check your assumptions

* yesterday i wrote "kathleen reardon is a negotiation expert (and taught me everything i know)" - that was slightly hyperbolic (which she pointed out in an email to me - (i havent heard from her for over a decade)) - but her work really is exemplary. all that stuff about lakoff and framing and whatnot? i didnt get excited about it because kathleen taught me that stuff back in the early nineties. i recommend that you familiarise yourselves with her work. her huffpo stuff is here, and i've just learnt that she has another blog here. (thankfully she didnt stumble across another comment i made about her back in oct 05 when i said "kathleen was one of my lecturers at USC - i had a teacher-crush on her")

all that stuff that we do these days trying to understand fear, and trying to understand frank luntz' playbook? kathleen taught me all this stuff a decade ago in a single semester.

a lot has been written (though not nearly enough) about the merging of journalism programs and pr programs at universities - but i dont really think that people fully appreciate the implications. a long long time ago i fell in love with dated a pr professional, and her folio was literally a compilation of press releases that she'd written, side by side with the resultant press stories - which were largely verbatim. so when judyjudy started printing her nonsense, i kinda already knew from whence it came. there's that saying that we ought shield our eyes from the production of sausages and politics - media is just as bad (as everyone now realizes)

kathleen's body of work (inadvertently) demonstrates exactly how the propaganda is rolled out. like everything else the egadministration touches, they've appropriated forces of good (tools for negotiation) for their own evil purposes.

with respect to kathleen, i suspect that she's being a little too credulous when she asks:

"Why would Rice take an anti-negotiation stance? Is she incapable?"

i think the answer is that the public claims are different to the private motivations. i wish that we were at a point where this could be aired in public - but we arent, even after all the damage and lies of the bush 43 presidency.

as kathleen drummed into me - "check your assumptions"