Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
A friend says to me
I'm just wondering if the persona he [Kerry] presented to the Massachusetts electorate might not have been equally manufactured.
What bothers me about this is the phrasing, the framing. "Manufacturing a persona is bad" and "Kerry manufactures personas (one to get elected Senator, another to get elected president)" and, by implication, "Bush doesn't do that, so let's vote for him." But think for a minute; do you supose that the persona Bush proffers at a $2,000 per plate dinner, where he has been known to say things such as, "You are my base" is the same persona as he offers in his folksy TV ads? Of course not. But what I took exception with was less the claim that Kerry has done this (not being entirely ignorant of social registers I understand we all do it to no small extent with varying measures of conscious intent) and more the choice of phrasing, which was shockingly similar to what I'd expect from a Limbaugh or an O'Reilly. Framing is the key. Without taking sides in a debate one can still call for phrasing that fails to unfairly frame. Problem is, there's two kinds of debates, the first kind is about advancing knowledge, the second kind is about persuasion. And where persuasion is the game, as in politics, there is no incentive to fail to frame unfairly. Which is truly sad. In this particular case the framing precluded substantive discussion of what is appropriate in the realm of image control, and whether either candidate has overstepped those bounds. Good framing for persuasion, bad for andvancing knowledge.
...wondering whether he [Kerry] has been pragmatic/opportunistic in crafting his political persona isn't snarky.
And of course, this is technically correct; the snarky bit was the phrasing, which implied that somehow Kerry's pragmatic and opportunistic crafting of political persona is more evil than Bush's pragmatic and opportunistic crafting of political persona, this despite Bush's efforts come off as "a good ol' boy," rather than the privileged son of a former CIA head, the privileged son of a former president. Hard to imagine someone who's background makes him *less* of a down-to-earth type than Bush's. But my friend's wonderful phrasing, his framing implies that Kerry is doing something Bush isn't.
We must vote for Bush so the terrorists won't think they influence our voting.
This is either fatuous or cunningly fatuous-seeming, neither of which is soemthing I want to think of my friend as being. This quote is marvelous rhetoric, at least is for the unenlighted, but it doesn't stand up to the most basic of critical thinking skills. "My vote is controlled by my desire not to let the terrorists control my vote," sounds pretty circular. If my friend had at least said, "We don't want to send the wrong message," I could swallow and agree to disagree about which message is wrong. But this is exactly the point of such underhanded phrasing: the average speaker simply has not the training to realize they've been swindled into accepting a world view where they can't argue which message is the right one to send; instead it's a world where they either go with the neo-conservatives who currently control the White House, or be labeled as terrorist-sympathizers.
What makes this appropriate for this blog as opposed to my less thematically controlled blog is the issue of the slipperiness of framing. I have not yet given up on the Presupposition Project, and days like this I wish I'd devoted more time to it sooner, becuase it would be such a valuable resource at times like this when critical thinking is so important. From the use of embedded question to the clever counter-factual, the quote that started this is a delightful example of verbal attack, of intellectual dishonesty. Some folks just talk that way, some do it on purpose, but not enough know how to spot it, how to give it the belly laugh all such nonsense deserves.
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