How to do a great political ad: Dan Gelber for FL Attorney General ~ OPEN THREAD ~

Rising above--far, far above--the mudslinging and vitriol of the typical ad, this one instead imparts a strong sense of the candidate's humanity, integrity, commitment to service, and overall goodness, and in so doing, underscores Dan Gelber's obvious qualifications for a public office such as that of AG.

Bravo Dan, and bravo, Travis!

We're playing laundry catchup, doing a bit of boy-shoe shopping, and generally winding down a much-too-short summer and (kind of) looking forward to school starting this Tuesday.  How about you?

(H/T Michael)

Comments

[kathy a.]

i'm finishing a happy quilt [crazy quilt, no pattern] for a friend with cancer -- bunch of friends and family sent me an amazing and wild assortment of fabrics! not fancy, but fun. i'm about to do the borders, and hoping the sides more or less turn out the same length!

and meanwhile, there is this tiring and frustrating family angst thing going on. bleah.

[kathy a.]

litbrit, that ad is just wonderful.

[minstrel hussain boy]

i think that it is wonderful, and far too rare that a politician makes his case by saying what's right about himself, and about us.

bravo! hope he wins and others notice that.

i'm puttering around today, getting ready to whip up some french toast for dinner, made from the last half loaf of cinnamon raisin bread (it makes the finest french toast in the world).

threw the tennis ball for mose for a long time this afternoon. planning to go out to billy hale's horse farm tomorrow. he's got a colt out of my arab stallion and one of his cutting quarter mares that's giving him fits to train. he says the colt's crazy. i think it's just that he's not used to working with arabians, and arabian attitude and willfulness always seem to breed through any mix.

billy said he wanted me to come out and lay some of that indin horse medicine on him. i told him i'd bring the full mamba jahamba out. (i didn't tell him that most of what i do is straight out of john lyons seminars with a heavy dosage of b.f. skinner operant conditioning, let the cowboy keep his romance sez i)

[oddjob]

God damn what an excellent ad! How cool to think Florida's next attorney general might be an honest to goodness mensch!

:)

[oddjob]

arabian attitude and willfulness always seem to breed through any mix

Do you figure that's probably where the thoroughbreds get it from?

[oddjob]

i didn't tell him that most of what i do is straight out of john lyons seminars with a heavy dosage of b.f. skinner operant conditioning, let the cowboy keep his romance sez i

Whatever works!

As long as the horse regards you as a horse whisperer it's all good, right? ;)

[Krubozumo Nyankoye]

MHB -

"i didn't tell him that most of what i do is straight out of john lyons seminars with a heavy dosage of b.f. skinner operant conditioning..."

I can't tact any knowledge of john lyons but I can certainly relate to the allusion to operant conditioning.

Have you read any of Reese?

After more than 3 decades of this stuff being generally avilable one wonders why it is not common currency, but then you realize it totally disenfranchises exceptionalism. That alone would be enough to make it poison. Like all other science it does however, work. So the same people who propagandize against it use the technology to shape behaviors to their liking.

[minstrel hussain boy]

yeah, i've read reese. john lyons is one of the inspirations for the horse whisperer. he used to travel the country where he would demonstrate his techniques. he'd put on a show riding his blind horse jinx without a bridle, and they'd go through dressage movements.

it's a combination of sliding into the expected herd behaviors with the horse and then using that to help produce desired outcomes. one of the things i learned from him was "there are two games you'll never win with a horse; race, and tug 'o' war. don't play those."

the first time that i saw john in action was at a BLM auction where i was picking up a mustang filly. since they tend to be some pretty rough startups, i figured "what the fuck, any old edge will do." i learned to get lots more out of a kind word, solid consistency on my part, and licorice bits, than i ever got with crops and spurs and shit like that.

you talking benjamin reese? if so, yes. although when it comes to behavior modification it's really hard to beat skinner. i cracked a pHd that i was teaching to ride the fuck up by intoning

"there is no god but behavior mod, and skinner is his prophet."

[minstrel hussain boy]

correction for the link i fucked up

sheesh, late. must rest now.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

No.

I am not seeing contributors on a liberal blog praising Skinner. I am not seeing someone claim that 'like all science, it works' when the fact is that, because it doesn't work, it ain't science. I am not seeing the person whose work was behind at least the pre-NARTH attempts to "cure homosexuality" -- and whose work failed here, as elsewhere, not because 'gayness is genetic' but because this sort of behaviour modification doesn't work.

And the failure of the gigantic 'Skinner box' of the Soviet Union, and the attempt to create a similar one in the areas 8under German control demonstrates that it is just as effective politically as it is for individuals.

And i did not see anyone claim that its weakness was its 'disenfranchising exceptionalism' -- a position that a Neitzchean like Mencken could claim, but no believer in the idea that 'we are all exceptional' that is, or should be, behind liberalism.

The only possible explanation is that i only dreamed my alarm went off and i saw these comments and wrote a reponse.

Please wake me up.

[minstrel hussain boy]

i will not apologize or back off from my experience that there is a lot of basic skinnerian techniques that i use, and i use them because they work.

skinner made a lot of mistakes, and also took many things way to fucking far. that doesn't discount that, just like freud, while some of the boundries he crossed led into wrong paths and wrong conclusions, a lot of the foundation that got there is solid.

because the nazis and social experimenters, like jung, got genetic and evolutionary concepts completely wrong and allowed eugenics to be something that ended up doing great evil does not mean that when i'm in a horse barn trying to figure out what mare to match with what stallion i don't consider which animal does what well. i, like a lot of horse folks, tend to breed like to like. i also will breed an arab with a quarter horse hoping to come out with a smarter quarter horse with better stamina. sometimes i get a bull strong quarter with arab crazy, but, dude, that's horse breeding from a boots in the shit perspective.

i totally agree that there is not only no need to "cure" gay people, attempts to do so are futile and oftentimes unspeakably cruel. when i'm using operant conditioning techniques i'm not trying to turn a horse into a dog, cat, or possum. i'm trying to teach basic cue and response situations. i'm also trying to get the horse to realize that when the horse allows me to do most of the thinking we become a force multiplied.

while i am fully aware of the problems and great misdeeds of things done in the name of behavior modification, even with people, there are conditions where the real therapy cannot proceed until the dysfunctional behavior is fucking fixed.

no, skinner didn't create the "magic bullet" of psychology, and he was dreadfully wrong to think so. a lot of his foundation work is solid though. if you don't believe that i would like you to show me a school classroom where the bell rings and the kids don't do something appropriate. or a football play where the players don't stop at the whistle. a boxing match where they continue to throw punches after the bell, or come out for another round after the 12th.

[minstrel hussain boy]

p.s.

if this means that i am not a "real" liberal i promise to mail back my ideological purity ring. 'cept i never had one of those motherfuckers

[big bad wolf]

your loss, mhb. i use mine all the time and get discounts in college cities across the nation. :)

[oddjob]

LOL!

[oddjob]

Cool article!

Hat tip, Talking Points Memo.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

mhb: You misunderstand me. First, I am a behaviourist -- though I find the writings of Dr. Albert Ellis -- despite his self-admitted 'hucksterism' -- to be much more realiztic than those of Skinner.

But my most important point was not that ASkinner's ideas are evil, that they have been used for evil purposes. Bith, I'd argue are true, but they are truly irrelevant -- except in adding to the condemnation -- because, above all,

Skinner's ideas don't work/blockquote>

That was the point of my examples. It was bad enough that gays were exposed to the 'tender mercies' of Skinnerism. But it adds to the horror that those who survived, who bore the scars, mental and even physical, of their 'treatments' -- and who did not react to the self-hatred the therapy engendered by choosing suicide -- suffered those scars for nothing. They remained gay -- and we may celebrate this, yes, but how horrible it was to have undergone what they did for pure futility.

And the Thirteen Year reich was a laboratory in Skinnerism. Every possible positive and negative reinforcement was included in the attempt to build the 'perfect Nazi society.' Behavioural adjustment was the very heart of Nazism, creating the new German Superman, brutal to the weak, so superior that he was subject to no laws, cruel, unrelentings, the perfect Nietzschean. Surely, Skinner would say, the political ideas might have been abandoned, but the changes would be permanent, and would have perhaps even been turned on their leaders with the same force they had been aimed at the Jews. There was none of this, no sign of the new Nzi personality in the remainder of post-war Germany.

And the Russian people had twenty-six years of Stalin, and 73 years of various systems called Communism, yet their Skinnerian treatment did not even wean them from that most mindless of Christianities, Russian Orthodoxy. (Others are more stupid, more insane, but I have yet to read anything of Russian Orthodoxy that even pretends a mind exists. I am still searching, so if you can show me I am wrong, please do.)

And what Skinneristic effects did three hundred years of slavery produce. Blacks were neither whipped, cowed, and willless slaves, fully accepting of the behaviours they had been taught, or the revengeful savages eager to wreak havoc on the masters who treated them that way -- the reason why so many people who hated slavery feared to end it -- even Lincoln, at first.

So, I'm sorry to say that -- maybe for horses it is different -- for people Skinnerism is not merely a horrible crime, but worse, a pathetic blunder.

[Prup (aka Jim Benton)]

help, litbritr, I did it again. (Other platforms let you know about unclosed tags. Why doesn't TP?)