Jobs

[elSicomoro]

"I won't fail if my intentions are good."--Perry Farrell

[juju]

The road to hell is paved with good intentions -- Samuel Johnson

[jaguar]

Man i'm up against the wall now aren't I.
OK lets see how i can play this one out.

If everythign has a spin on it, which noone has denied, wouldn't the spin wnet your way? The truth is purported to be told by so many, yet so many of them contradict each other. Odd about that. 'Truth', for such a simple concept is stunningly difficult to track down, two people might have and beleive entirely different 'turths' , even when you do find the 'truth' its often not the whole truth, which is reality means its not the truth. When you're responsible for a multibillion dollar organisation wouldn't you want the 'truth' to be yours - not the guy that wants to bring you down becase of his agenda? Whether either be 'right' or 'wrong' ?

The bottom line is, if you're in PR, you are a liar. It is your business to lie. Whether or not this is acceptable depends on your morals.

Or to tell the truth? WHo does tell the truth? The media? Fat fucking chance? Your local political activists incorperated? Don't think so.

As for UTs - all business is exploitative, do you remember the long, long thread months ago i did with dham and a few others about exactly that? That one was fun.

which I took as assertion that spin-doctoring is noble when done in service of a noble cause.

Well it wasen't

perception = reality

Personally i'd word it Your perception is your reality. Reality is subjective afterall. I honestly don't see the evil in that statement.

At the end of the day the case is i can write that kidna stuff well (straight A+s for years) and can bullshit well, waht ebtter palce is there to work? At the moment i might do advertising (graphics based) @ uni, or i might do Media & Communications or International studies, we'll see i guess. Depends how ahrd the moral weight of cellar starts crashing down on me

[spinningfetus]

Originally posted by MaggieL

When you study argumentation (if your major will be foreign affairs I do hope you get to take a forensics class) you'll hear about "slippery slopes".

That's how we get to flacks and pols making statements like "That statement is now inoperative." (which was how a Nixonian flack chose to say "We got caught lying about that so we don't stand behind what we said anymore") and other gems like Clinton's "It depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is. If the -- if he -- if "is" means "is and never has been," that is not -- that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement.", apparently intending to convey that he meant to say that he wasn't actually screwing Monica *while* testifying. The "is" in question was in fact the one in the question "Is the statement you made in the past actually true?"

SpinnigFetus, even though one can pose hypotheticals in which telling a lie is preferable to telling the truth, that doesn't say anything about the ethics of lying in general, much less the practicality of it. "Lying to other people is your business, but I'll tell you this: once a man gets a reputation as a liar, he might as well be struck dumb, for people do not listen to the wind." -- Col. Baslim to his adopted son in Heinlien's "Citizen of the Galaxy"

Ok, to start with: Spin is a product of language; there is ambiguity built into the structure of it at several different levels. (This is the reason that building a NLP is so difficult) This abiguity can be manipulated so that a phrase may mean denotatively something that is completely true, while its connotative meaning may give the public a different meaning all together that would in fact be contrary to the facts. Is that lying? In spirit I would say yes, but in the strictest sense it isn't, meaning isn't static so there can never be absolute truth conveyed through linguistic means. It isn't possible. It is this design feature of language that gives the hacks thier ammo. Polotitions are dishonest by nature, spin is just a loophole that they exploit like any loophole in a legislative sense.

Ethics are an interesting can o' worms. Personally, I feel that everybody lives by some standards. These are something that each person must arrive at by themselves and aren't something that I feel that I can cast judgement on. The other side to this the ethics of our society which basically boil down to do whatever you can get away with. It is kind of sad, but again at the same time this is what western thought has been moving towards for centuries so maybe that is just the way things are supposed to be; from a social Darwinistic view if the thought process were unsustainable sooner or later it would cease to be. This is also true from the practicality stand point. We have a president who lied repeatedly about drunk driving charges before the election, got called out on it before the election, and still is our honored commander in chief today. I think television and especially digital special effects have altered our peception of things like reality and truth to such a degree that the defintions that were in place fifteen or twenty years ago are no longer applicable. Again that isn't to say that there aren't any defintions they are just different.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by spinningfetus
The other side to this the ethics of our society which basically boil down to do whatever you can get away with. It is kind of sad, but again at the same time this is what western thought has been moving towards for centuries so maybe that is just the way things are supposed to be; from a social Darwinistic view...

I wouldn't form an opinion of the ethical norms of "western thought" based on what the "polotitions" do. (No matter how much air time they get.) Corporate managements right now are watching their stock prices go flat as the market realizes that a lot of accounting practices over the last ten years have been that "listening to the wind" that Colonel Baslim was tralking about.

Ethical norms are quite a bit above "what you can get away with", although, that said, it must still be recognized that you *can* get away with what you can get away with, by definition.

[jaguar]

Thankyou spinningfetus for thoughly mudding the waters after me so that the calls of 'morality!, truth!, ethics!' are so thoughly lost in the turbulance they are unlocatable
You're also entirely correct.

Ethical norms are quite a bit above "what you can get away with", although, that said, it must still be recognized that you *can* get away with what you can get away with, by definition.

You honestly beleive that? In business? Ethical norms are *above* what is required? In a public owned business driven by stock price?

[spinningfetus]

Originally posted by jaguar
In a public owned business driven by stock price?

What else could it be driven by? public service? If you think that I've got some great real estate deals for you...

[spinningfetus]

Originally posted by MaggieL


I wouldn't form an opinion of the ethical norms of "western thought" based on what the "polotitions" do. (No matter how much air time they get.)

Neither would I... I would however use them to illustrate a point...

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by spinningfetus

I think television and especially digital special effects have altered our peception of things like reality and truth to such a degree that the defintions that were in place fifteen or twenty years ago are no longer applicable.

Having actually been around twenty years ago, I gotta say I don't think the general perceptions of reality and truth changed as much over that timespan as you seem to think they did.

In fact, my own view is that these technical advances serve to *illustrate* the importance of bearing honest witness rather than making that notion obsolete or even significantly different from what it was. After all, twenty years ago was only 1982....when you were five years old. Isn't it more likely that what's changed over that timespan was more your *own* perception of things like "reality" and "truth"? C'mon, it's not like everybody's gone "oooh, we have CGI movies and VR and Photoshop now, so the underpinings of world are totally different, there is no truth and reality is completely relative."

BS is still BS, and it still smells.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by spinningfetus


Neither would I... I would however use them to illustrate a point...

The point being that pols lie? That's not exactly a new emerging trend.

Pols (and US Presidents in particular) have been getting caught peddling hooey for centuries...it's just that you have to get out of school and into the real world before you realize that; it's not featured in the history texts.

[spinningfetus]

Originally posted by MaggieL

The point being that pols lie? That's not exactly a new emerging trend.

Pols (and US Presidents in particular) have been getting caught peddling hooey for centuries...it's just that you have to get out of school and into the real world before you realize that; it's not featured in the history texts.

Thanks, I had no idea... The point that I was trying to make is in the culture of mass media one now has the tools to lie to millions of people at a time. Back in the day lying had to take place on a more or less face to face basis (yes I'm aware of the existance of newspapers prior to my birth) whereas now the tools for disseminating media have destroyed the adage seeing is believing. I'm not so naive as to think this is something that has happened overnight nor so naive to think that I am always being told the truth. I think you think I'm arguing for something I'm not; I believe in personal responsibility but that is it. I refuse to hold someone else up to my scale of values in the same manner that I won't acknowledge being held up to someone elses. In otherwords, to protect myself I won't trust everyone else to tell the truth but at the same time I am going to be as honest as is possible in dealing with the outside world as well as with myself. I also think that many people confuse truth with accuracy; two people could give differect answers about a shared event and still both be answering truthfully, that is where perspective comes into play. There is a myth out there that goes by the name of objectivity. It is a fairy tale to young science students by thier professors. Everything we percieve is mediated by our minds and therefore no account of reality can be truely accurate, and it can only be truthful in the sense of a single person relaying their perceptions without consciously altering the account.

[LordSludge]

I ran across this comic and found it somehow appropriate to the thread:

<img src="http://est.rbma.com/content/Rhymes_with_Orange">

Originally posted by LordSludge
I ran across this comic and found it somehow appropriate to the thread:

<img src="http://est.rbma.com/content/Rhymes_with_Orange">

Maybe you wanna try that again.

[warch]

Jag,
Use your powers for good. You're too creative and alive to be gobbled up by corporate marketing. Or maybe you could be a double agent. Join the creative resistance! Adbusters

[LordSludge]

Strange... I see the comic in both my posting and my quoted posting. Is anybody else having problems seeing this?

It does have a weird reference: there's no file extension, although IE6 says it's a .GIF