalisbury

The term "righty" was meant generally. I've never thought of you as a conservative actually.

And that brings me to 'cool' - 'cool' is a very complex feeling. For one, the very idea of cool is often tied to not "selling out" so that , in placing a product in conjunction with someone cool, the cool person can be drained of his coolness, and so become incapable of associating the product with coolness. — csalisbury

To a point, as your example shows. I would still contend though that in most product/target market combos, at least, the cool celebrity association is not too hard to pull off.

But in any case 'cool' runs up against all sort of psychological defenses so you cant simply beam cool+pepsi to any one who sees the ad. Tho of course you'll hit some targets, I never claimed everyone is invulnerable to every campaign. — csalisbury

Sure, and I'm not claiming the opposite, that we're vulnerable to every campaign's aims. The campaign may even make us hate the product. But that's an intellectually driven orientation, which kicks in to override what, if we are lucky, is just a fleeting inner conflict. My issue is not so much that we actually do what the marketers want us to do but that they plug into a part of us that works in ways we are not fully aware of with consequences we don't fully understand.

I'm familiar with the story. I thought it a bit unfair that suicide victims were trapped in trees and scourged by winged demons with not even a stick of gum to relieve their stresses, whereas Satan himself, though immobilized in ice, at least got to chew on Judas.

That's fair enough. The points you raised do apply to many. It may be that I'm too keen not to be seen as a commie.

Educate The People about the side effects of capitalism till the cows come home--it won't make any significant difference. Capitalism is a remorseless system, and it isn't going to play nice. What is it about providing an ever increasing flow of profit to shareholders don't you understand? — Bitter Crank

By side-effects, I meant more specifics like information about how advertising works or the kind of stuff MU was posting. Don't underestimate the potential of education. Give me the boy, I'll give you the man and so on. But that's more for un's new discussion when I can get round to it.

And on that bombshell... — unenlightened

I guess that's the climax. So, if this was a Hollywood movie, everyone would do hugs now. Right?

And it's pretty mainstream. Baden mentioned Hollywood and how much he hates it. — jamalrob

I was being somewhat hyperbolic. I'm quite looking forward to the summer blockbuster, Virgil vs. Baden, for example.

Isn't it easy enough to avoid movies? Are you surrounded by people who have movies blasting continuously? Is it like Clockwork Orange where you live? — Mongrel

Yes. No. Yes.

Let's take the example of cheap flights, mentioned in the song. "Cheap flights", at least in the UK, is middle-class code for loutish working-class lads and lassies heading to the Costa del Sol to get drunk and have a lot of sex. But this is a stereotype. In Marx's time my forebears were poor uneducated rural labourers, and maybe some of them were recent arrivals in the cities, where they went to find work (it's mostly the upper class that can trace their ancestry with any certainty, so I can't be sure). It's unlikely they ever set foot outside Britain and Ireland. But here I am now in sunny Spain, having been to several countries in several continents, writing about politics and philosophy even though I haven't studied them in a university. I would never have been able to travel without cheap flights, and I would never have been able to read Kant without leisure. I'm pretty sure this is a cultural as well as a material enrichment, and it was made possible by capitalism. — jamalrob

My pointing out the negative effects of the push towards consumerism doesn't mean I don't recognize the positives. What I'm looking for is education regarding the side-effects of capitalism (to continue the medical metaphor) rather than an excision. I would hope that would lead to more controls in the area of advertising among other things, so that, for example, ads would have to be mostly informative rather than emotive. There would be some cost to that, but I think it would be worth the sacrifice of some economic and even some technological growth in order that human growth be focused on more. I could go on about what I mean by this. But I won't. Maybe in un's upcomng education thread.

I admit this is impressionistic and emotional, but--something about it just stinks. The critique of consumer culture and the influence of corporations appears to be often motivated by a contempt for the masses, or at least a superior paternalism, not to mention a snobbish distaste. — jamalrob

More psychological analysis. How can we know for sure what others or even ourselves or motivated by? I'd rather concentrate on identifying problems in order to solve them. I think the way advertising works is problematic. I think the solution is more controls.

There is a simplistic sanctimoniousness in the suggestion that we are mere puppets of the advertisers, and for me it's reminiscent of my heritage of Presbyterian sobriety. — jamalrob

I don't remember anyone saying we are mere puppets of the advertisers. I did say advertising affects us in undesirable ways, and that it's designed to. The chain of reasoning for a business is hardly more complicated than "Doing X will result in a greater profit than doing Y>>>Doing X is not good for consumers>>>Consumers are unaware we are doing X>>>Doing X is legal>>>Do X." So what's your stance here? That we are not emotionally manipulated in ways that are not good for us? Because if it's just that we are not "mere puppets", I'm sure we all agree.

But come to think of it, this kind of Protestant puritanism is actually a real thread in the development of radical thought, from the English Revolution onwards, so maybe it's not quite true to describe anti-consumerism as a regrettable reversal--it's been in the Left the whole time. It's just that this is not the Leftist tradition that I have sympathy with. It hates capitalism for the good it has done, not only the bad. — jamalrob

Take me out of that jar on the shelf marked "Capitalist hater". Anti-consumerism has levels and criticism is not hatred.

But wait. Did I just hypocritically denounce Leftist snobbery after having held myself up as an exemplar of the culturally enriched in contrast to the loutish working-class lads and lassies on the Costa del Sol? Not quite, I don't think. I've been on holidays like that myself. That's the point about stereotypes and caricatures: they are unfair generalizations. Thanks to cheap flights, people--non-rich people--travel now for all sorts of reasons. — jamalrob

I don't do anything but cheap flights if I can help it. Does anyone with a brain?

Indian medicine. They make you feel bad first and good later. Unlike Hollywood medicine, which does the opposite.

Catharsis and such. — Mongrel

Glad you brought that up. Where that's done well, a movie can work and be a healthy engagement. It rarely is. Maybe Cronenberg.

...your statement calls for a Virgil quote.

"When Heav'n had overturn'd the Trojan state
And Priam's throne, by too severe a fate;
When ruin'd Troy became the Grecians' prey,
... — Mongrel

I don't get your point, but there's no need to explain, just point me in the direction of the corresponding Hollywood movie.

You joke about bombing Hollywood, but making others bear the brunt of your joke is the foundation of this problem, which is getting entertainment at someone else's expense. We call it making fun of someone. The true comedian recognizes that this is unacceptable behaviour, and switches things up to make fun of oneself. But what happens when my own entertainment is a case of me making fun of myself, but all I notice is that I am entertained, and I don't notice that I am making fun of myself. I'll continue to beat myself into the ground (...and loving it!). — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't get your point, and there is a need to explain. My joke was explicit. It did what it said on the tin, so to speak. That's a difference I consider key.

It is possible that we exaggerate the influence of various media, which we like or don't like. — Bitter Crank

I agree with this. And I'm actually quite open to being shown to be exaggerating here. But a significant amount of what's been thrown in my direction in this discussion is empty contrariness based on the idea that I'm a Marxist conspiracy theorist who hates business and, well, whatever else the conservafairy has been whispering in the ears of certain of my interlocutors. Anyway, it may come as a surprise to some but I'm not anti business per se. I recognize the positive innovation driven by business and that some of the smartest and most hard-working people around are business people. But it always has to be a case of letting the leash out and then reining it in a bit.

So let's take Pavlov. You take a stimulus that elicits some reaction and place it in conjunction with something else. Food and a bell. The dog is always going to salivate at food. Now what do people most deeply want, what do advertisers usually play to: Belonging, respect, love, inclusion (to be a loser is to not belong, not be respected, not be loved, not be included etc.) Thus the stimulus has to somehow elicit the idea/feeling of belonging/respect/love/inclusion (or the fear of lacking any of those). And then the bell's your product. The problem here is how you elicit the idea/feeling of those things, or their lack, at a level as immediate as the dog's desire for the food. If your super hip everyone's happy and in on the party vision doesn't move someone, they're not going to associate pepsi with belonging or not drinking pepsi with not-belonging. — csalisbury

It doesn't have to be that complicated or even about what people "deeply" want. Advertising has never been an emotional hypodermic needle. The conditioned stimulus, the product, only has to evoke a feeling, any feeling, that makes a purchase more likely (and obviously the more likely the better). Ergo, associate Pepsi with the feeling of "cool" by placing a can of it in the hand of someone "cool". Now the Pepsi sitting in the supermarket next to a virtually identically tasting non-promoted cola seems cooler, and those who value cool (i.e. most of the target market) are more likely to buy it / place a higher value on it; therefore, you can sell it for a higher price and make more profit. It's not rocket science or difficult to do at that level. (And you can replace "cool" with any other vague positive feeling you like elicited by someone or something associated with the product in the ad).

You can also go a step further and notice that people these days seem feel 'included' when they're making fun of commercials and how dumb the super hip everyone's happy and in on the party vision in those commercials is. Then you can start making ironic commercials, making fun of the very idea of commercials. And, in doing so, associate pepsi with the feeling of being included among the people who wouldn't fall for yesterday's pepsi's commercials. But if this post-vision vision doesn't move someone, you get nowhere. All of which is to say: if you want to use Pavlovian techniques (without using bodily pain and pleasure)to immiserate or goad humans you have to have recourse to the freudian stuff: desire, the superego, love etc. — csalisbury

I take your point here; methods do move on, although you may be overestimating how sophisticated the majority of consumers are (as far as I know, Coke ads are still the same old crap they always were and Coke is as popular as ever, no?) Anyway, the other reason I don't want to invoke Freud here is that he's not even taught on psychology courses today. So, he's not really directly relevant to marketers.

So the Party Everyone's In On. The In-Group Too Cool To be Taken in By The Party. Here's one more Vision: The Evil And Nearly All-Powerful Media/Advertising Bloc that Makes Us Dissatisfied but Maybe We Can Stop Them And Become Satisfied) But what does the last vision sell? Well Banksy, for one. But it also subsidizes a whole lot of liberal arts programs. (here's a freudian/pavlovian analysis. Stimulus: The Bad Dad Trying To Control You And Make You Do Stuff When You Want to Remain Contented Hanging with Mom. Place in conjunction with People in Suits, The word 'media' or 'advertisting.' ) — csalisbury

Sure, we can play Freud Tit-forTat all day. The bad Dad's trying to control the lefty and righty didn't play with his shit enough when he was a kid. Totally pointless. The only way to get out of this, as I think you'll agree, is to look at what advertisers are actually doing and have been doing and why, and try to draw reasonable conclusions from that.

(Y)

Interesting one.

The verbs "to land" and "to connect" in their non-typical transitive and intransitive versions respectively can be used with jab/punch/blow.

So you can go with:

He landed a punch /the punch landed
Or
He connected with a punch/the punch connected

But not

He connected a punch
Or
He landed with a punch

Thanks for the quote. Going out now, so I will read it later to discover whether I really should be thanking you or not. :P

Psychologically, the forms of manipulation are very different though as they are between, say, porn movies and Hollywood flicks (including those with explicit sex). The narrative of the former such as it exists (and, usually, from a structural perspective there is no narrative at all as there is no "problem" to be solved) must be transparent and non-engaging to allow the full foregrounding of the imagery (the plumber comes round to "fix the pipes", students get a "special lesson" in the classroom etc. - we all know what's coming next and that that's what's important). As the narrative is the emotional container, so to speak, porn is by design empty and because of that I would claim less damaging (or at least less invasive) than an emotionally manipulative movie. (This also explains why movies including a lot of fully explicit sex don't really work. The narrative and the sex tend to detract from each other or push buttons in the self that pull it in conflicting directions).

Hence, my sentiment towards the advertisement of sex. — Question

Do you mean the use of sex to advertise other products? Or are you talking specifically about the sex industry?

It's funny, one upshot of all this is that I essentially agree with @Agustino that Hollywood, as a major hub of the entertainment industry, is "evil" - if you want to out it like that. Not so much because of the values (or lack thereof) it espouses though but its inherent structure and how it operates. The question arises though as to what extent all this is necessary to maintain a free and open society. I'd happily see Hollywood obliterated if possible. Let Agustino arm the bomb and I'll light the fuse. Then we can get back to throwing grenades at each other.

(Education thread to follow in a bit.) — unenlightened

You'll notice I'm taking that as free reign to be off-topic on this one.

I can't improve on anything MU has said, but just to emphasize that there's no escaping the basic formula: Modern forms of entertainment result in the emotional equivalent of a sugar high and they are no more necessary or desirable for us psychologically than sugar is physiologically.

If you read my earlier post, I find the entire entertainment industry an affront. The reason I feel this way is that it has transformed entertainment from an effective form of stress release, into a cause of stress. Therefore it is a self-perpetuating habit. We seek entertainment to relieve ourselves from our stresses, but the so-called entertainment just causes more stress so that we seek more entertainment. It's consumerism at its best (or worst), addiction, where the consumption of the product continually increases the need for the product. I may as well be paying my money to the local coke dealer. — Metaphysician Undercover

The show may cause excitement, but excitement is just an elevated level of stress within the members of the audience. So the entertainment is designed to incite the emotions, and this itself is stress, which manifests in the excitement of anticipation. The entertainment is designed to create stress. — Metaphysician Undercover

Brilliantly put. Expect to be called a communist in 3...2...1...

Shall we start again with a different example? Psychology and education? — unenlightened

I'm game.

Sorry.. I missed your comments. As I mentioned early on the thread, I rarely see TV commercials because I watch streaming TV. I'm in that category that wonders: "Does anybody still watch broadcast TV?" Some do, but I think in many cases it's that they just don't know that streaming is better and cheaper.

I wonder how the advertising industry is planning to adapt to this change as it becomes more prevalent. Any thoughts on that? — Mongrel

Well, it seems to me that in the future, without mass TV viewing to rely on, advertising is likely to be more targeted, dispersed, invasive and diverse.

• More targeted.

See neuromarketing:, for example:

"Neuromarketing engages the use of Magnetic Resance Imaging (MRI), electroencephalography (EEG), biometrics, facial coding, eye tracking and other technologies to investigate and learn how consumers respond and feel when presented with products and/or related stimuli (Kolter et al., 2013). The concept of neuromarketing investigates the non-conscious processing of information in consumers brains (Agarwal & Dutta, 2015). Human decision-making is both a conscious and non-conscious process in the brain (Glanert, 2012). Human brains process over 90% of information non-consciously, below controlled awareness; this information has a large influence in the decision-making process (Agarwal & Dutta, 2015). "

• More dispersed/invasive:

More on subways, buses, taxis, lifts, anywhere where people congregate. Louder, flashier etc.

• More diverse:

Constant innovation. What was that movie with Cruise where he gets offered a Guinness by a hologram? Coming soon...

I thought I had been doing that. Do you have a more specific question or response to one of my comments?

Well, I did design and run a university course on advertising that went over a lot of this stuff. That may not count for much, but I'm not completely ignorant. Now as I said, if you are not willing to even Google the basics, why not run along?

Again, complete ignorance. This discussion is not about the personal psychology of the interlocutors, it's about advertising and psychology in general, which you know nothing about. There are other discussions on these boards, you know...

Well, at least neither of you are denying complete ignorance of the subject. Whatever floats your boats.

What would be better to explore in my opinion is why there's a niche of people who have such averse, such conspiracy/evil-plot-oriented attitudes towards marketing. What's going on with those folks psychologically that they effectively see advertising/marketing as an affront? — Terrapin Station

Only someone completely ignorant of the history/psychology of advertising could come up with such a silly comment. So you don't like people who criticize business? Good for you. Give yourself a a pat on the head. But unless you can identify the conspiracy theory being put forward here, that's all you get.

It's not as though advertisements have a quantity of conditioning power that is beamed through the sense organs, affecting each purely passive body/soul equally, so that all we have can do is run from the beams etc.. You are right that it's sometimes easier to con the guy who thinks he can't be conned. But often it's easier to con people who don't have a sense of how cons work. — csalisbury

None of this is much more mysterious than having your mood and thus your behaviour changed by a piece of music. You may be perfectly aware of the process but it hardly matters, it doesn't work on the on that level (unlike a "con"). Does that mean music has a "quantity of conditioning power that is beamed through the sense organs"? Well, if you want to put it colourfully, it does. At a higher level a hypnotist can put you in an extremely suggestible state against which incredulity at his powers is not necessarily a defense. And advertising falls somewhere in between. No claims of magic here; it's a science, if an inexact one.

I'm a bit skeptical of the idea that advertising and the media has created dissatisfaction and unhappiness. — csalisbury

OK, but in the case of advertising that has been more or less the stated goal since production methods became so efficient in the early twentieth century (starting in the U.S.) that potential supply began to far outstrip demand and economic growth required the creation of new demands. New demands require new desires require new dissatisfactions and so on. Trillions of dollars have been spent on advertising on the basis that this is what it does and that it works.

I don't think that the natural state of people is relative satisfaction, then mad men who've read Freud come in and make people dissatisfied. — csalisbury

Think Pavlov/Skinner not Freud. The traditional basis of advertising psychology isn't all that exotic. For example:

The present paper examines the implications of recent developments in classical conditioning for consumer research. It discusses the finding that the conditioned response need not resemble the unconditioned response, and that the conditioned stimulus must predict but not necessarily precede the unconditioned stimulus for conditioning to occur. The paper also considers the implications of several situations in which classical conditioning may unexpectedly fail to occur, several of the characteristics of classically conditioned behavior, and the role of awareness in conditioning. — Journal of Consumer Research

Link

Maybe that's because they've drilled down to my core, but I don't think so. — csalisbury

Nobody has to drill into your core to make you not aware of something though.

How else might one come to moral judgement if not through reasoning with the mind the validity of a statement or action through the means of removing all doubt? Can something be moral, however you think of it, if there is doubt surrounding it? — Heister Eggcart

The suicide bomber has no doubt his action is moral. He literally bets his life on it. Yet he is mistaken. Does that surprise you somehow? Or does it surprise you that the man who gives to a beggar out of compassion but is not absolutely sure he has done the right thing is judged to have acted morally? Or that the woman who unthinkingly dives into a pond on seeing a drowning child is?

More to the point, do you actually agree with this statement or not?

The lack of a mental narrative doesn't ensure the immorality of your actions any more than the presence of one ensures their morality. — Baden

Seems like the person that doesn't consider the morality of their actions is rather the more dangerous individual, no? — Heister Eggcart

That all depends on where their moral considerations lead them. Some will end up saving whales and others flying into tall buildings. However, I don't want to get sidetracked on this. I've edited the post to make my main point clearer, which is this:

You just don't have enough information to make a moral judgement. The same applies to having sex simply because it feels good. The lack of a mental narrative doesn't ensure the immorality of your actions any more than the presence of one ensures their morality. — Baden

If I had doubts about my actions, I would not do them. I've attempted to reason, and thus remove all doubt, from why I do what I do, and subsequently what I do not do. — Heister Eggcart

I accept that you've attempted to reason and I'm not accusing you of anything except overestimating your moral reach in the context of the examples given.