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You Can Tell Which Way The Wind Blows…

When big cosmetic companies like Lauder subsidiary MAC start running ads like this, in which comedian Sandra Bernhardt refers to “thin-lipped Republican bitches”:

On the whole it’s a crap ad apart from that one outburst, but it was withdrawn immediately once the predictable howls came from those who immediately recognised themselves in Bernhardt’s description.

But I don’t think the withdrawal was due only to the right-wing bleating. Any canny advertising bod would know that an inflammatory internet ad would be immediately YouTubed, so any later withdrawal would be an empty gesture and I’m sure MAC’s advertising agency knew exactly what they were doing in making this ad and that they took that into account.

What’s odd is that MAC owners The Lauder family have long been out & proud Republicans. Take Ronald, for instance:

Lauder is the son of Est?e Lauder and Joseph Lauder, founders of Est?e Lauder Companies, and the younger brother of Leonard Lauder, chairman of the board of the Estee Lauder company. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and holds a Bachelors degree in International Business from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He studied at the University of Paris, and received a Certificate in International Business from the University of Brussels. He is married and has two children. Lauder started to work for the Estee Lauder Company in 1964. In 1984 he became a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for European and NATO policy at the Pentagon. In 1986 Ronald Reagan named him as the US ambassador to Austria, a position he held until 1987. As a Republican, he made a bid to become the mayor of New York City in 1989. Lauder manages investments in real estate and media, such as Central European Media Enterprise and Israeli TV.

It’s interesting tp speculate whether this might be a testing of the zeitgeist for the massive, Republican-inclined Lauder cosmetics empire, and if so, whether it presages a general shift towards liberalism in the boardrooms of the US. Are we finally seeing a commercial backlash of sorts against the prevailing values of the administration ?

It maybe so, but at bottom it’s just another way of making a profit from womens’ insecurities, this time by dressing them up in politics .

[Thanks to Pandagon for the tip.]

Read more: Advertising, Marketing, MAC, Cosmetics, Make-up,Fashion, Beauty products, Sandra Bernhardt, Republicans

Irony Is Dead

Or at the very least it’s gasping like a landed fish. Consider this morning’s headline:

Washington to investigate Israel’s use of cluster bombs in conflict

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

Published: 26 August 2006

The US government is investigating whether Israel has broken secret agreements with Washington with its use of cluster bombs in the Lebanon conflict.

Officials confirmed yesterday that the State Department had launched the inquiry into a possible violation by Israel of an undertaking to use the munitions against only organised armies and defined military targets. The Pentagon has also postponed a shipment of M-26 artillery shells, according to The New York Times.

[…]

And this from just 3 years ago:

Cluster bombs kill in Iraq, even after shooting ends

By Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY

When Jassim al-Qaisi saw the canisters the size of D batteries falling on his neighborhood just before 7 a.m. April 7, he laughed and asked himself: “Now what are the Americans throwing on our heads?” (

The strange objects were fired by U.S. artillery outside Baghdad as U.S. forces approached the Iraqi capital. In the span of a few minutes, they would kill four civilians in the al-Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad and send al-Qaisi’s teenage son to the hospital with metal fragments in his foot. The deadly objects were cluster bomblets, small explosives packed by the dozens or hundreds into bombs, rockets or artillery shells known as cluster weapons. When these weapons were fired on Baghdad on April 7, many of the bomblets failed to explode on impact. They were picked up or stumbled on by their victims.

The four who died in the al-Dora neighborhood that day lived a few blocks from al-Qaisi’s house. Rashid Majid, 58, who was nearsighted, stepped on an unexploded bomblet around the corner from his home. The explosion ripped his legs off. As he lay bleeding in the street, another bomblet exploded a few yards away, instantly killing three young men, including two of Majid’s sons ? Arkan, 33, and Ghasan, 28. “My sons! My sons!” Majid called out. He died a few hours later.

The deaths occurred because the world’s most modern military, one determined to minimize civilian casualties, went to war with stockpiles of weapons known to endanger civilians and its own soldiers. The weapons claimed victims in the initial explosions and continued to kill afterward, as Iraqis and U.S. forces accidentally detonated bomblets lying around like small land mines.

[…]

Silly Israel. The US has no ethical problems with cluster bombs per se. The IDF just didn’t drop them when and where they were told to. Now the WH thinks the announcement of an ‘investigation’ will soothe the outrage and shut the public up. But it won’t shut up, not when we see that the investigator is investigating a crime it regularly commits itself. You might as well as Tom DeLay to investigate Jack Abramoff.

Read More… USA, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, War, Bombing, Cluster bombs, Munitions, Human rights, Arms trade

Help!

The Power Of The Internet: Texas Beatles fan foils burglary on the other side of Atlantic by webcam

A Texas man was browsing Liverpool webcam sites, looking at locations associated with the Beatles, when he noticed 3 men scaling a ladder. He called the Liverpol police, who swooped and arrsted the burglars on the spot.

The man from Dallas, Texas was using a live camera link to look at Mathew Street, an area of Liverpool synonymous with the Beatles as it is home to the famous Cavern Club where the band regularly played.

He saw intruders apparently breaking into a sports store and alerted local police.

We did get a call from someone in Dallas who was watching on a webcam that looks into the tourist areas, of which Mathew Street is one because of all the Beatles stuff,” a Merseyside Police spokeswoman told Reuters.

“He called directly through to police here.”

Officers were sent to the scene and three suspects were arrested.

Read whole story…

More… Internet, Webcams, Crime, Liverpool, Dallas, Merseyside police, Burglary,Beatles

Feh, Enough Seriousness. It’s Friday, Bring On The Pole-Dancing Kitten!

Read more… YouTube, Friday cat-blogging, Kittens pole-dancing, Cuteness

A Load of Bull? LRB On Hardt, Negri, Sovereignty and Totalitarianism

The London Review of Books has this thought-provoking review, by Malcolm Bull, of Hardt & Negri’s influential Empire.

Bull posits that Negri has substituted Spinoza for Marx in his political reasoning on sovereignty (which is based in the autonomist movement) and that this distorts their whole thesis:

[…]

It’s easy to see why Empire has proved the most successful work of political theory to come from the Left for a generation. Not only is it written with unusual energy, clarity and wit, but it addresses directly the central political issue of the moment: the perceived distance between ordinary people trying to live in the way they want and the systems of power that defeat them. By simultaneously redefining globalisation as a form of sovereignty and recasting the autonomist project in the republican tradition, Hardt and Negri offer an exceptionally optimistic analysis of the problem: remote as it may seem, sovereignty is nothing that a few like-minded people cannot create for themselves [My emphasis]. Today’s anti-capitalist protests may look like mob violence, but that is half the point: the street mobs made America, too; this is counter-Empire in the making.

[…]

But Bull also says that replacing Marx with Spinoza results in a kind of shadow neoliberalism and says that Negri has misunderstood Spinoza entirely in espousing the view that power is only power if you take it. Negri has aligned himself with those who say there is no such thing as civil society, which Bull says was not Spinoza’s point at all.

It is not at all obvious that Negri’s interpretation of Spinoza is correct. In the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza had maintained that some sort of social contract was necessary and that natural right was transferred. In the Political Treatise, the contract disappears, but whether its elimination means the continuation of natural right in the civil state or the elision of the difference between the civil and the natural is less certain. Spinoza sometimes says the former, but he also emphasises that in the state of nature where ‘the natural right of man is determined by the power of every individual, and belongs to everyone . . . it is a nonentity, existing in opinion rather than fact.’ Only on entering the commonwealth does natural right become more than a fiction: ‘men in the state of nature can hardly be possessed of their own right.’ On this interpretation, civil right is the only form of right there is; in the state of nature there is so much risk that men are virtually powerless against each other; far from taking their unalienated power into the commonwealth, they experience it there for the first time. For man, the social animal, if not for God or nature, potestas creates potentia.

I have to admit that I gave Empire only the most cursory read, as I do so many things these days due my declining eyesight. (It’s much easier to read online and until they put brightness and contrast controls on books it’ll stay that way.) But I will make the effort to go back and read it in the light of Bull’s review.

I’m firmly of the view that sovereignty resides in the people, but why does it? Is it because of their innate potential for force or because we agree that it does? It’s arguable, which I suppose is Bull’s point.

Whether you agree with him or not Bull does flag up interesting issues about globalised social control and totalitarianism in this article. Well worth reading.

Read more: London Review of Books, Globalisation, Hart& Negri Italian Autonomism,Socialism, Marx, Spinoza