advertising only necessarily serves to advance sales of products that are competing against other products, for the most part. for instance, there are tons of detergents, so tide spends millions putting it in the minds of people that their products are the ones to be generally used for cleaning clothes. most detergent is basically the same thing. then look at, for instance commercial aircraft. while boeing or mcdonald douglas may have the occasional company spot during the super bowl or whatever (if they still do that) they aren't advertising to sell airplanes (come test drive the all new 777), and most people who get on airplanes at an airport will reliably use an airplane from any manufacturer (though of course there are loyalists). advertising 777's won't suddenly sell more of them, butto the contrary, no amount of advertising could help sell them if they constantly fell from the sky. just as all the great advertising in the world would not serve to help sell...i don't know, poison dum dum suckers. people will stop buying them if it is known commonly that dum dums will kill you, regardless of how much they are advertised. the advertising that our own government has done, of a completely unsubstantiated narrative, does show how well this particular type of advertising (propaganda) works when the underlying knowledge needed to make a reasonable assessment is absent. here, however, we are presented with pretty much every talking head in the nation advertising that russia is out to poison us through an influence campaign. that knowledge alone should have people in a position of being reasonably wary and investigative of either russia, their news sources, or both. it won't, but it should. and in the end, if advertising works, in spades, then the 1.2 billion spent by hrc in the general election, which was some twice what trump spent, should have put her into office. influence, however, is more subtle than just advertising and advertising dollars, and people on both sides of the aisle are far more intelligent than most academics or advertisers give them individual credit for. walk into a church and the group will let you know about the awesomeness of their god. ask them individually if they think snakes can talk, and you are likely to get at least mostly reasonable answers with the occasional, 'of course they can, the bible told me so' types. advertising is powerful enough to remedy the bad image tylenol gained after poison tampering left people dead, but it would not have worked to keep tylenol in business if they chose to keep poisoning people. here it will be simply preemptive pseudo-liberal excuses for why things did not go the right way (all over again), and more democrats acting as if they are somehow mentally superior to republicans because when their candidates kill children in yemen, they are able to do so without denigrating civil rights in our own country. and ultimately the russian influence narrative means, by definition, every person who voted for hrc is to be considered above the influence of russians, while every person who voted for trump, or a third party candidate (like for instance dr. jill stein, who is far and away the most qualified candidate we have had in decades) is thought to have succumbed to russian influence. the hubris for a group of people who can't figure out the difference between a hack a leak and plain theft to be telling others that they succumbed to russian influence is immense, and far beyond deserved by democrats or republicans. anyone who wishes to let me know how stupid i am, and how much i have been influenced by russians in supporting dr. stein, is welcome to attempt their argument with me any time. :)
