I was thinking today about the old practical joke involving dog poo wrapped in toilet paper, dumped on your doorstep, and set alight. The intuitive response to seeing something burning on your doorstep is to stamp it out. In this case, leaving you with warmish dog poo all over your footwear.
A shitty joke - literally - but what it demonstrates is that if you can hijack people's intuitive responses, you can induce us to act against our own best interests.
(1/?)
What got me thinking about this is the rhetorical equivalent, used by corporations and politicians. Sneaking assumptions (the poo) into public debate, by wrapping them in inflammatory rhetoric (the flaming paper), that we feel duty bound to stamp out. But by doing so, we fail to challenge the sneaky assumptions, and we end up with them smeared all over our public discourse.
(2/?)
https://natlib.govt.nz/records/33844176
That it was so tricky to find out who's behind this paper - even for a long-in-the-tooth media critic - is a problem in itself. I'll circle back to that.
(3/?)
The page in Canterbury News that caught my eye was headlined "Water Matters". It appears to be a regular column by a Dr John Bright, the R&D director of an irrigation consultancy called Aqualinc;
https://www.aqualinc.co.nz/our-people
(4/?)
In the olden daze, it would be a paper bag.
It was important to knock loudly or ring the doorbell.
It was a better trap.
Ah yes, I forgot to mention that crucial step.
> it would be a paper bag
Anything flammable that can conceal poo will do : P
This is a bonfire demo instance for testing purposes
