FIRST: There are ONLY 3 possible positive answers that communicators can evoke in response to their arguments: I understand; I agree; I will act. The responses MUST come in that order–if your audience cannot understand you, that audience cannot agree with you; if your audience cannot agree with you, it cannot/WILL not take the action that you prefer.

SECOND: There are ONLY 3 possible means to elicit a favorable response from your audience: logical appeal, emotional appeal, and ethical appeal. Without logic [which includes data, proof, explanation, definition, examples], you cannot win your audience’s agreement, if that audience is a thinking audience; you must appeal to their minds.

With uncontrolled emotion only, you can “win” ONLY those who already agree with you, as you appeal to their emotions; otherwise, your audience will resist the lack of logic and may, in fact, react violently with emotions of their own.

More important than either pure logic or pure emotion, however, is ethical appeal, which combines both logical appeal and emotional appeal within your audience’s PERCEPTION of you as an ethical, informed, trustworthy being. Ethical appeal resides WITHIN THE CHARACTER of the speaker/writer: you must convince your audience that you are worth listening to, that you care about them and their concerns, that your advice is sound, that your emotions are healthy: in other words, that they can TRUST you.

What has tripped you up and has prevented a lot of your audience from responding positively to your posts is your lack of ethical appeal–as we perceive it. We have ONLY your words on the monitor as bases upon which to form our assessment of your ethics. When you call names, issue insults, make accusations, slander or mock other posts, use profanity, and SEEM to be responding with emotion ONLY, you defeat your own goal: to have your audience at least understand what you mean, so that they might be moved to agree and to take action.

What you’ve elicited has been hostility; your posts induce laughter and are taken lightly as targets for our amusement. Your audience is not taking you seriously and is instead laughing at your posts. If you made your same points without the destructive lack of ethical appeal mentioned above, many among your audience could see that you DO have valid points.

In a very real sense, “you are what you write.” Speaking only for myself, I think that you do, basically, mean well–at least you mean well when you’re not lashing out at others. Your thoughts deserve a better presentation than those you have been giving them.

Fred,
rhf has never had a problem being a hypocrite.

Hillary doesn’t support gay marriage

Sen. Hillary Clinton will not stand in the way of New York’s governor and legislature if they want to enact a same-sex marriage law, though it is not the position she supports, the New York Democrat who is running for re-election said today in Syracuse, N.Y.

Clinton said that she favors civil unions, not same-sex marriage

so much for rhf’s theory and outrage

rhf calling anyone else a drama queen is f ucking hilarious.

The Republicans are going to have a hard time trying to say that Obama doesn’t talk to them or listen to them and that he’s a divider aren’t they.

I can’t imagine why you would think that. They have an easy time saying anything. Picture Kristol grinning while stating that the heliocentric model of the solar system is scientifically in doubt. Or saying that up is in fact down, and the “downist” media has been trying to hide the truth.

These beings are selected from humanity for their special characteristic of not having that part of the brain that shuts you up when you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, or when you know for a fact that what you’re saying is the exact opposite of what’s true. I think what they lack is technically called “shame.”

Shayne Says:
The Republicans are going to have a hard time trying to say that Obama doesn’t talk to them or listen to them and that he’s a divider aren’t they.

Obama is so much more intelligent than any of the right wingers that I think they are afraid of him. They are used to someone like bush who hid from anyone who might not agree with him.

Obama is not afraid of them.

“ROFL”

**eyes rolling**

Fred Says:

RHF finally had a complete meltdown. I haven’t seen anything like that since bartlebee augered in.

Mission accomplished? :)

HAAHAAHAA ! FEED ON YOURSELVES DIRTY, FILTHY, AMERICANS, AND WHEN THE TIME COMES, YOU WILL BE SO BUSY FEASTING UPON THE BLOOD OF YOUR BROTHER, YOU WILL FAIL TO NOTICE MY PRESENCE !! ( did I getchyer attention ? )

I’m sorry, I missed your post last night. Was too busy feeding on brother-blood. So, whassup?

There was a news item on this thread? Really? I thought this was the “read RHF cuss and spit at anyone coming near” thread. A case study in some sort of psychosis. I guess I shouldn’t use this material in a psychological paper?

Yes, it would have been greatly amusing if the dinner went like that. It was probably just a lot of as$ kissing and “here’s a good idea” by the cons, and pleasant calm by Obama. How he will act as the president has yet to be seen. Many want to criticise him a bit early on anything and everything. This sentiment was stirred up by the neocon camp, and many disgruntled Hillary supporters took up those marching orders without question. Still, for good or bad, the man is in charge for the next 4 years, and, more importantly, the man has done nothing at all yet as president because he is not president yet. While I despise the republican/conservatives now as much as i despise nazis, the KKK, fundamentalist (pick a religion — christianity, judaism, islam …), and think that they should have as much legitimacy as the kkk or neo-nazis have in our politics, that is not the reality. They are THE other party in our two party system, and trying to shut them out will cause only problems. These activities of Obamas are possibly very shrewd statesmanship, possibly he is trying to honestly live up to his pledges of not running a partisan administration (which means listening to and compromising with the others), and possibly he is not all he campaigned as. Most likely there is some measure of a combination of these things. I will still wait to judge his actions as president for when he is president AND had some time to actually implement policies. Who he talks to and eats dinner with or has pictures taken with — who cares? Well, this last admin cared about photo ops and who one is seen with. But that is not policy: that is propoganda. I would rather Obama show that he is capable of diplomacy with enemies: war should be the last option, not the pre-emptive option.