A rare insight by way of a blog by Paul, a ‘right-of-center, gun-owning, gay Texan’, here quoting Keith Burgess-Jackson (BJ), who calls himself the Anal Philosopher:

‘Conservatism is committed to a presumption in favor of tradition. Presumptions by their nature are rebuttable. Law is filled with presumptions… There is a legal presumption that people accused of crimes are innocent. To a conservative, traditions are innocent until proved guilty.’

This idea ties in nicely with a US government funded study of the psychology of conservatism, published last year by some of Stanford, California and Maryland Universities’ finest minds. Amongst other things, they discovered rightwing thinkers to be rather dogmatic and averse to ambiguity. So BJ calls on us to follow tradition dogmatically, without proving its value first and he talks of black and white concepts like innocence and guilt.

Yet BJ talks in the abstract, neither defining his traditions nor the crimes of which they’re accused. And he talks as if a tradition accused is on a par with a person accused of crime, which is just silly. Of course, leftwing thinkers – and US liberals – do care less for tradition. They tend to concern themselves with issues like prejudice, poverty and inequality; aberrations they regard as criminal. And all too often they find dogmatic, traditional values – a woman’s place in the home, say – at the root of these crimes.

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Former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey’s assertion that, amongst other things, ‘no great invention has come for many hundred years from Muslim countries’ was always going to whip up Muslim anger, accusations of racism and almost tiresome listing of Muslim achievements.

Carey may have a point, but he finds himself hurling stones from inside a glasshouse. Christianity is certainly not a religion of science or invention, but has a long history of suppressing discovery. Pope John Paul II may have admitted the mistake – after a special commission – in 1992, but some still hold that the church was right and Galileo was wrong when he pushed the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun (buy their book).

Meanwhile, Christians across America are getting so good at promoting creationism, that briefing documents like this have to be issued to teachers. For these people, a lack of empirical evidence is no barrier to teaching creationism as if it were a verifiable scientific discovery – biologists, geologists and palaeontologists are part of some great conspiracy.

Today, no religion enables a culture of innovation; we owe that to secularism and tolerance.

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Marketing has been prompted to compare easyGroup’s Stelios Haji-Ioannou with Virgin entrepreneur Richard Branson, following the announcement that cheap flights, cheap car rental, cheap cinema, cheap buses, cheap credit cards and other cheap stuff are to be joined by… easy4men, a cheap toiletries range.

Now I might boast about getting a cheap flight to Barcelona… but will anyone brag about how cheap their aftershave is?
Naïve Marketing Strategies#1: High-Low……Naïve Marketing Strategies#3: McDonald’s Salads Plus

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According to some survey (I’ve lost the reference) sex, free and chocolate are the three words most likely to catch the eye, so advertisers everywhere should be working them into their copy. Of course, sex-free chocolate is somehow off putting, so you need to cheat and switch the order a little to create that perfect headline: free sex and chocolate.

And it works. I took two series of 100,000 text ads. The first references recent blogs like this…

Sex & the City meets…

Mad Mullah Murders… Britney’s Onyx Hotel… Barcelona’s 11-M…

The second’s like this…

Free Sex and Chocolate!

Mad Mullah Murders… Britney’s Onyx Hotel… Barcelona’s 11-M…

Thirty-six in every thousand people click ‘Free Sex and Chocolate’, while ‘Sex & the city meets…’ manages just fourteen per thousand (even though the s-word is still in there). Ultimately though, this has to be a naïve piece of marketing because as soon as people realise there are no free pics of naked people smeared with chocolate, they go elsewhere.

It seems obvious that these three words should come out top, but maybe there’s more to it than meets the eye. Maybe sex, free and chocolate are so potent because they point to both heaven and hell – symbols of guilty indulgence and corrupted morals as well as pleasure, something for nothing and luxury.

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Having had a pop at Pink, I was reminded of a study – reported in the New Scientist – that suggests children who develop a fascination with celebrities, are likely to be more popular and better adjusted than their squarer piers.

The desire to suck-up to ‘prestigious individuals’ is a survival mechanism; ‘prestigious individuals’ have leadership potential and the power to reward our sycophancy. That doesn’t mean that Pink is going to do her fans any great favours further down the line, but that her fans are more likely to know who else to stick to, if they want to be on the winning side.

But what when your hero turns out to be a bit dodgy? I’ve always been a great fan of Bryan Ferry who, together with Roxy Music, revolutionised the UK music scene and who remains one of our greatest singer song writers. So it took me some time to come to terms with the fact that he supports fox hunting and his son is a whipper-in. (And I’m not the only blogger to feel this way.)

Meanwhile Pink’s music is terrible… but then again, she is an animal rights supporting vegetarian.

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It’s sad to say that my parting memory of Safeway – finally gobbled up by Morrison’s – will be of rip-off special deals. Like the time I found bread that cost 55p in Tesco or Asda ‘on offer’ at £1.20 for two (or 70p for one to make the offer look good) and bought carnations at the special price of two bunches for £5, only to discover a couple of days later they were only £1.48 a bunch in Tesco!

Safeway fell for what’s known in the trade as a ‘high-low’ pricing policy; raising prices across the board, then compensating with lots of special offers designed to catch shoppers’ eyes. It’s based on the naïve notion that if you scream loud enough about the offers, people won’t notice how expensive everything else it. But people aren’t that stupid.

Naïve Marketing Strategies#2: easy4men

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Pink’s appearance at the Manchester Evening News Arena (world’s most popular music venue) has coincided with the Plain English Campaign’s exposure of the UK’s most irritating clichés. And the campaign’s list reads just like a Pink song sheet. The incredibly well hyped concert has produced some extraordinarily sycophantic media coverage, in which Pink gets to explain that M!ssundaztood contains her deepest, most heartfelt lyric, because it’s effectively therapy. This is really sad because there is very little on Family Portrait, say, that wouldn’t be at home on the Plain English Campaign’s list (It ain’t easy, growin’ up in world war three, etc). So if you’re thinking of writing some lyrics for Pink, simply jumble up the clichés on the campaign’s list and insert some typical teenage outbursts (e.g. Daddy I hate you) and away you go.

Avril Lavigne songwriters paid by the word?

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Why is it that Beenie Man’s Dude (featuring Ms Thing) gets so much airplay? Perhaps it’s that Ms Thing promises to reveal all her womanly secrets? But she’s no female Roni Size – her diction is appalling – and she sounds like she’s been on the vodka and Red Bull as she slurs her way through; ‘I want a dude with the wickedest slam/I need a one, two, three hour man/I want a dude who will time me to the fan/a thug that can handle his biz like a man’. So when Beenie (who ain’t that much better, yet somehow remains a delight to listen to) comes back triumphant with, ‘You heard… what she preferred’, as if the secret to wonderful sexual relations has been revealed, I feel short changed. I had to look it all up here.

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Within a week of the Vague Film Club’s homage to Brief Encounter at Carnforth, at least twenty Chinese cocklers drowned in Morecambe Bay, with the first body washed up at Silverdale where we had taken our walk. More bodies may yet be found, in what ranks as the UK’s most serious accident at work in many years. All who drowned were illegal immigrants who endured the most horrific working conditions.

One might think that a Labour government would be particularly shamed that such a thing could happen on its watch. Yet it seems that nothing could be further from the truth with ministers unable to agree responsibility for designing measures to prevent a re-occurrence, and one admitting that parliament may not have time to pass a law to control gang masters like those responsible here.

With the British economy at near full employment and no sign of a recession, and the birth rate too low to maintain the population, economics and demographics will continue to ensure we import workers. Yet our immigration policy is based on the hysteria of a right wing media. We should be looking at George Bush’s solution and giving illegal immigrants the right to work as soon as they arrive. Then they wouldn’t need gang masters to protect them from the authorities, would receive the benefits of a minimum wage and reduced working hours. And our economy would legitimately enjoy the benefits of their labour.

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BBC North West Tonight weather presenter Diane Oxberry just put her career in serious jeopardy. She’d just finished telling people what the weather had been like today (in case you’d forgotten already) and was moving on to the weather at that moment, when she made her near fatal error. Her description of the weather, she explained, should match what viewers could see through their windows.

I do hope this looking through the window to see if it’s raining idea catches on, because I’ve long been irritated by over long weather reports. By the time they’ve finished telling you what the weather’s been like or what it’s like if you’re abroad (and unable to tune in), my concentration’s gone. BBC Breakfast is particularly bad, giving its incredibly frumpy presenters far, far, far too long. There’s nothing worse in the morning than Carol Kirkwood, the most irritating person on television cooing, ‘Oooooo! It’s cold on the roof of BBC TV Centre!’ or ‘Oooooo! What a lovely day!’

Let’s hope Diane’s faux pas heralds a revelation among viewers – you don’t need TV to tell you what the weather’s like right now.
Carol Kirkwood naked… or nude perhaps……Diane Oxberry: subversive weather girl

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