Facts and Emotions: Battling A Culture of Lies
We need to answer emotion with counter-emotion. If we don’t trigger an emotional response, our facts won’t matter because they won’t be heard.
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Is This Heaven?
But for the 24-hour political newscasters, the Iowa caucus results were a panic moment. And now, 36 hours later, they are still mumbling and grumbling, talking about apps and coding problems and the horror of having to wait.
Candidates: How Do You Decide?
We elect people to do one thing only – to make decisions.
But we never ask them the fundamental question: ”How do you make a decision?”
Yes, he’s guilty, but I don’t care!
As we await the trial phase of the impeachment proceedings, it’s apparent that many members of the U.S. Senate are jumping past the first question – the question of fact – and starting on the question of punishment.
Death Threats – Not Rhetoric – Words Matter
I’m watching the most anti-Trump of mainstream networks and, without exception, they are sane-washing Trump’s threats as “violent rhetoric”. Even Harris is shying away from the word “threat”. But there is no question about it. He threatened Cheney.
Message-Making: The Biden Speech
The speech is a lesson in the tactics, large and small, that hold a message together and burn your ideas into your audience’s consciousness. Repetition. Litanies. Framing. Promoting your Values, naming the Villain, holding out a Vision.
Election Fraud is reason enough
What gets me is that people say that he has to be expelled IF he is convicted of a crime.
Why is a criminal conviction required?
It is enough that he defrauded the voters. Actual election fraud is reason enough for expulsion.
Where is the caucus that railed about election fraud?
A Teaching Moment, Squandered
Give 30 minutes to walk out and return, then give an hour to study of these basic tenets of being a citizen in the US, their history, the difficulties of conflicts between rights and safety, how bills become law, and how protests change (or don’t change) law, how courts decide conflicts.
Basic civics education.
Re: Fake email replies
It plays on your sense of guilt that you missed an email, that you rudely ignored an email, that the sender is really interested in helping you – when, in fact, this email is just a pretense.
Speak to their Values
If the impeachment managers hope to win this persuasion argument, they must speak to how Republican senators can stay in power – or recover their lost power – or protect themselves from the loss of power. They need to demonstrate that the actions of the defendant threaten the ruling authority of these Republican senators.