Tag: rhetoric

An invasionist laments the fact that the visual rhetoric isn’t working as designed anymore:

You may look at this photo and think that its deep message is “We are all hoping for a better life and will take extraordinary risks on behalf of those we love.” But someone else will probably say, “People shouldn’t cross borders without permission.” The drowning becomes a kind of punishment, a river stands in for ideas of human authority, and the photograph doesn’t break through anything. It merely reiterates an old and cherished belief: Bad things happen to those who break the rules. … there will be efforts to make it an allegory of law and judgment rather than an opportunity for moral imagination and compassion.

The day after these two people perished in the Rio Grande, the president of the United States dismissed an accusation that he had sexually assaulted a prominent author and columnist in the 1990s. He used a phrase similar to ones he has used in the past to deflect similar allegations: “She’s not my type.” It is a terrible thing to say, with a specifically misogynistic meaning in the context of how men practice violence against women.

But it is a perfect summation of our new and deformed American conscience. It is pithy and dismissive, an invitation to look at people who have been victimized and see only otherness. It shuts down any understanding of trauma before empathy has begun to interrogate how trauma is felt and experienced. It is about looking without seeing, judging without understanding. For anyone who wants an off-ramp to the moral demands made by this image, this could be the universal caption: “They weren’t our type.”

Translation: Did you not see the DROWNED LITTLE KID? How can you not submit to our insane immigration policies when we are showing you pictures of a DROWNED LITTLE KID! And WITH HER DADDY no less! FFS, what do we have to do, drown an entire kindergarten class of refugees just to evoke the desired Pavlovian reaction from you heartless bastards!

The title kind of gives it away. “We used to think photos like this could change the world.” That’s just it. They did. But that was before people began to recognize that they were being rhetorically manipulated.

The God-Emperor is such a ruthless rhetorical savage:

Prince Harry was noticeably absent from the State Banquet staged in honour of Donald Trump, in the wake of alleged comments made about his wife. The Duke of Sussex appeared less than keen to be pictured with the President – who reportedly branded Harry’s wife Meghan ‘nasty’ at the weekend after learning of comments she made about him while she was an actress.

Earlier in the day Harry had chaperoned Mr Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, into Buckingham Palace’s Picture Gallery for a display of US-themed artefacts.

But the Queen’s grandson quickly disappeared into the background and did not follow other members of the Royal Family as they walked round the exhibition with the American leader and his party.

The reason Prince Harry is so furious is that he knows perfectly well what President Trump means when he said that he didn’t know Megan Markle “was nasty”. He knows the President wasn’t referring to any name-calling, but rather, to his wife’s former profession that did not involve acting.

You’d think people would have learned to keep their mouths shut about President Trump by now. At least, people with secrets they don’t want distributed around the world by the media.

The Z-Man observes how civic nationalists, melting-potheads, and proposition nationalists repeatedly fail to grok the reality of a demographically failed state:

Those who have tried to engage with hardcore civic nationalists or evangelical patriots will have experienced a strange phenomenon where they appear to be strangely blind to certain topics. For example, the story about the black seeking out and throwing a white child over a third floor railing at the Mall of America. These super-normies respond to it by blaming communism or democrats. It’s as if the facts cause their code to reboot and they start repeating whatever they saw on Sean Hannity the prior evening.

If you press them on the obvious racial angle, they get flustered and either change the subject or break into a different chant about how America is an idea. It’s an odd thing that suggests these people have some sort of shunt in their consciousness that prevents them from seeing certain aspects of life. It’s not just a matter of self-censorship in order to avoid taboo subjects. Something seems to have been altered in their brains that prevents them from seeing anything that contradicts the colorblind fantasy.

It is an important fact for dissidents to accept. A lifetime of conditioning, perhaps generations of conditioning, have made it impossible for some people to ever look up and see the great divide, much less cross over to this side. Part of it is the normal desire of most humans to belong to the pack. To stand outside the main, with regards to biology, is a dangerous place. It is a form of self-exile. Naturally, most people would not choose it, even if it meant degrading themselves by repeating what they know to be untrue.

Aristotle explained this mysterious phenomenon: “Before some audiences not even the possession of the exactest knowledge will make it easy for what we say to produce conviction. For argument based on knowledge implies instruction, and there are people whom one cannot instruct.”
– Aristotle, Rhetoric   

Their attachment to racial equality, civic nationalism, the melting pot, and the concept of the nation as idea is emotional, not rational. Reason will not change their minds. Only emotion will do so, and the most convincing emotion is fear. They will not, they cannot, change their minds until they begin to fear for their lives, one way or another.

The Littlest Chickenhawk is outraged that the Economist has described him as an “Alt-Right Sage”:

Ben Shapiro@benshapiro
This is a vile lie. Not only am I not alt-right, I am probably their leading critic on the right. I was the number one target of their hate in 2016 online according to ADL data. I demand a retraction.

Ben Shapiro@benshapiro
You should be ashamed of yourselves for that garbage headline and description. To call yourselves a journalistic outlet and then botch this one so badly is astonishing. Here is me in 2016 in WaPo ripping Trump for flirting with the alt-right

Ben Shapiro@benshapiro
My book itself contains several pages devoted to the evil of the alt-right and white supremacy. Retract this pathetically inaccurate and defamatory nonsense now.

Spare us the outrage, Benny. You’re the liar who maliciously and knowingly slandered me as “an outspoken white supremacist” just last week.

What a pathetic little weasel. I’ll be sending him a demand for a public retraction and apology this week.

Ben Shapiro slanders me and Milo in his outrage over the fact that Jordanetics is still on sale at a bookstore in New Zealand while 12 Rules for Life is not.

There is no way that banning Jordan Peterson’s book from sale in New Zealand is preventing shooting. This is, it’s just utter craziness.

By the way, other books that continue to be on sale at Whitcoulls include Mein Kampf, which has to do with white supremacism, guys, and also, a book called, it’s like, Jordantology, by Vox Day, an outspoken white supremacist, and Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right troll. That book is still on sale, apparently, at Whitcoulls. So, just, very, very solid stuff here, from the Left.

This is classic Judeo-Christian wormtonguery from the Littlest Chickenhawk. There is literally nothing even remotely objectionable in Jordanetics except for the language that some of the Jordan Peterson fans direct at me and the disturbing quotes from Jordan Peterson concerning his overheated dreams about his naked grandmother and his hot cousin. The book has literally nothing to do with white supremacy, mass shootings, or New Zealand, but as far as little (((Ben))) is concerned, Jordanetics is right up there with Mein Kampf.

Which, I suggest, testifies to it being a compellingly conclusive takedown of the intellectual fraud that is Jordan Peterson.

Notice how heavily these wormtongues rely upon their inversive rhetorical wizardry to deceive their audiences. Consider that here we have an example of a Neo-Palestinian supremacist who openly boasts about his racial purity calling a mixed-race American Indian who publicly rejects the concept of racial supremacy “an outspoken white supremacist”.

Anyhow, if you don’t understand why Ben and Jordy are crying about Jordanetics, you can acquire the audiobook+ at Arkhaven.

Owen Benjamin responds to Ben Shapiro attempting to get people to talk about his latest attempt to twist the history of the West to serve his Neo-Palestinian interests:

This little shit called my buddy Vox Day a white supremacist today. Shapiro brags about his racial purity that allegedly leads to high IQs and justifies their dominance in power and wealth. While Vox is an American Indian who reads all day and writes video games has never once said white people are “superior.” Ben Shapiro is barely 3 Rogans tall and schizophrenia runs deep in his family.

He should pump the brakes on his (((strong genes))). Apparently not recognizing Jews as racially superior makes you a white supremacist. But it doesn’t though. That’s a lie. Which is what Ben does. You gotta read some of the sick shit this guy has said on record. He’s literally pro (((genocide))) and no the stupid three parenthesis thing is not as offensive as genocide you bunch of sheep morons. #owenbenjamin

I was wondering why Shapiro would suddenly resurrect that old libel to which the New Republic first resorted during the demolition of the Hugo Awards, and apparently the reason is that he’s talking his book.

The very title of Shapiro’s new book is a lie: The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

Typical revisionist wizardry. One could make a better historical case for the Black Plague than for “reason and moral purpose”. The West became great for three reasons: Christianity, the European Nations, and the Greco-Roman philosophical legacy. The Littlest Chickenhawk is on the side of those attempting to destroy Western civilization, which is why he is consciously echoing the Marxianism of his Trotskyite forebears.

UPDATE: I’ll do a video review of The Right Side of History on Unauthorized for subscribers next week. It won’t take long to read the book, as it’s only nine chapters long and the style is far less meandering than Peterson’s. But having read the introduction, it’s obvious why Ben Shapiro was attacking me in connection with the book’s release, as he uses the false and self-contradictory term “Judeo-Christian” no less than 70 times in the book, although it felt as if he used it 70 times in the introduction alone.

His basic thesis is that Western Civilization is the result of Jerusalem and Athens, which is about five-sixths false. Based on that initial glance, I have no reason to doubt that the book will be full of similar deceptions, falsehoods, and blatant historical revisions.

One amusing point. He actually mentions that his wife is a doctor in the third sentence of chapter one. Promo code: hilarious!

Muslim students blame the Democratic Party politicians and activists who have been relentlessly hurling hate speech at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) for the violent events in New Zealand:

Muslim students have berated Chelsea Clinton at a vigil for the victims of the New Zealand mosques massacre, saying she is to blame for the attack.

Clinton, who is pregnant with her third child, was attending the vigil at New York University on Friday when senior Leen Dweik began castigating her in an astonishing moment caught on video.

‘This right here is the result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the words that you put out into the world,’ says Dweik, gesturing to the vigil for the 49 who were killed in Christchurch when a white nationalist shooter stormed two mosques.

‘And I want you to know that and I want you to feel that deeply – 49 people died because of the rhetoric you put out there,’ Dweik continues, jabbing her index finger toward Clinton as other students snap their fingers in apparent approval of her words….

According to NYU student Rose Asaf, who posted the video on Twitter, students at the vigil were angry about Clinton’s accusation last month that Rep Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, used ‘anti-Semitic language and tropes’ while criticizing Israel.

It’s rather amusing to see how bewildered the media is about this unanticipated reaction. “Wait, you’re supposed to blame the false flag on white supremacists, WHITE SUPREMACISTS! How can you possibly screw this up?”

I have to admit, I know that the rhetoric of “anti-semitism” is losing its effectiveness, but I never anticipated it backfiring to such a degree, and in such an amusing manner.

The French globalists are desperately trying to hide behind the shield of anti-semitism:

More than 20,000 demonstrators filled the Place de la Republique in Paris on Tuesday night in response to a nationwide call for mass rallies against the continuing surge of antisemitism in France.

The show of solidarity with French Jews in the capital was replicated across the country, with rallies against antisemitism being held in more than 60 cities and towns, including Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse and Strasbourg — the city in eastern France near which only on Tuesday morning dozens of graves in a Jewish cemetery were found defaced with swastikas and antisemitic slogans.

The vandalism at the cemetery came following a week of high-profile antisemitic incidents, including the daubing of a Jewish-owned bakery with the slogan “Juden!” and the abuse hurled at the French-Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut last weekend by protesters affiliated with the populist “yellow vest” movement.

Under the floodlit statue of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic, the demonstrators who gathered at dusk in Paris held signs declaring “Ça suffit!” (“That’s enough!”), as well as the greeting “Shalom, Salaam, Salut.” Many of the signs at the rally highlighted the figure “74{eeec9489c486a2281592101ee839cae41681be6ec2c423372fef8d25db0a7fab}” — the total increase in the number of antisemitic outrages recorded in France during 2018.

At the podium, children from schools in the local district read out speeches against antisemitism, some of them recalling the mass deportation of the Jews of Paris by the Nazis in July 1942.

French rap artist Abd al Malik closed the rally, leading the crowd in a chorus of “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem.

Initiated by the opposition Socialist Party, Tuesday’s rallies against antisemitism were backed by 14 political parties from the far left to the center-right. Political leaders attending the demonstration in Paris included Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and 14 other members of the French cabinet, including Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer and Higher Education Minister Frédérique Vidal.

Minutes before the rally against antisemitism commenced, French President Emmanuel Macron paid a separate visit to the Holocaust memorial in Paris.

Yeah, crying anti-semitism works about as well these days as crying drowning polar bears. This clumsy attempt at changing the nationalist narrative in France strikes me as a highly effective way to make anti-semitism very, very popular again. The French globalists are transparently trying to disqualify and discredit the Gilets Jaunes and shore up an emergency foundation of support for a tottering Macron regime, but they will fail because no one who is struggling to make ends meet in a country that is disappearing before their eyes gives a damn about foreign people being killed in foreign lands more than seventy years ago.

I don’t think complaining about the anti-semitism of Muslims is going to be any more rhetorically effective than pointing out how Dems R the Real Racists.

Jesse Kelly@JesseKellyDC
Republicans should be POURING money into IIhan Omar’s re-election campaign. If you’re a Republican and you wanted to plant a destructive parasite in the Democrat party, what exactly would you be doing differently than what she’s doing? It’s glorious. I’m donating.

Instapundit is similarly skeptical: On the other hand, that’s probably what the Germans thought when they put Lenin on the train for Moscow.

Even so, the fact that there are no less than SEVEN EIGHT posts about anti-semitism on the main page and none concerning anti-American, anti-Christian, or anti-white statements does tend to raise an eyebrow or two. Because that’s the conservative grand strategy, to win by being even less racist and anti-semitic than Democrats.

Anyhow, the fact that most people keep their mouths shut for fear of falling under the scrutiny of the Eye of Soros does not mean that they are going to leap to the defense of that which they fear once those with more courage or less to lose begin to speak out against it.

This is highly amusing. A reader sent me a transcript of JF’s absurd attempt at performing a victory lap after his inept retreat to rhetoric in what passed for our debate about the theory of evolution by natural selection:

So there was the debate about the theory of evolution with our friend Vox Day. Vox Day has now made a reply, a kind of analysis after the debate. He considered that I have been winning rhetorically which is hilarious because I could basically not speak, I was unable to speak because I had a deep cough and I was unable to say much sentences. To claim that I have been playing it, playing it dishonest with the rhetoric that is the, is so beside reality that I do not know what to say about this. That being said, he seems to not have understood fully my point. So let me just clarify with the paint description. [JF opens up a paint file and takes notes while talking]

So, Vox Day’s argument. Vox Day he set his own threshold, he came here and said: Alright I have all sorts of takes on the theory of evolution, but today I’m going to do a case that I have a few premises about what should happen in evolution, and this includes mutation and fixation of the mutation. So the mutation must occur and then the mutation must spread across the population, and this is what we call fixation. And he says I have calculated the fixation rate. I have obtained this rate from single cell organism. Maybe it was bacteria, maybe it was single cell nucareat, I don’t know where he got his number, but he said based on this premise my conclusion is that the human-chimp division could not have happened in less than 12 million year as is claimed by evolutionary theorists.

Alright, so that is an argument with a structure, and I have not been winning rhetorically against this freaking argument. I said Vox Day I reject your premise here, you got it wrong. [JF is circling the note that says: “Fixation → rate bacteria” under “1. Premise”] And I even specified why you got it wrong. Because fixation rate, fixation rate greatly vary. Fixation rate in single cell organism is not equal to fixation rate in mammal. And there is two reasons for it. One is sexual reproduction. The second is variability of population size.

Why do we not use fixated rates? It’s because fixated rate are highly dependent on the number of population you have, the number of competitors you have to overcome before a gene becomes widespread in the population. It depends a lot on what you are fighting against, and a million bacteria are fighting together for dominance of the whole population. But because bacteria do not reproduce sexually, or if we are talking about since cell nucareat they do, but only optionally unlike mammals. They are stuck in a replicative cycle that keeps all of the mutations in the same genome. In other words there are no short cut for evolution. If you want to evolve two good genes in a bacteria it needs to be the case that the first gene mutates, and the second gene then mutates. That’s what happen in a non sexual life form.

In a sexual life form like mammals, mutations can get fixed much faster because sometimes you have bottleneck effects, sometimes you will not have a million mammal in a population. Sometimes the productively relevant population that will leave decent in the future can be reduced to thirty, sixty, one hundred fifty. Because all of the others may be subject too have facing environmental pressures that will end up either having them die or their decedents. So the rate of fixation for bacteria is totally unrelated to the rate of fixation in mammals. Because on top of it in mammals the mutation is not stuck in a single individual and all of its decedents. It can jump, because you can fuck woman. And if you fuck woman it is an opportunity for your mutated genes to jump and combine with other mutated genes. Not only because the chromosomes will come from, one from your father, one from your mother and they will link together to form your chromosome, but on top of it there is crossover. So there are scissors that come in, they cut DNA and they re-plug DNA at different parts. This generates a lot of mutations on its own, but it also generates an opportunity for mutations to spread into the population at much much much faster rates than bacteria. The only way for a bacteria to fix their a mutation is to out compete all others.

And on top of it Vox Day is working with a fallacy witch is a fallacy of species as a natural category. It is one thing to say that today chimpanzees cannot reproduce with humans, homo sapiens. It is another thing to know exactly when that lack of reproduction possibility has started for real. Could homo erectus reproduce with a chimpanzee? Who knows, we don’t have homo erectus sperm, we’ll never know. Are there some transitional life form between the two species that could reproduce? Possibly, we don’t know. So that is why we do not talk about fixated, because fixated is a mathematical illusion, created by your understanding of the population size. We do not have population sizes back in Africa in seven million years ago. So we follow mutations and lines of descent like a fucking boss. This is what Vox Day has not understood and he thinks that I have misunderstood him. Motherfucker, I am a PhD in biology. I whopped the floor with you, I have cleaned the floor with you and I had a big cough. I was suffering and I could only use a few words per sentence and I was suffering.

He’s going to be suffering a lot more once people start explaining the difference between rhetoric and dialectic to him, to say nothing of the fact that he completely failed to understand that I specifically addressed the possibility – which is not at all the certainty that he assumes it to be – that fixation rates are considerably faster in mammals than in bacteria for a variety of proposed reasons that include the Fisher–Muller effect and the Ruby in the Rubbish effect, among others. And I did so in the debate, he simply did not understand that I had done so, and not only that, that I had done so in a manner extremely favorable to the orthodox perspective.

Remember, in my initial bacterial model, I utilized the observed average fixation rate of 1,600 generations. First notice that JF completely omits to mention that he incorrectly assumed that this was a successional-mutations regime and tried to claim that I was wrong because I was unaware of parallel mutations. However, it was a concurrent-mutations regime, which is why I pointed out in my post-debate analysis that JF was wrong and that particular objection was irrelevant.

Second, I directly addressed the possibility of faster fixation rates in mammals. In fact, I came up with a completely different fixation model which was built around the idea of a minimum viable population mutating into a recurring series of minimum viable populations. It should be conceptually impossible for fixation to occur any faster than this barring genetic engineering, even if we take asteroids, volcanoes, Biblical floods, and other possible catastrophes into account. This rate reduced the average fixed mutation propagation time from 1,600 to 15.7 generations, more than two orders of magnitude faster than the observed parallel fixation rate. And despite this average rate being considerably faster than any fixation event that has ever been observed or even seriously proposed, the recurring minimum viable population scenario still renders even the maximal evolutionary timelines highly improbable to the point of being considered a mathematical impossibility given the observed genetic differences.

So, it is clear that despite his PhD in biology, JF completely failed to grasp that I had already foreseen and accounted for his objections, and not only that, he still doesn’t understand the significance of the numbers that I cited any better than he understood the math of Askhkenazi intelligence before having it explained to him three times. And he still doesn’t understand that the number of seeds scattered about the forest floor has very, very little to do with calculating the average annual growth rate of the tallest trees in the forest. And finally, his claim that fixation is a mathematical illusion is belied by the continued attempts of more serious and competent biologists to address that very issue.