Tag: rhetoric

And yet they remain useful when conclusive evidence is not available:

Faced with the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, John Snow had no idea what mechanism caused cholera, and his instruments could not reliably identify the contaminants in water supplies, but he noted what we would now call correlations: some water companies had more of their clients die than others, even though all of them supplied to rich and poor households alike. South of the river companies were more deadly, and they drew more contaminated water from the river rather than other sources, and filtered it less than other companies. Some neighbourhood pumps had more deaths nearby than did others. This was a geographic form of correlation (now called a Voronoi diagram) and it was on that correlational basis, without knowledge of the real mechanism, that he took the handle off the Broad Street pump, and stopped the epidemic.

That is the way we tell the story now, but Snow was a careful and clever man, and pointed out another explanation: the cholera outbreak was coming to an end anyway, as people ran away from areas where there were many deaths. The common folk who believed that correlation implied causation ran for their lives and lived to see another day.

Snow also had to cope with a major anomaly in his geographic correlational investigations. None of the brewery workers right next to the Broad Street water pump fell ill with cholera. It turned out that they received free beer, and the water for the beer was boiled so as to release the flavour of hops, thus inadvertently killing off the water-borne organisms.

Snow jumped to a conclusion because his mind was prepared to interpret associations in a particular way, intially by his doubts about the air transmission miasma theory and later by his own hypothesis of water-borne transmission. He jumped to the right conclusion, without proofs of the causal mechanism which were only available years later.

This is why you should NEVER try to dismiss any correlation with the idiot’s refrain that “correlation is not causation”. That is an astonishingly stupid thing to say, as it is tantamount to saying that “a clue is not a mathematical proof.” Who claims that it is?

As Michael Woodley points out, there is never causation WITHOUT correlation. Which means that correlation is a necessary, but insufficient indicator of causation, it is not a synonym for it.

As promised in last night’s Darkstream, I started reading Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism last night. I only read up to Chapter 8 before turning in, but so far, Hazony appears to be a genuine nationalist rather than a fake nationalist Neopalestine-Firster like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro. He makes some excellent observations, and while he so far has steered almost entirely clear of the heavy involvement of members of his nation in what he calls “the international liberal empire”, that’s not particularly important in light of the focus of his work on the intrinsic imperialism of universal liberalism.

MY LIBERAL FRIENDS AND colleagues do not seem to understand that the advancing liberal construction is a form of imperialism. But to anyone not already immersed in the new order, the resemblance is easy to see. Much like the pharaohs and the Babylonian kings, the Roman emperors and the Roman Catholic Church until well into the modern period, as well as the Marxists of the last century, liberals, too, have their grand theory about how they are going to bring peace and economic prosperity to the world by pulling down all the borders and uniting mankind under their own universal rule. Infatuated with the clarity and intellectual rigor of this vision, they disdain the laborious process of consulting with the multitude of nations they believe should embrace their view of what is right. And like other imperialists, they are quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition from those who they are sure would benefit immensely by simply submitting.

Liberal imperialism is not monolithic, of course. When President George H. W. Bush declared the arrival of a “new world order” after the demise of the Communist bloc, he had in mind a world in which America supplies the military might necessary to impose a “rule of law” emanating from the Security Council of the United Nations. Subsequent American presidents rejected this scheme, preferring a world order based on unilateral American action in consultation with European allies and others. Europeans, on the other hand, have preferred to speak of “transnationalism,” a view that sees the power of independent nations, America included, as being subordinated to the decisions of international judicial and administrative bodies based in Europe. These disagreements over how the international liberal empire is to be governed are often described as if they are historically novel, but this is hardly so. For the most part, they are simply the reincarnation of threadworn medieval debates between the emperor and the pope over how the international Catholic empire should be governed—with the role of the emperor being reprised by those (mostly Americans) who insist that authority must be concentrated in Washington, the political and military center; and the role of the papacy being played by those (mostly European, but also many American academics) who see ultimate authority as residing with the highest interpreters of the universal law, namely, the judicial institutions of the United Nations and the European Union.

These arguments within the camp of liberal imperialism raise pressing questions for the coming liberal construction of the West. But for those of us who remain unconvinced of the desirability of maintaining such a liberal empire, the most salient fact is what the parties to these disagreements have in common. For all their bickering, proponents of the liberal construction are united in endorsing a single imperialist vision: They wish to see a world in which liberal principles are codified as universal law and imposed on the nations, if necessary by force. This, they agree, is what will bring us universal peace and prosperity.

The book so far almost reads like something John Red Eagle and I might have written as a follow-up to Cuckservative. It’s definitely something Castalia House would not have hesitated to publish. A warning for libertarians, though. You will find yourself distinctly disappointed, if not outright angered, by the positions espoused by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek with regards to liberal imperialism.

It also makes me suspect that Hazony’s tangential attack on globalism as a particularly virulent form of imperialism might prove to be more effective rhetoric than attacking it directly in its own right.

From the transcript of the Darkstream.

What Peterson is doing when he’s talking to Rogan, and I suspect that what he does on a regular basis, is what a lot of fake psychics do. He’s doing a cold reading, he is utilizing the clues that he’s picking up in order to make you think that he knows more than he does.

It is a guess that is posing as knowledge and you can get away with it, if you’re someone like Jordan Peterson you can get away with it a lot. One of the ways that you can tell that someone is doing this is that they’re very intent, they’re very intent on the other person. They’re listening very hard to the other person, but they’re not actually listening in order to understand what the person is saying, they’re listening for key words that they can target off and use. They’re looking for anchor points that they can take from the other person and use to launch to launch their own statement and use it in order to convince the other person of whatever it is they want to convince him.

So listen to this and keep in mind Jordan Peterson has a reason for this whole cockamamie story. You know, people got carried away, they got they got focused on the whole Cider of Doom thing, right, because this was such an epic disaster that it actually did manage to kind of conceal what Peterson was hoping to conceal. See, what he was hoping to achieve when he went on and talked to Joe Rogan about his terrible experience with cider was that he was trying to produce an excuse to cover up his disastrous performance with Sam Harris because that was one of the first times that he was unmasked.

You need to understand Jordan Peterson is exceptionally dishonest. Jordan Peterson is one of the most dishonest people in the public eye other than Hillary Clinton. His level of dishonesty can only be described as Clintonian.

The subject is Answering the Pharisees, and what got me thinking about this is the way in which the trolls and shills and alt retards and philosemites are constantly trying to trap people verbally. They’re constantly trying to get you to commit yourself to a position in public that they can then use to discredit you. So you know, with me, they will bring up questions from articles that I’ve written 15 years ago that they think will be that will be damaging to you. There is this constant attempt to get you to disqualify yourself, to get you to discredit yourself, and what it occurred to me is that this is exactly what the Pharisees did to Jesus Christ.

This is exactly what the people who are doing this, whether they’re SJWs, whoever they are, they are functionally Pharisees. They are little satans, by which I mean they are little accusers, and so when you look at what they’re doing, they are attempting to get you to admit that you’re guilty and then they will proceed to prosecute you. And so how did Jesus handle that? I think that as in pretty much everything else, we’re very very well-advised to follow Jesus’s example whether you’re a Christian or not. What did he do, what did he say, when they came to him, when they said people are saying that you are the Son of God, that you are the King of the Jews?

What did he say? The thing that was awesome is that he answered both his enemies and his friends in the same way. He said ‘who do you say I am’ because he knew what they were doing. He knew exactly what they were up to, and so this was really meaningful for me.

There’s a question, wasn’t he silent at first? No, that was later that was when he was actually on trial. So when you when you turn it around on them what you’re doing is you’re making it clear to them that not only do you know what they’re doing, you’re letting them know that you’re not going to play along. That’s why it’s always a mistake to answer the question honestly. It’s a mistake to answer the question in a Socratic manner, and you know it’s a mistake to answer the question in the Petersonian manner.

A CNN media whore attempts to inoculate globalists in a remarkably inept manner:

CNN host Don Lemon addressed what he called the “ugly history” of the term ‘globalist’ “and how far-right extremists use it to suggest racial and anti-Semitic ideas” on the Thursday edition of CNN Tonight. Lemon argued because people like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones use the term that a dog whistle is automatically attached to it. He said it is popular with the ‘alt-right’ and anti-Semites.

“That word globalist keeps popping up, it sounds like a pretty mainstream term, a description of an economic and political ideology,” Lemon said. “But it’s more than that. It’s also become a dog whistle to right-wing conspiracy theorist.”

At this rate, it won’t be long until these idiots actually start trying to claim that the term “Satanist” is anti-Semitic. They don’t seem to grasp that words actually mean things, that words are more than just labels for people whom one irrationally dislikes for some mysterious and unknown, but definitely unjustified reason that cannot possibly be caused by the objectives, behavior, or actions of those being labeled.

Globalists favor global governance. They do so by definition and self-admission. IF it is anti-Semitic to accurately identify such individuals as globalists, THEN logic dictates it is necessarily accurate to assume that Jews are attempting to impose global government on the human race and anyone on the planet who opposes totalitarian one-world dictatorship is justified in their anti-Semitism.

Are you certain you want to go there, Don?

The New York Times attempts to explain the NPC meme to NPCs:

It’s a long story, but the short version is that a group of young, extremely pro-Trump internet trolls have spent the past several years mocking anti-Trump people as whiny, easily triggered snowflakes who are primarily motivated by social acceptance rather than by logic and critical thinking.

Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters — including, as of last week, Kanye West — put their support for him in the language of freethinking rationality and paint the other side as being motivated by blind loyalty and identity politics. (Mr. West said of his pre-Trump-supporting days, “I was programmed to think from a victimized mentality.”)

The NPC meme fits neatly into this narrative and offers Mr. Trump’s online supporters an easy shorthand way to paint liberals as humorless prudes who say “Drumpf” because the HBO host John Oliver told them to, who march in protests and put on pink “pussyhats” because they’re the popular things to do, and whose views can’t withstand scrutiny.

(And then, when progressives object to a meme that portrays them as unthinking automatons, it becomes another piece of evidence: See? The left can’t take a joke.)

It wouldn’t sting if it wasn’t true. And the Left observably can’t take a joke. That’s why it attempts to deplatform and silence everyone who cracks wise at their expense.

It’s all a bit meta at this point, as what the NYT is really doing here is programming the NPCs to point-and-shriek: “NPC meme racist!”

The proof of the effectiveness of a rhetorical term is in the emotional reaction of the target. And the targets, they are most certainly reacting:

The new “NPC” meme mocks leftists by depicting them as unthinking and reflexive automatons. The meme has upset the left so much that Twitter is now banning people posting it for “dehumanizing speech,” but its humble origins are the computer-controlled characters of limited intelligence found in most video games.

The popular NPC meme trend frames its targets as non-player characters (NPCs) who reflexively spout neo-Marxist axioms in response to real-world events. Actual NPCs are computer-controlled characters in video games with limited scripted responses given the parameters of the games in which they appear. For example, NPCs may assign quests to the player in games like Skyrim, or join the player as a companion in Fallout.

Built on the long-running Wojak meme, the NPC meme mocks leftists as expressionless in appearance and bot-like in behavior. The universal standard appearance illustrates the left’s political homogeneity.

 And, as those who have read SJWs Always Lie know, rhetoric is effective because it points toward the truth. SJWs don’t think for themselves. They change their beliefs as the Social Justice Narrative evolves and when the Narrative is in conflict with objective, material reality, they insist that the Narrative is true. They do as they are instructed, they do as they are programmed, as we saw in the recent self-destructive decisions by Bleeding Cool and Indiegogo.

They are, in a word, Non-Player Characters.

I suspect that the reason the rhetoric is so effective is that it is most utilized in the very technological spaces that are populated by the people who are most familiar with the acronym. One senses the fine hand of GamerGate at work in this. And there is nothing that hurts the feelings of a prideful SJW who firmly believes he is smarter and more thoughtful than most than a contemptuous observation of the fact that he does not even think for himself. It also lends itself very well to visual rhetoric, aka meming.

How do we know it’s effective? Because the Social Justice Thought Police are already attempting to bury it.

Twitter suspended 1,500 accounts that were using the NPC meme as their avatar.

By Ben Shapiro. Code Pink’s National Director shows how easy it is to rattle Ben Shapiro and completely shut him down. The rampant hypocrisy in his contradictory approach towards his nation-state and towards the USA leaves him with an easy weakness that anyone can easily exploit. It’s also clear that both the Left and the Right have increasingly had it with all the Israel First activists in the US media. There is a very hard line between supporting Israel and supporting Israel at the expense of America, and Ben Shapiro is one of many in the US media who is observably on the wrong side of it.

It’s also a good example of how rhetoric trumps dialectic. “Apartheid Israel” is a rhetorical kill shot. Sure, one can make a reasonable dialectical argument that Israel is not an apartheid state according to the technical definition of the series of laws that were collectively known as the historical South African policy of apartheid from 1948 to 1994. But the very effectiveness of the kill shot indicates that whether the charge is technically true or not, the rhetoric tends to point towards the truth of the situation, especially since Israel has the legal equivalent of South Africa’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949, which was the first apartheid law, as well as a milder religious version of the Population Registration Act of 1950.

For example, the Code Pink woman could have easily pointed out that Israel observably practices religious apartheid, as the Supreme Court of Israel has ruled that even Jews or the descendants of Jews that actively practice any religion other than Judaism are not entitled to immigrate to Israel. The point is that it is relatively easy to expose even the smoothest, most-practiced wormtongues with sufficient mastery of rhetoric and dialectic combined with an awareness of their customary deceits and inconsistencies.

From the transcript of the Darkstream:

Is calling an SJW a social justice terrorist good rhetoric?

No, it’s terrible, it’s absolutely terrible. The whole point of rhetoric is to instigate emotions. SJWs do consider themselves to be brave warriors for social justice, that’s why using SJW in a derogatory sense upsets them. They do not consider themselves to be terrorists, so you might as well call them social justice poopyheads, that’s not effective either. What you guys need to learn is it’s not about what YOU think.

You know I find this incredibly irritating. People are constantly saying “well, I call them social justice crybabies cuz I think they I think they cry and they’re babies.” First of all, no, you don’t call them that, nobody calls them that, you’ve never called them that. Second, it’s not about you, it’s not about what you think, it’s about what they think. That’s why rhetoric is effective. Rhetoric points to the truth, you know,  and they’re not terrorists, terrorists are actually scary and SJWs are not. That’s part of why they’re so successful, you know, because they’re not scary people who are taken seriously.

Yeah, alternatively use what they call you, mockingly, but use it not ironically,  that can also be effective. SJWs aren’t warriors and they don’t fight anything but caffeine and sugar addictions, diabetes, and obesity. That’s true, but they like to think that they are, and so when you’re calling them “warriors” they know that you’re mocking them,  that’s why it’s so effective. What is a good use of rhetoric to use against SJWS? They hate being called SJWs, it drives them crazy, they even try to claim that the Alt-Right invented it! No, the Alt-Right didn’t invent any of that, that’s what they actually call themselves and it was just such a lame, ridiculous term that it became a perjorative, a very effective one.

What would you call them to offend them? I just call them SJWs, that offends them every single time, they hate it. Don’t you understand the most effective rhetoric to use against something is that which upsets them the most? That’s why the whole “Democrats are the real racists” doesn’t work at all, because they don’t regard themselves as being racist, they’re too clueless and hypocritical to make the abstract leap that is required to connect their paternalistic attitude towards minorities with racism and understand that it is actually racist. Again,  you’re delving into the realm of dialectic, as soon as you have to start explaining something you are in the realm of dialectic. If you are applying logic to it you’re in the realm of dialectic. Whatever you use has to inflict emotional pain on them.

To which I later added in the comments:

For the benefit of those of you who are too stupid to understand either my books or Aristotle’s, I will dumb the concept down to the maximum extent possible:

Rhetoric is NOT about YOU. It is not about what you think, it is not about what makes sense to you, it is not about what you think sounds cool, clever, witty, funny, or will “cause heads to explode”. Rhetoric is about what observably causes emotional pain and distress to its target.

If you think calling the Left, which has supported every terrorist movement since the Irgun, the IRA, and the PLO, “terrorists”, is going to cause them any emotional pain at all, then you are even dumber than I already think you are.