Obama's Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches | Hacker News Reader

Obama's Use of Hidden Hypnosis Techniques in His Speeches

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7 pointsAlex391716 comments

Crackpots.

[I'm sorry for insulting your intelligence by wasting time addressing this paper, which among other things suggests Obama is transferring positive feelings about JFK to himself using "secret hand gestures", but NLP annoys the hell out of me]

This is all using jargon from "neurolinguistic programming", a discredited research area most often associated with "pickup artistry", a school of thought that says guys can hypnotize girls in bars by touching them on the hand and echoing back whatever they say. Yeah, good luck with that.

This paper presupposes:

* that much of what Obama has to say is overtly dishonest (always a great sign in an academic publication)

* that basic techniques of rhetoric written about since the Greeks like alliteration and call-and-response are, in Obama's hands, devastating psychological weapons (want to learn "rhetoric hacking"? start: http://www.uky.edu/AS/Classics/rhetoric.html)

* that cadence and word selection can be used hypnotically to "bypass" the decision centers of the brain and implant thoughts

* that capabilities not ascribed to any form of hypnosis in any therapeutic setting can be accomplished on a mass scale with a microphone and a podium

Homework assignments:

* Find citations in the actual scientific peer-reviewed literature for terms like "non-dominant hemisphere programming" or "pre-programmed response adaptation".

* Read a well-regarded Obama speech and see if it suddenly becomes less compelling when not read by Obama (last night's speech, for instance, reads even better than it sounds).

This paper is right about one thing: speakers who have mastered rhetoric and oration are capable of making disproportionately compelling arguments. Yep, they're right: that is in fact one of the major reasons we elected Obama. Most of us --- the sane ones, at least --- consider this a fucking feature, not a defect.

[Adding: here's the (uniformly excellent) Language Log on the same topic; I guess if it's worth his blog, it's worth a comment here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=778]

In other words, the paper should be titled: "How To Be A Great Public Speaker"

This is all using jargon from "neurolinguistic programming", a discredited research area most often associated with "pickup artistry"

To be fair, I think NLP would be better described as extrascientific rather than discredited. A couple ideas have been tested without finding any support, but most of the ideas are either untested or untestable. Also, the ideas from NLP that are discredited aren't the same as the ideas that the pickup artists promote.

That said, people who pay for NLP books and seminars are probably wasting their money.

The NLP concepts seem so broad and vague that whatever a socially skilled person is saying might be cast in terms of them. For example, can you imagine a single good public speaker that's not doing any "pacing and leading" or "emotion transfer"?

NLP is just a way of making basic social skills sound more scientific.

also: social skills are just a euphemism for convincing other people that their interests are congruent with yours. manipulation.

I suspect the text has the objective of hypnotizing you, and talk to you on a subconscious level, to make you believe that Obama is using "Hidden Hypnosis Technicques".. Very clever...

What's more, he corrupts the youth and shall be sentenced to death by drinking a mixture containing poison hemlock.

I haven't actually read this, but I found it somewhere and thought people here might find it amusing.

It might be funny if they weren't serious.

Apparently, when you cry while reading a book, you are being hypnotised.

when i first suspected it i cut up all my identification cards. so by the time the trigger actually hit and i was compelled to vote for him, i couldn't.

suck it obama. i love you, man. you'll never take me alive. god bless you

Maybe it's true? How else can you explain the Messiah-worshipping fervor into which he whips his listeners? Seriously.

Even if it were true, the flagrant use of emotive language in it discredits any opinion as completely bias. There is very little factual evidence cited, mostly it is just a white paper of rant.

He is a very clever boy: since he doesn't stem from a white culture, but (quite) directly from an african one, he is able to capture nuances that practically no white man is able to see/feel/recognize.

He is really clever, in many more than one senses, and this is what US currently really needs...

This is quite surprising:

I'm actually WHITE. Now, we: the white men, have considered darker colors nothing else than lower down the intelligence scale for hundreds of years...

BUT: if someone (like me), just out of curiosity, takes the opposite approach (that is, considering darker-than-white colored people superior in some aspect(!) to us (the REAL minority on BROWN/DARK earth)), that only fact seems to give WHITE people all rights to instantly down-vote such an heretic opinion.

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME on YOU, WHITE ONES!!!

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