Editorial & Opinion
« Older Entries | Newer Entries »Confessions Of A Plum Market Paparazzi
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 28, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Thursday, October 28th, 2010OR: How taking innocuous photos at Plum Market can lead to veiled accusations of corporate espionage.
 One of the nice displays at Plum Market. Too bad I’ll never lay eyes on them again. |
I had an interesting experience today which – in an indirect way – highlighted the corporate personhood vs individual personhood rights issue. The irony being the fact that it was a fellow personhood that was attempting to assert the corporation’s “rights”, ultimately at some small expense to the corporation. Let me explain. I do a lot of random small business consulting that runs the gamut from point of sale and display advice to web marketing development. Because of my work, and simply because of my nature, I am constantly – in fact almost compulsively – analyzing products, packaging, advertisements, and retail layouts. Today, for the first time amongst many visits to retail stores, I was more or less accused of being a possible corporate spy. I was in a local Plum Market, admiring the spacious, clean displays in their wine section. I ended up taking a few photos for two reasons. First of all, I wanted to show their wine racks to a friend who’s trying to figure out an interesting way to outfit his growing wine cellar. Although Plum’s display racks presented wines in a reasonably attractive way, they also frankly looked like they would be fairly cheap, and suit my friend’s simplistic modern tastes. The other reason I was taking a few photos was because I simply wanted to make a visual note of what I considered less-than-ideal display design that while visually appealing, was oddly flawed in a few ways. I was in fact doing casual research that would probably influence the ideas I would share with a client. It was after I had taken a few photos that an employee walked up to me and said “Excuse me, I noticed you were taking photos”. The camera was already back in my pocket at this point, but I had nothing to hide, and said “Yes, I was. Is that a problem?”, to which he replied: “Well, that depends on WHY you were taking photographs. Are you a competitor?” I replied – quite honestly – that no, I was not a competitor. In spite of being rather annoyed by his accusatory tone, I maintained a brief, courteous dialogue with him in which he explained that “lots of our competitors come in to copy our model, we’re a very successful operation”. There were a number of things that raised my hackles about this interaction. First of all, the simple fact that he approached me with suspicion rather than as a customer. I can understand (within reason) a retail operation’s concern about corporate espionage, but it was immediately obvious that this man’s reason for concern was rather nebulous, and that he was sort of justifying his low-key accusation on the fly. It’s important to note that I’m a fairly distinctive looking person with white hair, wearing a fairly conspicuous vintage grey outfit, taking a couple of pictures, making absolutely no effort to hide the fact. Wouldn’t a “spy” be wearing sweats and discreetly taking pictures with their iPhone, so they could transmit their covert surveillance photos back to headquarters? I’m not the first to raise this question; there are plenty of question & answer posts out there in which people discuss the same topic. And I don’t question a retail store’s right to state a “no photos” policy, as long as they post it. But all the arguments against taking photos while you shop don’t fly with me. Almost anything one could “steal” (i.e., visual presentation) in this context certainly doesn’t require a camera to copy, and if in fact the ideas being “stolen” are somehow a legitimate legal trademark of the store and they get copied and implemented somewhere else, the business can pursue legal action. This article sums up some of my thinking, but this goes deeper for me. Later in the day I asked a barrista at a local cafe how they’d respond to a person randomly taking photos in their cafe, and they said they’d be concerned. When I asked why, they fumbled at a similar answer about competitors. To me, this smacks more of knee-jerk, post 9/11, culture of fear reactions than rational policy. Because I’d bet this month’s Google AdSense revenue that these same stores will let Google take the same kinds of photos without batting a lash, without Google having to resort to these devious methods recommended by The Consumerist. Because you know, a person working for a corporation can’t trust a person, but they can trust another corporation. Watch for a future piece on this topic; I plan to test it out in a variety of stores and present the results. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this though.
Michelle Malkin: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Disingenuousness
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 6, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010We shouldn’t fear anchor babies, we should pity them. Especially if they grow up to be Michelle Malkin.
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I feel sorry for Michelle Malkin. And perhaps even more sorry for the uptight white conservative males who hang on her every word (see graphic, below). This is a recent development by the way; since she’s essentially the heiress to Ann Coulter’s hyperbole-driven partisan “journalism”, I’ve always found her ranting to be pretty predictable. So why do I feel sorry for her? Because I took the time to read her basic biographical information on Wikipedia. If you juxtapose the basic facts of her personal life and her desperate (but profitable) pandering to xenophobic white America, an image of an intelligent and driven individual warped by dashed hopes and consumed by self-denial comes into sharp focus. The fact that she was born in Philadelphia as a child of Philippine citizens that had arrived in the United States earlier that year actually makes her anti-immigration diatribes make sense. As a friend of mine put it, “she’s like the slave who says all the right things to make the master happy”. If it matters, the friend who said this is black and Republican. It’s also enlightening that Malkin attended Oberlin with hopes of being a concert pianist. When – as she puts it – she realized that she “couldn’t cut it with piano”, she switched her major to English, later belittling the school as a “radically left-wing, liberal arts college”. So here we have a classic frustrated artist, whose birth is much like that of the “anchor babies” she rails against, whose parents are from a country that has probably felt the negative effects of American colonialism more than most, rabidly upholding the kind of isolationist nationalism that might make Kim Jong-il proud. It’s sad that someone so bright – who has benefited so much from foreign nationals immigrating to America – is so tortured by personal failure and cultural shame that she can’t discuss immigration in a more positive light. I mean, take a look at these mind-blowing lists of American immigrants. With Columbus Day just around the corner, maybe it’s a good time to remember that EVERYONE on this continent is an immigrant. Read the rest of this entry »
This Headline Is Devoid Of Useful Information
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on September 27, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Monday, September 27th, 2010But most media and political thought lately is, due to its blindness to its own self-referential absurdity.
 Thanks, Google. |
I went down a slightly disturbing rabbit hole today. I’ve been confused a bit lately anyway, what with the profusion of meta-references and the death of irony and satire (bonus point for self-link!) that have been making it impossible to separate reality from the many parodies of itself that we’re presented with daily. Today it started with a Guardian piece called This is a news website article about a scientific paper. Which is basically just a text version of Charlie Brooker’s How to Report the News from earlier this year, or Cracked.com’s Trailer For Every Oscar-Winning Movie Ever (both videos below). This is an old gag; the community blog Metafilter did a “this is a comment thread full of all the comments that would be made if these were actual comments” thread back in 2001. Which all got me pondering things self-referential, and led to the really twisted part of the rabbit hole, and gave me a disturbing sort of brain freeze that I’m worried won’t go away. If – like me – you’re not especially intelligent, but live in an elitist smarty-pants college town, so have to give the impression that you are – you may have a copy of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
The Death & Rebirth Of Political Meta-Satire As Quantum Comedy
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on September 25, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Saturday, September 25th, 2010Figures like Stephen Colbert, Glenn Beck, and Sarah Palin have introduced an uncertainty principle in current politics that makes it hard to distinguish a wave of sentiment from an actual political particle.
 The confusion almost makes one nostalgic for the campy satire of Pat Paulsen’s presidential campaigns |
Recently I was going to write about the laws in Brazil that prohibit satirical political candidates during election time, criticizing such laws for denying free speech, which many of us would view as a cornerstone of modern democracy. I mean, sure. This can lead to odd results, like porn star Ciccolina being elected to parliament in Italy, but as we long ago pointed out, it’s hard to tell a prostitute from a politician in the first place. But a confluence of recent events has caused me to rethink things a bit. It started when I received an e-mail from a reader referencing my attempt at meta-satire of the Stephen Colbert/Jon Stewart events sheduled to take place in DC at the end of October. The reader – an obvious teabagger – actually said “I’m happy to see that someone in the mainstream media is calling out these socialist Obamanation jokesters for what they are doing, which is obviously ramming there [sic] liberal agenda down America’s throat right before the elections“. Never mind how much it hurt my feelings when they called Dissociated Press “mainstream”, what really was worrying was the fact that they were regurgitating satirist/comedian Glenn Beck’s humorous spin on political commentator Stephen Colbert’s rally in Washington. Oh. Wait. I think I reversed something there. This inability to distinguish the comedians from the commentators and the candidates wasn’t helped any by Colbert’s recent appearance at a congressional hearing. Although you could reasonably argue that Colbert was wasting taxpayer money somehow, or blew a great opportunity to use his clout to make progress on an important issue, I think he did something even more reckless: he not only highlighted how easily the public can be confused and misled, he exposed how easily a politician can be confused and misled. And in the process exposed the American public to something they should NEVER be allowed to see, i.e., the arcane and out-of-touch legislative process in action. It was hard to decide which was more surreal – Colbert’s presence, or the committee’s response. You’ve taken us into dangerous territory Mr. Colbert, the world of “quantum comedy”, in which the frame of observation can completely determine whether an individual is a comedian or a politician. Which now has me thinking that maybe the Brazilians had it right all along. Leave the comedy to the politicians, Mr. Colbert. They do just fine on their own. Read the rest of this entry »
The Terrorists Have Finally Won
[ Comments Off ]Posted on September 9, 2010 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Thursday, September 9th, 2010Jesus America, you really blew it on this one.
It’s hard to believe it’s been almost ten years since those airliners crashed into the World Trade Center. Harder still to believe that America’s psyche still seems to be reeling from the events. I like to think that we’re not a bunch of Chickenshit Crybabies, but I never seem to see evidence to the contrary. Don’t tell me again about the tragedy of the nearly 3,000 people that died that day. Over 100,000 people have died as a result of the bizarre and poorly conceived invasion of Iraq that was made possible only through the perverse manipulation of American sentiment and ignorance in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. Whenever I think about the symbolic hole of sorrow and tragedy in New York City that is slowly becoming a building once again, I think of Warsaw, and how in spite of the fact that the Nazis wiped out more than 85% of the city, the Poles chose to restore as much of it as possible, in some cases completely recreating entire buildings, and using as much of the original material as possible. Here in America, we spent as long debating what to do and duking out the details in court as the Polish did rebuilding an entire city. The recent debates about the “mosque at ground zero” and the attention the press is giving that fucktard in Florida are in my opinion simply more evidence that America needs to get up off its collective ass, wipe the tears from its eyes, and show some dignity. Until then, I’m sad to say that those 19 Sauds achieved much of their goal, and bumpkins like Terry Jones are only helping wave the flag of their victory.