Kingsley 2.0

Sri Lanka plans to release the remaining 136,000 Tamil refugees still in the squalid and overrun government camps where they have been detained since the country’s civil war ended six months ago, a top official said Saturday.

3. They don’t realize that most Muslims aren’t Arab. Going back to point #1, the imagery of what it means to be Muslim in the United States is so tied in with our images of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf (not even the Arab world on the whole!) that even on progressive blogs, you will often see people refer in blanket terms to Muslim women’s dress as “the burqa.” What they don’t seem to realize is that the countries with the largest Muslim population are all in Asia (where, mind you, women don’t even wear the burqa), and not Arab at all!

One of the most popular ideas amongst social marketers is the idea that we will listen to commercial endorsements from our friends because we trust them. Thus, by putting brands into our friends’ mouths, we will somehow trust those brands more by extension. Not for the first time, the marketers have got it backwards. The reason we trust our friends so strongly is precisely because we know that their opinions are not commercially motivated. The moment that ceases to be the case – or we even suspect that it has ceased to be the case – the bond of trust between friends is destroyed. The cocktail party is ruined, society crumbles, the apes take over the world.