On Aug 23, 2004, at 6:05 PM, Alberto Monteiro wrote:
Isn't it Evil when marketing presents its lies as _imperatives_?
Hm.
I think it becomes evil the moment it tries to compel anyone to trade any part of his life for something he just doesn't need.
Asking someone to buy a book, for instance, is OK with me (for a lot of reasons) -- but trying to convince anyone that he Simply! Must! Have! some damn thing or another, when frankly ...
Okay, here's a concrete example. When I was 18 my dad gave me, for my BD gift, a membership in Amway. (Oy, yes, and verily gevalt as well.)
So anyway I'm at one of those endless pointless breakfast things with a "double diamond" or some bullshot [sic] distributor, and we get into an argument on an ethical point. Because the Amway catalog offered Minolta cameras for 35mm SLRs. Being a photo geek, and being an argumentative excrescence, even then, I heard something float by about how "Amway sells the best..." bla bla.
So I asked, knowing my shi'ite, how I could possibly justify my KNOWING that Nikon and Leica and Olympus ALL made better 35mm SLRs than Minolta. If some potential customer (this was Amway! Everyone, from the postman to the cop writing you a traffic ticket, was a potential customer) asked me what was the BEST camera he could buy -- how could I tell him "this hya Minolta, shweet", when in fact I knew better?
The answer? None! Save: "Well, tell him about this camera."
"But it's not the best�"
"Tell him about it�"
"But it's not the best�"
And cetera.
That, to me, is the evil of marketing. And why it should be eradicated.
This kind of BS is evil marketing. Actually, Amway is mostly a cult. http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Amway/ Scientology and Amway both redefine ethics.
If you want to know how cults like Amway can attach like a leech to your brain I can tell you, short version, long version (nine pages) or a pointer. Take your choice if interested at all.
And if you're asking for volunteers for the firing squad, I can hit a dime at 100 yards.
That should be just fine, after recalculating angular differences for diameter relative to distance, for hitting a marketer's brain at 6 feet, using a Howitzer.
My wife has a comment on this. Brainwashing shrinks brains.
Keith Henson
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