The Essence of Rhetoric

As I have repeatedly pointed out to those who speak dialectic, there is no actual information content in rhetoric. Or, if you prefer, whatever perceived information content happens to appear in rhetoric is irrelevant. Consider the following example:

I’m in a weird situation. A new colleague joined and he refuses to use my pronouns or even my name. Instead, he refers to me as “my esteemed colleague”. I confronted him politely and just said something like “you are my colleague and I hold you in esteem hence my esteemed colleague”.

It’s bs, I can tell he’s just a transphobic pos he calls others by their names. I’m the only trans woman in the office and it’s really making me uncomfortable.

I even spoke to HR about this but they said they can’t do anything because “my esteemed colleague” is apparently not discriminatory.

It’s genuinely uncomfortable working with him because of this. It really gives me the creeps and makes me feel dehumanised.

Notice the way in which even a polite and positive form of address is effectively triggering of the target’s emotions when utilized in a manner that distinguishes itself from an ordinary form of address. So, there is absolutely no need for dialectical sperging over what the rhetoric actually means, much less how the use of the term makes the deliverer feel, because those two elements are unrelated to the intended objective of emotionally manipulating the target.

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Don’t Think of it as Surveillance

Think of it as training the NPC-AIs that are assigned to you.

We’re not locked in here with them. We’re just here for a short time to speak the Truth, share the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and live the Life. But as for them, they’re locked in here and we are their only way out.

“Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.” But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

—1 Peter 3: 14-15

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Micro-weaponization

Finland claims that Russia has “weaponized mass immigration” by sending 700 migrants across the Russo-Finnish border:

Finland’s prime minister said today that the country will close all but its northernmost crossing point with Russia following a surge in migrants, which Helsinki claims Moscow is intentionally pushing after it joined NATO.

Since the start of August, around 700 asylum seekers have entered Finland without a visa over its 1,300-kilometre (800-mile) border with Russia.

‘The government has today decided to close more border posts. Only Raja-Jooseppi station will remain open,’ Prime Minister Petteri Orpo told a press conference. After seeing a surge in migrants seeking asylum on its eastern border in November, Finland last week shut half of its eight crossings to Russia.

So, 1.3 million migrants entering Great Britain and 5 million migrants entering Europe and 50 million migrants entering the United States, that’s all fine. But Russia kicks out 700 and that’s a “weaponization”?

Sometimes, Clown World is just insulting. We knew it was fake, gay, and evil, but we really never anticipated this level of rhetorical retardery.

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Sheepoleth

sheepoleth [ shee-puh-lith, ‐leth ]

noun

  1. a peculiarity of unjustified belief that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.
  2. a slogan or catchword that regurgitates the mainstream Narrative
  3. a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth that is accepted by the average individual without skepticism, critical thought, or question.

“Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.'”

-George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

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Ideology is Rhetoric

I wouldn’t get too excited about the election of Javier Milei in Argentina. If there is one thing that we have learned from more than 100 years of democracy in America and elsewhere, it is that ideology is usually an irrelevant mask for the true objectives of those the elected politician serves.

In END TIMES, Peter Turchin cites compelling and reasonably comprehensive data analysis that proves the democratic will of the people in the United States has absolutely no influence on the policies put into place by their elected leaders, by means of a large-scale comparison of their policy preferences with the resulting policies put into place by their government.

The political scientist Martin Gilens, aided by a small army of research assistants, gathered a large data set—nearly two thousand policy issues between 1981 and 2002. Each case matched a proposed policy change to a national opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. The raw survey data provided information that enabled Gilens to separate the preferences of the poor (in the lowest decile of the income distribution) and the typical (the median of the distribution) from the affluent (the top 10 percent).

Statistical analysis of this remarkable data set showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes. This is not entirely unexpected. What is surprising is that there was no—zilch, nada—effect of the average voter. The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent. There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies. Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Peter Turchin, END TIMES: Elites, Counterelites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, 2023

In a highly relevant essay, the Bronze Age Pervert explains why “economic populists” always end up betraying the nation they are nominally supposed to represent, regardless of whether they are considered “right-wing” or “left-wing”. This is why ideology is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter very much if you elect Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, or the Irish Republican Army, as their collective answer to everything is always: open the doors wider, bring in more immigrants, flood the nation!

It is also why China, and to a lesser extent, Russia, are very good bets to defeat the denationalized remnants of the adulterated nations of the West. In both great powers, the nation always comes before ideology. Stalin transmuted the international socialist revolution into national communism, while in China nationalism is built right into the ideology, as even socialism is required to have “Chinese characteristics”.

Consider for example that the doors of Argentina have been busted wide open to mass migration. This has been done despite the economic populist and nationalist language that Bannonites invoke in America and that Peronists have used even more aggressively in Argentina. I find it fascinating that all left-populist and economic populist platform nations or regions have this same result by the way. Ireland did, so does Basque Country in Spain — ETA being the spirit of that region and along with the Kurdish PKK one of the old and dependable factions of the international “nationalist left.” But all are flooded with migrants. To look into the reasons why I will again leave for another time but I suspect that, although when out of power such parties insinuate that migrants are being let in for “cheap labor” as a conspiracy by Capital or devious capitalists who plan to build an orbital station like in Elysium movie; and so they promise — maybe genuinely — the lower middle and middle classes that they will stop this migration and improve the labor market, wages, and their economic condition. But then once in power, left-populist parties discover that the migrants were never being brought in by capitalists for Machiavellian reasons; that at most, the capitalists were being bought off, and not all the capitalists but only some industries, who were allowed to profit and who therefore complied… although it’s unclear their willingness to comply or not would have been at all relevant. That the migrants were in fact being brought in primarily as political clients and political tools for the left and by those who opposed “the rich” — a shifting definition that often comes to include much of the middle class as well. And so the logic of this is irresistible to “economic populist” parties once in power for some time, regardless of their initial rhetoric about the “pauperization of the proletariat finally coming true through the vehicle of mass migration.” If your position is “the poor and conservative many against the decadent and predatory Elite and rich,” why wouldn’t you come to see millions of foreign poor “decent family people” as your allies? Economic populists, even when they have open nationalist and ethnic rhetoric in their beginnings, will always abandon this in favor of importing new clients, and it is rational for them to do so. In many cases they don’t in fact have specifically racial, or national or ethnic-cultural language even by the way: many rightists are dumbly misled when a leftist starts to inveigh against “globalism,” the “IMF,” “international Anglo-Liberalism,” “the transnational elites,” and many such things, into thinking that such a person must surely want to preserve the demographic and cultural characteristics of a particular country or region. But that’s almost never the case: importing millions of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians in Argentina, or migrants in Basque Country or Ireland may actually come to be seen as “yes we are importing good family people who will stand with us in native solidarity against globalism, Capital, and Neoliberal atomization.” And that is in fact what happened.

The Populist Moment Never Happened

The point is that if Ben Shapiro is publicly celebrating the election of a political leader who is an immigrant Catholic apostate, the chances that the new president-elect has any intention of governing the Argentine nation to its actual benefit are not very favorable, no matter what ideology he purports to espouse.

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Why Gen Z Rejects the Jews

This incident in the UK pretty well summarizes why Israel is getting obliterated in the global PR war, particularly among Gen Zers.

This is the moment an irate taxi driver kicked out an ‘antisemitic’ passenger from his cab after she ranted about the ‘Jewish machine’. The furious London cabbie was filmed booting out his female fare, telling her to ‘get the f*** out of my cab’ during a journey through Soho, on Halloween last month.

Footage of the clash appeared online today, with former Tory leadership hopeful Tom Tugendhat MP hailing the driver’s actions as ‘the correct response to racism’.

In a conversation recorded on dash-cam, the passenger says: ‘It’s so easy to trigger people nowadays… The Jewish machine is so strong. It doesn’t allow you to talk. But again, there are so many examples of me showing you brutalisation of Palestinians.’

The irate cabbie then interrupts the woman and rages: ‘Right, you can get the f*** out of my cab. Out. Out.’

‘Why,’ asks the woman, before the driver shouts back: ‘The Jewish machine doesn’t allow you to talk!?’

‘You’re an example of that,’ replies the passenger as she gets out the taxi and a door slams shut.

Now, I’m sure Jonathan Greenblatt and his UK-resident equivalent are celebrating the fact that their pet politicians and clueless Anglo-Boomers are applauding what they have been taught to be “the correct response” to antisemitism. There are no shortage of comments supporting the cab driver’s actions; these are some of the top-rated ones:

  • Well done the cabby
  • Well done cab driver for speaking out.
  • Absolute respect for this man. Absolutely none for her!
  • Love that taxi driver!
  • Excellent. Well done, sir!

Of course, no one under the age of 65 comments on a newspaper site.

Meanwhile, the younger generations, who have been taught that everyone is equal, everyone has a right to his own opinion and his own truth, and that freedom of thought, speech, and expression is the highest human value, are NOTICING that this poor woman did literally nothing but express her own opinion, and in response was angrily denied a basic service that she had already purchased.

And I’m certain they are perfectly aware that if the positions had been reversed and a British driver had told a Jewish passenger to “get the fuck out of my cab”, the British flag would be flown at half-mast over Buckingham Palace, every Premier League team would hold a minute of silence before games for the rest of the season, King Charles would announce that he would prefer to be styled “the Defender of the Torah”, a new Cabinet Ministry would be appointed to “fight antisemitism”, Rachel Riley would be on the front page of every major newspaper crying about how she has a panic attack every time she sees a taxi, and the driver would be hunted down by Scotland Yard, disemployed, and prosecuted for thirty-seven hate crimes.

Now, the Boomers observably don’t give a damn about fairness. They literally could not care less about it. But Generation Z genuinely cares about fairness. Young people have always cared a lot about fairness, with the obvious exception of the Boomers due to their super-special generational status that rendered them society’s wise elders from birth. And there is absolutely nothing fair about the claim that an individual’s opinions, however unpopular, somehow magically eliminate all of the laws and rights and principles and ideals that have been relentlessly trumpeted since the dawn of the Enlightenment.

Those who don’t play by their own publicly declared rules will eventually discover, to their dismay, that their enemies have followed suit. And they will also learn that no one under the age of 50 gives a damn about this totally unexpected state of affairs.

The lesson, as always, is this: shameless hypocrisy is terrible rhetoric.

UPDATE: Yeah, blasting your users and banning their videos is totally going to convince Gen Z that you’re the good guys. Totally.

TikTok has blasted users promoting a vile letter written by Osama Bin Laden in regards to the 9/11 atrocities and promised to remove any content referring to it. ‘Content promoting this letter clearly violates our rules on supporting any form of terrorism,’ TikTokPolicy wrote in a post to X, formerly Twitter. ‘We are proactively and aggressively removing this content and investigating how it got onto our platform.’

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Mailvox: Why International Opinion Matters

An SGer asks a reasonable question:

Why does Israel care what the international community thinks?

Because the nation is too small and too weak to survive without being provided resources and protection by other nations. Only large nations with abundant natural resources such as China, the USA, and Russia can afford to ignore international opinion without rapidly regressing into a pre-industrial state of starvation. Unfortunately, the current Israeli elite has transformed what was once excellent diplomacy into an abusive parasitism over time, which is short-term advantageous but long-term self-destructive.

The current crisis is almost certainly related to the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Israel. In the eyes of the world, Israel had a just cause to use force to take its hostages back. But it does not see Israel having just cause to ethnically cleanse Gaza or bomb the civilian population there. Hence the rapid loss of global sympathy, and the concomitant increase of global antipathy.

Here’s a hint: if you’re appealing to the historical examples of Dresden and Nagasaki, you are absolutely going to lose the rhetorical war every single time. Even many Americans regard those wartime acts as inexcusable war crimes, as does most of the planet.

Scott Ritter’s article on his complicated personal history with Israel is, as is often the case with Ritter, somewhat hit or miss – at this point, the current state of South Africa is better seen as an ex post facto justification of apartheid than as a positive example for Israel or anyone else – but he does manage to demonstrate why no world leaders, and even many Israelis, have absolutely no trust in Netanyahu or his leadership in this war.

I didn’t blame Israel as a whole, but rather the individual Israelis involved, first and foremost the man who had taken over from Yitzhak Rabin as the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s incompetence as a political leader had resulted in him being voted out of office in 1999, replaced by Ehud Barack (who had apparently learned to lie to a degree sufficient to the task of being an Israeli politician). In September 2002, Netanyahu testified before the US Congress about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. Even though he did so as a private citizen, his status as a former Prime Minister gave his words credibility they did not deserve.

“There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking, is working, is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons,” Netanyahu said. “Once Saddam has nuclear weapons, the terror network will have nuclear weapons.”

Netanyahu’s statements directly contradicted the findings that my Israeli colleagues and I had reached—findings that were shared by the International Atomic Energy Agency, responsible for overseeing the dismantling of Iraq’s nuclear program—that the Iraqi nuclear program had been eliminated, and that there was no evidence of its reconstitution.

But Netanyahu’s job wasn’t to tell the truth about Iraq’s nuclear program, but rather use the fear generated by the specter of an Iraqi nuclear weapon to justify a war with Iraq that would remove Saddam Husein from power. “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told his receptive congressional audience. “And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots is gone.”

Looking back today, at the horrific consequences of America’s illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, at an Iranian regime firmly entrenched behind a nuclear program that is not going away, one can clearly see that Benjamin Netanyahu was wrong about everything. But that has been his modus operendi from the start—to exaggerate and lie about threats faced by Israel to justify military action which invariably resulted in disaster.

Now, regardless of what one thinks of Ritter, the fact that Netanhayu’s known modus operandi for more than two decades has been “to exaggerate and lie about threats faced by Israel to justify military action which invariably resulted in disaster” does not leave one with a great deal of confidence in a positive outcome of this recent war between Israel and the organization it helped create, Hamas.

This is Netanyahu’s war, one that he has long sought, and quite possibly one of which it will eventually be learned that he arranged and staged. We may even need to coin a new term for this sort of war, because if it is true that Netanyahu not only permitted, but was involved in encouraging the attacks, “green flag” wouldn’t suffice to describe it. “Puppet flag” would be more accurate.

And as for any objections that it would require a sociopath to contemplate and actually do such a contemptible thing, well, there appears to be considerable evidence that Netanyahu is not only a sociopath, but one whose psyche was deeply affected by the death of his heroic older brother at Entebbe. As the Germans learned to their great detriment, as the Ukrainians are presently learning to theirs, it is very costly to a nation to permit a psychologically-damaged individual to hold the reins of government.

UPDATE: Oh, Sweet Moses. Israeli PR doubles down on the rhetorical retardery.

Nations that have failed to support Israel’s response to the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 are on the side of the militant group in the conflict, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has declared. There can be no neutrality regarding the conflict, a ministry spokesman has insisted.

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The Rage is Boundless

I don’t mean to elevate the blood pressure of anyone who is reading alternative media, but I fear it has been reliably reported on social media that new Hamas outrages have been discovered.

  • Hamas hands Israeli babies bottles but they are actually dynamite sticks painted to look like bottles, and they explode after the babies realize the fuse is lit.
  • Hamas paints walls to look like tunnels and then makes Israeli babies drive into the walls thinking it was a road the whole time.
  • Hamas puts Israeli babies on see-saws and then drops anvils on the opposite side, launching the Israeli babies into the stratosphere.

There is only one solution to these unconceivable horrors committed by subhuman animals, and that is to send in every single soldier in the US Army and the US Marine Corps to genocide the entire Gaza Strip, West Bank, and the East Bank. Also, Syria, Iran, and southern… what the hell, all of Lebanon too. After which, gold-plated condominiums will be constructed, at US expense, to console the shattered survivors of these unprecedented outrages.

Anything less would be an anti-semitic hate crime. Write your congressman!

UPDATE: The media elites really don’t get it. The lack of self-awareness is astonishing.

Israel has made two major mistakes.

  • First, the goals of the war have been poorly articulated.
  • It has failed sufficiently to emphasize that an entire army of accomplices stands behind Hamas.
Why Israel is fast losing the public relations war, THE TIMES OF ISRAEL, 1 November 2023

The first point is relevant, the second one is not, but neither explain the global loss of sympathy for the Israelis in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks. The reason Israel is now losing the public relations war is because a) the response is observably and statistically disproportionate, b) the misguided attempt to capitalize on the initial world reaction through argumentum iniuriae has failed due to both a lack of credibility and a complete failure to read the crowd, c) the media narrative contradicts the Ukraine media narrative of the last 20 months, and d) neocon + ADL overreach.

UPDATE: It appears the Israeli propagandists failed to learn the lesson of Sandy Hook, which is this: Americans don’t give a fuck anymore. GenX and the younger generations are not gullible Silents and Boomers. We all know that governments have historically done terrible things in order to get the people to buy into whatever their cause du jour is. So, the elites can fly false flags and slaughter every kindergartener in New Jersey, they can rape every puppy and kitten in Tel Aviv, and it still won’t move us to support them one little bit.

Also, you might not want to run with “dead babies” when you support abortion. Your rhetoric is DOA. I mean, what’s the real problem there, the lack of maternal consent to the murder?

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If At First You Don’t Succeed

Fail and fail again.

It looks like we’re about 2-3 weeks away from being told that Hamas has built underground death roller coasters, Hezbollah is unleashing lethal AI rape-bots, and Iran is locking little children into a cage with a sabretooth tiger and a Tyrannosaurus Rex, if current social media is any guide.

Of all the things that never happened, whatever the latest Middle East-related outrage is supposed to be never happened the most.

Incontrovertible proof of Iranian T-Rex death cages

First, Americans are perfectly aware that the neocons are frightened by the situation in the Middle East and are desperate to get Americans to go and fight Iran for them. Which is what they’ve been doing for the last 18 years, since 2005. That’s not happening, not on a scale that matters, and regardless, not for long. All US military involvement in the Middle East can be reasonably expected to accomplish is to give Russia and China free rein in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Because it’s too late, as evidenced by the events in Ukraine over the last 20 months.

Second, if you want people to care even a little bit about what happens to you or your children, it’s not particularly helpful to be constantly observed chanting “death to the White race”, “Europe must be destroyed”, “Jesus is evil”, all the while systematically undermining the greatest civilization Man has ever known through advocacy of abortion, feminism, mass immigration, miscegenation, and satanic transgender ideology.

Neocon Inc. can invent whatever imaginative atrocities they like. Jon Podhoretz and Ben Shapiro can hurl accusations of hatred of this and anti-of that all they want. Aside from a few gullible Boomers who wouldn’t hesitate to believe that Iran is building a lunar military base using rockets fueled with the blood of Jewish children, no one gives a quantum of a fragment of a damn what they say anymore.

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