Is Donald Trump trying to hypnotize American women? Like, literally?

@ David

Wow, this is, I think, your best video yet! You are just getting better and better. Hope that you only had to do this one once.

And what a fascinating topic. I have a bit of a professional interest. I do the advocacy training for barristers. Both here and abroad. It’s very interesting to compare and contrast the different courtroom cultures. But what we all have in common is that advocacy is “the art of persuasion”. So this was an especially Interesting video for me.

When we teach “narrative advocacy”, that is to say making submissions and speeches, we touch upon some of the points you mention.

Theoretically, and especially with judges as opposed to juries, we focus on actually using logical arguments. But even with judges there’s an emotional component. For example, when people are doing pleas in mitigation, yes refer to the sentencing guidelines, but this is also your chance to humanise your client with a bit of a sob story.

The NLP thing is very much discredited at the Bar. But we do teach some of the classic rhetorical tricks. Rule of three and all that.

We also have this idea of “the theory of the case”. That’s a snappy memorable phrase that encapsulates your key argument. The ur American example is “If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit”. But we do that here as well. I remember talking to a barrister who was just about to prosecute a case against a serial killer’s wife. The case had all been prepared agains the guy, but then he unalived himself as the kids say. So they now had to shift to his mrs. He came up with “She must have known!”.

That is one thing the right seem to be much better at than the left. Soundbites. As has been said, left wing politics is a vocabulary in search of an ideology. So it’s more like you might address a judge or someone who has time to listen to logical arguments; whereas with laypeople in a hurry you want something snappy. Even if that is, as Scildy would put it, ‘an empty heuristic’.

MAGA might not hold up to scrutiny, but it fits on a hat.

I can’t imagine Trump has had any formal training. He just doesn’t seem to be someone who would actually take advice from experts. He already thinks he knows everything. But he may have picked some things up from osmosis. If however I was to critique him as we do the barristers, the key thing to address would be ‘structure’. He’s all over the place. I can relate to that. My videos are very stream of consciousness and I am literally “ooh, squirrel”. But whilst some advocates do lean into that slightly disheveled winging it on their feet approach, it can be risky. And that is a common criticism of Trump, that he just rambles.

But before I do an essay Ill just repeat how much I enjoyed that video.

[One minor thing, Im not sure if you use AI in your videos,. But if you do you need to tick that box on the upload screen. Otherwise YouTube can issue you a strike]

Well, I guess we’ll find out how well Trump’s hypnosis worked when election time comes. Personally, I think that most people will vote for Kamala Harris.

By the way, you are better and more confident in this video than the previous ones. Well done. It’s good to write a script for them and practice it before putting it together and remember that you have the advantage of editing. You’re becoming more like a professional youtuber now.

I will note that the Bible uses those techniques as well: embedded commands (along with actual commands) and repetition definitely, and arguably confusion; though the latter might not be intentional, but instead a product of having been translated multiple times plus scribe errors.

Not to mention that it is a compilation of works by multiple authors with varied perspectives who didn’t always agree. Compare the Four Gospels some time; or note that Genesis has two accounts of the order things were created in, and those two accounts disagree. I suspect the latter is the result of a) committing originally orally-transmitted stories to print for the first time and b) intentionally collecting multiple versions from different tribes in the sample area.

Indeed I strongly suspect the Old Testament originated as an early encyclopedia, collecting local beliefs about creation, local histories, genealogies, and assorted other lore, parables, fables, and life advice from the various shamans and storytellers and historians in the region, and packaging it all into a set of books (which later tended to be combined into a single huge doorstopper of a book). It’s a hypothesis that explains both the points of internal disagreement and the eclectic mixture of things that were included.

Consider the modern Wikipedia. It includes information about a wide variety of religious beliefs from across an entire planet, excerpts from things like the Rig Veda and the Viking sagas, and much, much more, including practical information about real-world things like machines and physics as well as fictional and mythological. If chunks of it survived through a dark age of widespread illiteracy, then were recovered and imperfectly translated several thousand years later, and then assumed to be a unitary and true account of things, the same things would be noticed, and questions raised like “and Shiva had nothing to say about this whole Ragnarok thing, nor raised a hand or five to stop it? Where was Thor when Loki was tricking Eve into eating the apple? Why does passage X describe an omniscient Allah while passage Y says some ancient prophet Heisenberg proved that there could be no such thing as omniscience?” …

The New Testament is different; I expect it started as a combination of proselytization material (much of the content in the Gospels, esp. that which is present in multiple of them and in the Dead Sea Scrolls) and a written history of the early Church (including all the various letters-to-whomever parts, such as the II Corinthians made notorious by Trump), and was then heavily manipulated by later factions for an assortment of political reasons, especially around the time of major sectarian splits, from the Coptics to the Catholic/Orthodox split to the Catholic/Protestant split to the Protestant/Mormon split (so far as I know, the most recent to produce an enduring sect from each side of the split, able to substantially outlive its founder and its early-adopting generation). Certainly the various sects spawned from these splits usually modified their Bibles, in many cases adding or dropping whole books as well as making substantial revisions to others. The transition from being a religion of an oppressed minority to being an imperial state religion would also have been accompanied by major politically-motivated changes, as its role shifted dramatically from challenging the existing power structure to legitimating same. (One wonders how accurate the Chinese translation of Das Kapital is, and how intentional the deviations are, and how many of those date to shortly after the end of Chairman Mao’s reign and the start of China’s transition from some actual semblance of Marxist-Leninist to its present, distinctly un-Marxist, form of state capitalism.)

Yeah, one thing I remember hearing years ago (and I have relatives that got sent off the stage at a hypnosis act early because they weren’t getting hypnotized) is that your standard hypnosis act doesn’t work on people who don’t know what the act is supposed to be doing. This was demonstrating by finding relatively isolated groups of people who had never seen a hypnosis act before, and putting on a show for them. But if people were primed by being shown what ‘should’ happen by people who were in on the routine, suddenly it started working.

It makes a disturbing level of sense, as Slacktivist has been pointing out for years in his description of the ‘World’s Worst LARP’, a lot of the over-the-top stuff is at least as much ‘proving you’re a member of the in-group’ as it is anything to do with actually believing any of it.

@ Snowberry:

It also uses whatever “look, squirrel!” is called to distract from the fact it isn’t going to answer most of the questions which it raises.

Could the Dead Cat Strategy (an Australian idiom brought to wider attention by Boris Johnson) be what you have in mind? https://archive.ph/GVR0X

@Alan Robertshaw:

But the best way to understand the OT is to remember that M*A*S*H was set in the Korean War but was about the Vietnam War.

A good example of this is how Exodus is a rather garbled chronicle of the period when Yehuda (ancient Israel) was occupied by the Persian Empire, but it’s set in Egypt. It’s also generally believed that both the part about slaves building the Pyramids and the part about the Tower of Babel are garbled references to the construction of the Great Ziggurat of Babylon, which again occurred during the Persian occupation.

@Full Metal Ox:

It’s been quite awhile since I last read it, so I’m not sure how well it fits, but maybe.