The View From the Sinister Side of Life
October 28th, 2008
Look: socialism is a word that has a meaning. It means public control of the means of production. It does not mean taxing the top bracket at 39%. Likewise, “collective ownership” has a meaning, and it does not mean the situation that obtains when the government can repeal tax cuts for the top 5% of the population.
Categories: Economics, Politics, Taxes | No Comments
October 28th, 2008
Well, the conservatives are boycotting something again. When are they not?
This time it’s Pepsi-Cola. Seems Pepsi redesigned its logo, which they do every 5-10 years. The old sort-of-yin/yang symbol, in which red and blue areas inside a circle were separated by a wavy white stripe (with the edges of the separate areas parallel to each other), has been replaced by a similar circle in which the edges of the red and blue areas are not parallel, but all three (red, white, and blue) sort of curve upward to the right at different angles.
PowerLine, the right-wing mob-blog, has announced a Pepsi boycott in response to the new logo. Yes - the logo.
Why?, you might ask, if you were mentally normal and cared what goes on at Powerline. Well, it’s obvious. Pepsi has become part of the liberal media bias conspiracy. Their new logo is (obviously!) a subliminal propaganda effort aimed at reinforcing . . .
. . . the Obama campaign!
Because when you’re conservative, this is the way your mind works.
Note that the article that Powerline links to explains in detail that the logo update has been long-planned, and is tied into a project to adopt a distinct “smile” symbol for each of Pepsi’s different products (the new logo’s curves are supposed to evoke increasing degrees of smiling - because, if you’re an advertising executive, that’s the way your mind works). They read the explanation and still insisted this was all part of a political campaign. Because, just like Proctor & Gamble publicly advocates Satanism with all its products (another perennial right-wing boycott target), PepsiCo decided it had nothing better to do with its $84 billion in assets than tie it to a partisan political campaign that will be over before the logo is rolled out. If you’re conservative, that sounds believable.
More and more I think conservative rhetoric is meaningless in itself, but merely serves as a kind of anthropological evidence of how certain primitive intelligences struggle to make sense of the world. Conservative blogs are like those shape-puzzle experiments with monkeys: it’s not what they say, but how they say it, that’s so fascinating.
Categories: Culture, Economics, General, Media, News & Current Events, Politics | 4 Comments
