http://blog.voyou.org/2009/09/07/there-is-no-big-lie/ Lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:03:51 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 http://blog.voyou.org/2009/09/07/there-is-no-big-lie/comment-page-1/#comment-37543 roger Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:40:37 +0000 http://blog.voyou.org/?p=784#comment-37543 I'm for the hippies on this one. More pertinent than Zizek is Alan Brandt's The Cigarette Century, which shows precisely how the big lie - the combination of lobbying, science as a front, and advertising - could be used to spread big lies. The cigarette industry was an avant garde liar and heavy advertiser, borrowing tactics from the AEC (with their big lie campaign to convince people that testing atomic bombs was harmless) and the Pentagon (whose campaign of lies about Vietnam took exactly the form that the cigarette companies used to increase cigarette smoking by half AFTER it was discovered that smoking led to cancer). Don Draper knows not whereof he speaks. If you intercut his speech against the big lie (such sophistication) against say your standard TV cig commercial, it would be easy to see that the hippies - as well as Galbraith - were right, and Zizek and the neo-classical economists (who also refuse to grant advertising any power whatsoever - after all, everybody has all the information they need in an efficient market) are wrong. I’m for the hippies on this one. More pertinent than Zizek is Alan Brandt’s The Cigarette Century, which shows precisely how the big lie – the combination of lobbying, science as a front, and advertising – could be used to spread big lies. The cigarette industry was an avant garde liar and heavy advertiser, borrowing tactics from the AEC (with their big lie campaign to convince people that testing atomic bombs was harmless) and the Pentagon (whose campaign of lies about Vietnam took exactly the form that the cigarette companies used to increase cigarette smoking by half AFTER it was discovered that smoking led to cancer). Don Draper knows not whereof he speaks. If you intercut his speech against the big lie (such sophistication) against say your standard TV cig commercial, it would be easy to see that the hippies – as well as Galbraith – were right, and Zizek and the neo-classical economists (who also refuse to grant advertising any power whatsoever – after all, everybody has all the information they need in an efficient market) are wrong.

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