http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/11/oh_no_barack_obamas_hypnotizing_us_all_t.phpRemember the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)?
It's been a long time since I've written much about the AAPS, of course, but refreshing your memory will be easy. It's the ultra-libertarian wingnut medical "association" that routinely scrapes the bottom of the barrel, as far as pseudoscience goes, as long as that pseudoscience fits in with their schizophrenic combination of Ayn Randian "superman" libertarianism mixed with a toxic brew of anti-immigration, antivaccinationism, HIV/AIDS denialism, and social conservatism that leads them to lie about the evidence to argue that abortions cause breast cancer or promote the particularly despicable lie that shaken baby syndrome is in reality "vaccine injury." Worse, the AAPS maintains a dubious medical "journal" that claims to be "peer-reviewed," namely the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS), which it uses to give its crankery a veneer of respectability that sometimes fools more credulous reporters.
I had often wondered if the AAPS could sink any lower into out right crankery, and, if so, how. Then, amazingly enough, the weekend before what is arguably the most important Presidential election in my lifetime, I find that the AAPS can indeed go lower. Indeed, it's backed some of the most amazing assertions of woo that I've ever seen, and I have to discuss them today, because it's the day before the election. Why?
Because, if you believe the AAPS, Barack Obama's using his mad skills to hypnotize the American electorate to do his bidding, all to further his own nefarious, socialist, terrorist, redistributionist ends!
snip
Of course, to the wingnuts at the AAPS, it's far more than Obama just being an excellent orator. Oh, no. That alone wouldn't be enough to explain his popularity, not to the AAPS. No, Obama must be putting his audiences into a trance:
Techniques of trance induction include extra slow speech, rhythm, tonalities, vagueness, visual imagery, metaphor, and raising of emotion. Hypnotists often have patients count. In a speech after the primaries closed, Obama said: "Sixteen months have passed (paused)...Thousands (pause) of miles...(pause)...Millions of voices...."
Hypnotists call this a distraction technique: sending the dominant hemisphere on an assignment involving linguistic processes, thus opening the nondominant hemisphere to suggestion.
Hand gestures can be used as hypnotic anchors, or to aid in hypnotic command implantation. They can be difficult to distinguish from innocent gestures used for emphasis. Obama, however, uses some gestures extraordinarily often and for very specific words such as "believe" and "chose." His characteristic thumb-and-forefinger gesture looks like a hand holding a pencil--as if you were in a voting booth. The gesture of pointing sends the subconscious message that a person in authority is giving a command.
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