The freak out of some Democrats over

[foo_bar]

49. c'mon, the whole thing is a rebranding exercise

Yesterday was the soft launch of Hillary 2.0 (or whatever point oh), but these things aren't set in stone, she could change logos twelve times before the convention if the invisible hand wills it. I'm almost ready to give in and embrace this democracy-by-marketing concept, I bet some genius came up with this logo just to piss off the sorts of people who worry about these sorts of things. Aldous Huxley penned some prescient thoughts on these matters:

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of uni­versal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democra­cies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions. <...>

The task of the commercial propagandist in a democ­racy is in some ways easier and in some ways more difficult than that of a political propagandist employed by an established dictator or a dictator in the making. It is easier inasmuch as almost everyone starts out with a prejudice in favor of beer, cigarettes and ice­boxes, whereas almost nobody starts out with a prej­udice in favor of tyrants. It is more difficult inasmuch as the commercial propagandist is not permitted, by the rules of his particular game, to appeal to the more savage instincts of his public. The advertiser of dairy products would dearly love to tell his readers and lis­teners that all their troubles are caused by the mach­inations of a gang of godless international marga­rine manufacturers, and that it is their patriotic duty to march out and burn the oppressors' factories. This sort of thing, however, is ruled out, and he must be content with a milder approach. But the mild approach is less exciting than the approach through verbal or physical violence. In the long run, anger and hatred are self-defeating emotions. But in the short run they pay high dividends in the form of psychological and even (since they release large quantities of adrenalin and noradrenalin) physiological satisfaction. People may start out with an initial prejudice against tyrants; but when tyrants or would-be tyrants treat them to adrenalin-releasing propaganda about the wickedness of their enemies -- particularly of enemies weak enough to be persecuted -- they are ready to fol­low him with enthusiasm. <...>

Effective rational propaganda becomes possible only when there is a clear understanding, on the part of all concerned, of the nature of symbols and of their rela­tions to the things and events symbolized. Irrational propaganda depends for its effectiveness on a general failure to understand the nature of symbols. Simple-minded people tend to equate the symbol with what it stands for, to attribute to things and events some of the qualities expressed by the words in terms of which the propagandist has chosen, for his own purposes, to talk about them. Consider a simple example. Most cos­metics are made of lanolin, which is a mixture of purified wool fat and water beaten up into an emulsion. This emulsion has many valuable properties: it penetrates the skin, it does not become rancid, it is mildly antiseptic and so forth. But the commercial prop­agandists do not speak about the genuine virtues of the emulsion. They give it some picturesquely volup­tuous name, talk ecstatically and misleadingly about feminine beauty and show pictures of gorgeous blondes nourishing their tissues with skin food.

http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/#propdem