Tag: rhetoric

Doesn’t anyone know how to play this game?

Steve Sailer busts the Other Vox:

From Vox, an article about factchecking that starts with an un-factchecked falsehood:

Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don’t care.
A new study explains the psychological power — and hard limits — of fact-checking journalism.
   
During the campaign — and into his presidency — Donald Trump repeatedly exaggerated and distorted crime statistics. “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed,” he asserted in his dark speech at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. But the data here is unambiguous: FBI statistics show crime has been going down for decades. 

Uh, the liberal Brennan Center estimated back in April 2017 that the homicide rate (the most reliable crime rate) was nationally 19% higher in 2016 than in 2014 and up 29% in the 30 biggest cities.

Media “fact-checking” is a perfect example of pseudo-dialectic. It’s framed in the style of dialectic, and pretends to be an objective appeal to the truth, but it is actually nothing more than disguised rhetoric meant to manipulate the emotions of the reader. Which, of course, is why it is almost entirely ineffective. The “hard limits” are the result of their “facts” being incongruous with observable reality and the truth as the target perceives it.

The problem most people have in understanding the difference between rhetoric and dialectic, let alone grasping the concept of pseudo-dialectic, is that they are philosophically monolingual. Consider, for example, Jagi Lamplighter’s typically dialectic disdain for rhetoric.

The problem with Rhetoric is…it cannot stand up against reality. It is only useful for persuading sheep. Worse, when a person is persuaded by rhetoric, he will change his mind as soon as someone comes along with snazzier rhetoric.

The advantage of dialectic is when someone is persuaded by reason, they stay persuaded.

Vox is a bright and brave man with brilliant ideas. He is so smart that much of what he understands, most people cannot follow—and that is a harsh and lonely way to live.

But that doesn’t mean that he can’t use his brilliance to learn how to present real arguments in a simple and concise manner that the masses can grasp.

This rhetoric nonsense is beneath him.

But one might as reasonably claim that this Chinese nonsense is beneath the English speaker, even when speaking to a Chinese-speaking audience. Jagi’s faith in my ability to not only leap the IQ communications gap, but successfully reason with emotion-driven non-thinkers, is probably more flattering than she knows, but I can assure her, neither I nor anyone else in the course of human history has ever been sufficiently brilliant for that.

Remember, dialectic is a form of rhetoric. That sweet reason dialectic speakers value so highly is merely a subset of the art of persuasion, and moreover, it is not the only legitimate form. Rhetoric is not about truth and falsehood per se, but rather emotional content that can point towards the truth with falsehood as readily as it points towards falsehood with the truth. And, as I noted above, the more rhetoric points towards the recognized truth, the more effective it tends to be.

Surrender or antisemite

Those are the options being presented by the Israeli ambassador to Hungary. I have no doubt that Hungary will rightly choose the latter.

The Israeli ambassador in Budapest has called on the Hungarian government to end its campaign against Jewish billionaire George Soros, which he claims is stoking antisemitic sentiment.

The Hungarian government has recently rolled out a nationwide billboard campaign, urging Hungarians to stand firm against the ruinous influence of the Jewish financial speculator.

George Soros is well known for his involvement in the open borders campaign, with his Open Society organisation essentially acting as a front for the criminal people smugglers bringing third world migrants to Europe.

What is lesser known however, is the extent to which Soros is using his ‘soft power’ to influence civil society.

The Central European University in Budapest was founded and bankrolled by the Jewish billionaire, and has attempted to exert its influence against Viktor Orbán’s popular government in loosely veiled retaliation for recent legal measures against the university.

In recent months Hungary has seen protests by students carrying the Soros message against the potential closure of the university, with some fearing that this could be the beginning of another ‘colour revolution’.

Soros’ Open Society organisation has also worked tirelessly behind the scenes against the Hungarian government’s opposition to illegal immigration, despite the fact that 98.5% of Hungarians rejected illegal migrant quotas in a referendum just last year.

Yet despite the validity of the Hungarian government’s complaints against George Soros, it is apparently antisemitic to speak out.

Hungary’s largest Jewish organisation Mazsihisz has also called for the government to end its campaign, also on the basis that it is ‘antisemitic’.

This is precisely why I don’t give an airborne rodent’s fornication about it when people cry antisemitism or Holocaust anymore. It’s no different than when Zoe Quinn or Anita Sarkeesian cry sexual harassment and death threats; the accusations are just a rhetorical means of attempting to shut down legitimate and well-merited criticism. There is simply no substance to them.

If you’re going to call me a Nazi, or a Fascist, or an antisemite, or a Holocaust denier, or a rape apologist, or an Alien Autopsy denier, or a racist sexist transgenderphobe, or an anthropogenic global warming denier, or whatever vituperative label you can concoct because I disagree with your belief that one world government under anyone but Jesus Christ is desirable, then I do not give so much as a single electron for your opinion.

The undeniable fact is that most people have a very good reason to hate certain individuals and what those individuals have done to their nations as well as the rest of Mankind. Their creed and ethnicity is irrelevant. If you don’t hate what Immanuel Celler did to the USA, you’re objectively anti-American. And if you don’t hate what George Soros has done to European countries from the UK to Hungary, you’re either evil yourself or you are simply unaware of the unmitigated wickedness of his globe-spanning Evil Society. And if you don’t hate these creeps who believe God has chosen them to enslave the rest of humanity, well, you’re clearly suffering from a severe lack of self-esteem.

Everyone hates liberals

The Left and the Right finally agree on something:

‘‘Liberal’’ has long been a dirty word to the American political right. It may be shortened, in the parlance of the Limbaugh Belt, to ‘‘libs,’’ or expanded to the offensive portmanteau ‘‘libtards.’’ But its target is always clear. For the people who use these epithets, liberals are, basically, everyone who leans to the left: big-spending Democrats with their unisex bathrooms and elaborate coffee. This is still how polls classify people, placing them on a neat spectrum from ‘‘extremely conservative’’ to ‘‘extremely liberal.’’

Over the last few years, though — and especially 2016 — there has been a surge of the opposite phenomenon: Now the political left is expressing its hatred of liberals, too. For the committed leftist, the ‘‘liberal’’ is a weak-minded, market-friendly centrist, wonky and technocratic and condescending to the working class. The liberal is pious about diversity but ready to abandon any belief at the slightest drop in poll numbers — a person who is, as the folk singer Phil Ochs once said, ‘‘10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.’’ The anonymous Twitter account ‘‘liberalism.txt’’ is a relentless stream of images and retweets that supposedly illustrate this liberal vacuousness: say, the chief executive of Patagonia’s being hailed as a leader of ‘‘corporate resistance to Trump,’’ or Chelsea Clinton’s accusing Steve Bannon of ‘‘fat shaming’’ Sean Spicer.

This shift in terminology can be confusing, both politically and generationally — as when baby boomers describe fervent supporters of Bernie Sanders as ‘‘very liberal,’’ unaware that young Sanders­istas might find this vomit-inducing. It can also create common ground. Last year, the young (and left-leaning) writer Emmett Rensin published a widely read piece on Vox deriding liberals for their ‘‘smug style’’; soon enough, one longtime adept of the right, National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, was expressing his partial approval, writing in Bloomberg View that what contemporary liberalism lacked most was humility. Here was a perspective common to both sides of the old spectrum: that liberals suffered from a serene, self-ratifying belief in their own reasonableness, and that it would spell their inevitable defeat.

When it comes to diagnosing liberalism, both left and right focus on this same set of debilitating traits: arrogance, hypocrisy, pusillanimity, the insulated superiority of what, in 1969, a New York mayoral candidate called the ‘‘limousine liberal.’’ In other words, the features they use to distinguish liberals aren’t policies so much as attitudes. The profane hosts of the popular podcast ‘‘Chapo Trap House,’’ prime originators of the left’s liberal-bashing, spend a good deal of airtime making fun of liberal cultural life, with one common target being fervor for the musical ‘‘Hamilton.’’ ‘‘Nothing has represented them more: a hagiographical musical where they can pretend to be intersectional and pretend to be multicultural,’’ said Felix Biederman, a co-host, on the second episode of the show. ‘‘They have no policy. They’re all cultural signifiers.’’

And now we know what to call moderates…. However, after much reflection, I think I may have finally landed upon a useful rhetorical term: spectator. Mull it over and try it out the next time you happen to have a moderate cluck-clucking and waving his finger at you.

The construction of rhetoric

In last night’s Darkstream, I noted that the most effective rhetoric tends to have something in common: it is based on mocking an aspect of the target’s self-identification.

For example, the reason Social Justice Warrior is effective rhetoric that triggers the emotions of SJWs while derogatory terms like Social Justice Bully and Social Justice Crybaby do not is because “warrior” is a term that the SJWs gave themselves, and more importantly, it is how they see themselves. To hear the term used contemptuously, as an open form of mockery, is what causes the emotional pain that triggers them.

Fake News, which is arguably the most effective rhetorical term ever deployed against the media, is almost exactly the same. It is a term originally coined by the media, but stolen and deployed against them, and one that strikes at the very heart of their self-value and self-identification as devotees of truth and accuracy.

So, as an exercise, let’s see if anyone can utilize this principle to come up with a rhetorical term for moderates that would serve as an alternative to Cuckservative, which is itself already an effective tag that is a play on a self-title rather than an actual one, but nevertheless strikes powerfully at the conservative’s self-image as loyal and moral.

The mother of all rhetoric

Remember, the most effective rhetoric is founded in truth. Which helps explain why “fake American” is so powerful. They’re not Americans in any non-paperwork sense, and they know it:

So I am talking with one of my cuck friends that is a Facebook shill reposting a bunch of Huffington articles. I was talking to him about his kids and school and which school they are going to attend because they go to private schools. He starts talking shit about Trump and Betsy DeVos and how they are going to ruin the school systems. And I say, “well you made your decision to go to private schools long before Trump and DeVos had any influence.” He chuckles sheepishly and says the public schools in his area suck.

So I give him a little shit and say, “Oh yeah, so you are all about open borders as long as those kids don’t go to the same schools as your kids.”

AND THEN I SAY THE MAGIC WORDS: “Fake American”

And this guy that I knew and loved absolutely loses his shit on me. I am talking epic meltdown. I thought at one point he was literally going to attack me.

I don’t know what it is with the left and that label “fake.” They really really hate it. I mean #fakenews is driving them f-ing insane.

So I walked away from that conversation not really realizing I had stumbled onto something. I told my based wife and she laughed at his meltdown. Then, I told my cucked mother-in-law, who I also have a really good relationship with, and she got very upset over that term “fake.” “You can’t just throw that word around.”

Huh? So this got me scratching my head. I don’t watch CNN so maybe somehow they’ve poisoned the minds of the masses to believe that “fake” is an evil word.

So I started dropping the label “fake American” every chance I got when I knew I was talking to a leftie, in a very casual sarcastic joking manner. And you know what? Sure as shit, each and every one of them had a strong visceral response – they were TRIGGERED!

This is excellent rhetoric for immigrants, the Left, and cucks alike. The former because they know that they are not truly Americans, even if they were born in Portugal, and the latter pair because they know their ideologies and actions are diametrically opposed to the interests of genuine Americans.

It’s also why “you have to go back” is such powerful rhetoric. Not-Americans are genuinely afraid, and with good reason, that eventually they will be called upon to do so. Whereas, in the case of disloyal Americans, they are afraid they will not be permitted entry into the American Redoubt when the collapse occurs and the vicious struggle for territory begins.

The Right Alternative

It’s all but a dead letter now, but this little photo montage from Twitter should suffice to demonstrate why the American Alt-White’s Master Plan to embrace a long-defunct German political ideology was, in a word, retarded.

Is it fair? Not particularly. So what? It’s funny and effective. It is excellent rhetoric. It’s the first time the Left has outmemed the Right in ages, and all because some amateurs thought they were playing underwater 5D chess. Sometimes, what looks stupid is just stupid.

And while the media’s power is on the decline, it is still formidable. They should not be feared, but they should not be trusted or dismissed as irrelevant either. Richard Spencer thought he could play the media, but he learned the hard way that they played him instead. If your marketing plan ends up with you being beaten, in public, to the applause of tens of thousands of people, you should probably rethink your strategy and its underlying assumptions.

None of this will have any effect on the rise of the Alt-Right; the media’s attempt to paint us as National Socialists will only build interest in us and sabotage their own credibility because their claims are observably false. Which, of course, is precisely why they are afraid to run my answers to their own questions about the Alt-Right. Indeed, the mere disclosure of an interview I did today would be sufficient to shatter their false Narrative like a nuke in a Waterford Crystal factory.

We don’t need to dance for the media to win. We don’t need to play-act or engage in theatrics. We need to do nothing more than speak the truth without fear. Liberalism has failed. Conservatism has failed. Neoconservatism has failed. Communism has failed. Secular liberal democracy has failed. Multiculturalism has failed. Feminism has failed. Progressivism has failed.

The Alt-Right is the Right Alternative.

He didn’t read Aristotle

From Gab:

Todd Kincannon · @ToddKincannon
Had dinner with a political operative friend last night. He said “I had no idea that all it took to win was to call Democrats and media worthless pieces of shit all the time. I thought you had to be reasonably nice. Trump has shown me the light. Fuck the Left.” 


This is an exact quote. 


It’s called “the art of rhetoric”. See Chapter 10 of SJWs Always Lie.

Left-wingers will only change their minds if they experience enough emotional pain to provoke the desire to avoid it. They are entirely irrational; the more intelligent they are, the more highly developed their facility for rationalizing away any logical inconsistencies is. And that’s why those on the Left are always calling people on the Right stupid, racist, and so on, because they are attempting to convince us by inflicting emotional pain and triggering aversive reactions. It may sound like insults, but in reality, that is how the Left makes converts.

Of course, their understanding of dialectic speakers is as poor as the average dialecticals understanding of rhetoricals. It really shocks them when their name-calling has no effect. In fact, that is a good way to discern a right-wing rhetorical; the more they are affected by name-calling, the more they are rhetorically minded despite their protestations.

The power of the bully pulpit

Trump has a powerful weapon to wield against corporate America’s free trade mythology:

Some U.S. companies are reviewing potential mergers while others are rethinking job cuts or looking at their manufacturing operations in China for fear of being cast as “anti-American” by President-elect Donald Trump, according to Wall Street bankers, company executives and crisis management consultants.

Having seen some of America’s largest companies, including General Motors Co, Lockheed Martin Corp and United Technologies Corp, bluntly and publicly rebuked by Trump on Twitter, many others are worried they may be his next target – especially if they have significant overseas manufacturing, have had U.S. job cuts or price increases for consumers.

“Any business that leaves our country for another country, fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. without retribution or consequence is WRONG!” Trump, who assumes office on Jan. 20, tweeted in December.

Trump campaigned on an “America First” anti-globalization platform that promised the return of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs to economically depressed areas.

That nationalist rhetoric and Trump’s willingness to use his Twitter account as a cudgel has so rattled some companies that they are putting on hold mergers and acquisitions that may involve significant job cuts or moving production or tax domicile abroad, out of fear that such deals could be seen as “unpatriotic”, several top Wall Street bankers said.

This is excellent news. It also shows how perilously thin the corporate case for free trade is.

All your rhetoric are belong to us

A GamerGate tactic goes mainstream and the mainstream media backs down fast.

When Jim DeMint wanted to dis a TV interviewer’s suggestion that Obamacare has merits as well as flaws, the former senator and tea partyer used a handy putdown: “You can put all that under the category of fake news.”

When conspiracy theorist Alex Jones wanted to deny a CNN report that Ivanka Trump would take over the East Wing offices traditionally occupied by the first lady, he used the same label.

And when a writer for an arch-conservative website needed a putdown for ABC’s chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl, he reached for the obvious: “fake-news propagandist.”

Fake news has a real meaning — deliberately constructed lies, in the form of news articles, meant to mislead the public. For example: The one falsely claiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump, or the one alleging without basis that Hillary Clinton would be indicted just before the election.

But though the term hasn’t been around long, its meaning already is lost. Faster than you could say “Pizzagate,” the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.

“The speed with which the term became polarized and in fact a rhetorical weapon illustrates how efficient the conservative media machine has become,” said George Washington University professor Nikki Usher.

As Jeremy Peters wrote in the New York Times: “Conservative cable and radio personalities, top Republicans and even Mr. Trump himself . . . have appropriated the term and turned it against any news they see as hostile to their agenda.”

So, here’s a modest proposal for the truth-based community.

Let’s get out the hook and pull that baby off stage. Yes: Simply stop using it.

The Alt-Right and conservatives managed to jujitsu the rhetorical term “fake news” so easily because the best rhetoric is rooted in truth. And because it is readily observable that no one reports more false information than the mainstream media, there were far more examples that could be reasonably described as “fake news” to be found in the mainstream media than were being spread around social media by the Right. Ergo, it stuck to them rather than to their targets, and blew up in their faces.

That doesn’t mean the tactic will work every time, only when the truth is more in line with the Right’s use of the rhetorical term than the Left’s. Of course, that will be most of the time, as the shameless dishonesty in this piece demonstrates:

“the label has been co-opted to mean any number of completely different things: Liberal claptrap. Or opinion from left-of-center. Or simply anything in the realm of news that the observer doesn’t like to hear.”

No, it hasn’t, as it was instead applied to mean false information presented as accurate news by the mainstream media. Notice that Left can’t afford to be completely honest even when they are affecting to do so, which is why they will always be vulnerable to rhetorical jujitsu of this sort. And on a tangential note, observe that this is why larping and “mocking” the media by playing along with its narrative is always a mistake, as doing so strengthens their rhetoric and eliminates the possibility of turning it around on them.

If you don’t understand the tactic’s connection to #GamerGate, it is an application of the frequently used GG tactic of taking over enemy hashtags, also known as “all ur hashtag are belong to us”. I even described this specific tactic in modest detail in SJWs Always Lie.

Mailvox: diversity and dialectic

A reader whose existence would almost surely be denied by the Left shares his experience of gravitating towards the Alt-Right over time:

I have been reading your blogs –Vox Day and sometimes Alpha Game–almost daily for some time now; probably spent an entire day reading post after post on Vox Day once. For those reasons, and another I will tell you down the line, I thought you might be interested in my perspective. First, a little background information. I am of Black East African descent, the son of immigrants to the USA, and a citizen.

I was a leftist from most of that life until I stopped listening to the popular race narrative and picked up books on racial politics from the opposition (conservatives); to test my convictions, give the the other opinion a fair hearing. Following lots of discussions, frustrations and insults with conservatives, I quickly joined the “it’s not oppression, it’s culture” side of the debate.

This would also be my first lesson in the power of identity vs ideology. On the left, I had come to identify with “Black America”. As I realized just how retarded and economically illiterate the victimhood narrative is, I dropped the identity. The ideology followed soon after. First, I became a Milton Friedman/Thomas Sowell conservative; then, upon reading Hoppe, Rothbard and Mises a minarchist Libertarian. That’s pretty much where my ideological journey ended when I first heard about you.

On racial differences, I couldn’t bring myself to deny their existence. But I clung to the amorphous concept of culture to explain them away. Reading Thomas Sowell and Jared Diamond was enough for some time but the question couldn’t be erased from my mind: where does culture come from? I eventually got tired of the farce. A little research made it abundantly clear that the only thing holding the culture crowd together was sheer denial and ignorance of uncomfortable facts. It’s not culture, it’s genes.

That was way too long, but hopefully enough that you get where I am coming from.

Now, reading Vox Day has been the source of perhaps the greatest succession of Eureka moments I have had in my life. It has been my utmost pleasure to be intellectually challenged by your views, wrestle with them and ultimately understand them. Also, saying that your writing is excellent would be a gross understatement. I love it!

I have been amazed at just how reading you has gotten me to espouse opinions which I wouldn’t have ever considered before. It just works. If I were a little more inclined to the ridiculous African tendency for superstition, I might call it magic; we still disagree on a few things, of course. I am an atheist, for example, and I still hold reservations on free trade. Much less enthusiastically after reading you and yes, I realized long before reading you that I could only be a consistent thinker–as an atheist–by denying the existence of evil. Still struggling with that one. But I wanted you to know that I truly appreciate the work you do, and not just in my own selfish quest for the truth, but also for America.

As much as I hate to admit it, the only people in the world casting their vote for freedom are White Americans. America alone stands against the mindless, brainless slavery the rest of the world has to offer; the last hope of freedom lovers everywhere, the last chance to gift humanity with a land where freedom reigns (more so than anywhere else). Seeing Blacks, Hispanics and now Asians continually and cockroachly eating away at this legacy has me royally pissed off!

That’s why I wrote this mail. Today, I was with an Asian-“American” cuckservative arguing in favor of abolishing the electoral college, in the wake of the God-Emperor’s rise. My anger was enough that my inner reaction was some version of: “Bitch, this country was not founded for people like you! Shut the fuck up and stop trying to inject your foreign political influence into the nation!”. Of course, I never actually said it. I am as polite a gentleman as they come. But I realized that I had spent too much time on your blog, and how thankful I was for it.

I hope that the work you do, and that of others like you, will be enough to rouse up White America. And even if it doesn’t, should the worst come to pass, know that I consider it an honor to have intellectually stood with you–perhaps on the wrong side of history–but on the side of bravery, truth and freedom.

The reader answers the question that is often asked of me: why would an American Indian expat, or African immigrant, or South Pacific islander, or Chinese national, ever support the Alt-Right? As should now be obvious, we support the Alt-Right because the Alt-Right ideology, such as it is, is the only one that is in philosophical harmony with history, science, current events, and the truth as we best understand it today. It is the only ideology that is capable of defending truth, freedom, and Western civilization because it is the only one that is not dependent upon the adherent believing, and telling, provable lies. It is the only ideology that is presently providing predictive models being confirmed by events.

The Alt-Right lens is the only one that makes sense of the world as we observe it.

The reader’s email also highlights the supreme importance of rhetoric. Very, very few individuals, of any race, color or creed, are as intellectually courageous as the reader, or as ruthlessly devoted to dialectic. He was able to surmount the heavy influence of identity- to say nothing of being steeped in a lifetime of rhetoric – through nothing more than educating himself through information, but it took him a long time and it was a difficult and emotionally painful process. (For me, admitting the truth about free trade was a similar, though less painful intellectual baptism of fire.) No individual who is limited to rhetoric, or is even modestly susceptible to rhetoric, will ever intellectually survive that arduous process.

Pain is the path to truth. If a fact bothers you, if it triggers you, if it makes you want to shy away from contemplating it, that is the signpost indicating the way you will have to go in order to find the truth. As a far better philosopher than me once said, it is a hard and narrow path.

And the reader’s email also demonstrates why the Alt-West is likely to become the intellectual driving force of the Alt-Right over time. Those who support the Alt-Right for dialectical reasons rather than for reasons related to rhetoric, culture, and identity, those who can never be a part of the Alt-White due to identity, are generally going to be as intellectually formidable as they are emotionally courageous.