Tag: education

Fighting rhetoric with rhetoric

An author who appears to be in transition one way or the other (it’s hard to tell) provides a salutory lesson in how NOT to do it:

As Movement Conservatives consolidated their power in the Republican Party their appeal became more and more emotional and less and less rational. By the time of the George W. Bush administration, it no longer reflected, as one of Bush’s advisers put it, the “reality based community.” But, like any other myth, its lack of reality made it more emotionally powerful than ever. The good guys are pure and virtuous, and they are under attack: Christianity is under siege in a country that is 70 percent Christian, for example, and those who occupied the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are fighting to kill the big government that gives “subsidies” to lazy black people despite the fact that they themselves have received subsides — and one of the occupiers an outright loan. And the bad guys are really bad. Donald Trump has famously asserted that Mexican immigrants are rapists, and his attacks on black Americans are so inflammatory that the Ku Klux Klan uses them as a recruiting tool. Indeed, all Democrats are demons: Republican presidential candidates Carly Fiorina has asserted—all evidence to the contrary—that Democrats support Planned Parenthood because they want to kill babies and sell their body parts. The emotional punch of these allegations stays with supporters despite the fact they are false.

The national triumph of this Movement Conservative narrative explains the present political moment. Republican leaders who were previously focused on consolidating voting blocs now face two very real voter insurgencies. On one hand, those like Ted Cruz argue that rank-and-file voters feel betrayed because Republicans have not actually shrunk the government. Cruz promises to see that destruction through. On the other, Trump voters have absorbed the racism and sexism in his candidacy and are following it in pure rage. Cruz and Trump have a clear narrative. Republican Party leaders do not.

But, like Republican insiders, establishment Democrats have also suffered for lack of a narrative. The Movement Conservative story has made America a hostile place for minorities, women and those falling behind economically. Democratic voters are angry at leaders who have stayed largely quiet as the government has befriended Wall Street, gutted the middle class, slashed social programs, and endangered their health. While Clinton still works to line up narrow voting blocs, Sanders offers an alternative: a narrative of America that gives Democrats a national vision to counter that of Movement Conservatives.

Voters on both sides are angry, and neither cares much what the political establishment says, especially an establishment that on both sides is notably white, elitist and male—aside from Clinton’s refreshing candidacy– and clearly has no idea what life looks like for those outside its bubble. If establishment figures want to regain leadership, they should try articulating a narrative for their vision of America, a narrative that lets voters choose a direction for their country.

Until then, they are preaching to a choir that has lost its audience.

 The Rhetorical Test:

  1. Is this rhetoric, dialectic, or pseudo-dialectic?
  2. What is the most effective way to refute it? 
  3. Why is this likely to be ineffective?

Mailvox: stampeding the sheep

It’s amazing to see how the media was able to whip up a fearstorm on the basis of absolutely nothing, not even a dubious accusation.

I’m a long time lurker at your site. Today i got a panicked call from my daughter who goes to Boston University. The rumor on campus is that a dangerous group of men were planning to form a mob and rape women this evening. She wanted to know what to do to be safe. She sent me this link from facebook

I assured her that it was a hoax and that she had nothing to worry about from Roosh and company.

I thought that you might be interested to see this going around social media and that students are genuinely concerned.

This may be the most cogent argument against female suffrage ever presented. Especially considering that many, if not most, of the same young women will blithely insist that importing one million Muslim migrants can’t possibly cause any problems.

One would think these easily stampeded young women would be far more concerned about a man who has written about his own stalkerish tendencies. And remember, we have been reliably informed that “writing something that shows you’re a horrible person and then
proclaiming “it’s satire!” neither makes it satire or excuses you.”

Convergence kills

Oxford University learns the hard way that allowing SJWs free rein is an effective and efficient way for an institution to destroy itself:

Oxford University’s statue of Cecil Rhodes is to stay in place after furious donors threatened to withdraw gifts and bequests worth more than £100 million if it was taken down, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.

The governing body of Oriel College, which owns the statue, has ruled out its removal after being warned that £1.5m worth of donations have already been cancelled, and that it faces dire financial consequences if it bows to the Rhodes Must Fall student campaign.

A leaked copy of a report prepared for the governors and seen by this newspaper discloses that wealthy alumni angered by the “shame and embarrassment” brought on the 690-year-old college by its own actions have now written it out of their wills.

The college now fears a proposed £100m gift – to be left in the will of one donor – is now in jeopardy following the row.

The donors were astonished by a proposal to remove a plaque marking where Rhodes lived, and to launch a six-month consultation over whether the statue of the college’s biggest benefactor should be taken down.

But Oriel College confirmed in a statement to the Telegraph: “Following careful consideration, the College’s governing body has decided that the statue should remain in place.”

 At a meeting on Wednesday the governing body was told that because of its ambiguous position on the removal of the statue, “at least one major donation of £500,000” that was expected this year has been cancelled. In addition, a “potential £750,000 donor” has stopped responding to messages from the college, and several alumni have written to Oriel to say “they are disinheriting the college from their wills”.

One of those who has already cancelled their legacy was going to leave a “seven figure sum” and the college is aware that “another major donor is furious with the College… whose legacy could be in excess of £100m”.

The report warns that there will now “almost certainly” be “one or two redundancies” in its Development Office team because of the collapse in donations. And it has cancelled an annual fundraising drive that should have taken place in April. The report also warns that Oriel’s development office could now make an operating loss of around £200,000 this year.

As a general rule, it is a massively stupid idea for an institution to allow it’s decision-making to be influenced, let alone dictated, by the antics of the low-IQ, affirmative-action pseudo-scholars who were foolishly admitted in the name of diversity. It shouldn’t be surprising when the pseudo-scholars engage in all sorts of destructive drama; they’re not capable of succeeding at Oxford and they know it, so they find “more important” activities to serve as a mask for their academic inadequacies.

Social Justice convergence kills.

But the pseudo-scholars are right about one thing. Cecil Rhodes would have been absolutely horrified to see Africans permitted to engage in these antics at Oxford. Everyone knows that Rhodes was a racist and Anglo-Saxon supremacist, but what those who condemn him are failing to consider is this: he was a racist whose opinion of those he called “the most despicable specimens of human beings” was derived from considerably more direct experience of Africans and African culture than those who condemn him today.

Indeed, the destructive and disrespectful behavior of those African students at Oxford is intended to undermine Rhodes’s reputation, but instead it is serving to support his now-controversial opinions.

Unlike most anti-racists, I’ve worked with African students struggling to stay academically eligible at university. And based on my experience, I can say two things: a) they worked harder and put in more time studying than any of the other students on campus, and b) they absolutely should not have been there. Most of them simply weren’t smart enough to grasp the necessary concepts involved. It’s not that they were stupid, but they were at a 2-SD disadvantage to the average student there.

It is more than unfair, it is downright reprehensible to continually push these young men and women into academic situations where they simply cannot succeed. It doesn’t help them, it destroys their confidence and it undermines the success of the few who are actually capable of succeeding.

It’s exactly like giving the nerds from the high school chess club a college football scholarship, then putting them on the field to play Penn State. Sure, they can legitimately call themselves “football players”, but that’s not much consolation when they’re getting crushed by 250-pound linebackers.

Mailvox: lessons in rhetoric

MJ suggests a rhetorical device:

I thought of something while last night about the immigration crisis in Europe.  We should start calling it Vichy Germany (probably could say Vichy Europe, but I feel like Vichy Germany would have more impact for most).  Merkel is acting like Germany is a Client State to the Muslim world.  They allow an occupying invasion force to abuse their own people.  They cover up Muslim crimes and avoid arresting and/or deporting known criminals that are Muslim.  They arrest the German Resistance fighters who have risen up to fight the Muslim occupiers. Multicultism is propaganda to berate the native population into submission to the occupying force.

I don’t know what the occupier-to-populace ratio was in Vichy France, but it seems like it probably is similar to the Muslim-to-German ratio in Germany right now.  Anyways, I thought of this last night and thought that you would probably be able to use it as a rhetorical device.

Unfortunately, “Vichy Germany” is not going to work rhetorically for the following reasons:

  1. It is fundamentally dialectic in nature. Anything that has to be explained is more likely to be rhetorically impotent. How many Americans or English adults even know what “Vichy” means?
  2. It doesn’t flow. That’s always important.
  3. It doesn’t move the emotions. No one has any emotions about Vichy France, except perhaps
    the French.

Now, if the Front National began referring to the two mainstream French parties
that have banded together to stop it as “L’Alliance Vichy”, that would be effective rhetoric. But it’s not going to work in the
Anglosphere because the concept of Vichy is only really applicable to the French.

Contrast with “Vichy Germany” the rhetorical device of “Invader-American”. This is effective due to the following reasons:

  1. It flows.
  2. It directly targets the hyphenated identity of the various New Americans: Chinese-Americans, African-Americans, Indian-Americans, and so forth.
  3. It works directly upon the emotions. Immigrants get very upset at being called invaders, even though that is what they are. The term also links the children of the invaders to the invasion, depriving them of the ability to wrap themselves in an American sheepskin simply because they were born inside its borders. There is a reason Nimrata Randhawa Haley prefers to be called “Nikki”; it allows her to pass for something she observably is not.

And, of course, the term is quite literally true. Remember, the best rhetoric has a sound foundation in the truth. The children of those who invaded America are Invader-Americans and as such, they are distinct from native Americans… as well as Native Americans.

Ann Coulter is an expert rhetorician. It would behoove her to adopt the Invader-American term, as it would be extremely effective for her. Notice how she managed to trigger the cuckservatives of the GOP establishment with a single tweet.

    Trump should deport Nikki Haley.
    — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 13, 2016

    Nikki Haley: “No one who is willing to work hard should ever be turned away.” That’s the definition of open borders.
    — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 13, 2016

    Nikki Haley says “welcoming properly vetted legal immigrants, regardless of religion.” Translation: let in all the Muslims.
    — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 13, 2016

    Haley: Let in unlimited immigrants “just like we have for centuries.” Has she read a history book? Coolidge shut it down for 1/2 a century.
    — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 13, 2016

    Nikki Haley: “The best thing we can do is turn down the volume” Translation: Voters need to shut the hell up.
    — Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) January 13, 2016

Grow up or get out!

A Christian university president’s message to SJWs:

This past week, I actually had a student come forward after a
university chapel service and complain because he felt “victimized” by a
sermon on the topic of 1 Corinthians 13. It appears that this young
scholar felt offended because a homily on love made him feel bad for not
showing love. In his mind, the speaker was wrong for making him, and
his peers, feel uncomfortable.

I’m not making this up. Our culture has actually taught our kids to
be this self-absorbed and narcissistic. Any time their feelings are
hurt, they are the victims. Anyone who dares challenge them and, thus,
makes them “feel bad” about themselves, is a “hater,” a “bigot,” an
“oppressor,” and a “victimizer.”

I have a message for this young man and all others who care to
listen. That feeling of discomfort you have after listening to a sermon
is called a conscience. An altar call is supposed to make you feel bad.
It is supposed to make you feel guilty. The goal of many a good sermon
is to get you to confess your sins—not coddle you in your selfishness.
The primary objective of the Church and the Christian faith is your
confession, not your self-actualization.

So here’s my advice:

If you want the chaplain to tell you you’re a victim rather than tell
you that you need virtue, this may not be the university you’re looking
for. If you want to complain about a sermon that makes you feel less
than loving for not showing love, this might be the wrong place.

If you’re more interested in playing the “hater” card than you are in
confessing your own hate; if you want to arrogantly lecture, rather
than humbly learn; if you don’t want to feel guilt in your soul when you
are guilty of sin; if you want to be enabled rather than confronted,
there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere)
that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t
one of them.

You will notice that unlike Missouri president Tim Wolfe, who resigned in the face of SJW pressure, Mr. Piper will be keeping his job. About the only thing that could possibly have been better is if he announced that he had expelled the SJW student who complained. And talk about sticking the rhetorical landing!

“This is not a day care. This is a university!”

As the brand name universities succumb to social justice convergence, the Christian universities will rise in both educational value and social cachet. Which is why they need to set policies in place to defeat SJW entryism now. 

Let the witches burn

Milo asks if the Right should try to save the universities from the rampaging SJWs:

Students of history will notice an alarming similarity in the video above to the “struggle sessions” of Maoist China, a form of public shaming in which perceived enemies of the Party would be surrounded in a public place by Red Guards, Mao’s most zealous supporters. The Red Guards would hurl abuse at their target until they confessed to their crimes.

Uninformed critics might argue that the Red Guards were a weapon of the Communist state, and not a genuine grassroots movement, but they’d be wrong: the Red Guards started out as a student movement, on Chinese campuses. Afraid yet?

College staff finally are. Earlier this year, Vox published an essay from a liberal professor who confessed that the zealotry of his own students frightened him. Earlier this month, Salon published an article from a black feminist film studies lecturer, describing her “disastrous” attempt to accommodate her students’ strangely aggressive emotional fragility. It seems the left, and especially the academic left, has finally woken up to the Frankenstein’s monster that they’ve constructed.

You’ll forgive me if I lack sympathy. Conservatives have warned for decades that the proliferation of women’s studies, colonial studies, gay studies, and an assortment of other oppression-studies courses would end in tears. We also warned you that campus speech codes were a bad idea.

And when conservatives and critics of Islam started being banned on campuses up and down the country, we warned you that a tidal wave of zealotry, intolerance, and even totalitarianism was coming. Now it’s here. As a famous internet meme goes, you only had to listen. Now it’s too late.

No, we should not be saving them. We need to build alternative institutions and keep the SJWs out. One infected and infested, the only solution is to burn it to the ground. If they want to start the cleansing fires, let them.

The future of Vibrant America

We were told that Diversity and Vibrancy make America stronger. The truth is that they have made America literally stupid, ignorant, illiterate, and innumerate:

In the Detroit public school district, 96 percent of eighth graders are not proficient in mathematics and 93 percent are not proficient in reading. That is according to the results of the 2015 National Assessment of Educational Progress tests published by the Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics.

Only 4 percent of Detroit public school eighth graders are proficient or better in math and only 7 percent in reading. This is despite the fact that in the 2011-2012 school year—the latest for which the Department of Education has reported the financial data—the Detroit public schools had “total expenditures” of $18,361 per student and “current expenditures” of $13,330 per student.

According to data published by the Detroit Public Schools, the school district’s operating expenses in the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2014 amounted to approximately $14,743 per student.

Nationwide, only 33 percent of public-school eighth graders scored proficient or better in reading in 2015 and only 32 percent scored proficient or better in mathematics.

This isn’t public schools. This isn’t bureaucratic inefficiency. It isn’t Common Core or whatever the latest school fad is. It is the direct result of shortening time preferences and lowering the average IQ by 15 points.

And there isn’t a theory or a social policy in the world that can fix that. There is one answer and one answer only, an answer that every immigrant implicitly knows and nearly every American is afraid to admit, even to himself.

This is not a theoretical matter

MD emails to tell of SJWs getting a friend coming under media assault for a Halloween costume:

SJWAL hit close to home today as a family friend was FIRED from his teaching position after posting a picture at a party in a harmless Kanye get-up. His wife being a ‘Kim with a bootay’ tag-a-long.

All hell broke loose when the pic was posted and he quickly lost his job and issued sort of an apology. From your material I believe this was still a wrong move.

Now, the media leads with the title of “Teacher apologizes for wearing blackface” instead of “Teacher fired for dressing as Kanye”

You’ve taught me to see through the rhetoric and never give them a tiny opportunity to redirect the narrative. He was apparently an amazing teacher and benefactor to all his students, who were mostly inner city. It’s blown to huge proportion now and experts are stating that he shouldn’t have been fired but “re-educated” on the issue of blackface.

What would be your tactics in handling this situation now that he’s dug himself into a little larger hole? Amazing to see your book come to life.

I don’t know if it is true that the teacher lost his job – that seems unlikely given the teachers unions have made it all but impossible to actually fire a teacher for anything short of serial killing students – but the apology was absolutely the wrong move.

As I explained in SJWAL, the apology has been taken for a confession and is now being used to prosecute and further humiliate him. The correct thing to do would have been to inform the school that Halloween costumes often involve dressing up like celebrities and it would be racist to refuse to dress up like a black man. Then he should have arranged to have a picture taken in the classroom, dressed up like Kanye West and surrounded by his smiling black students.

Remember, always fight rhetoric with rhetoric. An apology is a form of dialectic, and we all know that the only thing replying to rhetoric with dialectic produces is more rhetoric.

Remember: never apologize.

And don’t even think about resorting to the stupid “I have never seen color in my life” bullshit that features in the guy’s craven, futile, “please don’t hit me” apology. If you’re not completely retarded, you see “color”. Even the literally color-blind see color in this regard. All that sort of statement amounts to is publicly declaring that you are not only a brainwashed coward, but there are five lights too.

As far as what he should do now, all I can say is: stop digging. Stop apologizing. Stop cringing and cowering. He chose his course out of fear and it has already metastasized in the media. Now he has to let the chosen scenario play out. If nothing else, he will serve as yet another cautionary tale demonstrating the foolishness of apologizing to SJWs.

The irrelevance of college

TK observes that a university education is simply not relevant for an increasing number of jobs today:

I just spent some time with one of my oldest friends who did electronic maintenance in the army and afterwards designed PCBs. For the past 12 years he’s been driving a cab in San Diego and loving it.

Since since uber, et al., came to town, however, they have destroyed his ability to make a living wage as a cab driver (most uber drivers drive part-time, for drug and beer money (more true than not) and with a zero barrier to entry there are too many cars on the road now. Yay free market – I mean it. I think it’s great!). So he decided to get back into PCB design.

He spent the last six months updating his skills 100% online. In just the past month he contacted a recruiting agency and began setting up interviews. The other day while I was visiting him, from just his second interview, he was offered a job for $32/hr! After he passes his first certification in February he will get a significant bump in pay and when he passes his second certification in October his salary should move into the low six figures.

He is 54 and has been out of the field for 12 years and has NO college degree!

Yet he was able to bring himself back up to speed in less than 6 months using just the internet. His employers didn’t even care that his only formal training was in the army – 30 years ago!

You can always tell the difference between a job that requires real work and a pseudo-job that doesn’t. If they give a damn about university credentials, it’s the latter.

Diversity: the only credential

As a Native American, naturally I support this exciting new development in Social Justice Convergence:

Cornell University is looking for a tenure track assistant professor whose only qualification is diversity; actual field of study is irrelevant. The job listing says that the candidate can apply for “some area of the humanities or qualitative social sciences.” Might that area be French literature? Or field methods for anthropology? Who cares! Such nit-picking disciplinary distinctions harken back to a bygone era when universities thought of themselves as the guardians of knowledge.

Today, when they are focused overwhelmingly on the expansion of identity politics, the most important academic qualification is the claim of victimhood. And in Cornell’s case, victimhood is now the only academic qualification required. The Cornell listing goes on to explain: “We are especially interested in considering applications from members of underrepresented groups, those who have faced economic hardship, are first-generation college graduates, or work on topics related to these issues.”

It no longer matters what you’ve done or what you can do, what matters is what you are.