I'm having one of those depressed days looking at the news. It's hard to remember that the news is essentially controversy junkies cherry-picking the worst of humanity and that the rest of the human race isn't like that. Sigh. Anyways, here are some random thoughts.
● "OMG! There's a hurricane! WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!" I hate the media. They do this every time anything happens, especially hurricanes. They pull a freak out and talk about imagined worst case scenarios so far beyond the point of reality that they rival apocalypse fiction. It's ridiculous.
● I'm sick of clickbait. If your headline reads like clickbait, I don't click anymore. I don't care who you are.
● The NFL season "is over" for about 20 teams now... according to sportwriters. The same sportswriters who, by the way, have gone right back to glorifying big hits after whining about concussions all off season. Some even said they couldn't morally cover the league anymore and yet here they are. Hypocrites. Anyways, after one game, they have pronounces most of the league finished. Hot takes are for morons.
● I think Nike is in trouble on the Colin Kapernick thing. When Nike signed America hater Colin Kapernick, the calculation they made was typical, but ridiculous. Nike made the assumption that their market is basically angry blacks and young whites who don't care or who might not like it, but won't do anything about it. Basically, this was virtue signalling for their target audience. Based on that, some analysts have claimed that Nike scored over $145 million in free publicity. Victory, right?
Ok, but whenever corporations get in trouble, they deny they are in trouble and then you see them suddenly open new avenues of advertising in which they try to paint a picture of how great they are without ever mentioning the scandal. Wells Fargo did this most recently, but I've seen it regularly from groups as diverse as Monsanto, Boeing and Kraft. It's what companies do. (Watch for Serena Williams ads to appear touting her niceness and shyness.) So in the middle of all this talk about how Nike scored and how twitter likes the Kapernick ad (Twitter is a worthless measure of anything), and how their stock price has regained all it lost... I'm suddenly seeing Nike ads on Pinterst, where they've never been before. Why pinterest? Because Nike's biggest market is Starbucks moms, the group Nike thought would be sympathetic to Kapernick or would remain passive. That tells me Nike has a problem.
● I'm amazed at how often a "fact" gets repeated by newspapers even after it's been debunked.
● Did you know that Subway got rid of ham because of complaints by them Muuuslims? So said this GOP bulletin I get every few days. Funny, mine still sells ham.
● It looks like the cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, have been exposed as, well, worthless. Duh.
● I actually don't care that Alex Jones is getting banned. I'm a big believer in freedom of speech even being extended to cover big companies that make themselves akin to utilities, but I think the crap Jones sells is beyond free speech. It's in the realm of fraud and lies and slander, which has never been protected. I am troubled that conservatives are latching themselves onto him. Pick your figurehead victim better folks.
● Some numbers that might interest you. Sports talk is as poisonous as political talk radio, maybe even moreso. It's pure hate. And the television now seems to be full of these sports talk shows. So what are their ratings? The biggest is around 150,000 people with most in the 100,000 range. So we're talking less than a million if they all have totally unique audiences, which they don't. So just like with talk radio, which is about 5,000,000 people TOPS, sports talk isn't even a statistical blip. Hence, all this hate you see floating around the internet and the newspapers is being driven by about 1% of the population. Similarly, did you know that the American socialist parties have about 50,000 members? They can't even fill a stadium.
● I hate mommy bloggers. Just hate them. "Like, OMG, like 10 things you'll just hate about Disney! //giggle giggle Like, it's so great that OMG you'll hate to leave. //giggle giggle unicorn fart" If I ever meet a real person who acts this plastic, I will savagely beat them to death. Hopefully you can come watch the trial.
Thoughts?
● "OMG! There's a hurricane! WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!" I hate the media. They do this every time anything happens, especially hurricanes. They pull a freak out and talk about imagined worst case scenarios so far beyond the point of reality that they rival apocalypse fiction. It's ridiculous.
● I'm sick of clickbait. If your headline reads like clickbait, I don't click anymore. I don't care who you are.
● The NFL season "is over" for about 20 teams now... according to sportwriters. The same sportswriters who, by the way, have gone right back to glorifying big hits after whining about concussions all off season. Some even said they couldn't morally cover the league anymore and yet here they are. Hypocrites. Anyways, after one game, they have pronounces most of the league finished. Hot takes are for morons.
● I think Nike is in trouble on the Colin Kapernick thing. When Nike signed America hater Colin Kapernick, the calculation they made was typical, but ridiculous. Nike made the assumption that their market is basically angry blacks and young whites who don't care or who might not like it, but won't do anything about it. Basically, this was virtue signalling for their target audience. Based on that, some analysts have claimed that Nike scored over $145 million in free publicity. Victory, right?
Ok, but whenever corporations get in trouble, they deny they are in trouble and then you see them suddenly open new avenues of advertising in which they try to paint a picture of how great they are without ever mentioning the scandal. Wells Fargo did this most recently, but I've seen it regularly from groups as diverse as Monsanto, Boeing and Kraft. It's what companies do. (Watch for Serena Williams ads to appear touting her niceness and shyness.) So in the middle of all this talk about how Nike scored and how twitter likes the Kapernick ad (Twitter is a worthless measure of anything), and how their stock price has regained all it lost... I'm suddenly seeing Nike ads on Pinterst, where they've never been before. Why pinterest? Because Nike's biggest market is Starbucks moms, the group Nike thought would be sympathetic to Kapernick or would remain passive. That tells me Nike has a problem.
● I'm amazed at how often a "fact" gets repeated by newspapers even after it's been debunked.
● Did you know that Subway got rid of ham because of complaints by them Muuuslims? So said this GOP bulletin I get every few days. Funny, mine still sells ham.
● It looks like the cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, have been exposed as, well, worthless. Duh.
● I actually don't care that Alex Jones is getting banned. I'm a big believer in freedom of speech even being extended to cover big companies that make themselves akin to utilities, but I think the crap Jones sells is beyond free speech. It's in the realm of fraud and lies and slander, which has never been protected. I am troubled that conservatives are latching themselves onto him. Pick your figurehead victim better folks.
● Some numbers that might interest you. Sports talk is as poisonous as political talk radio, maybe even moreso. It's pure hate. And the television now seems to be full of these sports talk shows. So what are their ratings? The biggest is around 150,000 people with most in the 100,000 range. So we're talking less than a million if they all have totally unique audiences, which they don't. So just like with talk radio, which is about 5,000,000 people TOPS, sports talk isn't even a statistical blip. Hence, all this hate you see floating around the internet and the newspapers is being driven by about 1% of the population. Similarly, did you know that the American socialist parties have about 50,000 members? They can't even fill a stadium.
● I hate mommy bloggers. Just hate them. "Like, OMG, like 10 things you'll just hate about Disney! //giggle giggle Like, it's so great that OMG you'll hate to leave. //giggle giggle unicorn fart" If I ever meet a real person who acts this plastic, I will savagely beat them to death. Hopefully you can come watch the trial.
Thoughts?
Jim Rome turned me off of sports talk 20 years ago. The only part of the show remotely enjoyable was the part where he opened the lines up for callers to give their takes. If they regurgitated Jim's take, they were praised; if not, they were blasted and hung up on. That's not what I liked about it, though. I'm pretty sure there was some pre-internet trolling occurring, as many of the callers Jim liked bordered on parody of the host, and I don't think he got it. LOL
ReplyDeleteHe's still out there. And the big thing now is the outrageous "hot take" because it's super obnoxious, which gets their viewers watching, and you can later claim it was said off the cuff without thought (hence: a hot take) so it can't be held against you.
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how angry and obnoxious these shows can be.
I can’t imagine how latching onto Jones will do anything but hurt the GOP.
ReplyDeleteYou are so right about the professional haters and outrage twits are a small minority.
Which I am most thankful for, and it always makes my day when their audience turns on them, or, like Jones they lose a platform to regurgitate their hate.
I didn’t know that about Subway, OMG! Lol!
Recently, I deleted all my FB “friends” who can’t seem to take the hint that I don’t want to read the crap spewed by the media, their favorite hate group or the next hot outrage.
And I am far happier for it.
Makes me wonder why I didn’t do this sooner.
Imaginary money is worthless? I can’t say I’m not surprised, lol.
Excellent post as always Andrew ����
Not sure why there are question marks there at the end. I didn’t type that.
DeleteThanks Allena. You know, I've tuned out a lot of the garbage and it's made me so much happier. There is politics and there is batsh*t crazy politics. Avoiding the batsh*t crazy stuff has made me happier, as has ignoring as much of the negativity I can online.
ReplyDeleteYeah, imagine that... a currency based on nothing except that people want it to be real isn't working. Huh. Sounds like the EU.
Let's see...
ReplyDelete1. We're getting a few evacuees in our part of Georgia and we're preparing relief shipments at work but most people down here have a good perspective on the hurricane.
2. It's beyond old at this point.
3. I don't follow sports but it doesn't sound like I'm missing much. I know I'm not impressed when sports talk shows are the only thing on at restaurants.
4. Not surprising, though your take on why they did it makes more sense than others I've read. As the saying goes, "Get woke, go broke."
5. Supremely annoying for sure.
6. As far as I know we still have it at our Subways!
7. Took them long enough to realize it. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for this garbage and computer part prices will go back to normal without crypto miners hogging them. More later!
Hi Daniel,
ReplyDeleteCorporations never act based on emotion or bias. They act based on their own markets and their strategies. For Nike, this was an obvious move with the exception of the Starbucks moms, who see Nike as a must-have status symbol. It shows that they work out... whether they do or not.
I think Nike miscalculated when it comes to them. We'll see, but their pinterest ads suggest it. In fact, the ads I've seen show a small, chubby black boy and talks about how he's going to grow up to be a respectable nearly-white person. That plays right into the ersazt social conscience of the Starbucks set and it basically converts the Che Guevara image of Kapernick into a noble savage.
All the Subways still sell ham.
Sounds right, Andrew. The most convoluted explanation I heard was that Nike and other apparel companies were doing this to protest Trump's China policy. Market miscalculation is far more likely.
ReplyDeleteThis actually brings me to the Jones thing, especially since I was wondering what your take on it was. I do think the issues regarding the tech companies' near utility status that you mentioned are definitely worth exploring but it's unfortunate that they ended up coming up because of that psychotic idiot and the way he wastes bandwidth. I did find some arguments in his favor more compelling than I should have, admittedly, but I'm glad that this blog keeps a rational perspective!
On the mommy bloggers, thankfully my only experience was a brief click while trying to find out how to clean something specific and found the shameless advertising variety of it. The Internet really is a pit sometimes.
Daniel, I think the tech companies are a problem and need to be viewed as hostile to conservatives. But I think Jones is the wrong case to use to make the point.
ReplyDeleteI don't think Nike is protesting anything. They see him as a way to reach their biggest target market. That's it. And if he becomes a problem, they will drop him quietly.
Mommy bloggers kill me. They've been trained to be sickly sweet and dizzy cute and it comes across as horrifically plastic and stupid as hell.
On the Alex Jones thing, I'm not sure when the appropriate point is to circle wagons around a controversial figure, but it's going to have to be figured out. It seems Dana Loesch is the next target for social media banishment and, while she's still plenty obnoxious, she's several degrees less so than Jones.
ReplyDeletetryanmax, I think the difference is that Loesch is an ass, but Jones is a fraud. You should protect people even when they are asses, but you shouldn't defend a fraud. That's my take.
ReplyDeleteAs far as most media right now. They have really succeeded in getting me more annoyed with them than President Trump, whom I don't even like. That's quite the accomplishment.
ReplyDeleteBen, I'm the same way. I like some of what Trump has done, but I really can't stand him personally and much of what he does makes me cringe. But the media is so obnoxiously biased that they make me defend him.
ReplyDeleteSounds reasonable on all counts to me, Andrew. Tryanmax brought up a good case with Loesch, since I know she's gotten crap like people saying that maybe she'd change her mind on guns if her kids were shot dead on Twitter. That particular gem was reported but Twitter said it was acceptable until the pressure got to be too much and they removed it. That's the sort of thing that definitely needs to be addressed. I've even heard some people mention that it might be time to turn antitrust laws on some of the tech companies, with Google and Facebook being the top two that come up. I haven't really had a chance to think through the possibility and implications of that yet so I was wondering what you and the Commentarama community thought of that.
ReplyDelete