Tag: rhetoric

Stealing their wind

To the Point articulates how Trump systematically undermines the power and influence of the media:

President Trump’s systematic thrashing of the leftist media is the example that illustrates the theory.  See his literal thrashing in the YouTube above.

Conservatives complained about the media for a long time. Aristotle’s dialectic approach, against people uninterested in truth. Net effect? Very low. Sad!

So let’s apply what we’ve learned.

Why do the media have power? Because they have social status with ordinary people. Are we still hearing about Watergate — decades later? The Pentagon Papers? How many movies seem to exist just to show journalists as heroes?

Or let’s take a different tack: What’s the attraction of such a low-paying profession? Status given by the profession, and status from rubbing shoulders with high-status people. Status by acting as a vector for status signals, which is what every women’s magazine is.

Ditto publications like WIRED, which is just Cosmo for geeks.

The media offers people clues about what things are high status within the areas they cover. People notice, and act accordingly. Yet most conservatives still don’t understand Trump’s response:

 If I lower the media’s status, I will wreck their power.

So The Donald says that the media has “some of the most dishonest people” he has ever seen. Not an arm’s length complaint. A direct and personal status attack, rooted in truth.

Trump also acts in ways that cause journalists to fulfill his pre-suasion labeling. He makes “outrageous” statements, which many people outside the Beltway Bubble agree with. Those statements receive over-the-top media attacks, which make his enemies look ridiculous.

Then events swiftly show that Trump had a point. Trump rubs it in, using the media’s own “Fake News” term against them and pouncing on every sloppy and dishonest mistake. As a final topper, Trump makes the dishonest media a focus during every massive rally. Which strengthens his out-grouping effect among participants and viewers.

He uses ridicule and lèse majesté, not bended knee and appeals — note that subordinating word — to logical argument.

The result?

American belief in the credibility of their news media is now at about 32 percent. That’s the lowest ever polled, and an 8 percent drop from the lowest point of the 2008-2015 period. The media has lost audience, and a lot of power.

This is an extremely effective technique. And like all rhetoric, the more based in truth it is, the more powerful it is. The point about status-signaling is important too, because that is how SJWs decide who gets to determine the Narrative. It is also one more reason why giving them what they demand will never satisfy them, because the struggle for status continues regardless.

Mailvox: still not getting it

I’m getting very, very tired of this tedious line of woefully uninformed thought. This is neither the first time nor the one hundredth time I’ve heard the same clueless sentiment expressed:

Linguistic Kill Shots aka a New Lexicon

It strikes me that our language to describe the malice and evil the Marxist Left perpetrates is weak. For example, Social Justice Warrior actually sounds kind of cool and virtue signaling is vaguely academic.

While the language is accurate, none of it is persuasive. As part of meme war, I’d like to propose the re-branding of leftist actions to better convey the harm they cause, much like the left re-branded tea partiers “tea baggers.”

To get the ball rolling (although not that well. this begs to be crowd sourced):

Social Justice Warrior —>  Social Justice Parasite

Virtue Signaling —> Virtue Implants (as in fake, like breasts)

Scott Adams owes all of us an apology for convincing people that because they’ve read his blog and his book, they are suddenly masters of strategic persuasivery. Yes, let’s “rebrand” one of the most effective pejoratives coined in recent years and replace it with something obvious and utterly harmless that no one will ever use. All because conservatives are uptight about words and prone to sperging about dialectic. FFS, read the Social Justice series already!

From SJWAL:

The correct strategy is to fight dialectic with dialectic, expose pseudo-dialectic with dialectic, and fight rhetoric with rhetoric. And the most important thing about implementing that strategy is to understand that with rhetoric, the actual information content is largely irrelevant.

Rhetoric is all about what emotions you trigger in the other person; when SJWs talk to each other, they try to inflate themselves at the other’s expense in order to sort out their position in the SJW hierarchy. Of course, SJW metrics are all but unintelligible to normal, sane human beings, so it can be amusing as well as educational to watch them attempt to simultaneously exaggerate both their importance and their victimhood. The perfect Queen of the SJWs – and she would be a queen, never a king – would be a mixed-race lesbian Swedish immigrant who was abused as a child by a conservative white Republican politician and kept as a sex slave by neo-Nazis with Confederate-flag tattoos prior to writing a bestselling novel about a fictionalized version of her terrible experiences, appearing on Oprah, and starring on a science fiction TV show popular with white nerds.

The basic idea is that if you can make the other person feel small or angry, you are winning at SJW rhetoric. This is why SJWs are constantly accusing other people of being mad or upset; it’s just another way of them claiming to be winning the conversation. If you can make the other person submit, run away, or fall silent, then you have won the conversation, and you are higher in the SJW hierarchy than he is. So it doesn’t matter what you actually say, and in fact, resorting to straight-up namecalling, the more ridiculous the better, is often the fastest and most efficient way to get through the conversational process with an SJW. If he launches the usual “sexist, racist, homophobic, Nazi” line, don’t blink and don’t defend yourself. Just hit him right back with “racist, child molester, pedophile, monster” and watch him run. If you’re of a more delicate constitution and are not willing to go that far even when attacked unprovoked, try “creepy” and “stalker” on the men and “psycho” or “ugly” on the women. This will usually have much the same effect.

You will know your rhetoric is effective when they block you online, or in person if their eyes widen with shock and their jaw drops. And you have mastered the art of rhetoric when you can make an SJW retreat in tears or cause a room full of people to gasp in disbelief before bursting out laughing at the SJW.

Again, you must keep in mind that the actual information content is irrelevant. SJWs communicate in competitive emotion. If you’re not doing the same, then you’re not communicating with them, you’re doing little more than serving as a punching bag for their verbal strikes. I realize this probably doesn’t make sense, but that is because you are a normal, sane individual who thinks rather than feels. But keep in mind that just as their argument “X is Not X because feelbad” makes no sense to you, your argument that “X cannot be Not X due to the law of non-contradiction” makes no sense to an SJW.

Don’t try to work through the logic of it all. Just try it. It works. Chances are that you’ll be as surprised as I was to discover how effective it can be to speak in rhetoric to the rhetoric-speakers. When Milo Yiannopoulos destroyed a feminist on live television during a public debate concerning modern Britain’s hostility to men, it wasn’t his smooth recitation of relevant facts that left her reeling in shock and disarray; she blithely ignored all of that. It was his dismissive use of the word “darling” that literally muted her. Her wide, staring eyes and gaping mouth made it very clear how powerful a well-placed, well-timed rhetorical bomb can be.

Calling an SJW a “social justice parasite” or a “social justice whiner” doesn’t work. It will NEVER work. They know they are parasites and whiners. That doesn’t burn. But they WANT to think of themselves as warriors, and they know they are not. So, when they hear you calling them a “warrior”, they hear the sarcasm and contempt in your voice, and it burns.

Rhetoric follows a different logic than dialectic.

And before any self-appointed champions of Gab jump in to push their false narrative that I am being hypocritical due to my advice about ways to effectively respond to a verbal rhetorical attack, please trouble to note that context always matters, especially when it comes to the law. You will note that I have not changed the text of SJWAL in light of the subsequent situation nor do I have any need or reason to do so. SJWAL addresses the verities of rhetoric, not the vagaries of the law.

The players crumble

The NFL players are beginning to grasp that it is futile to fight the God-Emperor on rhetorical grounds:

Only 11 NFL players did not stand during the national anthem during the first set of games Sunday. That is a stark contrast from the 180 who kneeled last week, according to ESPN’s Darren Rovell.

This is why it is always a good idea to stop and think before reacting. Especially when you’re dealing with an opponent who is very, very good at anticipating the other side’s probable reaction.

It will be amusing to see how the owners who supported the protests will now try to climb back after leaping to take the side of the players.

Lies, deceit, and rhetoric

In last night’s Darkstream, I explained why there is no “us” when it comes to the Fake Right and the genuine Right. It’s not a question of rhetoric. Rhetoric is not intrinsically dishonest. It can be, but as we are instructed, rhetoric is most effective when it is enlisted in the service of the truth. Jesus Christ was not lying when he described the Pharisees as “white-washed tombs” and “serpents” and the “offspring of vipers”. He was not speaking dialectic, he was utilizing rhetoric to illustrate their emptiness and dishonesty.

But lies and deceit are always and intrinsically dishonest. Such dishonesties may be necessary at times, when one is forced to make a choice between two evils, but they can never serve as a core strategy for any movement that is genuinely on the side of the good, the right, the white, and the true.

These selections from the Anglin Style Guide demonstrates that not only are these people not on our side, they are not to be trusted by anyone, ever. There is so little truth in them, and so much intentional deceit, that I don’t think even their claimed purpose of “saving the white race” can necessarily be taken at face value.

PRIME DIRECTIVE: ALWAYS BLAME THE JEWS FOR EVERYTHING

As Hitler says in Mein Kampf, people will become confused and disheartened if they feel there are multiple enemies. As such, all enemies should be combined into one enemy, which is the Jews. This is pretty much objectively true anyway, but we want to leave out any and all nuance.

So no blaming Enlightenment though, pathological altruism, technology/urbanization, etc. – just blame Jews for everything.

This basically includes blaming Jews for the behavior of other non-Whites. Of course it should not be that they are innocent, but the message should always be that if we didn’t have the Jews we could figure out how to deal with non-Whites very easily.

The same deal with women. Women should be attacked, but there should always be mention that if it wasn’t for the Jews, they would be acting normally.

What should be completely avoided is the sometimes mentioned idea that “even if we got rid of the Jews we would still have all these other problems.” The Jews should always be the beginning and the end of every problem, from poverty to poor family dynamics to war to the destruction of the rainforest.

LULZ

The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not…. This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes. But that’s neither here nor there.

POSITIVITY

We should always claim we are winning, and should celebrate any wins with extreme exaggeration. This does not mean we downplay the enemy, just that we play up ourselves. We overestimate our influence.

We should always be on the lookout for any opportunity to grab media attention. It’s all good. No matter what. The most obvious way to do this is to troll public figures and get them to whine about it. I keep thinking this will stop working eventually, but it just never does.

100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} BLACK AND WHITE

Just as we mustn’t present multiple enemies, we mustn’t leave any room for nuance in any other area. To the entent that it is physically possible, everything should be painted in completely black and white terms. The basic idea is that everyone on our side is 100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} good and everyone who isn’t on or side is 100{4b033d089a03a9d6b9674df13602c915dbf0bc6412bba28fe81b059d5445fd00} evil.

DEHUMANIZATION

There should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths. So it isn’t clear that we are doing this – as that would be a turnoff to most normal people – we rely on lulz.

ATTACKING MAINSTREAM SHILLS

Pro-Jew shills should be attacked. These include Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and Milo. At the same time, they should also be accused/celebrated as secret Nazis whenever they post anything that lines up with our agenda.

As you see, not unlike SJWs, Swastika-Wearing Jackasses are also prone to lying. Of course, as is the case with SJW projection, their very strategies inform us how we can effectively respond to them. Every time they claim a victory, praise them for being good little Stormpoopers and “celebrating the win with extreme exaggeration”. Every time they claim to be important or the most-trafficked site in the history of the Internet, praise them for remembering to “overestimate their influence.”

If they whine about being attacked and ask you why, keep the answer short and succinct: “because you are evil and your Alinsky-inspired strategy is literally satanic.” At the end of the day, that is sufficient cause to reject them, no matter what their professed objectives may be.

And when they try to run Jon Stewart’s “clown nose on, clown nose off” game and start posturing about how you’re just too old to grasp “the lulz”, you would do well to remind them that you are aware the lulz are only there to hide the fact that they are actively seeking to dehumanize people and inure others to their deaths.

Winning the rhetorical battle

This successful memetic campaign is an object lesson to every dialectic speaker tempted to show off how smart and righteous he is by sperging about someone else’s rhetorical sally.

Far-right activists are using fake Twitter accounts and images of battered women to smear anti-fascist groups in the US, an online investigation has revealed. The online campaign is using fake Antifa (an umbrella term for anti-fascist protestors) Twitter accounts to claim anti-fascists promote physically abusing women who support US President Donald Trump or white supremacy.
Researcher Eliot Higgins of website Bellingcat found evidence that the campaign is being orchestrated on internet messageboard 4Chan by far-right sympathisers.
One image shows the slogan “53% of white women voted for Trump, 53% of white women should look like this”, above a photograph of a woman with a bruised and cut face and an anti-fascist symbol. The woman pictured is actually British actress Anna Friel and the photograph was taken for a Women’s Aid anti-domestic violence campaign in 2007.
The images first started circulating on social media late on 23 August with hashtags #PunchNazis, #MakeRacistsAfraidAgain and #BashTheFash. Accounts appearing to belong to anti-fascist groups tweeted the memes, calling on activists to physically attack women who voted for Trump.

I retweeted one of the memes, which met with the following responses. First, from Antifa sympathizers crying foul, which is a sure sign of a meme’s effectiveness.

Antifa LI‏ @RefuseFascismNY
its also fake. Notice how these battered women memes are ONLY showing up on alt-righty accounts? No attribution. Just a fake logo.
Far Right Watch‏ @Far_Right_Watch
Various US based Far Right Groups are creating both fake #AntiFa accounts and memes as their latest weapon. Few are fooled.
Taz Wake‏ @tazwake
If you have to fake an account to make your point, your point is probably wrong.
Patrick‏ @TrickFreee
Here’s another Daily Stormer troll waging information warfare on the United States. Literal information warfare, no one doing anything.

Second, from dialectic-speaking spergs, who, despite more than 2,400 years of evidence to the contrary, continue to cling to the belief that “credibility” is the key to successful persuasion. Which, of course, is a little ironic, considering that the appeal to authority is a well-known logical fallacy. And it demonstrates, again, why dialectic-inclined spergs really need to learn to SHUT. THE. HELL. UP. when they happen to encounter rhetoric in the wild. You do not criticize a football coach’s play-calling by appealing to the rules of baseball. It is a category error.

Spritz‏ @Halfamish
This is fake, from 4chan. They already do enough shit that we don’t have to spread lies. That only weakens our credibility.
goth vampire daddy‏ @admirableism
you’d think having to straight up lie about the opposition would make one realize their cause is shit. and yet here we are

And third, from rhetoric speakers who grasp the brilliance of the 4chan campaign and the way that it simultaneously undermines Antifa’s rhetoric as well as reframes them in a manner that most third parties will find incredibly distasteful.

Malt‏ @maltsphere
Confirmation for top tier memeing is when BBC write an article “exposing” it as a 4chan troll. Ignoring that this is what punch a nazi means
Jay 5.1@notjayfivekille
Replying to @voxday
This is a brilliant satire of Antifa and the savagery of alt-left politics.

Remember, the most effective rhetoric communicates truth without necessarily being literally truthful in the details. It persuades through emotion, not reason, which is why it cannot be analyzed in the same way as a logical syllogism. Today’s #DailyMemeWars meme took the 4chan meme and went one level deeper, using nothing more than actual quotes from Antifa and Antifa-sympathetic media, for maximum memetic effect.
As always, we see that the Left is far better on the offensive than they are on defense. Which is why it is preferable for us to always seize the initiative and simply ignore their rhetorical attacks. The irony of people who constantly lie about their opponents complaining that they are not being portrayed accurately is significant, and is why their protests, even backed as they are by all the biggest media organs, are useless in the face of the rhetorical meme magic. And if you want to force-multiply these increasingly effective efforts, sign up for the Daily Meme Wars here.

BEST TIMELINE EVER

mary beard @wmarybeard
I’m afraid I dont think that academic debate is about ‘fights’ or freaking out. It’s about debate: one thing I hope I have learned in 40 yrs
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
But you don’t debate, Mary. You run crying to the media, whining that someone hit a poor wittle girl by criticizing your erroneous ideas.
mary beard‏ @wmarybeard
just for info, i never ‘ran to the media’ or even approached them. They have eyes for what goes on on Twitter! Now i’m back to writing
NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
NOTHING academic in calling pple “misogynists” for dissenting, using Lewinski/Rowling & misrepresenting debate
mary beard‏ @wmarybeard  2h2 hours ago
oh come on. I never ‘used’ anyone; if they supported me, it was because they saw exactly what was going on. I dont recall using ‘misogyny’.
NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
This should refresh your memory. For a “historian”, you keep being caught with misrepresentations.

NassimNicholasTaleb@nntaleb  1h1 hour ago
Mary Beard retweets n accusations of “misogyny” & articles in press & claims she never accused me of “misogyny” Historians shdn’t Fabricate!
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
It could have been worse. Just wait until she writes the inevitable book about the incident.

NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
Bad picture.  Use these.
Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
The second edition of Mary Beard’s heart-rending case for scholarship sans criticism.

I think the goatee and the confident leaning back really pulls the whole thing together, don’t you? I can honestly say I never expected to have one of my intellectual heroes critiquing and polishing my meme magic. It’s almost as astonishing as the time Umberto Eco invited me to join him on a visit to a monastery. So, to find out that Taleb is now reading SJWAL is just the icing on the cake.
NassimNicholasTaleb@nntaleb
Lesson I leared from UK thoughtnazis. Appease/correct them w/”I am not saying…”; they destroy you. Be aggressive, disrespect: they freakout
A. Epiphanes 4th‏ @A_Epiphanes4
I can’t help but to think of @voxday rule #1: do not apologize!
NassimNicholasTaleb@nntaleb
This morning, at page ~ 45 of his book.

Irony

To be a National Socialist in the West today, you have to be so mentally retarded that Hitler would have euthanized you under the Lebensunwertes Leben principle.
That, my friends, is irony.

Antifa = Alt Left

In one fell swoop, the God-Emperor changed the rhetorical game:

“What about the ‘alt-left’ that came charging at, as you say, the ‘alt-right’? Do they have any semblance of guilt?” Trump said. “They came charging with clubs in their hands,” he said of the counter-protesters.
Trump effectively reopened the debate, despite insistence from politicians in both parties that white supremacists and other racists deserved to be singled out.
“You had a group on one side that was mad, and you had a group on the other side that was violent. Nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say that,” he said.
Trump defended the cause of those who gathered to protest the removal of a statue honoring Gen. Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy.
“Was George Washington a slave owner. So will George Washington lose his status?” he said. “What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? Do you like him? … You’re changing history. You’re changing culture.”
While Trump condemned the driver who rammed the crowd and killed a counter-protester, he declined to label the action specifically as an act of terrorism.

That’s the power of the bully pulpit. And that’s the work of a master of rhetoric in action. Trump is right to decline to label the action of the driver as terrorism, because the chances are extremely good that he’s never going to face trial.
This is not the first time someone has run over and killed protesters blocking the road. In previous cases, the drivers were found not guilty of any wrongdoing. No doubt the video of masked antifas smashing the car with metal bars is going to go a long way towards exculpating the killer driver.

When smart guy meets smarter guy

The result often looks like road kill, because far too many smart guys, and girls, rely upon nothing more than bluffing and credentials, which only serve to intimidate the midwits and prevent them from noticing that they haven’t actually backed up their arguments.

This is straight out of The Autism Spectrum Handbook For Winning Online Arguments, 3rd Ed. and it shows a common weakness of the inadequately socialized: they are rarely satisfied with anything other than a FLAWLESS VICTORY in a discussion despite the relative rarity of said victories. I think it probably goes back to when Zunger was the smartest kid in his classroom and he could easily demolish any argument with a list of pre-memorized facts and figures, seasoned liberally with the I’m-smarter-than-you-and-you-know-it attitude. Many people, including both commenters and authors at this blog, have fallen prey to that temptation, because most people of above-average intelligence have, at one time or another, been the smartest person in the room. Of course, to be the smartest person in your Ohio State Classroom you probably need to be a 95th-percentile intellect, while to do the same at Stanford maybe you’re one in a thousand — and that means there are still more than seven million of you out there.

1.I’m not going to spend any length of time on (1); if anyone wishes to provide details as to how nearly every statement about gender in that entire document is actively incorrect, and flies directly in the face of all research done in the field for decades, they should go for it. But I am neither a biologist, a psychologist, nor a sociologist, so I’ll leave that to someone else.
This “I’m not enough of an expert to explain why I’m right but I’m enough of an expert to know I’m right” business is a smart-guy boilerplate response. It can be ignored. There is plenty of scholarship out there that shows innate differences between men and women in nearly any category of which you could readily conceive. Here is just such a paper, which should appeal to Mr. Zunger because it is both a front-page Google result and a product of Stanford….
It’s plainly obvious from Zunger’s essay that the primary function of Google, as he currently understands it, is to cooperate and collaborate for the social good. It has nothing to do with writing good software or effective software. Anybody can do that now. Code doesn’t matter.
Mr. Zunger is a very smart man, and he is a scientist to boot. But here’s the thing about modern scientists: they are only trained focus on very small things. The days of the Victorian gentleman chemist are past us now. All of the big ideas that could possibly come to a classically-educated man relaxing on the Louis-Quatorze-era chair in his family estate’s library have been discovered. Today’s science is done by putting laser-like attention on finite areas of effort.
The problem with Google, and the problem with other modern software houses, is that they have decided to put their laser-like attention on things other than quality of product. They focus on diversity, social good, various arcane theories of user-interface design, and other things that have nothing to do with writing effective code. Unsurprisingly, they aren’t very good at doing any of those new tasks — and because they’ve abandoned the things that they used to do well, the foundations are slipping out from underneath them.
Today’s Google home page is a slow-loading mess compared to what it used to be, loaded with buggy features and featuring plenty of bugs. Browser-dependent, hugely bloated, more like the old Excite! homepage than anything a Google user would have enjoyed a decade ago. It’s simply not very good anymore. That should worry the people at Google. Fixing that should be a priority above “social good” or “diverse teams”. They should hire the smartest people and have them write the best code. Period. That’s what Google is supposed to do. Whenever Google does that, it succeeds. Whenever they try to change the world, it’s a ridiculous failure.
Which brings me to the funny part. From what I’ve read, Mr. Zunger’s primary accomplishment at Google was…
wait for it..
Google Plus. Which is
a) utter garbage
b) currently serving a user base that is 74% male.

I think one of my biggest advantages as a debater is that I grew up with a best friend whose IQ exceeds mine. I could not say anything without him playing devil’s advocate, and promptly ripping to shreds any baseless posturing or unsupported assertions.
Zunger’s empty posturing is remarkably common among the cognitive elite, particularly the professionals, who are frequently inclined to opine about matters on which they are not sufficiently informed. That, of course, is why they are so defensive when called out; they realize that the whole edifice will come crumbling down if deference is not paid to them, thereby allowing them to avoid their bluffs being called.
Smart people usually construct their arguments to impress midwits and normal people. Smarter people construct them with an eye to hypothetical critics who may be smarter than they are.

What part of “cruelty artist” do they not get?

Do home run hitters ever stand there watching a nice fat pitch heading straight over the plate, and, as they start to swing, find themselves thinking, I cannot believe he thought THAT was a good idea?

Choy Li Fut Lady虎爪‏ @HungSingMA
Why does being a physicist make Brian Cox more intelligent? Btw, Liam Gallagher’s IQ is Higher than Einstein’s was.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday

Because you have to be able to grasp the math involved. Most really smart people (150+) don’t work in intellectually elite professions.

Choy Li Fut Lady虎爪‏ @HungSingMA
So? Doesn’t mean people who are able to grasp the maths don’t do history.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
True. But the highest measured IQ of 148 Cambridge faculty members was 139. Academics, on average, are third-rate intelligences.

Matthew L‏ @Blethigg
When asked what his IQ is: “I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers.”
 – Steven Hawking

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
I bet he doesn’t know his 100-meter time either.

The irony, of course, is that Steven Hawking himself is a wildly overrated academic who could not philosophize his way out of a box. Like most popularizers, he is considerably less intelligent than his fans believe him to be. Hawking wouldn’t fare much better in a debate on religion or philosophy than he would in a footrace.

I discussed the concept of overrated intellectual elites in last night’s Darkstream on Our Third-Rate Intellectual Elites. There is an Easter Egg in there if you listen to the whole thing. I suspect it will amuse most of you.

Meanwhile, the outraged response to this tweet should prove entertaining.

Supreme Dark Lord‏ @voxday
For her next trick, “historian” @wmarybeard is going to defend Kevin Costner’s American accent in Robin Hood.

The creepy thing is that Mary Beard was attempting to justify BBC diversity propaganda aimed at children while obviously being aware that mass rape is “a way of creating a mixed society”. What are we supposed to conclude from this, that Rotherham is the modern equivalent of the Rape of the Sabine Women and therefore justified in the name of diversity?


The Romans’ sense of their society as a hybrid one, Beard finds, is folded into their founding legends. Virgil’s Aeneid celebrates the Trojan hero who founded the city—a foreigner who, though he kills some of the native inhabitants, also unites the warring tribes. And without downplaying the horrific violence in the tale of Romulus and Remus and the rape of the Sabine women, Beard notes that the mass rape is portrayed not just as evidence of Roman aggression but as a way of creating a mixed society.


UPDATE: Mary Beard is already trying to run away from her own positions. Not that it will do her any good. It just adds two steps to the same conclusion. She’s also cried to The Times already.




UPDATE: Taleb pulls no punches, as usual.


NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
More Evidence that Ms Beard is a bullshitter. She tried to degrade me to “pop risk” until I compated the “pop” to HERs. Her report. Bullshitter!

NassimNicholasTaleb‏@nntaleb
If that’s how Mary Beard bullshits about her exchange with me, how can anyone trust her historical reports? No more use for her.