Con men do sometimes win.
What is a con?
1) A con is a swindle where you try to convince someone something that is factually not true, is to be true.
2) It uses a mixture of appeals to emotions, cognitive capture (you controlling their attention and controlling the narrative), and confidence. It works by not letting the other person have time to process and think counter narratives and when they do have time to process they are FEELING such intense emotions of your making that they discount all counter narratives that you create.
Con men win so often, that Confidence Games WORK, they work by appealing to human nature and to human dreams and aspirations, but also to human fears.
If they never worked, then no one would attempt to do a confidence game.
[QUOTE]A confidence trick (synonyms include confidence game, confidence scheme, ripoff, scam and stratagem) is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their confidence, used in the classical sense of trust. Confidence tricks exploit characteristics of the human psyche such as dishonesty, honesty, vanity, compassion, credulity, irresponsibility, naïveté and greed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trick[/QUOTE]
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I have lived in a manipulative family that have tried such bullshit to their own goals at the expense of other family members.
I have also worked at a sales job where they tried to teach high pressure sales tactics (boiler plate stuff) in order to optimize the most profit they could extract from each customer.
Personally I loathe all of this shit, and when I see it, I notice almost instantly what they are trying to do, and I have a counter-response where I do not want to get pulled in. Yet I realize that all human are supsectible to this, this is because it is part of our dna, it is part of how society and social interaction function. And it is not always a bad thing.
Sometimes Confidence Tricks are used for good things as well. Asking someone to hold their horses, and just listen, and let me paint a picture is the same type of stuff you do with a confidence trick. Changing a person's mind is not necessarily a bad thing.
It is when such things are used to prey on people, that leads to a bad thing.
Hillary Clinton can very much lose. Remember these types of tactics were used in 2004 by Karl Rove, and Donald Trump is much more charismatic than George Bush was.
Then again Hillary Clinton can win in a landslide. It depends on how you respond, and how the audience, the american people judge these two people.
Note I am not calling republicans evil, nor am I calling Donald Trump evil. He may make a great president, yet his arguments of what is happening in the US with regards to crimes, and his use of data is FACTUALLY FALSE AND SOMETIMES SO FALSE it is PANTS ON FIRE FALSE, or COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY MISLEADING
It is theatre, and it is incorrect theater. Now theatre does not tell anyone who will be the best president, whose judgement is better, whose ability to do policy is better, etc.
Regardless what Donald Trump is doing with his theater in my mind is distasteful.