Dragonfly: Are we talking about a portrait of Siegmund Freud woven out of straw, with the word SEX hidden in the background?
I saw one at a yard sale years ago and said
“I want that two dimensional Psycho strawman with subliminal adversising” but I didn’t have the Fifty cents
A straw man is a false argument. Basically what it means is that one debater sets up a weak argument with the supposition that his/her opponent will use it. The debater then easily defeats the argument (just like you’d easily defeat a man made of straw in a fight), and puts forward the assumption that “hey, I just destroyed the argument they would have used, so I must be the correct one”.
However, I’d venture to say that the only one using a straw man argument here is Dragonfly99.
Kudos, Ambushed on your treatment of this subject. Many years ago, I wrote a college research paper on this very subject and used some of these same sources.
My only objection is to your inclusion of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders in Wilson Keys’ class. It’s been a while since I read Packard, but as I recall, he argued that advertisers used psychology to influence buyers. Surely this is manifest to anyone who has watched a few TV commercials. Packard may have overestimated the sophistication of advertisers in the 50’s, but I don’t think he said there were imbedded pictures in magazine ads which drove us to purchase rum. The Hidden Persuaders was more an examination of how advertisers used psychology and sociology to present their products to the masses.
President of the Vernon Dent fan club.
AuraSeer wrote:
Dr. Key says it best:
Marshall McLuhan once commented:
Dr. Key points out that:
“Right is only half of what’s wrong” - George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe -
Ambushed I will return to your far-fetched reactionary claims later. On the surface they appear to be only nothing more than thinly disguised personal attacks on Dr. Key.
Once again you rely on frivilous lawsuit type logic and laughable personal attacks (with references no less) than with any hard proof or valid science.Sans cajones
“Right is only half of what’s wrong” - George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe -
Silly, silly ambushed. You responded to a incredible claim with logic and facts.
Bad ambushed, bad.
Excerpted from the FCC’s 1984 Statement on Subliminals
“Right is only half of what’s wrong” - George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe -
I wish I wasn’t such a strong partisan in this debate so that my words would carry greater weight, but I just have to humbly and sincerely congratulate bill422 on his intellectual integrity. It’s very reassuring that reason, logic, and evidence can still lead people to change their views. I guess The Straight Dope just seems to (usually, anyway) attract people with a higher degree of self-knowledge and honesty!
CKDextHavn and Frankd6, I thank you for your very kind words. It’s nice to know my efforts were appreciated! Thanks!
smegmum V, I want you to know that you’re responsible for all the little beads of mucousy milk all over my monitor. What a mess!
And regards slythe “scolding” me for my foolish arguments: I’m so embarrassed, slythe… 
If only I had the powerful and lucid intellect of a flying insect! Alas, I’m forced to settle for reason, logic, science, evidence, and reality.
Perhaps I should try to get my hands on one of smegmum’s artistic door mats!
somebody wrote:
Oh. Is that right?
I’m still waiting, and not too surprisingly I maight add, for any semblence or logic, reasoning and evidence in any of your posts. Personal attacks seem to be the order of the day.
But what can you expect from someone who bases several redundant and highly superficial posts on a frivilous lawsuit? Who continuously blurs lines of logic? Who can only resort to euphemisms and factual distortions and wholesale misrepresentations?
You keep dodging the issues at hand here ambushed. And for good reason. You don’t know what you are talking about.
Your “dumbing down” of this thread is simply ineffective but amazing. 
“Right is only half of what’s wrong” - George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe -
Hey, folks, I was just passing by and I thought you might be interested in some of the sad-yet-silly history of the FCC’s formal position on so-called “subliminal” messages and images in broadcasting.
I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it all stems from the lies James Vicary told in 1957 about his fabricated “experiment” of “Eat Popcorn / Drink Coke” infamy. Nobody knew for certain that he was lying until he admitted it five years later (and very few people ever heard about his retraction anyway). In the meantime, Vicary was hyping his bogus “subliminal advertising” baloney for all it was worth.
When people started hearing of what was erroneously referred to as the subliminal Popcorn/Coke “study”, the American public did what it always does with unsubstantiated but “catchy” allegations: it accepted the stories as scientific “gospel” truth! From that point on, any hope of enlightening the public at large about the non-existence of “subliminal advertising” was doomed. Doomed, I tell you!
Naturally, the public was anxious and frightened by the idea that they might be manipulated subliminally (nobody seems to mind very much about overt manipulation). Though in reality there was nothing to be frightened about, people understandably demanded protection from what appeared to be an insidious plot to “brainwash” them. Thus, they turned to the Government to save them from this apparent technological and psychological peril.
Representative William Dawson, a Republican from Utah, jumped eagerly to the rescue! Falling for Vicary’s silly “subliminal” BS as thoroughly as did just about every other layman, Dawson wrote a series of letters to the FCC demanding that they outlaw “subliminal” messages in broadcasting.
After each letter, the FCC would reply with more and more conciliatory language and modify their formal position a bit in order to placate Dawson. Then the cycle would repeat. And repeat.
The eventual result is that we now have an FCC regulation that prohibits something that doesn’t even exist! Ain’t politics grand?
Next we’re gonna have a law that prohibits us from mistreating elves, or maybe ghosts!
(Interestingly, a lot of this information can be found in a series of articles at a URL recently given in another post!)
For the record, I’ve decided to start drinking a shot everytime I read the phrase “one dimensional psycho-strawman” or whatever. As of this posting, D99 owes me a new bottle of vodka.
“I guess it is possible for one person to make a difference, although most of the time they probably shouldn’t.”
(I just thought Jophiel could possibly use another drink. Maybe that’s the only way it makes sense!)
D99:
Of course, the “frivilous lawsuit” was the silly waste of court time brought by your boy, Keys. You are the one who has refused to provide a single shred of evidence for your demented ideas beyond your own obvious dementia. To date, the closest thing you have provided as evidence has been a handful of links to quotations from (the confessed liar) Vicary, the deluded Keys (in which he makes assertions without providing evidence) and a college kid who simply accepts the statements of Keys at face value.
I know, you scoff at psychology and the behavioral sciences. Fine. I also read Keys when he first published. Reviewing his original book I discovered a phenomenon that has often been repeated with “backward masked” records: people can only see his images after he tells them to see them and where to find them. On most of the photographic enlargements in the book, it is impossible for a person to see the same thing that Keys claims without having Keys explain where to look. This is on the enlargements where the alleged pictures have supposedly been made large enough to see plainly. We tried it in college. We would show the enlargement to several people. Among the people who were told what to look for and where, maybe half the people could make out some image that bore a resemblance to Key’s claims–the other half could not. Among the people who were told that there was a suggestive image in the picture, but who were not told where it was, only a quarter of the people could find a suestive image and they only rarely saw an image where Keys claimed it would be and they never saw the image Keys claimed was there. Among the group that was asked “Do you see any images in this picture?” with no preparation of what to see, no one found any images. The only subliminal messages in Keys books are the ones that Keys creates by claiming to have found images and then stating where he found them.
Utter poppycock.
Tom~
Another quotation from the FCC statement DF posted (directly following the part he quoted):
That said, two things are important to state at this juncture. First, as a social scientist I must note that there is considerable doubt in the scientific community that these techniques are very effective.
There is a whole host of problems, stemming from such things as the fact that individuals have highly varying levels of perception, making generalized threshold levels of subliminal perception very complicated. Another such problem is that to the extent that these messages are designed to change people’s behavior, scientists as well as advertisers know that subtle appeals are often more interesting than they are effective.
But my second point is of more direct relevance – that the Commission’s prohibition against use of this technique by broadcasters is clear regardless of whether the technique is effective or not.
In other words, the efficacy of this technique is irrelevant to the FCC.
Ambushed, your statement that the FCC “prohibits something that doesn’t even exist” seems overly strong, but I could stand behind “doesn’t even work”.
As long as enough people believe <sex> that subliminal advertising works, I am sure that <send me your money> somebody has tried it. I don’t think it is common.
Perhaps you could clarify a point for me, Dragonfly. Lets assume that images are being embedded “subliminally” into photos in advertisements. What effect will a skull in an ice cube or a skeletal Uncle Sam have on me as a consumer? What effect should they have? Why would a subliminal image in an ad be more effective than an overt one?
I know nothing of Dr. Keys as a person, only what I’ve read through your links. His assertions show no links between subliminal messages and buyer preference. Which (I assume) is the point that both he and you are trying to make.
Sh*t It’s a “ONE dimensional psycho-strawman”
According to Euclid the only one dimensional figure is a LINE.
substitue the word “line” for “one dimensional psycho-strawman” and D99 almost sounds like a rational person, rather than some ranting Art Bell caller
<insert witty sig here>
tomndebb wrote:
Then why are you here? Either you are a junk scientist in training or just sadly misinformed on the subject matter at hand.
Remember that at one time **state of the art ** science believed the earth to be at the center of the universe and that the earth was shaped like a disc and if you sailed off far enough into the horizon you would fall into the Abyss.
Kinda like what’s happened here.
“Right is only half of what’s wrong” - George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe -
Does anyone here support Dragonfly’s position? If so could you please step in and provide a better explanation.
Incidently, your last link labeled “Here” to the wall of graffiti made about as much sense as the rest of your arguments…but I do have an urge to drink a Coke.
Mojo wrote:
Exactly the kind of question[s] I innocently wanted to ask at the start of the original thread (now closed). Instead I ran into a firestorm of psuedo-logic, pseudo-science, misrepresentations, personal attacks ( directed towards I and Dr. Key!)and scientific-flavored propaganda (read: mainstream denials).
I couldn’t help but notice the San Cajones quality of most of their remarks and “statements of facts”. In fact they were engaging me in obvious obfuscation tactics either to misrepresent my innocent inquiries or distort the truth. I soon found out that it was both!
As I have mentioned earlier I have read Subliminal Seduction in the early 1980’s but in reality I had forgotten how provocative and ground-shattering his ideas and hypotheses were. Hence my innocent entrance into this thread. I really was expecting a debunking along the lines of “Yeah, it’s there, but it can’t be tested in a clinical situation”, “it’s a shot in the dark”, “absolutely no noticable effect”, etc. I have yet to see it.
If these others who publicly state that they doubt the validity of Dr. Key’s work really believe what they publicly pronounce, I sincerely doubt that they would invest as much time and energy as they have here in an attempt to discredit him and on top of that, placate me with shallow propaganda, junk science and threats of censorship. Their motivations to me are cystal clear.
You have to look no further than the reincarnation of my one-dimensional psycho strawman.
“Right is only half of what’s wrong” - George Harrison - Old Brown Shoe -
Okay, I’ve read this thread, I read the previous thread. I’ve also spent 25 years in advertising, marketing communications, and related fields. I’ve written literally thousands of ads, I’ve gone on press checks, I’ve seen television production.
Forget the mumbo jumbo.
In 25 years, I have never seen an instance of subliminal advertising. (I’m not talking about the catalog incident that Cecil spoke of, which was traced back to an angry employee, I’m talking about the real deal.)
In an industry where we are quick to accuse our competition of everything from shady business practicies to outright crimes, I have never heard of anyone accused of trying subliminal advertising.
I have never even had a client ask if we could slip some subliminal stuff into an ad.
Furthermore, I’ve talked to advertising people who have been in the business longer than I have, and they agree – it’s a great urban legend, and nothing else.
If you want to believe in subliminal messages, it’s okay with me. It just means you’ll be looking at the ad more and more closely, inspecting every word, every photographic dot on the page, every curl of the typeface, every fluctuation in the density of the ink. You might even remember the ad the next time you go to the store. You might even be so influenced by what you’ve spent hours scrutinizing that you pick up a product without even considering its competitors.
And in the unforgettable words of Bartles and Jaymes, “thank you for your support.”