Briefs. Three short items.
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(1) Greed Is Good. Bribery Is Better. I just emailed the following letter to the editor:

AMAZING. The Post actually published an opinion piece in praise of payola: corruption in the music industry. What next? Legalize bribing public officials? If the free market is in favor of corruption, maybe we should abolish capitalism and make socialism work. Or maybe people should just stop reading the New York Post.

(Responsive to "Eliot's Sour Note", July 29, 2005 column by Ryan Sager in the New York Post)
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(2) Sand in the Gears. Advocates of targeting searches of bags to people most likely to be terrorists by means of "racial profiling" focused on people who somehow look "Middle Eastern" (which might well take in lots of Latinos and southern Europeans) have run into a big problem: most of the men arrested in connection with the second cluster of London bombings are plainly what in the United States would be perceived as "black". Let's hear all those Jewish advocates of "profiling" now. Are they going to advocate searching not just people who look Middle Eastern but also everybody black in the United States? I dare them!
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(3) Words and Images. An ad posing as an Internet poll on same-sex marriage uses a graphic showing two male icons (like those we are accustomed to seeing by restrooms), rather than two female icons, holding hands. The "lesbigay" movement must be very unhappy, since they have done everything in their power to replace the public conception of homosexuality as being lust between men with instead the feeling that it is only affection between women. People inclined to manipulate passions, however, know which image will incite more negativity, and use the more incendiary.
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Words as well as images make a difference. In a short real-estate seminar I attended last week, the wife (of a husband-and-wife team of presenters) said that when approaching people interested in selling, you speak of selling their "house". But when you talk to people looking to buy, you speak of buying a "home". Clever, huh? You linguistically separate sellers from their emotional connection to a structure and engage potential buyers' emotions in making a nest.
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Little things matter.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,792.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:29 AM