How to Effectively Argue, Part 8

 This is the final article in an eight part series that is intended to help our readership understand and engage in modern logic and debate techniques

Still relying on logic and reason to make your points, enhance your debates, and for letters to the editor? The Moose droppings would like to introduce you to Saul Alinsky’s 12 Rules for Radicals. The last three are:

* RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog. (Unions used this tactic. Peaceful [albeit loud] demonstrations during the heyday of unions in the early to mid 20th Century incurred management’s wrath, often in the form of violence that eventually brought public sympathy to their side.) 

* RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem. (Old saw: If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Activist organizations have an agenda, and their strategy is to hold a place at the table, to be given a forum to wield their power. So, they have to have a compromise solution.) 

* RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

The Moose Droppings hopes that this series has been helpful, and will entice our readers to take the time to write nonsensical, illogical and emotional charged tirades and rants to the various newspapers around the county, just like the pros do now.