John Abbe: Better Practices

Don't know who these guys were, but the FBI has shut down RaiseTheFist.com in a raid of their offices, according to this kuro5hin article/discussion. This may be the first really over-the-top civil rights abuse in the new secret government scheme the current U.S. administration wants to foist on us (not that the last administration didn't share some of the same bad ideas). I'll try to do a little research to see if they were really up to anything nefarious, but from the pages i was able to find in Google's cache of their site, it looked like pretty normal (albeit loud and angry) progressive stuff. There's an effort to mirror raisethefist.com already underway...

Jonathan Delacour writes: "The editor of the Sydney Morning Herald might print articles or letters critical of the newspaper's stance on a given issue, but he doesn't have to devote space every day to a column whose sole purpose is to draw attention to real or imagined deficiencies in his business and personal behavior." Personal, no. Business, yes. Of course news media don't have to, but it used to be common for newspapers to have an ombudsman, with a column, whose job was exactly that: to be an independent in-house critic of the paper. Sadly, this practice has nearly disappeared (at least at papers here in the U.S.). More power to Dave for not exercising the power he has over the server that Winerlog sits on to block it.

Jonathon Delacour Unplugged:

Dean's argument In Defense of Advertising can be summarized as: Advertising deserves respect because large numbers of talented people expend enormous creative effort to communicate the virtues of products and services, and in doing so they underpin not just the market economy but freedom and democracy too.

I read Dean's piece. The efforts he extols are not infrequently applied in the service of convincing people to purchase things that diminish (physically or virtually) their own or others' lives.

I think the main point being missed is that half the upset is not directly about the advertising. It's about the products. I thought one of the key quotes was:

Some ads, of course, are terrible. Yet there are other forms of advertising which are so good, so creative, so wonderful they become a part of the vernacular, a part of the fabric of everyday life. There are also cases in which the ad campaigns prove to be superior to the actual products.

(my emphasis)

Advertising that gets into our vernacular is profoundly successful, and quite often remains associated with the product. Even an ad far less successful might be convincing many people to buy and use harmful things.

There is also criticism of advertising itself, but this is little different from criticism of non-selling media.

All that said, i'll admit i get lazy sometimes and say ads are bad, rather than applying Sturgeon's Law appropriately: 90% of everything is crap. And what are we here for? To create all 100% so that we can get the 10%. The real secret though is if you can figure out to enjoy some of the 90%.

Anyone who's followed the situation in Sri Lanka for more than a little while knows better than to assume this is the end of the war, but this is the most hopeful things have looked in a while, in terms of the big players. The ceasefire has been holding, and the LTTE has just extended it from their side for another month; the government seems likely to reciprocate. Jeyanthy is already checking out plane tickets for our upcoming visit there, to attend/help with a Nonviolent Communication International Intensive Training March 17-26. Want to come? I promise warm weather, warm people, and powerful & challenging learning.

CreationMatters might get sucked into the Green Alliance (or whatever we end up calling it) site. Except of course some of the personal, NVC, and Lanka bits.