JcDent

Watch as a complete outsider to the capitalistic advertising system states the obvious for several paragraphs about how ads at-large are, of course, just a symptom of a larger problem, and whatever vileness they hold is but a fraction of the stunning, real-world evil of Capitalism. But, hey, the obvious needs to be stated. Over and over and over.

TL;DR - no ethical consumption under capitalism; use an adblocker, tell your friends, educate your family. Hit them where it counts, in the bank accounts.

The classic understanding of ads includes the long con - the idea that it may not sell immediately, but it will plant the seed in your head for when the time comes to buy it somewhere down the line.

But either through greediness or the ability to track data, the long con doesn't seem to be a thing anymore. The results have to visible now, faster and faster. So the ad may be good in general, but if it doesn't start converting immediately, some manager or even a C-level piece-of-shit is going to shid they pants and start crying.

Good.

But since cowardice is the root of capital, they will never try to make a product better if there's the option of selling a shitty product better. That's how you end up with The Flash shipping with PS3 visuals (which the director tried to sell as intentional, lmao) while the movie spent like 250 million on marketing.

It's really hard to measure the connection between increasing the better-ness of the product and increased sales. It's a lot easier to fool yourself that measuring the data tied to advertising spend is easier.

So fuck ads, it's adblock country all the way. You want me to turn it off? Make the ads funny or witty like they used to be on Something Awful or LParchive.

Fuck you.

"they're using civilians as human shields" seems to be a favorite of fascist sympathizers and genocide-enablers. Of course they've been deploying it very often this week. "Hamas uses civilians as human shields". The monsters.

It always rings familiar to me because it's also a favorite of Argentine dictatorship apologists. I grew up hearing this shit. "Well, sure the dictatorship went too far sometimes, but they were fighting monsters! Don't you know the guerilla fighters (every single person targeted by the military was a guerilla fighter btw) would use civilians as a shield? They would hide behind children and babies and pregnant women! Hell, women would get pregnant on purpose to use their bellies as a shield¹"

Of course they never say the next part out loud, but it's always implied: "that's why they had to shoot them. That's why the soldiers and the police had to murder all those civilians and children and babies and pregnant women, to get at the monsters. Otherwise, who knows how many other civilians they would hide behind, how many more innocents the soldiers would be forced to kill." The monsters.

1. Incidentally, one of the dictatorship's many atrocities was stealing babies from the people they arrested, tortured, murdered and made to disappear. They would give the babies away (sometimes sell them) to "proper" and "good" families. No records of anything of course. There's still hundreds of Argentines that don't actually know where they come from. The organization "Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo" is still working to find them. It started as a group of women whose children were kidnapped and made to disappear by the dictatorship, trying to find their children's children. It's been 46 years and they recently found grandchild number 133. And I think back to that "women would get pregnant just to use their bellies as a shield" defense. How convenient for them, to see these women not as mothers, but as monsters. How justified in their actions they must have felt, separating a mother from her newborn child, sometimes letting her live exactly until she gave birth, and then discard her, dispose of her body because she's just that, a body now. She was a monster, became a body and soon, she'll just be a collection of bodyparts, mingling with others, never to be found, never to be identified, never to be given a name again because names are for people. It's lamentable, that work, but hey, they can now give this baby to a family that would "actually" love it. How necessary their work must have felt.

“We can forgive [them] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [them] when they love their children more than they hate us …”

• Israeli PM Golda Meir¹

1. historicity may be disputed, but it was good enough for an ADL ad in 2014!

Any country with more than a single truck factory seems to be developing IFVs and here we have UK which seems to have made prototypes so bad they had to suspend testing due to fearing for crew health.

This isn't even some future-tech design like F-35. The Ajax isn't meant to have hard-light shields and be able to shift dimensions to avoid incoming fire.

They're fucking up in making a tracked box that could move without harming everyone inside.

It's an infantry fighting vehicle that can't fire on the move.

AAAAAAGH