Advertising/Marketing

What is it when all the headlines are the same?
The post Spotting a Media Psyop first appeared on Dissident Voice.

One night in 1997, as Americans were parked on the couch in front of an episode of Touched by an Angel, they were touched by something else unexpected: an ad for a prescription allergy pill called Claritin®, promoted directly to the consumer! Prescription drugs had never been sold directly to the public before, because, without […]

As the ancient Greeks reminded us, bone cold definitions as starting points are essential in any discussion.  One current discussion, insignificant to posterity but amusing for advertisers and the presently bored, is the ludicrous reactions to a plastic doll rendered into celluloid form.  And as a doll, it can be no other.  Mattel’s Barbie has […]

She doesn’t love you, she doesn’t care for you, and she doesn’t know you.  But does her team pretend to, confecting an image of faux empathy and interest, sorting out the wheat from the chaff.  The predatory, fan sucking phenomenon of the Taylor Swift marketing machine is something to behold.  Leaving aside the sort of […]

God really must love Philip Morris. — John Safran, Haaretz, November 29, 2021 John Safran is a scamp, but in the finest tradition of investigative ones.  With the enthusiasm of a bloodhound, he gets wind of a scent and goes for it.  Of recent interest to his gonzo style of comedic yet lethal line of […]

In war, truth is the first casualty. — Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC) How many of us learn about Russia from a Russian point of view? Or about Syria from a loyal Syrian? Or Cuba from a Cuban supporter? Or Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea, China or many others on our current […]

Orientation Definition of propaganda and the purpose of this article Are the chances better that you’d read this article if I called it The Ten Commandments of Propaganda? The author of the book The Ten Commandments of Propaganda thinks so because you have deep collective associations with the Ten Commandments because of the centuries of […]
The post Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

Orientation Can language limit thought? If a dogmatic belief system can narrow the kind of vocabulary used, can language itself limit the kind of thinking that is going on? How free are people to think their own thoughts independently of language? My answer in this article is that language can trap thought. In his book […]
The post Speaking with Forked Tongues first appeared on Dissident Voice.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” — John Muir “All things are connected like the blood that unites us. We do not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to […]
The post Everything goes Better with Coca Cola: Hitching Capitalism to Sweet Slow Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.

One of the most damning assessments of COP26, the UN climate conference being held in Glasgow, came from Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist: ‘#COP26  has been named the must excluding COP ever. This is no longer a climate conference. This is a Global North greenwash festival. A two week celebration of business as usual […]