Scams

06 July 2016

Formulating government policy or a political manifesto is very much like making up a typical Facebook scam. Create a convincing document, pass it about a bit, and word-of-mouth accelerates its uptake.

The problem is simple: there’s nothing substantial about the thing. Attractive photos? Check! Lots of testimony from interested parties? Check! But try to get in touch with anyone concerned - to attempt to delve deeper, and there’s nothing there.

The political stuff has at least the illusion one can contact someone, whereas the Facebook stuff has zero contact details, at most 3 posts to establish provenance.

Where policy and FB scams differ: any company giving stuff away has the competition as a loss-leader. They have adverts for their products liberally interspersed with the competition details. They take a conservative approach to the giveaways; independently add their physical address, telephone number, email address, Facebook and Twitter usernames, and web site details. They’d have to be absolute loonies to miss out on the chance of a sale.

National and international advertising campaigns reliant on word-of-mouth do well, with minimal outlay.

A question: which has the biggest impact on identity?

Is it giving away one’s Facebook details to a faceless entity which won’t be around for longer has it takes the site administrators to catch on?

Or is it the voluntary subscription to an ideology which one has and almost-zero hope of influencing, and which alters dependent on the whim of that most capricious breed, the politician?

Which of them brings the most real disappointment?

It’s obvious.

Yet how can people’s hopes and dreams, and the constant let-downs be stopped? Conventional wisdom says that voters don’t care to vote because votes are wasted.

Well,THAT one’s been well-understood truly debunked, HASN’T it!

So wherever we go from here?

Fact-checking.

Its easy, requires only seconds (or minutes) and a very limited knowledge of how to formulate an Internet search.

Don’t believe the hype.

---

(Nothing to see here.)