Open Thread April 29, 2023
Open Thread April 25, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com
Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.
Open Thread April 25, 2023, Angry Bear, angrybearblog.com
https://www.c-span.org/video/?526363-1/win-argument-art-debating-persuading-public-speaking
Win Every Argument – The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan offered his thoughts on how to effectively communicate and make persuasive arguments. Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., hosted this event.
An awesome one-hour video at the link above that explains why outlandish appeals to emotion (e.g., Trump and Putin) are so successful at obtaining public support when pitted against facts and statistics.
Ron
synopsis please.
Coberly,
Lots of examples where the dry rhetoric of liberal politicians failed to influence voters. After Hillary cried on camera she did a lot better in NH than her usual. He liked Liz Warren and AOC best of liberal politicians because they are arousing firebrands instead of dry technocrats.
Being the best to govern is pointless for those that fail to win elections. Conservatives are successful at appealing to the electorate’s most base emotional contexts. Despite how awful that is, it allows them to grow political power. Liberals need to make strong appeals to our better angels, rather than expect to be supported because we are the smartest regardless of how boring that makes us seem.
ron
i agree with that. but the dem’s better angels are seen as existential threats by r’s.
i think that’s because they don’t know how to play the cards they have, to be honest i rarely hear dem politicians poking the r base in the eye, but their progressive friends provide fox and friends with plenty of raw meat to chew over.
one might do well to study FDR speeches. or even bill clinton or obama, but those two turned out to be feeding at the same trough as the big r’s, and did not deliver on their rhetoric, leaving more or less sane voters nothing to turn to but trump. and we saw how that turned out.
Coberly,
Yes sir. I totally agree with you on all that.
Conservatives are successful at appealing to the electorate’s most base emotional contexts. Despite how awful that is, it allows them to grow political power. Liberals need to make strong appeals to our better angels, rather than expect to be supported because we are the smartest regardless of how boring that makes us seem.
[ Crudely insulting have the adults in the country would seem to be self-defeating. As for Mehdi Hasan, having found him impossibly insulting, I immediately turn away at the name. ]
ltr
i did not know who Mehdi Hasan was so I looked him up on google. what i saw was him questioning what appeared to be a pathological liar. How the liar expected to get away with it would have been beyond me, but I have a theory about brains: they care nothing for logic or morality, but only association and repetition. [a motivated person can arrange to experience associations and repetitions in a disciplined way, but they can’t do it all day.] so the professional liar knows that people who have organized their brains around a false reality will take his lies as truth if they agree with their reality, and dismiss the arguments against their preferred truth as “impossibly insulting” or “fake news.” You have demonstrated this often right here on Angry Bear.
So the question is, am I doing the same thing? Quite possibly. There is no way to tell, unless of course real reality intrudes in a way that we can’t ignore…at least until the storm is over.
Ron
so did Hasan win that argument? I dunno. doubt he changed many minds, But in my opinion at least, he demonstrated to us relatively sane (we think) people that the person he was interviewing was the kind of liar you would kill on the spot or just walk away from and try to warn your friends. [“you” in this case is not you, or me, or even “one.” but a possibly imaginary Just Judge.]
Coberly,
Agreed. Glad that you found him interesting.
Ron
interesting enough to read his book? in what sense does he “win” arguments? or should i just find the book and enjoy the surprise?
ltr
change base to basic and you may be on to something. we, darwin sez, started out as animals living in fear and surviving by violence. civilization has somewhat changed that but only on the surface, when “civilization” fails, primitive survival behavior begins to show itself. calling our poitical enemies names doesn’t help, but then neither does much else at this point. FDR did a very good job of saving civilization in a way that Hitler did not. but he chose his enemies wisely.and correctly,,,the very rich, not our fellow workers in the field.
Coberly,
Certainly ltr is correct in that Medhi Hasan is impossibly insulting to the elite class that make the important decisions that maintain our existence in this Nirvana.
Coberly,
Realistically both Hasan and I lay too much blame regarding our present state of affairs on contemporary elites. Despite their own objections to the contrary, they are made persons rather than self-made persons.
In general population sociology and geopolitics as well as economics, hysteresis rules the present with greater influence than present leadership whims. FDR had the benefit of Wilson’s folly alongside cousin Teddy’s progressives to forge a New Deal with both the economy and global war, a standard that FDR was thankfully fit to bear. Take away FDR’s double dose of depression and the New Deal table gradually folds up and goes into historical storage.
Unfortunately the damage wrought in Paris 1919 by Wilson, Clemenceau, Balfour, and Lloyd George drew fault lines that until this day continue to crumble along the edges of human existence. Destruction is self-sustaining while construction requires constant maintenance and reinforcement.
Ron
do you mean “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
or that it is easier to kill a man than it is to make one? [even sex is harder than murder].
Neither.
well, we go to war with the elites we have, not the elites we used to have.
Often enough we go to war because of the damage done by elites already passed from their station in life. Both the good and the bad live after the men are gone, just a matter of degree and institutional remnants. Essentially that is what hysteresis means. Present conditions are prisoner to past actions.
so you mean that hystery has consequences?
yep
News of the week ahead…
Many in U.K. Greet King Charles’s Coronation With a ‘Take It or Leave It’ Shrug
NY Times – April 30
… many in the country are more focused on navigating a cost-of-living crisis than celebrating a dysfunctional royal family.
When King Charles III is crowned on Saturday (May 6), he will undergo a ritual so rare in modern British history that it last occurred 70 years ago, roughly the wait between sightings of Halley’s comet. And yet the coronation has yet to capture the imagination of a Britain preoccupied by other concerns.
Images of the new king — in chocolate, in Legos and in wax — are popping up in bakeries, toy stores and at Madame Tussauds wax museum. Ancient relics of coronation, like the Scottish stone of destiny, are being delivered to Westminster Abbey for the ceremony. Charles and his queen consort, Camilla, are rehearsing every step of the service in a specially staged room at Buckingham Palace.
But in a recent poll of 3,070 adults in Britain by the market research firm YouGov, 64 percent of respondents said they had little or no interest in the coronation. Only a third said they were strongly or fairly interested in it. Among those aged 18 to 24, the number voicing little or no interest rose to 75 percent. ,,,
The Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, is an oblong block of red sandstone that has been used for centuries in the coronation of the monarchs of Scotland. ,,,
Historically, the artefact was kept at the now-ruined Scone Abbey in Scone, near Perth, Scotland. It was seized by Edward I‘s forces from Scone during the English invasion of Scotland in 1296, and was used in the coronation of the monarchs of England as well as the monarchs of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, following the Treaty of Union of 1707. …
Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.
Rick Hasen, Author at Election Law Blog
As far as I’m concerned, the faithful got exactly the president they deserved. To this day I don’t believe Trump was running for office in 2016 so much as he was attempting to rebrand himself. With any luck, another Trump failure in 2024 will prove some form of restorative for the rotting remains of what was once the party of Lincoln.
geoff:
It would be nice if trump did time. Unlikely though. Good comment.
First Republic Bank Is Seized by Regulators and Sold to JPMorgan Chase
NY Times – May 1
Regulators seized control of First Republic Bank and sold it to JPMorgan Chase on Monday, a dramatic move aimed at curbing a two-month banking crisis that has rattled the financial system.
First Republic, whose assets were battered by the rise in interest rates, had struggled to stay alive after two other lenders collapsed last month, spooking depositors and investors.
First Republic was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and immediately sold to JPMorgan. The deal was announced hours before U.S. markets are set to open, and after a scramble by officials over the weekend.
Later on Monday, 84 First Republic branches in eight states will reopen as JPMorgan branches.
JPMorgan will “assume all of the deposits and substantially all of the assets of First Republic Bank,” the F.D.I.C. said in a statement. The regulator estimated that its insurance fund would have to pay out about $13 billion to cover First Republic’s losses. JPMorgan also said that the F.D.I.C. would provide it with $50 billion in financing. …
House Democrats Move to Force a Debt-Limit Increase as Default Date Looms
NY Times – May 2
House Democratic leaders who have been quietly planning a strategy to force a debt ceiling increase to avert default began taking steps on Tuesday to deploy their secret weapon.
… Democrats have been plotting for months to quietly smooth the way for action by Congress to avert a devastating federal default if debt ceiling talks remain deadlocked.
With a possible default now projected as soon as June 1, Democrats on Tuesday … started the process of trying to force a debt-limit increase bill to the floor through a so-called discharge petition that could bypass Republican leaders who have refused to raise the ceiling unless President Biden agrees to spending cuts and policy changes.
“House Democrats are working to make sure we have all options at our disposal to avoid a default,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, wrote in a letter he sent to colleagues on Tuesday. “The filing of a debt ceiling measure to be brought up on the discharge calendar preserves an important option. It is now time for MAGA Republicans to act in a bipartisan manner to pay America’s bills without extreme conditions.” …
… An emergency rule Democrats introduced on Tuesday, during a pro forma session held while the House is in recess, would start the clock on a process that would allow them to begin collecting signatures as soon as May 16 on such a petition, which can force action on a bill if a majority of members sign on. The open-ended rule would provide a vehicle to bring Mr. DeSaulnier’s bill to the floor and amend it with a Democratic proposal — which has yet to be written — to resolve the debt limit crisis. …
(… “The Breaking the Gridlock Act” … introduced without fanfare in January by a little-known Democrat, Representative Mark DeSaulnier of California, is part of a confidential, previously unreported, strategy Democrats have been plotting for months to quietly smooth the way for action by Congress to avert a devastating federal default if debt ceiling talks remain deadlocked. …)