General strategies of persuasive speaking (rhetoric)

Appear to be saying something very decisive

• http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/nov/23/superforecasting/
  • At ~74-75 he talks about how being a pundit is all about appearing to be very decisive, conjuring very vivid imagery, while being vague about the details and leaving yourself lots of outs.

Base your arguments on beliefs that your audience holds

2015.09 - YouTube - Bernie Sanders responds to abortion question at Liberty University

• Bernie Sanders is considered to be very liberal, and Liberty University is apparently a conservative school
• The interviewer points out Sanders' dedication to children and then ask Sanders if that shouldn't also include children still in the womb.
• Sanders makes what is, in my opinion, one bad argument, which is to appeal to the conservative disdain for government meddling in the affairs of citizens.
  • I think it's a bad argument because neither he nor conservatives think that a government hands-off approach should include situations where one person is harming another person...
  • ...and he's talking to people who think that fetuses are children who deserve the same rights as children once they're born.
  • And so the audience would say, "Yeah, sure, we don't want the government meddling with our affairs, but if one person is killing another person, we do want the government to step in."
• He then points out that Republicans are defunding a lot of assistance programs for children, which is affecting millions of children.
  • At first I thought this was a much better argument because the number of children affected by the defunding is much larger than the number affected by abortions, and so I thought he was saying "If you really care, this defunding is having a much bigger impact", but I then looked up the number of abortions in the US and saw it was on the order of 1 million per year (way more than I thought it would be).
• What I would have said: Well, first I would have prepared some kind of response for this question ahead of time. I probably would have pointed out that this is a really tough question that comes down to when you define a person to come into existence.