IdeaLog
Avoid Three Common Mistakes in Persuasion
Posted on May 29, 2024
First: Don’t repeat your opponent’s frame. To win any debate, you must proactively frame what the argument is about. A good frame is one where your language demonstrates, based upon your listeners’ preexisting beliefs,...
Updated Rules of Persuasion
Posted on May 15, 2024
What’s different about persuadable Americans is that they hold both progressive and conservative political beliefs in their minds. They don’t engage in politics with the emotional intensity of partisans, so they can be persuaded...
Evade the Trap of Confirmation Bias
Posted on April 30, 2024
Even when they are not driven by identity politics, people’s political beliefs often run contrary to logic or evidence. In fact, psychology tells us, there are many cognitive biases that skew human reasoning. “Confirmation...
Targeting the persuadables
Posted on April 17, 2024
The first thing you need to know about politics is, you can’t persuade everyone. When people say that MAGA (Make America Great Again) voters are impossible to persuade, that they believe what they want...
Crime has declined by a lot
Posted on April 2, 2024
Right-wingers have been attacking progressives and Democrats, as usual, over the issue of crime. But, in fact, crime is down across the nation. Murder, especially, has declined substantially both comparing 2022 to 2023 and...
The subminimum wage for tipped workers is a scam
Posted on February 7, 2024
Most discussions of the subminimum tipped wage are from the point of view of the employer or employee. Let’s consider instead how it works for the customers doing the tipping because, for them, it’s...
Ten Tips for Fundraising
Posted on January 23, 2024
Fundraising can be hard or fairly easy. It really depends on the way you prepare, the way you ask, and perhaps most important, the way you feel about the project. Here are ten tips...
Stop with the Ageism
Posted on January 9, 2024
The whole idea of fighting bigotry is that people should be judged on their individual characteristics not their group, such as race, religion, sex, or gender identity. And yet, Joe Biden is almost universally...
Poll explains what MAGA means
Posted on December 12, 2023
An NBC News poll found that 52 percent of Republicans consider themselves supporters of the MAGA movement and a Monmouth poll found it’s actually 66 percent. What does that mean for politics and governance?...
We can and must recapture freedom
Posted on November 29, 2023
Over the past 40 years, conservatives have tried to equate their policies with freedom, from economics to military policy. But the MAGA wing has made a huge mistake, trying to use the word freedom...