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Comment Threads

• anonemouse commented on Chefs in a city under siege
  "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. Now, if I only knew which half" --John Wanamaker. What evidence we have seen suggests advertisers don't demand a say in content - they merely withhold their ads from appearing with content they disapprove of. Perfectly legal, no collusion... but it scares the shit out of the American TV networks, at the very least....
• gmuir77 commented on Chefs in a city under siege
  I share your doubts. I think that good salesmen are real, we can verify this. Someone can sell an icemaker to an Eskimo, we see it happen. But in that very example, we know the customer's been flimflammed. So I think ad-men are very effective at selling the idea of advertising. But the nature of the beast is that it's very hard to get accurate metrics. I would venture to say that it's only marginally more scientific than sacrificing to gain the favor of the gods. Things went your way? The sacrifice worked. Things went against you? They weren't happy...
• scentofviolets commented on Chefs in a city under siege
  What evidence we have seen suggests advertisers don't demand a say in content - they merely withhold their ads from appearing with content they disapprove of. Perfectly legal, no collusion... Is it illegal for advertisers to demand a say in content? Not that I'm aware of. The other part here is that your hapless newspaper editor has to actually receive some feedback on the offending content, right? All the advertisers have to do then is to say, for example, they won't make any donations if the paper gives any column inches to any story or editorial that even mentions the...
• george.herbert commented on Chefs in a city under siege
  ScentOfViolets wrote... (much more, then) One. More. Time. I don't have to do any homework to justify not going to war. It's on people who want to start a war to do their homework and then present it to the public in an intelligible and honest fashion. That this even needs to be said out loud is . . . outrageous. And not in the way Aquaman says it. You're setting up an inaccurate strawman for what you think I'm criticizing. I'm fine with people who (at any point, then or now) believe / believed that the evidence was not...
• Earl Killian commented on Chefs in a city under siege
  What you wrote is true, but I don't think you go far enough and look at the process from an even higher altitude. Here is how I describe what is going on. Remember that regardless of who the electorate votes for, the real winners are our rulers. The nature of the game is to control where the poles lie (the poles in the US being the positions of the Rs and Ds—the bounds of "acceptable" opinion). The electorate’s choice one of the poles is minimally relevant, as the fix is already in when the poles are placed; either pole is...