Saturday - February 28, 2015
Interesting Man to Watch
Meet Mr. Van Jones, formerly of the Obama Admin.
I haven’t been paying much attention to him, assuming that he was playing some “advisory” roles around DC while fattening his bank account. Not bad work for a man often described as a Marxist or Communist, never anything as mild as Socialist.
I always pay attention to how people express themselves and communicate. Forty years ago, I wrote a lot of advertising copy and my bosses were usually happy with the results. After you figure out a few things to get people’s emotional reactions to shade their logic, it’s very easy to be persuasive. It also means I’m very proud of the quality of my Bull Shit Detector. I know when someone is playing sleight-of-hand with their arguments because I was better than most. Incidentally, I left advertising as a career in the early 80’s to find more honest work. When I couldn’t decide if I was a pimp or a whore, I got out of the business.
Van Jones wrote an Op Ed piece on Net Neutrality for CNN. Read it in careful detail.
When I first read it, I was impressed on how nicely, almost spiritually, he wrote the piece, but something nagged me, so I read it again to confirm exactly how several of his statements supported (or didn’t) each other. It’s an exquisite construct of emotionally based lies. Mr. Jones is much more subtle than Obama.
Read and analyze carefully, Van Jones is an absolute master of manipulative prose. It’s not a long piece. It will take you longer to realize how he makes you feel his ideas are wonderful than it will to read it.