Actually, they couldn’t:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw]For all David Mitchell fans generally and Peep Show fanatics specifically, November 9 will be a very, very welcome day.
Category Archives: Miscellaneous
“Every journey ends, but we go on.”
In a strange twist, Brad Pitt stars in a commercial for…Chanel:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGs4CjeJiJQ]Felix Baumgartner attempts to make history
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrIxH6DToXQ]
The skydiver is mere minutes away from skydiving from a world-record 23 miles up:
Skydiver Felix Baumgartner is making his ascent to the edge of space, where he plans to jump into the biggest free fall of all time.
In a capsule hanging from a helium balloon, Baumgartner is working his way to 120,000 feet (about 23 miles) — more than three times the cruising altitude of the average airliner.
With nothing but a space suit, helmet and parachute, Baumgartner hopes to be the first person to break the sound barrier without the protection of a vehicle.
The thin air at that height provides so little resistance that after just 40 seconds, he is expected to be free falling faster than 690 miles per hour.
Thank you
As of today, The First Casualty has now passed last month’s site visits total to become the most-visited month since I launched the blog in December 2010. With over half of October remaining, this means we’re on pace to more than double the readership month over month.
Thanks go, in very large part, to the new guest contributors who began posting late last month: Erik Landstrom, Mark McAdam, and Victoria Kwan. And a very, very large thank you to all of you who’ve been reading, commenting, and interacting on the blog. Keep it coming, and thanks again for making this The First Casualty‘s best month yet.
– Jay
Postcards He Gets
A buddy and former Sciences Po classmate of mine (currently studying at the London School of Economics) runs a very cool Tumblr blog called “Postcards I Get,” in which…well, I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. Here’s a recent description:
Very smart of the Universal folks to go sans explanation back here, although it might have been nice of them to give details on joining Dumbledore’s Army for self defense tips while on campus. Still, despite a day of rubbing elbows with wizards, Erin survived to tell the tale, so it can’t be all dark arts and deadly forests. Whatsmore, they seem to have figured out a new method of posting letters! Sure, that owl holding an envelope looks like a postmark, but…it’s not. I’ll accept that the nifty Hogwarts stamp is at least semi-legal, but nowhere were any of these stamps officially canceled by the USPS. How to explain this postcard I got, then, except accepting that it’s magic?
Bonus points: thanks for the clarity as to my status, incongruous stamp theme
Greed is good. Just don’t remind us too often.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsP6XTHBwRw]
Jesse Pinho (no relation; we just have the same parents) mutes his TV every time he sees the above Levi’s commercial, and wonders why:
Levi’s #GoForth commercial is an excellent example of the intersection of individual and corporation, in which the corporation (Levi’s) more or less blatantly proclaims its jeans to be the standard-bearer of creativity, leadership, and individuality. Wear Levi’s, and you’ve staked your claim to “it.” (Exactly what “it” is, I’m not sure–but it’s certainly something good.) Add Levi’s to your curation of relationships, and it will perfectly complement your other inevitably cool qualities–your artistry, your go-getter attitude, your so-perfect-it-could-only-be-in-a-commercial haircut…
So why, then, do I find myself reaching for the remote the instant I hear “This is a pair of Levi’s”? What triggers this reaction? Certainly, annoying or poorly-done ads (I’m looking at you, 5-hour Energy!) prompt the same response, but the Levi’s commercial was neither of those. So what is it? Is the call to action too transparent? That is, does Levi’s offend me by toeing the delicate line between subtlety and overtness vis-à-vis manipulation of its audience? Certainly, someone who responds positively to being told that he is “the next living leader of the world” won’t respond so well to realizing that the compliment was proffered simply to coax him into buying some company’s product. But then, all advertising aims to do just that: it offers the viewer something she wants (a compliment, entertainment, humor, etc.) in exchange for 30 to 60 seconds of her attention. Or, at the very least, it beats the viewer over the head with some piece of information (“5-hour Energy… every day! Every day! Every day!”) so that its message–“Buy this!”–is inescapable.
Perhaps, then, it’s that Levi’s violates the contract between viewer and advertiser, in which the viewer suspends her cynicism every time a commercial is played. We viewers know that we are being manipulated into action when watching a commercial; and we’ve come to accept that, under one condition: that the advertiser does not insult our intelligence. Levi’s, however, fails to acknowledge this basic requirement, blatantly exploiting our perception of cool and forcing us to confront it in such literal terms that we’re made to feel uncomfortable. Advertisers should take note of this interaction, and learn from it one important lesson: that we’ll gladly consent to exploitation as long as you don’t remind us that that’s what we’re doing.
Look out for more stuff from Jesse coming up on this blog (as well as on his), primarily on the tech scene and related topics.
It’s not all bad news
The New York Times reports on an advertising counteroffensive as a response to the virulently racist subway ads I’d mentioned about a week ago. Thankfully, the “culture wars” narrative has not yet vanquished all comers:
Striking back against an anti-jihad advertisement in the subwayswidely perceived as anti-Muslim, two religious groups – one Jewish, one Christian – are taking out subway ads of their own to urge tolerance.
Rabbis for Human Rights – North America and the group Sojourners, led by the Christian author and social-justice advocate Jim Wallis, are unveiling their campaigns on Monday. Their ads will be placed near the anti-jihad ads in the same Manhattan subway stations, leaders of both groups said and transit officials confirmed. The groups said their campaigns were coincidental.
The ad by Rabbis for Human Rights turns the language of the earlier ad, placed by a pro-Israel group, on its head. The original ad says, “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.” The ad by Rabbis for Human Rights says, “In the choice between love and hate, choose love. Help stop bigotry against our Muslim neighbors.”
“We wanted to make it clear that it is in response to the anti-Islam ad,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights, whose members include rabbis from all streams of Judaism.
The Sojourners ad simply says, “Love your Muslim neighbors.”
Related articles
The Internet is full of little gold nuggets
Yes, I can name that movie. From bit.ly’s online “About” page:
When advertising works
Beautifully shot, haunting soundtrack. This is pretty close to a perfect commercial.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmml46_eds]And since I’m on the subject, I’m also a fan of this slightly longer one, for a very different product. Again, it’s the combination of subtle music and, in this case, a phenomenal narrating voice.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRB0i9-AUQs]Turncoats, man your stations
Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein makes the point that, to convince ideologically rigid audiences of a fact, it is less important how persuasive the argument is and more important who is the one making it:
People tend to dismiss information that would falsify their convictions. But they may reconsider if the information comes from a source they cannot dismiss. People are most likely to find a source credible if they closely identify with it or begin in essential agreement with it. In such cases, their reaction is not, “how predictable and uninformative that someone like that would think something so evil and foolish,” but instead, “if someone like that disagrees with me, maybe I had better rethink.”
Our initial convictions are more apt to be shaken if it’s not easy to dismiss the source as biased, confused, self-interested or simply mistaken. This is one reason that seemingly irrelevant characteristics, like appearance, or taste in food and drink, can have a big impact on credibility. Such characteristics can suggest that the validators are in fact surprising — that they are “like” the people to whom they are speaking.
It follows that turncoats, real or apparent, can be immensely persuasive. If civil rights leaders oppose affirmative action, or if well-known climate change skeptics say that they were wrong, people are more likely to change their views.
I’m skeptical as to what extent this theory applies to ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities who have conservative or otherwise unorthodox ideologies for their groups, however. It seems the term “self-hating [insert minority group here: Jew, black, gay, etc.]” is very quickly applied to various targets by many critics in order to diminish the inevitable megaphone effect of the anomalous spokesman or spokeswoman. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas comes immediately to mind, but countless other examples exist as well: Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, members of GOProud, and even Barack Obama, to name a few.
Perhaps we’ve crossed some invisible line as a nation, and even these helpful “turncoats” can no longer inspire our trust. They certainly don’t persuade me much. I’m a little unclear as to whether this says more about me, or more about the turncoats.