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.
Irony
Tag: rhetoric
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 HawkingSupreme 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.
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.