Tag: rhetoric

It’s the BECAUSE That Gets You

Stop explaining yourself.

I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t want to look like a moron on a regular basis, if you don’t want to force others to have to conclude you are stupid, for the love of all that is Good and Beautiful and True, stop explaining yourself, your reasons, your decisions, and your actions.

Seriously, just stop. Consider the word “because” a period. Stop right there. When you hear yourself saying it, let it be your signal to end the sentence right there.

First, nobody cares. If they want to know your reasons, they will ask you for them. And be aware that if they are asking for them, there is a very good chance they are looking to argue with you, dispute your position, or at least convince you to change your mind.

Second, you’re probably wrong, either in your logic or in your assumptions. Perhaps in a small way, perhaps in a big way, or perhaps you’re not even wrong but there is enough ambiguous room for a pedantic person to intentionally object.

Third, you have a right to your opinion, whatever it might be. You don’t have the right to tell people to accept incorrect facts, incorrect logic, or general incoherency.

Fourth, when you offer an explanation, you are essentially inviting an argument whether you realize it or not.

So just speak your mind. Don’t justify your opinion, because if you’re like most people, you can’t do so in a competent manner capable of surviving an intelligent critique. You have your right to your opinion, however insane or stupid or justified it might be, so simply rest content with that.

Here’s how people know that you’re part of the greater retardery in which we are engulfed. When you explain yourself, and then your explanation is conclusively demonstrated to be substantively false in some way, you do not change your position. This informs your interlocutor that there is nothing inside and there is no point in attempting to engage with you on the dialectical level.

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The Failure of Holocaustianity

As I pointed out in a public debate with Louise Mensch in 2018, the Holocaust, such as it is, is over. In 2025, it is as emotionally relevant to the average individual on the planet as the Boxer Rebellion, the Sacking of Carthage, and the Battle of Manzikart, which is to say, no one alive today actually cares about it in the least. Surviving Boomers aside, it’s now a dead rhetorical letter.

Which, of course, is why those who are still trying to play that card are discovering, much to their surprise, the various ways doing so tends to backfire on them.

  • Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz laments to Jewish Federation that people are finding content from “Al Jazeera and Nick Fuentes” on social media and seeing videos of “the carnage in Gaza.” Holocaust education has backfired in part as people see Palestinians as Jews’ victims, she adds. “They think the lesson of the Holocaust is…you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.” The lesson they were supposed to get is that it gives Israel the right to commit genocide in perpetuity.
  • The Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles on Saturday took down an Instagram post that said, “‘Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.” The Jewish group lamented that the post was misinterpreted by some as a “political statement” reflecting the “ongoing situation” in “the Middle East” but “that was not our intent.”

The Gazacaust appears to have been a serious blunder by the Netanyahu regime, although it may simply be the same logic that applies to the current anti-semitism push and the anti-Iran campaigns by AIPAC, which is that time is running out on both a) Zionist influence and b) the power over which that influence is held, so however suboptimal the strategy might be, they’ve got to make use of that power before it ceases to be useful.

Either way, the Holocaust dies with the Boomers, and although a few people have been jailed or otherwise punished for their failure to believe that exactly six million people of a very specific ethnicity were killed by eagles, bears, medical experiments, and flaming roller coasters of death during a four-year period in the 1940s, no amount of propaganda and rhetorical appeals are going to convince anyone that being a fourth- or fifth-generation descendent of a survivor of those heinous historical acts grants one a lifetime license to subject other people to ethnic cleansing and genocide just because one’s great-great-grandfather’s relatives were subjected to it.

And for those who claim that it does, perhaps it would be well to keep in mind that we American Indians would obviously possess a much better claim on any such license than the descendants of survivors of much smaller, much shorter, much less comprehensive genocides.

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Nuclear Rhetoric

The man who lived by the meme is now dying by it.

It certainly cannot be argued that either the first or the second Trump administration has even begun to make the USA America again, much less make America great again.

This doesn’t mean it was wrong, stupid, or foolish to have had hope. It just means that most men fail in the end, regardless of what their intentions might have been.

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Vox’s Razor

The wider the variety of arguments against a specific assertion, the more likely the assertion is to be false.

When something is false, there are always going to be multiple angles and perspectives from which the falsehood can be perceived and exposed. So, a false claim is always going to have more observable flaws than a true claim, and many of the arguments against it, however weak or relatively unconvincing they may be, will be correct.

Compare the vast panoply of arguments against evolution to the relatively narrow range of arguments against the existence of God. While I personally don’t find some of the Intelligent Design arguments against the theory of evolution by natural selection to be particularly convincing, they are logical and they are also, in the end, absolutely correct. I happen to find appeals to conclusive mathematical analyses considerably more convincing myself, but it’s important to keep in mind that these various arguments are all ultimately correct because they point to the truth: what could not happen did not happen.

Now consider the various arguments against the existence of God. They are not only inconclusive, but they all amount to different flavors of the same argument: the appeal to personal ignorance and incredulity. The few attempts to utilize reason and logic are feeble and false even when they are not provably dishonest. See: Euthypro.

Anyhow, I think it’s possible that my philosophical Razor may be a more reliable heuristic than that of William of Ockham, which relies upon parsimony, and, in common use, is usually misapplied to competing hypotheses with varying explanatory power.

When presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions.

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Now They Care

The Hollywood stars who have supported and celebrated deplatformings, debankings, and crackdowns on “hate speech” are now worried about the pendulum swinging back on them. Which, of course, it is, because that is the nature of pendulums.

Hollywood celebrities have rushed to defend Jimmy Kimmel after he was ‘indefinitely’ taken off the air because of comments about Charlie Kirk’s murder.

ABC will not be airing Jimmy Kimmel Live! ‘for the foreseeable future,’ a spokesperson announced on Wednesday.

Stars have pushed back against the decision to take Kimmel off air, with Jamie Lee Curtis, Ben Stiller, Henry Winkler and Alison Brie joining the ranks in opposition.

Ben Stiller jumped over to X to repost the news of ABC taking Kimmel off air and typed out, ‘This isn’t right.’

Singer John Legend shared a post by David Frum which read: ‘How dare you call us fascists just because our appointees threaten government retaliation against broadcast networks if their comedians don’t say what we want them to say.’

Frozen actor Josh Gad said: ‘I see we are at the passive participation of authoritarianism now. God help us all.’

Community actor Alison Brie shared a news alert on Instagram: ‘This is unreal. And very scary.’

Henry Winkler wrote on X: ‘@jimmykimmel his humor, his insights are important to keep showing us who we are . AND he is a most wonderful fellow’ [sic]

Jamie Lee Curtis, 66 — who recently made a tearful statement about Kirk — reposted a photo of Kimmel to her Instagram Story with a quote attributed to the comedian that read: ‘I don’t think anybody should be canceled. I really don’t.’

And yet, they didn’t shed any tears when Owen Benjamin was banished from Hollywood over a single tweet about trans kids.

We’re seeing a lot of “I thought the Right was against cancel culture” online these days. And that’s right, we were. But that didn’t cause the Left, or Clown World, to drop it. It’s a sword that can cut more than one way, and those who lived by it for the last ten years are now at risk from dying by it.

Anyone who tries to cancel anyone for “hate speech” or “sexism” or “racism” or “antisemitism” are themselves worthy of cancellation and banishment from civilized society. They didn’t respect the free speech of others, so they have lost their own claims to it.

UPDATE: The Dark Herald knows why Kimmel was put on ice for the moment. It’s actually an attempt to save him by “suspending” him rather than firing him and cancelling his show.

In case you are wondering about Mickey the Great and Terrible suspending Jimmy Kimmel, this is an attempt to get out ahead of a bunch of negative stories about Disney employees reacting to Charlie Kirk’s death. They should start landing soon.

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The Talk was Necessary

ESR observes that John Derbyshire, who was canceled for pointing out the undeniable, was right all along.

15 years ago, John Derbyshire was canceled for writing an essay titled “The Talk: Nonblack Version”, framed as safety advice for his mixed-race children. In it, he said a number of things about dealing with the presence of Blacks in American society that I think are true, a few things that I think are probably false or exaggerated, and one which has stood out in my mind because I didn’t have the evidentiary basis to have any idea whether it’s true or not.

I’ll quote his point 9 in full:

“A small cohort of blacks—in my experience, around five percent—is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us. A much larger cohort of blacks—around half—will go along passively if the five percent take leadership in some event. They will do this out of racial solidarity, the natural willingness of most human beings to be led, and a vague feeling that whites have it coming.”

Now consider “I got that white girl” and the fact that the first public statements of the Black mayor of the city where the murder took place oozed sympathy for the poor mentally ill murderer while not even naming the victim. I think we can safely describe the murderer as ferociously hostile. And the mayor as part of Derbyshire’s 50% subset that willingly enables such hostility. What I’ve wondered about ever since “The Talk” is the size of the “ferociously hostile” cohort.

On general principles I was sure it’s non-zero, because if you go far enough down the left tail of any normal distribution you can find arbitrary levels of craziness; but I had no way of knowing if I can trust Derbyshire’s 5% estimate, and I still don’t know what the size of the “ferociously hostile” cohort is. I do think it’s time to abandon the taboo in polite society on recognizing that it exists, and needs to be contained with violent and punitive measures. It won’t do anymore to bandy excuses like “mentally ill” or “oppressed”. That way only leads to a lot more murdered women.

Anti-racism was always evil and stupid, but it was quality, high-pressure rhetoric that was more than capable of emotionally manipulating weak-minded whites. But the sight of a beautiful young blonde woman being brutally murdered by an unrepentant predatory criminal for no reason other than his racial hatred for white people is even more powerful imagery capable of dissolving the anti-racist rhetoric once and for all.

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Trannifa

How is it that no one has applied the obvious label to the violent group of deranged individuals hopped up on hormones and fantasizing about being members of the opposite sex? We had Antifa, then Pantifa, and now, the scourge of the schoolyards known as Trannifa.

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2 PM Announcement

President Donald Trump is scheduled to make an unspecified announcement on Tuesday afternoon following days of rumors about his health. The president will make “an announcement” from the Oval Office at 2 p.m. ET, according to the daily guidance and press schedule issued by the White House on Monday night. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Newsweek: “The President will be making an exciting announcement related to the Department of Defense.”

There is a lot of speculation about this, ranging from his supposed death to a war on Venezuela. However, if things go as they’ve gone before, it’s probably going to be something more on the order of restoring the old name of the War Department to the Department of Defense.

In other words, it’s probably just more rhetorical whoopty-damn-do. This is not the war on the Deep State we were promised, and for which he was elected.

UPDATE: That was a nothingburger even by Trump’s standards.

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Line to Go

I understand why the announcers are encouraged to refer to the yardage point that will give a first down as “the line to gain” since it is a line and not a “first down” in itself. But it’s awkward and doesn’t sound like a football term.

Which is why I suggest “line to go” to represent the first down line, since it’s in keeping with “first and goal-to-go” and so forth. So, if you’re a producer or an announcer reading this, try it. I suspect it will catch on in a way that “line to gain” won’t.

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