=p
Yea at the moment i'm looking at PR/Marketing, things like brand identity building etc. Be interesting work, might to a double in Psychology/Marketing.

But that's evil.

Don't see why =)
All depends on the context.

"The ends justify the means", right?

what the fuck does that have to do with the price of tea in China. By context i was refering to who you were doing it for and what thier aim of it was.

lol... I think they're serious about believing PR/Marketing folk to be evil.


Whenever I think of PR folk, I think of Jedi Mind Tricks.

"This music is not shit. It is good. You love it."

If corporations and countries were willing to just tell the truth, why would they need entire departments hanging around just for spin control? I suppose it could be used for good, but most of us here are probably too cynical to think of such cases.

Everyhting has a spin on it, every article you read, every brochure, pamphlet, newspaper article, eveyone has their own agenda.

Lieberman's law:
Everybody lies, but it doesn't matter since nobody
listens.

Maggie still doesn't make an sense, whatever framework i put that comment into. Evil? I don't see why - who hasen't used events out of thier control to thier advantage? Its merely an extresion of that - this is business, who's going to leave anything to chance? Brandname dev? Whats wrong with that? Tere is good anbad in everything, all depends whether you're doing it for Phillip Morris or CocaCola.

Don't see that much of a difference. One rots your lungs, one rots your teeth. They are both trying to sell us things that aren't good for us for the sake of the dollar. It doesn't really matter though, whatever job you take by the very definition is exploitive in some sense, thats the nature of captialism. While I'm no big fan it would sure be nice to get a job... Talk about wrong year to graduate. Personally, I have degrees in Chemistry and Cognitive Science (a somewhat rare combo I would think) and I don't see jobs anywhere. Anybody doing computational linguistics out there? Semiotics? Cognitive Social Science? Maybe I'll just skip out on my loans and go join Rainbow tour for a few years...

Combining skills somewhere like WINS Foundation

http://www.winsfoundation.org/

Here is the first lesson they teach you in Marketing:

<b><i>perception = reality</i></b>

They teach this to make marketing people less uncomfortable at what they do, but rarely do you see the face of evil show itself so directly.

And then there's the militant ascetics, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, who are trying to sell you on why everything that tastes good is bad for you. Or do you think those guys don't have marketing departments? Heck, even people who rail against modern marketing have marketing departments.

I drink plenty of Coke. My teeth are fine.

(tobacco, OTOH, really is bad for you :-) )

But what's that Coke doing to your esophagus?

Of course, few things in life are black-and-white. I have Acid Reflux (GERD), and sodas are bad for me if I drink them too often or if I'm not taking my medication. But y'know what's just as hard on my pipes, and probably worse? Good ol' seemingly-healthy organic fresh-squeezed Florida orange juice. I forget which company came out with packaged "low acid" juice, but it's a godsend.

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.

Once again it the perception of the lying that counts... Most people are willing to accept that in certain situations and circumstances lying can in fact be more moral than telling the truth. Its a matter of perspective....

I''d paraphrase that as "Jag doesn't get what Maggie's saying within any framework he can think of".

I said "The ends justifiy the means" as an ironic comment on your "It depends on the context", which I took as assertion that spin-doctoring is noble when done in service of a noble cause. As if it doesn't matter if you promote a false idea if it's done in the interest of a cause you consider good.

The problem with that kind of moral relativism is that it puts your personal judgement as to what is "good" above the value of the truth, which allows people to judge for *themselves* what is good.

There's a large grey area between spin-doctoring and outright lying...and a lot of folks don't know when to stop. 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"


(edited to change "Spin" to "SpinningFetus" at the beginning of the last paragraph, after realizing that in a post about "spindoctoring" it might be unclear that I was actually addressing SpinningFetus)