The Tories' failed £1.2m social smear ads reveal callouses on our attention’s tender spots

In what world was Macron an ‘outsider’?

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The world where he was not a member of an established political party?
(Even if he was one of the ‘establishment’.)

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Lib Dems were a new party in 1988, but they never pretended to be ‘outsiders’. Before that, when the Gang of Four split off from Labour to form the SDP in 1981, were they outsiders?

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Perhaps none of these techniques mattered in the first place, or at least not in any significant manner.

With Brexit and Trump, people in economic conditions that inspire desperation were presented with two choices: Vote for the current situation to last for the foreseeable future, or vote for any kind of change. Add plenty of people desperate enough to vote for any crazy idea, and plenty of people unable to vote for either side, and you don’t need targeted smear campaigns to reach a surprising conclusion.

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Yes. They put themselves ‘outside’ (which was a risk that did not pay off so they had to merge with the Liberals). They were still of ‘the establishment’. Same as Macron, as I said.

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So “outsider” as “untainted by the routine corruption and back-scratching of business-as-usual politics”?
I find myself thinking of “outsider” as having a stronger meaning, an “Outsider Art” sense, more like ‘not belonging to the establishment’. But your definition works too.

I concur with your stronger definition in general. In politics - a tribal pursuit - not being one of the existing tribes or (even worse!) appearing to put oneself outside one’s tribe does qualify to the tribal voter, and especially to the tribal voter sick of all the tribes, as being an outsider. And the SDP and Macron are only outsiders in that sense - i.e. still ‘the establishment’.

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There is a big difference between the ‘big five’ (introversion/extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to experience, and agreeableness), which were developed based on tens or hundreds of thousands of subjects, and the Myers-Briggs (the four-letter codes), which is essentially Jungian and dates probably to the 50s without much validation. The psychometircs of the big five are really well understood, and for a self-report test, it has a lot of evidence for validity in the form of thousands of studies that show they account for behavior differences.

see also this:
http://boingboing.net/2015/10/12/the-myers-briggs-personality-t.html

However, these are measures of personalty; not personality themselves, and these validity measures depend on taking a test that is at least 10 items, but more often 40+ items. Targeted advertising might be effective if you knew individuals true scores on these (probably not well validated), but if you are guessing their personality based on indirect indices like phone usage and things you like on facebook, correlations will go down from the typical .3-.5 to so-small-you-can’t-tell.

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All that is correct…but while studies into the “big five” personality factors are scientifically valid, simplistic tosh about five personality “types” isn’t. I suspect the marketing spin of the campaign consultants was based more on the latter than the former.

My background was applied psych (rehab counselling), research psych (psycholinguistics) and research neuro (psychopharmacology). There is a very noticeable phenomenon in psych of the level of scientific rigour decreasing as you move from research to application.

As a rule of thumb, a large chunk of the “proven theory” employed by the applied psychs is actually representative of once-promising hypotheses that were disproven about a decade ago. It takes a long time for discoveries to transfer from the lab to the clinic, and clinicians are very reluctant to abandon their favoured therapies.

Move from clinical psych to marketing psych, and it’s things that were disproven several decades ago, mixed with a lot of extreme over-interpretation and over-simplification of tentative findings.

The marketing folks aren’t particularly interested in scientific accuracy; they’re mostly just interested in abusing science as a marketing tool for their own services.

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Yeah but those are theirs. These are ours.

Says you. I’d rather stay Enlightened. Stupid smurfs!

In the end, this can be summed up with how so many tricks work once. Fancy fencing feints lose their potency quickly. As the old story goes, if throwing sand in the face of your opponent always worked, warriors would be walking around with bags of sand.

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Corbyn is actually a political insider, but of the Left, and therefore invisible to the UK media.

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Given her father was an Anglican clergyman, I guess before too long she’ll be singing “The Sash my Father Wore”, though she won’t actually understand it.

You seem to have failed to notice that Central Office is no longer paying for this stuff. They have minor problems of their own. Like trying to get actual terrorists to join them in their government instead of merely forgetting who you were on a platform with and using your usual word.

You’ll notice I’m carefully not saying what I really think of your post.

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For all their faults, and there are many, it’s ridiculous to call the DUP ‘actual terrorists’.

There were Unionist parties in Northern Ireland with direct ties to loyalist paramilitary groups, the UDP and PUP. Only the latter remains today and it doesn’t have much influence on anything these days.

Does UKIP represent change anymore? Weren’t they kind of a one issue Brexit party? I thought they accidentally became a status quo party and had no idea what to do with that.[quote=“Wanderfound, post:30, topic:102523”]
Move from clinical psych to marketing psych, and it’s things that were disproven several decades ago, mixed with a lot of extreme over-interpretation and over-simplification of tentative findings.

The marketing folks aren’t particularly interested in scientific accuracy; they’re mostly just interested in abusing science as a marketing tool for their own services.
[/quote]

It amazes me that people with a lot of money can’t get their heads around this. If someone is telling you they are going to trick people into buying your product or voting for you, they are almost 100% tricking you into thinking they can do that. Their entire product is trickery.

Of the two competing hypotheses presented in this post: 1) microtargeting political ads worked but people are becoming resistant; 2) microtargeting political ads didn’t work at all and Brexit and Trump were just the way the wind was blowing. I’m firmly in the (2) camp. I think people who say they can win an election for you are pretty well universally full of it.

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They started out as an anti-european but liberal/libertarianish/centrist party who then drifted towards the far right and started attracting a bunch of racist weirdos, most of the original guys were forced out after Farage took control. Now that their single issue is gone they don’t seem to know what they stand for any more (their leader hadn’t even read their manifesto prior to the TV debate lol) and nobody else seems to care.

Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 -

The Act places strict limits on the amount each party may spend in the run-up to the election (how that time period is defined depends on the type of election). The current limit for elections to the UK Parliament in Westminster stands at £30,000 per constituency contested within 365 days of a General Election, up to a maximum of £18.84 million.

Yeah, what do you do when your one-issue party’s one issue is resolved? Marijuana is going to be legal in Canada in the near future, will the Marijuana Party keep fielding candidates? I hope not. If they had wanted to try to have some say in what the future UK/EU relationship should be then I guess they could have tried to take leadership on that. But with Farage basically running for the hills as soon as Brexit won, I think they should have declared victory and dissolved with some decency.

Yes, if they had any integrity then they should have. What they really wanted though was for brexit to not have happened so they could continue getting elected to the MEP gravy train and have the odd moan about bent bananas and other nonsense. It’s a similar racket to the US Green Party.

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