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Samizdata quote of the day

The six stages of an election campaign:

1. Enthusiasm.
2. Disillusionment.
3. Panic.
4. The Search for the Guilty.
5. The Punishment of the Innocent.
6. Rewards and Honours for Non-participants.

10 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Antoine

    Is this yours? – in which case it is not a “quotation” or “slogan” (yet).

    Or is it not yours? In which case who did say/write it?

  • Adrian Ramsey

    Last time I looked it was “The six stages of a Civil Service IT project”, says the man with a Despair.com poster on his wall (The “Consulting” one, if you must know).

  • Not that it isn’t interesting/funny/etc.

    What stage has the Kerry campaign reached, do you think?

  • I first saw this hanging in the offices of a local branch of the Conservative Party in 1987. Origin unknown.

  • The 10 Stages of Internet Denial:

    Stage 1: Ignorance. “I’ve never heard of this ‘Interweb’ thing.”

    Stage 2: Early Awareness. “My kids are into this ‘Internet’ videogaming fad. It’ll pass, just like Virtual Reality did.”

    Stage 3: Raised Awareness. “What do you mean, look it up on Yahoo? Are you calling me a yahoo?”

    Stage 4: Shock. “What! That Drudge bastard is quoting the story we killed last week!”

    Stage 5: Fear. “Those damn Internet pseudo-journalists are going to steal our jobs! Can’t somebody stop them?”

    Stage 6: Paranoia. “It must be a massive right-wing conspiracy! So many people can’t willingly scorn our trusted old medium for that crap. Who’s backing them? It’s all about music piracy and pornography!”

    Stage 7: Despair. “It’s the end of our civilization. The Internet spells the end of (INSERT WORD HERE). Let’s escape to the countryside before we turn into zombies.”

    Stage 8: Negotiation. “This Harry Knowles doesn’t look so tough. We can buy this guy. Make him ‘Associate Producer’, the suckers fall for it every time.”

    Stage 9: Acceptance. “Can’t you see I’m busy? Google it, instead of wasting my time.”

    Stage 10: Faked “in-the-know”. “HTML is SO last year. The next big thing is RSS Feed. They do it with computers.”

    ;-P

    -A.R.Yngve
    http://yngve.bravehost.com

  • Sounds a lot like what CBS is going through right now.

  • Bush was probably not a stellar performer, militarily, but then, he didn’t base his candidacy on it either, the kerry camp did, to their everlasting regret.

    The ironic thing about all this is that it looks like the left partisans have handed over the election to Bush, handed over CBS’s viewer market to Fox, handed over news reliability to the blogosphere, and like a wierd Captain Bly, surrendered captainship of the vast information juggernaut to a bunch of misfits in pajamas.

    Talk about “power to the people!”

    Talk about a suicidal campaign.

  • Judging by the number of celebrities going on the radio and TV urging people to visit http://www.justvote.org I’d say they’re currently at about step 3 in the USA right now…

  • John Ellis

    Sam,

    “Bush was probably not a stellar performer, militarily”

    Yup, guess you could probably say that….:LOL: I suppose the Kerry camp were trying to emphasise the difference in two (not that dissimilar, to an outsider) candidates. That it backfired looks indisputable, which says a lot about the political process in the US (and the UK too, I expect) and the average person’s ability to distinguish recorded fact and propaganda….

  • derek

    Re The Six Stages Of An Election Campaign. I think the original list is from the Yes Minister books, but thanks for posting it anyway. I’ve been looking for the full quote for ages