Conversion Funnel

When you get out of high school and start experiencing the real world -- jobs, vehicles, girlfriends, responsibilities, ambitions, ideas about who you are and who you want to be -- you start formulating concepts that help you orient to the world as it is. In my second semester as a college freshman back in 1986, I took a Marketing 101 class. Within a week, I had cynically boiled down the principles of marketing to this:  getting people to spend money they don't really have on things they don't really want.

Feel free to take that as the angry pretension of a Holden Caulfield type, decrying the inauthenticity of the corrupt world he has been thrust into, but it's not wrong. As we grow up, we consciously or subconsciously modify these little maxims, adding and refining with the experiential knowledge we pick up along the way. Or we develop corollaries to them.

So another way to look at marketing is this:  convincing people either to try a product they do not use, or to keep using a product they have been using. That takes the sneering moralism out of the original, and enables us to focus on the practical nature of marketing. What are the features and benefits of the product? Why is it better than the product I am currently using, or have always used? I don't use this product at all, why should I start, and why should I use your brand?

Now, let's apply that two-pronged corollary [giggity] to the current political marketing schema of the Republicon party. Name a single thing any of them -- not just Trump himself, but any leading member of the party -- has said or done that would convince someone who voted Democratic in 2016 to jump over. You can't because they haven't. They've doubled -- tripled -- down on the lies and cheap shots and shitty rhetoric. They refuse to stop fucking that chicken.

That is a practical calculation on their part. Even if they were inclined to "reach out," they would lose the cult that keeps them there. And there is literally nothing they could do or say to change my mind at this point, and I suspect that is the median point for most people who did not vote for these scumbags in the first place.

So now the second part of the corollary:  keep using the product they have been using. White suburban women were the hidden demographic that helped Trump draw the proverbial inside straight last go-round. The midterms showed that they hemorrhaged that demographic, and the bleeding hasn't stopped.

What are they doing to win those women back? Not a goddamned thing. In fact, with Biden's selection of Kamala Harris as a running mate, the party's great idea is simply to point out that Mitt Romney's dipshit niece is the party chair. Big fucking deal. The only thing people like Ronna Romney McDaniel and Nikki Haley prove is that women can be just as awful and cynical as men.

And the cult base, not to be outdone in the all-important "humor" and pwning libturds departments, have already responded with "Joe and the Ho" tee-shirts, and a bumper sticker that shows the "A" in Harris" inverted, like a pair of spread legs, with the pulled-off panties as the crossbar in the letter.

Say what you will, they've got the market cornered on klass, y'all.

I can imagine what a woman, especially a professional woman but really any working woman, thinks when she sees that shit. Many of them already have to deal routinely with the snickering assumptions that they traded their way up the food chain with sex, and to have it dumped in their laps in such terms cannot be, let's say, a very convincing pitch to bring them back.

If anything, it's just a reminder to them of what they really did trade back in 2016, when they voted for a pig who literally bragged about his habit of sexual assault. Yeah, they told themselves it was just "locker room talk," but they know better. They know it wasn't bullshit, because they've dealt with assholes like that their entire lives, in school, at work, at home.

It is presumed that women generally vote on "safety and security" issues more than men. Since Trump has always talked a fake-tough-guy lawn-order game, that was part of the trade-off they bought into in 2016. Now all they have to do is look around -- they are neither safe nor secure. They get the kids ready for school, they go out and do all the shopping, they deal with the baroque clusterfuck that passes for a health-care insurance system, they frequently pay the bills. They know exactly what time it is now, and who ran the clock on them last time around.

It's very odd, not just from the usual political standpoint, but from the marketing standpoint, showing pictures from American cities aflame with violence all summer, declaring it to be "Joe Biden's America." Well, no, asshole, it's Trump's America, happening right now, and the women know it as well as anyone else.

For every cult Qaren or whatever female shithead gets dredged up for the latest viral video, you can bet that there are ten or twenty other women who are looking around them, and wondering how the hell they're going to get their families through the end of the year. Some of them fell for Trump's bullshit, and they know they got stung.

Back in 2016, the knock on Hillary getting the votes of men was that she reminded them of their ex-wives, or their divorce lawyers. The converse is true of women and Trump -- he reminds them of their first husbands, the bullshit artist who ended up banging their best friend and cleaning out their joint bank account. People make mistakes; the point is to learn from them. They gave him a shot, and now they know.

The Democrats have made the Terminator pitch:  Come with me if you want to live. The Republicons, because this really is all just a big fucking game to them, are content to stick with their tried-and-true Ike Turner pitch:  Bitch, why you make me do that?

We're about to see what kind of nation we really are, once and for all.

The Handmaid's Trail

You know, maybe if we'd had abortion on demand sixty or seventy years ago or more, we might have avoided having to watch all these ludicrous slapdicks insist on mandating procedures that medically do not exist.

Becker told the newspaper he never researched whether re-implanting an ectopic pregnancy into a woman's uterus was a viable medical procedure before including it in the bill. Sheets declined comment.

"I heard about it over the years," Becker said. “I never questioned it or gave it a lot of thought.”

Well, at least he's honest about his deliberate stupidity. Durrr, I never gave it a lot of thought, I just wrote a fucking law that would force women to have this procedure done, or face a murder charge. Fuckin' jabroni.

Go home and get your fucking shine box, Cooter, manage your burger stand or whatever the fuck you did before leaving the manure pit behind for the bright lights of Columbus, Ohio. Let the adults have a crack at this gubmintin' thing for once. And get your shit together, Ohio. You should be embarrassed.

Market Inequalities

Two lengthy pieces in the NY Times have gotten a great deal of (deserved) scrutiny lately. One is the "Intellectual Dark Web" piece by Bari Weiss, the other is Nellie Bowles' profile of Jordan Peterson (and yes, Peterson is also part of the Weiss article).

I recommend reading these pieces consecutively, one right after the other, as a way of limning the broader cultural landscape before us right now, and how the tectonic plates beneath are shifting, more rapidly than the ability of most to keep balance. This is also true, of course, of the plates supporting the political landscape, and obviously there is a ton of overlap here that all of us are just beginning to get a real sense of.

One weakness of Weiss' piece is that her group is a "group" only as characterized by the squelching of free speech that they all apparently feel. (And yet they are covered extensively by the nation's longstanding newspaper of record, and here we are, out the wilderness of the blogosphere. To be fair, Weiss does acknowledge the ideological disparity among the individuals within the profiled group.)

They may commiserate over the shared terror of being disinvited to a university speaking gig, but other than that, I don't really see much similarity between most of the subjects. They are mostly theorizing on different ideas, and meet primarily at the point where they feel entitled to spread potentially noxious ideas without any sort of challenge.

TMI

Not that it was at all unexpected, but I'm sorry to see that Wendy Davis lost her bid for the seat once occupied by the illustrious Jorge Fredo Arbusto, and then by the even more amazing Governor Good Hair. I think Davis would have been fine in an essentially powerless position, and more importantly, I happen to believe that we need more smart politicians with spectacular cans. Instead, the electorate in its infinite wisdom chose to simply throw in more enormous boobs.

Instant Replay

Now that the elevator video of Ray Rice cold-cocking his now-wife has finally come out, the real question can be asked:  What did Roger Goodell know, and when did he know it?

More likely is that, given how quickly Rice's case was adjudicated back in May, the league really didn't see the video, because its main goal was to see the whole thing get swept under the rug before the start of preseason. It might have actually worked, except that this is America, and cameras are fucking everywhere, especially in the elevator cars of casinos and hotels. So a video was known to exist by definition, it was simply a matter of time before the world saw it.

So the upshot is that the league wasn't interested in seeing it, because that would have tweaked the official narrative of a good kid who had a bad night, and had never done anything like this before, and would never do it again, so let's let him off easy, and pretend this never happened.

If I were a betting man -- and when it comes to football, I am -- I would bet that Goodell is out of a job by the end of the regular season, probably announcing his resignation before Thanksgiving. A more fitting and contrite response might be to simply exchange the increasingly tedious October pinkwashing campaign for a genuine domestic violence awareness campaign. It's probably about as likely as Ray Rice ever playing in the NFL again, but it would be a step in the right direction.