Another Infuriating (Son of) Sam Berkowitz FSView Article

Planned Parenthood's 270th trimester

Published Feb 7, 2011.

Somewhere between "We the people" and "intervened," the right to abortion on-demand has been staring us straight in the face all these many years, and only pro-choice liberals have been able to see it. How unfortunate that Mr. Berkowitz has had abortion providers enter his home while hes still asleep and stand over his bed glaring at him just as he wakes up from the time he was born. It must have gotten buried in the dense, overblown verbiage about the right to bear arms and all that stuff about enumerated powers, just after the "free health care for everybody" clause. Hmm, no I don't think it was buried, much like your ego isn't.

Those in favor of the right to abortion-who, strangely, are often squeamish about using the word "abortion"-are likely to be taking on a cautiously defensive mode these days, however, as recent events in the world of child murder have cast those in its employ in an even more negative light than they typically deserve. Who is squeamish about using the word? What ass did he pull this out of? Choice isn't a euphemism for abortion, pro-choice does not mean pro-abortion, it means a position that stands back and lets a woman take control of her body. A position Berkowitz wouldn't understand if it fell in his lap wearing red, white and blue.

A Planned Parenthood clinic manager in New Jersey this past week offered advice to a man posing as a pimp on how to ensure the availability of abortion to an underage prostitute. This woman believed the man on the tape to be a multiple felon guilty of child exploitation and, rather than report him, offered him assistance in becoming an accessory to infanticide. This is the inevitable result of a culture that embraces moral relativism for it's own convenience. As opposed to this single incident being a result of a person with less than altruistic tendencies? Blame the culture whenever possible, right? A culture that still finds abortion taboo, no matter whether Berkowitz would like to admit it or not. This is not to say that all liberals have bought into the abortion-as-unassailable-right credo that is the stock in trade of the far left. Far left? Last I heard, you don't have to sleep hugging a copy of Das Kapital to be pro-choice. Vasu Murti has, in fact, written a book entitled The Liberal Case Against Abortion, which makes no grandiose religious plaint against the practice, but which simply calls upon supposedly compassionate liberals to be consistent and afford unborn humans the same regard that they would an endangered species of grasshopper when a logging bill makes it through a state senate. "Unborn humans" is a needless, tear-jerk term. Any egg, ejaculation, or for that matter, cell has the potentiality to develop into a human being given our current technology. He's using a bad reductio ad absurdum argument -who would choose the life of a grasshopper over a human? Well if the grasshopper weighed 8 lbs and a woman was forced to carry it for 9 months against her will, I think she'd have a problem with that.

It hasn't been a month since even the Huffington Post was compelled to repost that "A doctor whose abortion clinic was described as a filthy, foul-smelling 'house of horrors' that was overlooked by regulators for years was charged Wednesday with murder, accused of delivering seven babies alive and then using scissors to kill them" in Pennsylvania. I reiterate: This is what happens in a culture of self-indulgent moral relativism. No, this is what happens when you have government regulators. I can't even imagine the horrors in a society of individuals as self-indulgent as Berkowitz. Thankfully, this degenerate disgrace to the medical profession hasn't been lionized in the press as some sort of liberal martyr, but those for whom this issue is near and dear are not about to let an undeniable Conservative electoral sweep dissuade them from using lies and distortions to further their agenda.

H.R.3, a bill designed to prevent taxpayer dollars from being used to subsidize abortions in a country consistently opposed to them-when you poll outside New England, New York and California, anyway-has been falsely labelled as a bill intended to lighten the abhorrence of some kinds of rape. The term "forcible rape" has never had a separate legal standing relative to "date rape"-if you have sex with a woman who is either unwilling or unable (because of alcohol or drugs) to give her consent, you are guilty of rape. One could, of course, argue that the penalties for such a crime are too lenient, and I would concur, to some conflicted feminists chagrin, but the language of HR3 is not intended to shield rapists, but to shield defenseless human babies, whether it is convenient to say so or not. "Defenseless human babies?" We're back to this again? Good for you bro. If you have a problem with the needless deaths of defenseless human babies, you should have a problem with your God - natural miscarriages result in more fetus deaths than abortions. Here I was thinking that life was sacred, I guess the lord does work in mysterious ways. If we are to be a country resolved to permit infanticide, at least have some pride and don't ask me to pay for whatever moral code-or lack thereof-to which you choose to subscribe. Hmm, step 1: Look up infanticide in a dictionary. Step 2: Okay, we'll make a deal - I won't make him pay for abortions, if I don't have to pay for wars. 3. Because any moral code that isn't in line with his isn't a moral code at all. But of course!

Wikipedia Perpetuates Female Victimhood or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Gender Gap

Today I was troubled by this NY Times article that discusses the gender gap in Wikipedia submissions:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=1&src=busln

It begins with impressive stats – over 3.5 million English articles and articles in over 250 languages, then awkwardly railroads these achievements by citing that “surveys suggest less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.”

And there are no Eskimo basketball players, so what? Well, it’s apparently a big deal. Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the site, set an arbitrary goal to increase the share of female contributions to 25 percent by 2015.

Why? Well, Cohen quickly rejects the obvious theory that it’s a matter of political correctness. He writes,

Her effort is not diversity for diversity’s sake, she says. “This is about wanting to ensure that the encyclopedia is as good as it could be,” Ms. Gardner said in an interview on Thursday. “The difference between Wikipedia and other editorially created products is that Wikipedians are not professionals, they are only asked to bring what they know.”

“Everyone brings their crumb of information to the table,” she said. “If they are not at the table, we don’t benefit from their crumb.”

Okay, so it sounds good – everyone gets a shot at bringing forth their information. But this assumes that more women want to be involved, if they do, why haven’t they gotten involved? Apologists can’t claim restrictions – men as well as women have access to the Internet (excluding of course countries that lack the technology or have used their tyrannical governments to restrict access.)

Is it a matter of some gender-based "performance anxiety?” Wikipedia doesn’t list any bylines, so even if some women might be deterred by the thought that, “Well, some people won’t care what I have to say because of my gender” – it doesn’t come into play on a Wikipedia page.

Cohen brings up a few ridiculous examples:

With so many subjects represented — most everything has an article on Wikipedia — the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis. A topic generally restricted to teenage girls, like friendship bracelets, can seem short at four paragraphs when compared with lengthy articles on something boys might favor, like, toy soldiers or baseball cards, whose voluminous entry includes a detailed chronological history of the subject.

Even the most famous fashion designers — Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo — get but a handful of paragraphs. And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?

If the goal here is some semblance of equality – why is Cohen, the writer who is supposed to bring this “important” issue to the forefront of social debate, using such obvious gender stereotypes? Does he really believe that only women have the ability (and interest) to discuss friendship bracelets and designer shoes at length? Are there not women who watch The Sopranos and men who watch Sex and the City?

What are these examples supposed to prove? If anything, they prove that stereotypically feminine subjects are underrepresented, so let’s recruit lots and lots of women to discuss shoes and TV! It’s like a Cathy comic strip come to life, and put online. Cohen, how long is the entry on chocolate?

Cohen then discusses how Ms. Gardner got teary eyed when one of her favorite authors had less written about her than a videogame character (will Gardner restrict the recruiting to women who will discuss women writers and other "women" subjects and not allow women who want to discuss violent video games? So much for equality.)

Cohen writes,

“According to the OpEd Project, an organization based in New York that monitors the gender breakdown of contributors to “public thought-leadership forums,” a participation rate of roughly 85-to-15 percent, men to women, is common — whether members of Congress, or writers on The New York Times and Washington Post Op-Ed pages. Catherine Orenstein, the founder and director of the OpEd Project, said many women lacked the confidence to put forth their views. “When you are a minority voice, you begin to doubt your own competencies,” she said.”

Women are not a minority – but if they do indeed represent a minority in terms of voice whose fault is it? There are women-based organizations, and plenty of female academics who have made names for themselves, but not every woman is interested in being political, to force them by scaring them with statistics and making them feel underrepresented isn’t going to empower anyone, except maybe those capitalizing on the victimhood.

Speaking of victimhood, (or feigned victimhood):

She said her group had persuaded women to express themselves by urging them to shift the focus “away from oneself — ‘do I know enough, am I bragging?’ — and turn the focus outward, thinking about the value of your knowledge.”

Yes, because we all go on to Wikipedia and say, "Ah, what a pompous jerk, how does this asshole know so much about Cicero?"

Ms. Gardner said that for now she was trying to use subtle persuasion and outreach through her foundation to welcome all newcomers to Wikipedia, rather than advocate for women-specific remedies like recruitment or quotas.

What happened to the increase of 25 percent? (Don't make me pull a "women are notoriously bad at math" joke...)

“Gender is a huge hot-button issue for lots of people who feel strongly about it,” she said. “I am not interested in triggering those strong feelings.”

Sure you aren’t.

'Stewart, Assange and Journalism Education' case study

I wrote this for my senior seminar What is a Text class and since I've been on my WikiLeaks kick, I figured I'd post it here as well. Enjoy!

Katherine Concepcion

Jan 25^th Case Study Presentation: “Stewart, Assange and Journalism Education”

Url: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/01/18/bugeja

Author and director of the Journalism School at Iowa State University, Michael Bugeja, must have titled his article, “Stewart, Assange and Journalism Education” because it mentions those topics in that order, but for no other reason. The bulk of his article contains caterwauling about the demise of journalism education and how the Internet is to blame. Curiously enough, for all his laments about the Internet, I have to think that the naming of the article was strategic - Stewart and Assange are all over the media, so mentioning them, albeit in passing, would undoubtedly lead to more clicks on Google than if he had just complained about America’s education system.
The bulk of my analysis has to do with the contradictions he makes, particularly when discussing Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks. On this topic, my thesis can be summed up almost in its entirety by the following quote, courtesy of Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
In the interest of clarity and comparison, I will quote Bugeja’s words (with added italics) first, and then follow with my critique and analysis, in bold.

“Satirist Jon Stewart and activist Julian Assange are symbols of a world without journalism — a largely online marketing-based, consumer-driven world at odds with principles of democracy and freedom.”
Right away he implies that Stewart and Assange are not journalists, and that, really, journalism, presumably the kind that he teaches or was accustomed with was completely outside consumer mandate, which of course rejects the fact that newspapers have to sell ad space to make money.

“Stewart is often considered a journalist because he holds people accountable when many metro media outlets no longer do so in their downsized newsrooms.”
So, the ability for journalists to hold people accountable is predicated on the size of their work spaces, staff and amount of funding? What about people who blog and do independent research on important topics for no money at all and what about the whistle blowers like Assange, who not only do it for no money, but also risk being jailed?

“"The Daily Show" does this often by following up on what newsmakers did or said in the past and then comparing that to current, contradictory actions and statements. WikiLeaks purportedly holds people and governments accountable. It does so, however, by “WebThink.” Whereas responsible journalists scrutinize motives of tipsters and fact-check authenticity of cables, WebThink just dumps it all on the Internet and lets computer chips fly where they may.”
The obviously implication here is that WikiLeaks, and, by extension, Assange, is not responsible. But journalists couldn’t fact check the authenticity of cables if the cables did not exist. WikiLeaks provides the cables, at least some of them. Assange, in an interview, likened the publication of semi-raw data to making scientific experiment results available for checking against the published accounts in scientific journals. The raw data is there to be able to check the authenticity of the claims made in the news stories.
Journalists dump their biases on the Internet too; you’ve got columnists who will always put their own spin on something. Stories can come from all different angles, and besides, is it not the point of journalism to give people the facts, not encourage them to align themselves with the ideology of the author? The facts are what count. That’s what cables do, that’s what WikiLeaks does.

“By elevating access over truth, ours has become a world that reacts via commentary rather than prevents in advance of calamity.”

Journalism IS commentary.

“What has society lost by allowing Internet behemoths like Google to alter the funding mechanisms for news? Educators should analyze that question because each discipline is affected, in as much as rhetoric now masquerades as fact.”

Rhetoric masquerades as fact: whenever you explain something, you filter it through your own biases. WikiLeaks provides no rhetoric, it provides raw data, raw facts. Shouldn’t he support this?

“Social networks and search engines give away that news for free in return for personal information and then vend those data to companies whose cookies are as hidden as terms of service.”

This is a different issue altogether the issue of privacy and the issue of journalism is different. Privacy is a major concern, but this is a red herring. The main complaint the author has is that journalism is moving away from what he thinks it should be.

“As evidence Doak cites WikiLeaks’ cables, calling them "a meaningless mass of information until the Guardian and The New York Times made sense of them, using traditional journalism techniques." “

It’s only a meaningless mass of information because it doesn’t have commentary attached, but Assange and WikiLeaks volunteers go through lots of trouble to decode these things, especially the complex military acronyms, and they protect their sources.

“WikiLeaks, he adds, proves we need traditional journalism more than ever "to decipher and interpret the information overload."”

WikiLeaks can stand alone because individuals can generate their own opinions, not just the ones espoused on the front pages of newspapers with corporate interests.

Synthesis:

The binary oppositions used throughout the article include old vs. new media, opinion vs. truth, good vs. bad journalism, and journalism vs. data dissemination.

The author made arguments which he felt applied to a defense of what he sees as traditional journalism, but could actually be applied to WikiLeaks, which he is against. The text is interesting because of the numerous internal contradictions and vague pronouncements. It also taps into an important current event and an issue that will be a thorn in the side of reactionary academics for a long time.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Aussie?

For months, the WikiLeaks saga has been unfolding. The major contenders:

● Julian Assange, the rogue, Australian backpacking activist hacker

● Two Swedish women who suspiciously have accused him of sexual misconduct

● A number of caterwauling U.S Government employees, conservative pundits and laypeople with their panties in a bunch over national security concerns

● The people who are cheering on Assange and praising the work that he and fellow WikiLeaks volunteers have done.

In the interest of transparency, since we’ll be talking about so-called “secrets” here, I should mention that I fall unabashedly into the latter category. The Nobel Peace Prize has been made kind of a joke at this point (Al Gore got one for predicting the scope of the floods that will kill us all, and Obama, well, I guess continuing a war and refusing to shut down Gitmo as promised is…peaceful?), but in the interest of posterity, I think Assange should receive one.

So, why is this man getting lambasted with bogus claims and espionage accusations? I could be crude and say his attackers are trying to save face (Uncle Sam’s face) and perhaps are jealous of his virility, but instead, I’ll be diving into several key issues on Assange and WikiLeaks more at length. Hold on to your swivel chairs.

Character Assassination

In December, Assange was arrested for incidents of sexual indiscretion that had allegedly occurred in Sweden, in August. First off, the charges against Assange were not for rape, as the media and Google searches would have you believe, but rather for “sex by surprise.” The main accuser, Anna Ardin, has ties to U.S financed anti-Castro groups, including the Ladies in White group, out of Cuba. She alleged that the condom broke during sex, which somehow takes it from consensual to non-consensual, under Swedish law. In a December 21 Democracy Now debate, Naomi Wolf, social critic and feminist recalled that in the 23 years she had been working with rape victims, this is the first case she had seen which was based on “multiple instances of consent.” Wolf explained that Ardin allowed Assange to sleep in her bed and stay in her home for 4 days after the alleged incident. She also noted that the charges launched against Assange are atypical, since Amnesty International has criticized Sweden for its disregarding of rape accusations. She seemed to insinuate that this was a politically-charged episode, to of course, discredit Assange, but maybe (my interpretation here) even to set an example of him, for the women of Sweden who are outraged because of their government’s lack of compassion toward rape concerns.

Ardin once posted a blog entitled, ‘7 Steps to Legal Revenge’, which talked about seeking vengeance against cheating boyfriends. According to a Swedish source, she is an “expert” on sexual harassment, apparently to the point of once reporting it against a male student who looked down at his notes instead of at her during a university lecture. Sofia Wilen, the second accuser, is allegedly friends with Ardin. Both women also apparently bragged about their conquests, and Ardin even threw a party in Assange’s honor days after the supposed sexual indiscretion and tweeted that she was “with the world’s coolest, smartest people, its amazing!” That tweet disappeared once she went to the cops, I wonder why.

A Few Good Leaks

These came from http://sowhyiswikileaksagoodthingagain.com:

● WikiLeaks exposed Scientology, a religion that scams its followers into a delusional set of beliefs in exchange for their money.

● WikiLeaks has released the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.

● WikiLeaks clarified the terms of operation at Guantanamo Bay, one of the most controversial detention centers in the world.

● WikiLeaks revealed covert Australian Internet censorship.

● WikiLeaks exposed hidden logs of the Afghanistan war showing high rates of civilian casualties and other facts previously denied by the US.

● WikiLeaks has demonstrated how Australia, Finland and Denmark are using child pornography as an excuse to censor legitimate websites.

● WikiLeaks has revealed the National Socialist Movement's neo-nazi internal workings.

● WikiLeaks released a video showing a U.S. army helicopter slaughtering Reuters journalists and Iraqi children in cold blood.

The latter “Collateral Murder” leak is almost certainly the most well-known. Regarding the way the footage makes U.S soldiers appear, Assange said, “The people in Baghdad, they don’t need to see the video, they see it everyday. It will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all.”

Espionage, the Media and Threats

There has been talk of the U.S government planning to extradite Assange and charge him, possibly under the Espionage Act of 1917, originally intended to squelch opposition to the war. Probably the strongest voice he’s got on his side is Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. Ellsberg was a military analyst with the RAND Corporation who ended up opposing the Vietnam War after seeing casualties first hand. He and a colleague, the late Anthony Russo, stole and copied highly classified government documents which revealed all the lies the Johnson administration had orchestrated about the war effort. They were tried under the Act, and acquitted. Elllsberg has recently come out in public support of Assange, saying that practically all of the same attacks being slung at Assange were slung at him 40 years ago.

On Tuesday, January 18, Reuters published an article readling,in part, “Internal U.S government reviews have determined that a mass leak of diplomatic cables caused only limited damage to U.S. interests abroad, despite the Obama administration's public statements to the contrary” and "We were told (the impact of WikiLeaks revelations) was embarrassing but not damaging.” Oh, and the clincher: “The administration felt compelled to say publicly that the revelations had seriously damaged American interests in order to bolster legal efforts to shut down the WikiLeaks website and bring charges against the leakers."

On a December 10 WNYC interview, Ellsberg had said the following regarding the situation:

“The Pentagon has revealed that they have no evidence of any individual having been harmed by that release. Meanwhile, the silence that led to these wars has not just risked, it's actually killed thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis. The risks are not at all only on the side of telling secrets. The much bigger risks are on the side of keeping secrets about wrongful wars and hopeless wars.”

Questioning Journalism

The interrogation of whether Assange is a journalist and WikiLeaks a media organization is a red herring slightly more annoying than the fake “rape” charges. The charges are insidious, to be sure, but at least they are against something that could somewhat be proven or thrown out by a jury. The question of his journalistic integrity is an unanswerable judgment call. Is a journalist only someone who A. Went to journalism school? B. Works for a major news outlet? C. Uses information and seemingly objective text to advance public understanding of news?

Leaving arbitrary definitions aside, isn’t a whistle blower who reports unethical behavior more useful than a gossip columnist describing how awful a celebrity looked at an awards show? Why is the latter considered accepted journalism and the former not? Why does a “journalist” have to be working within the confines of a socially and legally accepted institution to gain respect or even admiration? This is bogus, and everyone knows it.

Just because WikiLeaks doesn’t publish leaks with cliche’d sentences attached, “A recent report shows...Sources say...” doesn’t mean it’s not journalism. As a journalist, I’ve been cooking up sentences like these for almost half a decade, I consider one important leak to be much more useful to the public than five feature stories on a fun event going down at the local mall.

Assange isn’t careless, he doesn’t publish the names of sources, something that only journalists with the strongest integrity do. Something that New York Times reporter, Neil Sheehan, who promised to protect Ellsberg (a non-journalist himself), did not do.

According to Dan Kennedy, writing for The Guardian: “The Obama-Holder wrinkle is to attempt to draw distinctions between WikiLeaks and the traditional media. It can't be done.The US state department cables, after all, were not top secret, and WikiLeaks says it has taken pains to withhold potentially dangerous information. In that respect, attempts to separate the Times and the Guardian, on the one hand, and WikiLeaks, on the other, should be seen as entirely political.”

Lucy Dalgish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said, “It is not journalism. It’s data dissemination, and that worries me.”

How does journalism not fall into the category of “data dissemination?” It’s data, with who/what/when/where/why/how sentences and quotes. Not exactly a binary opposition.

Assange’s own response to the data dissemination quip is to explain that raw source materials must be made available so they can be checked against the story, just as the results of scientific experiments must be made available so they can be checked against scientific reports. And in an interview with TIME, Assange explains the aims of WikiLeaks:

"This organization practices civil obedience, that is, we are an organization that tries to make the world more civil and act against abusive organizations that are pushing it in the opposite direction...We have now in our four-year history, and over 100 legal attacks of various kinds, been victorious in all of those matters...It's very important to remember the law is not what, not simply what, powerful people would want others to believe it is. The law is not what a general says it is. The law is not what Hillary Clinton says it is."

Chamber of Secrets

The U.S has many secrets- the exact recipe for Big Mac special sauce, for example. But, what constitutes a secret? If you ask the conservative pundits you would think that anything embarrassing could constitute a secret. But, embarrassing for whom? They don’t care so much about embarrassing individuals (see the 2003 Valerie Plame scandal), but they do get teary-eyed over outing foot-in-mouth bureaucrats and what they have to say about the leaders of “lesser” nations around the world.

In actuality, one has to strongly consider the possibility that these loudmouths don’t care about national security. If it could be shown that it was in the national interest to expose the diplomatic cables, they wouldn’t even bat an eye. The issue is appearance - how to keep people trusting in “their” government, and believing that “their” leaders have only their best interests at heart. If someone threatens their livelihood, especially a handsome foreigner with a knack for cracking computer codes, a sense of social justice, and the ability to put together coherent sentences, it hits the fan. It has to, or they might be out of a job. At this point, why hasn’t the U.S fired all foreign policy advisers and replaced them with image consultants? Or did I just repeat myself?

Gustav Landauer, a German anarchist theorist, once wrote,"The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, it is a condition of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently".

Freedom of information is a necessary and important first step, and WikiLeaks is only the beginning. The means for WikiLeaks is transparency, the end is justice. For now, let’s give Assange the recognition he deserves. Let’s welcome in the new normal.

Sizing Up “Sexist” Ads

Cracked.com has relatively interesting lists and articles. While I can't help but be dubious of many of the more serious ones, the less serious ones can still irk me from time to time. Case in point, this list: http://www.cracked.com/article_17036_8-tv-ads-that-hate-women.html

It isn't like I've never seen lists or ads like this before, a quick YouTube search will come up with dozens of "misogynist" vintage ads. What I wonder about is what the point is of making lists like these.

Firstly, concentrating specifically on the eight ads chosen by Cracked, it seems absurd that an inanimate TV ad can maintain the mental state of hate

As for the ads themselves (specifically the old ads), while I won't try to deny that the producers of these ads didn't harbor some less than egalitarian sentiments toward women, the best approach is to look at the ads in one of two ways: They're outdated, so they serve as kitsch, or, they are an appropriate summation of their particular consumer zeitgeist – at least as examined by the company or researchers in question.

The kitsch part is easy. Speaking for myself, I've always had an affinity for these types of ads because they personify an era that I was not a part of, but that I've been able to marginally experience through the aid of Nick at Nite shows. False Nostalgia Syndrome, if you will. So, I enjoy them: the phony parochial nature of them all, the style, the transatlantic announcer voice. They're fun to watch because they're subdued, or if they're camp, they don't get near a flicker on the barometer of trash that most modern commercials easily hit.

When critiquing older ads, is the point to highlight how absurd the copy sounds when pitted against our more "enlightened" commercials of today (are there any?)

With new ads, what is the goal? What would complaining about a diamond commercial accomplish? Instead of complaining that the commercial portrays women as naïve little animals distracted by shiny stuff, why doesn't an endorser of "equality" complain about how the commercials generally show men proposing to women? Why not women proposing to men? What about couples who say, screw the expensive rings and let's instead go for something else – maybe ring tattoos? Diamonds might be forever, but so is ink, and there's no need for layaway plans with the latter.

A yogurt commercial might show two chatty women conversing about shoe shopping and noshing on sweets, but is it accurate to say this portrayal reveals a "hatred" of women? Should we instead assume that all women talk about at a spa is Shakespeare and Milton? Remember, the medium is television and the point of advertising is to move products, not show viewers how interesting some actors on a set can be.

Even though lists like these may be harmless fun, despite their flinging of derogatory labels like sexist, misogynist, etc, I have seen enough of them to ask: Why bother bringing them up?

Probably because it makes for cheap entertainment, much like most of television.

Consumption Dysfunction

Food stamp restrictions, new labels, restaurant and movie theater calorie display proposals – all of this, and more is part of what should be called “ChubGate” - the continued crackdown on any and all elements which appear to be contributing to the obesity epidemic.

Recently, the Grocery Manufacturers Association has announced new front-of-package food labels aimed toward simplifying the information for health conscious consumers.1

Food packaging has changed in recent years- hilariously. Check any cereal aisle today, and you’ll find the most sugar-laden cereal emblazoned with the promising “Made with whole grains!” Yes, Cocoa Puffs may well indeed contain grains, but the claim is largely counterfeit – it’s still a chocolate cereal. But if individuals want to have a bowl for breakfast (which would actually contain fewer calories than a bowl of organic granola) they should be able to do so. Of course, General Mills can afford to make these changes to their packaging. What about the smaller food companies that can’t?

The alleged aim of the new food labels is to target “busy customers.” Are we to believe that customers who shop at grocery stores do it at such a rapid pace that they don’t have time to turn over a can and check calorie counts? I don’t mean to speak for all, but in my own experience, I often become irritated at the leisurely stroll many patrons take in grocery stores. You’d be hard pressed to see someone running across one –unless they’re playing tag, or running after a small child who has begun a quest for Dunkaroos (sorry, kid, but I think you can only get them online now.)

There is one solution, it would be much cheaper, though potentially rather tedious: Turn all food packages around so the labels appear on the front.

Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, Marion Nestle (ironic name if I have ever heard one,) regularly condemns some of the proposed changes to food labels (including the front-of-packaging labels) but then urges the FDA to heed her advice and condemn the proposals.2

Why try and get the FDA on your side? This is the same bloated government department that was responsible for, among other things, the 2004 Vioxx scandal. The FDA admitted that this drug was responsible for 27,785 deaths3 and that it made “lapses” in judgment.4 One death is a lapse in judgment. Over 25,000 is institutionalized recklessness and chagrin. And let us not forget that it takes about 10 years to get a drug through all the FDA’s loops. Instead of suing McDonalds, why not sue the FDA?

Of course, the linchpin of the debate is calories. When it comes to stigmatizing calories, soda particularly gets a bad rap. A 12 ounce can of Coke contains 140 calories; compare this to a 6.75 ounce box of Juicy Juice brand apple juice, which boasts 100 calories. Too many people presume that fruit juice and lemonade is vastly nutritionally superior to soda, when in actuality, calories and grams of sugar are pretty much the same. Similarly, too many people are of the belief that salad – even fast food salads, are “healthier” than burgers. There are 425 calories and 21.4 grams of fat in a McDonald’s chicken Caesar salad with croutons and dressing, compared to the 253 calories and 7.7 grams of fat in a hamburger.

But what about calorie labels at fast food restaurants, does it really work?

A 2009 study which looked at consumption rates in McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Kentucky Fried Chicken’s located in poorer New York City neighborhoods found that people actually ordered more calories since the labeling law was established the year prior.5

No matter how hard bean sprout-munching anti-fat crusaders like MeMe Roth (of the National Action Against Obesity) fight for food bans, the government can’t change the delusions or the cravings of individuals. Personal responsibility should be the one game in town.

The government’s main barometer of health, the Body Mass Index (BMI) reveals that George Clooney is overweight, and Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger are obese.6 What results from getting government involved to somehow slow down the obesity crisis? Decades of contradictory information (milk is good- ignore the 1 in 10 Americans who are lactose intolerant, eggs are bad – no, now they’re good again), a lot of strong arming and nanny politics, an arbitrary and unhelpful food pyramid, and a one-size-fits-all standard of determining individual health.

With all this talk of changing labels, why not take a cue from the new cigarette package labels (showing pictures of diseased lungs and corpses)7 and put pictures of fatty livers and piano box caskets on packages of Twinkies and Girl Scout Cookies? Maybe that will make Meme Roth happy.

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Links:

1. http://www.idfa.org/key-issues/details/5319/

2. http://www.foodpolitics.com/2009/10/industry-abandons-smart-choices/

3. http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/vioxx_estimates.html

4. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/02/politics/02fda.html

5. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/nyregion/06calories.html

6. http://stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2010/09/14/michelle-obama-and-the-food-police/

7. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-11-10/cigarette-packages-may-carry-images-of-corpses-lungs.html

Firebrand Loyalty

My responses to this FuturePundit.com article, on religiosity and brand loyalty. My comments are in bold.

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Lost Religion Leads To More Brand Loyalty?

By Randall Parker at 2010 November 15 09:04 PM Brain Loyalty

Prof. Ron Shachar of Tel Aviv University's Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration says that a consumer's religiosity has a large impact on his likelihood for choosing particular brands. Comsumers who are deeply religious are less likely to display an explicit preference for a particular brand, while more secular populations are more prone to define their self-worth through loyalty to corporate brands instead of religious denominations. Here is where the obvious bias creeps in like a thief in the night. Notice the use of “define their self-worth” now look at how the sentence would look without this passively inflammatory distraction: “…while more secular populations are more prone to loyalty to corporate brands instead of religious denominations.” Still makes sense, eh?

This research, in collaboration with Duke University and New York University scientists, recently appeared in the journal Marketing Science. What is charming, is that the research is hinted at here, and in the lede, but that’s the end of it discussion. The result? "Here is some recent news that shows how silly and materialistic those atheists are, nevermind about causation and correlation, let me quote clichéd aphorisms to prove my point."

Now, without having read the report, or having done further research on what it said but merely commenting that it does not appear the writer of this article did much research either, I could, for the sake of argument, advance past studies in an attempt to find a correlation between non-religion and brand loyalty. First, numerous studies have concluded that non-believers tend to be more highly educated than believers. (Here is one such study: http://freethinker.co.uk/features/atheists-are-more-intelligent-than-religious-people/) If we grant that higher education (remember, this article is talking mainly about academics) leads to higher income/fewer children, this might mean an individual who is more tech savvy. After all, what is this research really about, whether or not atheists always go for Cheerios rather than generic wheat circles, or whether they go for specific brand-name electronics? So, yes, an academic who is more tech savvy, might be brand loyal one way or another. It seems silly if the results of the study showed allegiance toward a particular food or toiletry item, they likely were looking at products that are more involved. And if they weren't, what is the conclusion? Heavier marketing toward atheists? Is that the point of the marketing research?

More simply, higher education = higher wages = more likelihood of shopping the brand name and not buying generic/store brand.

There are a number of reasons this connection could have been shown, hell, I might be wrong, but to jump to the conclusion that “It’s because they’re de facto worshipping corporations” is ludicrous.

I am reminded of a quote (comes in variations) attributed to G.K. Chesterton: "When a Man stops believing in God he doesn¹t then believe in nothing, he believes anything." The real origin of the quote might be Emile Cammaerts writing about Chesterton:

The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything. Wrong. The first effect of not believing in God is not beliving in God. The first step in believing in God, for which no good evidence exists, is to believe in anything (witches, goblins, unicorns, the tooth fairy – all have equal lack of evidence for their existence.)

Okay, without taking a side in the God Stuff debate can we think rationally about what is going on here? (the answer to that question might depend on our specific brand loyalties - not sure if my fairly shallow loyalties to Google, Amazon, or Norelco will serve as an obstacle). My take: I suspect we all have a finite capacity for loyalty or feeling of being allied or bonded. Take away a supernatural belief and reverence and basically some unused capacity for loyalty (need for loyalty?) becomes available for hijacking by corporate marketers. Is this an improvement? It depends on the specific beliefs and loyalties. For example, I'd rather someone have loyalty to a brand of running shoes or cell phone than loyalty to a diety who he thinks wants him to blow up tube stations. Obvious anti-Islamic sentiments here. Imagine if it had read “…than loyalty to a diety who actually expects me to believe he had a son who he put on earth for my sins and was killed on the cross by a pack of Jews and then came back to life a few days later.” But loyalties to cigarette brands or sugary soda brands are definitely harmful to health.

Think religious thoughts before shopping and your purchasing choices will be less driven by brand loyalties. (Hah, hah.) Better yet – spend your money on tithe?

Researchers discovered that those participants who wrote about their religion prior to the shopping experience were less likely to pick national brands when it came to products linked to appearance or self-expression — specifically, products which reflected status, such as fashion accessories and items of clothing. For people who weren't deeply religious, corporate logos often took the place of religious symbols like a crucifix or Star of David, providing feelings of self-worth and well-being. According to Prof. Shachar, two additional lab experiments done by this research team have demonstrated that like religiousity, consumers use brands to express their sense of self-worth. Because the crucifix and star of David aren’t well-marketed and also serve to glibly show the wearer’s sense of worth or person?

Ever noticed how some ex-religious believers are incredibly bitter toward their former religion? This seems most visible with some ex-Catholics. Well, since brand loyalty seems to develop more strongly when religious loyalty is absent loss of brand loyalty makes people extremely emotional about their former loyalty.

It's just like a bad breakup: People get emotional when they end a relationship with a brand. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research examines what happens when people turn their backs on the brands they once loved.

"Customers who were once enthusiastic about a brand may represent a headache for the associated firm beyond the lost revenue of foregone sales because they sometimes become committed to harming the firm," write authors Allison R. Johnson (University of Western Ontario), Maggie Matear (Queens University, Kingston, Ontario), and Matthew Thomson (University of Western Ontario).

Online forums are overloaded with customer complaints from people who once loved or were loyal to particular brands but now strongly oppose them. "I used to love (name of store), let me tell you all why I plan to never go back there again; I hate them with a passion now," writes one unhappy former customer, for example.

Why do these people feel so strongly about brands they once favored? According to the authors, some people identify so strongly with brands that they become relevant to their identity and self-concept. Thus, when people feel betrayed by brands, they experience shame and insecurity. "As in human relationships, this loss of identity can manifest itself in negative feelings, and subsequent actions may (by design) be unconstructive, malicious, and expressly aimed at hurting the former relationship partner," the authors write. Also, it might be because online reviews are usually highly favorable or highly unfavorable. No one goes on a website to post a comment about having a mediocre experience at a particular shop. “I’ve been indifferent to going there before, so when the time came to go there again, as expected I wasn’t smiling ear to ear, but the products I bought were in relative order and I made it home with minimal pain and suffering. Overall, I probably won’t remember the experience in a week.”

Do you have any strongly felt brand loyalties that might disappoint you? Might want to try some competing products before you become disappointed. Is this a hidden way of saying "Has your old faith failed you, try out some others" - as if religious belief were a cheese of the month club. (This insinuation should bother believers and non-believers alike.) That way your loyalty will weaken before your loss of brand faith. That'll make it easier to move on.

There are a number of very interesting theories regarding the evolution of religious belief. One, advanced by Richard Dawkins is that belief is the byproduct of an evolutionary cognitive module that served to help us cope with problems of survival – these feelings can spread like a mental virus. It doesn’t have to be religious belief. It can be any type of belief, or piece of information.

In general, this type of research seems like it wouldn’t arouse genuine intrigue in most people, it will probably arouse contempt for atheists, even among hypocritically brand loyal believers – how are companies going to use this information? Will we see more ads targeted at non-believers? The answer is more than likely, no – but I guess this remains to be seen.