Tag: media

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

That went well

Talk about going well beyond the call of duty:

Five Stars

Awesome book! Nail, meet the HAMMER! Great interview as well on my national show, The Financial Safari!

Coach Pete

I did an interview last night on The Financial Safari; I understand it will be broadcast in a few weeks. I thought it went rather well, but apparently it went even better than I’d thought.

Anyhow, it was very gracious of him to post a review and I’ll provide a link to the interview here when it runs.

Reverify Milo!

This aggression shall not stand! Sign the petition and help right this social media injustice!

On Friday 8 January 2016, Twitter unverified the account of Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos, effectively declaring war on libertarian and millennial voices by punishing the outspoken commentator for his views. This comes despite CEO Jack Dorsey declaring that Twitter “stands for freedom of expression” just a few months ago.

The Obama Administration should issue a strong statement of support for freedom of speech. Give Milo back his badge! #JeSuisMilo

Seriously, how funny would it be to see the Obama administration lobbying Twitter to reverify Milo.

Another coverup in Sweden

A mass sexual assault by immigrants similar to the one in Cologne took place in Stockholm at a concert this summer, but it was covered up by the Swedish police and media:

The Cologne sex assault on New Year’s Eve, where groups of Arab and North African men groped more than a hundred German women, has shocked Europe this last week. But a very similar incident, with a large number of perpetrators and victims, took place in the Swedish capital last summer. That incident however was silenced by large Swedish newspapers and media companies, despite repeated attempts from police officers to contact journalists. This is how leading Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter tried to cover up a politically inconvenient sex assault story.

Nyheter Idag is now able to disclose in detail how major Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter deliberately covered up stories about widespread sexual abuse in central Stockholm in connection with a concert in the Kungsträdgården public square this August. “The mere suspicion that the abuse has been considered as difficult to describe involves a betrayal of the victims”,the newspaper writes about the event, almost six months later.

On Saturday August 15th, the nationally acclaimed and outspoken feminist artist Zara Larsson headlined the youth festival ‘We Are Sthlm” with a crowded concert in Kungsträdgården in central Stockholm. Thousands of young people were in attendance to take part in the event during the last summer nights of the year.

But for an unknown number of young girls the festival soon became a nightmare. Hordes of young men pressed against young girls, fondled and tried to cop a feel over and under skirts, pants and shirts. There were severe sexual assaults happening right in front of the stage, where artists such as Larsson and rapper OIAM performed.

During a single night police and security guards had to intervene against around 90 younger males, but even adult men took part in the abuse, says an eye witness to Nyheter Idag. The eye witness has professional experience from working at the Stockholm Police Department as a psychologist.

The police officer tried to contact Dagens Nyheter several times: “They never called again”

The psychologist who knew of what had happened in Kungsträdgården contacted journalist Hanne Kjöller at Dagens Nyheter, by, among other things, e-mail on August 17. The psychologist says he specifically turned to Kjöller because he knew that she had previously written about controversial topics.

“She was very interested and listened until I told her that all the boys and men that were apprehended were young asylants (unaccompanied is the terminology used by Swedish authorities) from Afghanistan and Syria. I sensed that she changed the tone (of her voice).

This is a good example of why you cannot believe ANYTHING that the mainstream media is reporting out of Europe, whether it is about Merkel’s continued “popularity” or the way in which the populations are reacting to the government-enabled invasions of third-world savages.

The European media is only reporting what it cannot cover up. For example, there is massive resistance to the immivasion across Western Europe, far more than in the USA, as thousands of refugee centers were burned or otherwise attacked across the continent in 2015, but the only images that are shown on the media are idiotic virtue-signalers holding welcome signs.

The civil war is already being fought, it simply hasn’t turned violent yet. Once the police turn on the governments, or the government uses lethal violence on an anti-invasion activist, or a politician is assassinated, the situation is going to change very rapidly. For better or for worse, I do not know, but to describe the situation as “unstable” would be putting it mildly. The original Saxon has begun to hate, he simply has not yet begun to act.

As for the Scandinavians, I cannot say, but as I mentioned before, the Vikings would be spinning in their graves at the cowardly acquiescence of their descendants if they had any.

Allow me to revise my prediction of a few years ago. In light of the scale of the sexual assaults on young European women in England, Sweden, and Germany, it is apparent that Anders Breivik will not be regarded as a Norwegian hero in the future, but as a European hero.

“The more of this that people in authority over there do, the more this
will end in tears. You can’t last long as an elite at war with your own
people.  At some point people have had enough and it becomes “Aristo,
aristo a la lanterne.””
– Sarah Hoyt

The art of punditry

Ross Douthat doubles down. He may have been wrong about Trump before, but he’s still entirely confident that Trump can’t win the nomination:

I certainly overestimated poor Jeb Bush, whom I wrongly predicted would profit from Trump’s rise. But for the rest — no, I had a pretty low opinion of the right-wing entertainment complex to begin with, and I’m not remotely surprised that the white working class would rally to a candidate running on populist and nationalist themes.

I am very surprised, though, that Trump himself would have the political savvy, the (relative) discipline and yes, the stamina required to exploit that opening and become that populist. And for that failure of imagination, I humbly repent.

Of course I’m not completely humbled. Indeed, I’m still proud enough to continue predicting, in defiance of national polling, that there’s still no way that Trump will actually be the 2016 Republican nominee.

Trust me: I’m a pundit.

That’s the true art of punditry. Never changing your mind, even while you are admitting that you’re wrong.

No wonder I couldn’t hack it. Meanwhile, Reihan Salam explains what Douthat missed, and is missing, at NRO:

“[Trump’s] emergence as the voice of the anti-immigration Right is a reflection of the failure of the Republican establishment to grapple with lawlessness at the border and half a century of mass immigration. Consider the events of the past two years. Child migrants have surged into the United States from Central America, and working-class cities and towns across the country are struggling to absorb them. Before the federal courts stepped in, President Obama signed an executive order shielding roughly half of all unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. from the threat of deportation, a move he had previously suggested was out of bounds. And now the U.S. is experiencing yet another wave of Central American arrivals. Border Patrol officials report that many unauthorized immigrants believe that the U.S. is going to welcome them with open arms, and who can blame them given the president’s rhetoric?

Interesting to see that even the heart of cuckservatism is beginning to sense that all is not right with open borders.

Are you ready for 2016?

The Rabid Puppies are stirring in their kennels beneath the Dark Tower, straining at the chains that bind them. The Vile Faceless Minions are being starved, the better to whet their appetites. The Dread Ilk are gearing up and sharpening their blades. The Ilk are oiling their guns and adding to their ammo stores.

And we’re not alone. Because in 2016, an all-out war on social justice has been declared.

In 2016, battle lines will be drawn. On one side, people of all colours, genders and orientations are rallying around the flag of freedom of speech. On the other, a nasty set of authoritarians are rallying around a flag that identifies as a flag only on Mondays, uses they/them pronouns and will try to get you fired or expelled from school if you forget it.

Let me explain. In 2015, I saw the seeds of a movement begin to sprout. Across the internet, and even in fear-gripped halls on campuses, young people began to stand up and challenge the humourless, divisive, identity-obsessed elites that have taken over our cultural discourse. People of seemingly disparate interests and politics — gamers, pundits, metalheads, comic book and science fiction fans, atheists, Catholics, conservatives, libertarians and even many disaffected liberals — came together to agree on only one thing: art and culture should be left alone….

Had progressives wanted to stem the tide
of cultural libertarianism, the time to do it was a year ago. They could
have edged back, been reasonable and won us all over. But instead they
doubled down. Fine: now they get to lose. Let’s defend culture and free
expression and push these odious halfwits back into their dreary studio
apartments filled with cat-piss and alt rock-records and let them know
that we’ve decided to opt out of the soft bigotry of San Francisco-style
hand-wringing nonsense. We possess a working sense of humour and we’re
going to use it — whether they like it or not.
 

If you take their crybully pronouncements at face value, social justice warriors believe,
with all the fervor of a paranoiac, that they are helpless, fragile
things, buffeted by sinister structural forces they are powerless to
resist. They believe that their opponents possess power that, if used
ruthlessly enough, could eradicate them. What do you say we prove them
right?

Who needs seminary?

I know when I’ve got a question concerning some of the trickier aspects of Tertullian or the Summa Theologica, the first person I always turn to is a journalist:

Every journalist in America has been secretly attending seminary, and now understands Christianity better than most Christians do. This is the only conclusion I can draw after months of theology lectures from reporters whose most recent encounter with religious terminology was Hozier’s “Take Me to Church.”

To those of us for whom church isn’t a metaphor for sex, it’s been a frustrating few months. First, the chattering class endlessly assured Christian bakers, restaurant-owners, photographers, and florists that Jesus would be totally down with making same-sex nuptials fabulous (and presumably, with paying the $135,000 fine for those who felt differently).

Then, in the wake of June’s gay “marriage” decision at the Supreme Court, we got an earful about how mean and un-Christian it would be not to attend same-sex “weddings.” (Wouldn’t you know it, we’ve been reading the Bible wrong all these centuries!) Then the Kim-pocalypse struck, and we were treated to smug editorials on how the Kentucky clerk’s faith represents the dark side of Christianity, while those who ignore tertiary topics like—say—God’s design for human sexuality in favor of social justice issues, are the good Christians. (I once was blind, but now I see!)

Sci-fi writers are nearly as bad. The one thing – the ONE thing – they know about Christian theology is John 8:1-10. Of course, apparently they never proceed to verse 11, which states: “go forth and sin no more.”

Trump, the proto-Destructor

A great column by Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

Enter Donald Trump. People who are unhappy with the things Trump is saying need to understand that he’s only getting so much traction because he’s filling a void. If the responsible people would talk about these issues, and take action, Trump wouldn’t take up so much space.

And there’s a lesson for our ruling class there: Calling Trump a fascist is a bit much (fascism, as Tom Wolfe once reported, is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe), but movements like fascism and communism get their start because the mechanisms of liberal democracy seem weak and ineffectual and dishonest. If you don’t want Trump — or, perhaps, some post-Trump figure who really is a fascist — to dominate things, you need to stop being weak and ineffectual and dishonest.

Right now, after years of Obama hope-and-change, a majority of Americans (56%) think Islam is incompatible with American values. That’s true even for 43% of Democrats.

In that sort of environment, where people feel unsafe and where the powers-that-be seem to be, well, weak and ineffectual and dishonest, the appeal of someone who doesn’t seem weak and ineffectual grows stronger.

You can see this in France, where the long-marginalized “far right” National Front is now winning elections all over. It’s doing so well because the French people, after not one but two Islamist mass shootings in Paris, feel that their government is not serious about protecting them, and their way of life, from their enemies.

Likewise, it’s a bit hard to take people seriously about Trump’s threat to civil liberties when President Obama was just endorsing an unconstitutional gun ban, when his attorney general was threatening to prosecute people for anti-Muslim speech (a threat later walked back, thankfully) and when universities and political leaders around the country are making clear their belief that free speech is obsolete.

Glenn is making two very important points here.

  1.  If the ruling parties break the laws and manipulate the democratic rules to keep out the law-abiding, democratic nationalists, they will soon find themselves facing the the lawless, anti-democratic, and violent ultranationalists. They are methodically cutting down the very trees of respect and authority that protect them from the people.
  2. The ruling Left has made it clear that they have zero respect for our free speech or our unalienable rights. That means we need not respect theirs.

The mainstream media and the political establishment pretends to be frightened of Donald Trump in order to try to keep American nationalism down, but they should treat him fairly and let the chips fall where they may rather than play their games in order to defeat him. Because despite being somewhat of a bull in a china shop, Trump plays by the rules. And others are watching his example, and learning from it.

A dialogue with Scott Adams

To put it into context, I was quoting this piece by Adams to which I had already linked:

Vox Day ‏@voxday
“I would accept up to 1,000 dead Americans, over a ten-year period, to allow Muslim non-citizens to enter this country.” @ScottAdamsSays

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
What’s your number?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Mine is zero. False dilemma. Plenary power doctrine permits Muslim immigration ban. 124 years of precedent.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
The legal question can be separated.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
It can be, but it shouldn’t be. That IS the context, after all. Look, it’s a good question. Just bad answer.

emilio rodriguez ‏@emiliorrubio
Mine is also 0. Seeing as we gain NOTHING from muslim immigration. It’s no benefit for a cost.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Nothing except respect for people of different religions (freedom). Do you value that at zero?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes, because I know military history. Muslim immigration into Dar al-Harb means war. Always.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
It’s a risk assessment about saving more than lives than you kill (in the long run).

Vox Day ‏@voxday
You need to reassess. Because the correct answer is definitely and absolutely zero.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Religious intolerance has bad history. Are you sure it always ends well?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Not always, but sometimes. If there was no intolerance at Vienna, at Lepanto, and Tours, no Enlightenment.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Would you expel legal Muslim residents in the country under the same principle of safety over principle?

Vox Day ‏@voxday
Yes. And I predict that every single Western country will within three decades. Reconquesta 2.0.

Vox Day ‏@voxday
False dilemma, though. Your principle doesn’t exist legally, and it’s your principle, not mine.

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Opinion noted. See my book, The Religion War (sequel to God’s Debris). Speaks to that scenario, in fiction.

Now, if you wish to analyze this, what you’ll see is Adams engaging in pseudo-dialectic, while I am utilizing dialectic in a rhetorical manner. With its 140-character limit, Twitter is a very poor medium for complex communication, but it does have the benefit of stripping away the ability to engage easily in word games. The simplicity of the medium makes communication cruder, but more direct.

Adams is not an SJW, but here he argues in a similar manner, simply moving the goalposts each time his point is successfully dealt with. However, Adams is an intellectual in the true sense; he likes to play with ideas so one should never assume that what he is saying is necessarily what he genuinely believes.

Adams knows the choice he puts forth is a false dilemma; it is based on a false foundation of the United States being a polity that enforces complete religious freedom. This is nonsense, as the transmutation of “Congress shall make no law” into “a moment of silence in public schools is outlawed” suffices to demonstrate. And Muslims are already banned from immigrating as “people who practice polygamy” as per the 1891 statute.

That’s why Scott wants to leave the legal aspects out, because they also render his dilemma moot. He tries risk assessment, but that’s even worse ground for him both rhetorically and dialectically due to the 1,300-year history of Muslim violence. So he tries to go to the abstract, but as numerous people on Twitter pointed out, “respect” is not synonymous with “granting permanent residence rights and citizenship”.

In the end, he’s forced to argue from incredulity concerning an proposition that no one has even made yet, but even there, he’s on shaky ground because most Americans would happily repatriate every Muslim in America tomorrow. While he does do a good job maintaining frame, the problem with doing so as your argument keeps shifting is that you eventually wind up looking like one of those whom Aristotle described as being unable to learn from information.