#appeal

The appeal to the white man's pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience. ↗

— Ida B. Wells

#appeals #been #conscience #effectual #ever

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it. ↗

— Neil Postman

#commercials #drama #emotional-appeal #falsities #idiocy

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition. ↗

— Israel Zangwill

#continuation #cradle #danger #glamour #imitation

A career in journalism suddenly lost its appeal. ↗

— Andy Grove

#career #journalism #lost #suddenly

The private citizen, beset by partisan appeals for the loan of his Public Opinion, will soon see, perhaps, that these appeals are not a compliment to his intelligence, but an imposition on his good nature and an insult to his sense of evidence. ↗

— Walter Lippmann

#beset #citizen #compliment #evidence #good

Bill Clinton was a liberal who could appeal to conservative-leaning Bubba voters. ↗

— Rich Lowry

#bill #bill clinton #clinton #could #liberal

The reason they look the way they do is that the first drawing I did of them was really small so I didn't draw fingers, nose, ears, etc and this drawing had a certain appeal that I really liked. ↗

— Craig McCracken

#certain #did #draw #drawing #ears

The implication that everyone would have to accept its judgments uncritically, that it was a decision from which there could be no appeal, was astonishing. ↗

— Edwin Meese

#appeal #astonishing #could #decision #everyone

I think guys who are rebels and make their own rules are appealing. ↗

— Leighton Meester

#guys #i #i think #make #own

Of course, the young male demographic has always been the target demographic for 'Star Trek,' the men ageing fifteen to about twenty-five or thirty, a very tough market to appeal to. ↗

— Kate Mulgrew

#ageing #always #appeal #been #course