Saturday, September 17, 2011

Loose lips sink ships

One of the entertaining stories this week has been the harebrained decision by Obama's reelection group Obama for America to create the website AttackWatch

It is supposed to allow his supporters to report attacks against the Obama, untruths being spread about him and the like so Obama's team can get out and counter them. Instead it turned into an internet joke, with anti-Obama folks flooding it with all sorts of nonsensical reports of crimes against the Won. 

Here are some samples from Results for #attackwatch: "Grandmas refusing to get in the box. Please help", "Like, man, we were told there would be free stuff" and "I have an idea for a solar powered vibrator...can I have a half billion to not make it?"

Aside from the idiocy of setting up a snitch website, especially considering how well his previous snitch website went over, the design is a disaster. There is a group in modern graphic design that is heavily influenced by old propaganda posters. Who ever designed this website, with its harsh black, red and white, is obviously a member of that group. 

The result -- not only do you get a creepy feeling from the notion of encouraging citizens to report each other, you get it in a website that has obviously drawn some graphic inspiration from propaganda posters. Propaganda is hardly a word that inspires images of the presentation of the facts and noting but the facts which is what this website purports to do. 

I can see some young web designers making such an off-kilter choice, but wasn't there anybody higher in Obama for America who realized how bad it looked, and how tacky the concept of citizen snitches is?

In thinking about it as I looked for a graphic to illustrate this post, it occurred to me how out of phase it was with the old WWII exhortation, "Loose Lips Sink Ships". I then discovered that our Soviet comrades, whose graphic style no doubt has caught the eye of  Obama for America's web designers, had their version of Loose Lips which involved industrial espionage. 

I took the above image from a Grigory Pasko post. There are a couple of other samples at his post. By the way, the poem on the poster reads:
Don't blab!
Be on your toes,
In days like this
The walls have ears.
It’s not far from blabbing
and gossiping
To treason.
Although in the case of AttackWatch what's not far away from blabbing and gossip isn't so much treason as it is self-inflicted mockery.
 

2 comments:

KurtP said...

Not to mention all the spyware and tracking cookies that must have been included on ANY visit to any website connected to the Chicago Jeezus.

W/V= sackwor
All it's missing is an H and an E

ambisinistral said...

True enough, all though I'm not sure those bunglers could do much with the information besides confuse themselves.

There was a lot of complaining that Twitter had removed the AttackWatch from their Trending stats because it had turned into such an embarrassment.