I’ve noted before the failure of advocacy groups who appear to offer protest as a means of persuasion when it is probably better understood as mere expressiveness.  Consider now this example from, of all issues, health care reform.

An advocacy group wishes to convince us that health insurance companies are Evil and need to be controlled as part of health care reform.  Here’s how they make this point.

And here, too.

I understand the cleverness of the metaphor and it does attract broader attention, as with ABC News, for example.  I have to wonder, however, at the persuasive impact of the message.  To equate the legal actions of people with a familiar icon of criminal identification, the Wanted Poster, seems to be an unreasonable stretch.

Sure, these Posters get Reception in the first Stage of the Cascade.  But, do the Posters then generate the kind of Processing and Response that will then lead to desired behavior change (Our Kind of Health Care Reform!)?  As I noted before, advocacy demonstrates its lack of skill or interest in persuasion when it only seeks and gets Reception, but then cannot produce helpful Processing and Response.

As always, All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

And, can’t you find more desperate photos of the Evil Ones?  Or Photoshop them like Time magazine did with OJ?

President Obama is selectively releasing his email, both personal and professional, to the press and hence the world at large.  You can read a sampling at the British newspaper website, the Guardian.  First, all the caveats that this is only a sampling and it’s selected and you don’t know the context, yada-yada.  But consider this reply to Secretary of Defense Gates on the issue of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military.

To: Robert Gates <secretary@defense.mil>
Subject: Re: New CBS poll on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell etc

Wait, wait, what? A much larger proportion of Americans support “gay men and lesbians” serving openly in the military than “homosexuals” serving openly in the military? That’s ridiculous. Sometimes I think half the people in this country need to check their homes for low-level carbon monoxide leakages. So do you think we could push this through with 100% Republican support if we said it was about “confirmed bachelors” and “ladies with close female companions”? Jeez. BHO

I am surprised at the President’s reaction and that he would allow this out in the open.  It betrays a tone deafness to persuasion.  Can you imagine Bill Clinton releasing this?  Or even George W. Bush?  Consider the Rules.

It’s about the Other Guy, Stupid.

If the Other Guy feels one way about Gays ‘n Lesbians and another way about Homosexuals, go with it.  You’re not selling your soul to the Devil with this kind of wording preference.  You might recall a recent post where NPR and some of their audiences got touched off because the new Census form included the term, “Negro,” in its survey.  Words matter to the Other Guy and if you want to persuade them (which the Census bureau does not want to do with NPR, but what Mr. Obama does want to do with the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy) then use the words the Other Guy gets.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Gee, it appears that President Obama has a low opinion of the intelligence of people who disagree with him over word preference.  How sincere.  How authentic.  How losing.  Where’s any kind of persuasion skill in this?

If You Can’t Succeed, Don’t Try.

My best guess is that the American public would largely support a change in DoD policy on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  We’re a different country today than in 1993 when the policy first arose.  But, if the Persuader-in-Chief is going to blunder around like this, he might jam defeat into the jaws of victory.

This is a great example of awful persuasion.  It certainly does nothing to polish Obama’s image as a great persuader.

An anonymous reader a Goodreads wants us to enjoy quotations.  Like this.

quotable quote

“You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her think.”
— Mae West

Great edgy line, isn’t it? And I almost compelled to “like” the quote except that Mae West didn’t say it.  Dorothy Parker’s got dibs on it.

Mae West was arguably the first great InSincere Blonde and I’ll bet she kicked herself for not thinking of this line if she heard the quotable Mrs. Parker. (”Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.”)

Mrs. Parker distinguished herself as a great New York City writer in the 1920s and 30s with the Algonquin Round Table luminaries of the time including Robert Benchley, George Kaufman, Alexander Woolcott, and occasionally Harpo Marx and Tallulah Bankhead.

I can understand the anonymous poster’s great confusion – Mae West should have said this to further inflame her reputation – but it was a Smart Girl who thought of it.  Not the Blonde.

Many years ago I was a regular reader and subscriber to the premier science publication in the English language, the journal, Science.  Real scientists, like those the hit TV show Big Bang lovingly mocks, would give an arm and either or both legs for a vita hit in Science.  It’s huge.  I stopped my subscription because the then current editor, Donald Kennedy, had an Ahab complex aimed at harpooning his Great White Whale, the former President George W. Bush and used the journal as his personal platform in a merger of self concept, science, and political advocacy.  But, real scientists would still kill to get into it because it is the real source for real science.

Today I received a complementary copy of the newest issue of Science and an offer to resubscribe.  The offer is an interesting mix of applied persuasion and first class cluelessness.  The offer to resubscribe was one page called an Exclusive Benefits Voucher Form that looked like a combined come-on ad and payment form.  There was no personalized letter, no brochure, no free gift.  The Voucher Form also contained a persuasion classic, the  bullet list of benefits like:

You’ve seen this form a thousand times largely because persuasion researchers have experimentally tested it, then published their results in various peer review journals.  It works and we know why.  Basic science, you know.

Except you’ll rarely see persuasion science in Science.  Every now and then they publish economics research that is a drawn from prior social psychology work published twenty years ago.  Of course, this prior work is not cited because it didn’t use fake money as the dependent variable and instead actually used real money which makes it an applied study, you know.

So Science uses a science it won’t acknowledge as a science for publication in its page to guide its marketing efforts during the current hard times.

All Bad Persuasion Is Sincere.

Let’s drop the Blog Wisdom pose and just accept it for what it is:  A Snowy Day.

Snow with Setting Sun.

Snow Angel with calisthenics.

Snow Steve with gratitude.

Snow Zooey with attitude.

Snow Melanie after I promised to take her to Acapulco next year.

While we wait for The State DOT Plow to hit our hill, I’m reading.  Got two good stories in the NYT, both written in a surprisingly thoughtful, but interesting way.  Like newspaper writing used to be.

The first looks at the continuing fight over Index Funds for investing.  Everyone with any sense knows that Index Funds are ridiculous, but then, every year nobody always beats the Index standard.  If the average always beats everyone, isn’t it the smart play?

The second takes a great analytic stance on the problem of disability and your likelihood of getting one while your working.  What are the odds?  How should you cover it?  How do you even think about the problem?  The writer here does a great job with a nice sense of humor and skepticism.

Still snowing.

Readers of a certain type remember this, but for the rest of us, you might recall a post where I considered the persuasion skill of Rick Leach, the highly successful, but recently fired, head coach of the Texas Tech football team.  Here’s a key observation I made back then.

Leach suggests that he just wants to sit at the table of brotherhood and work this out with the good folks at Texas Tech and not turn it into a circus with courts and judges, media and journalists.  “Can’t we all just get along with each other?”  If anything he says can be proven in a court of law, Texas Tech will be writing a large check.  Given that Mr. Leach wants to break bread at the table of brotherhood, Tech might want to take its chances with a judge.

Well, maybe administrators at Texas Tech read this Blog along with Mr. Leach and assorted other coaches because they aren’t going to mediation.

Lawyers for the former coach Mike Leach and Texas Tech held a court-ordered mediation session in Lubbock, Tex., but did not reach an agreement.

This should be interesting, but my money’s still on Mr. Leach.

And, yes.  I’m snowed in.  You’ll probably get a blizzard of blog posts over the next few days.