Tag: rhetoric

The Lad Protests WAY Too Much

This was the talentless and confirmed ticket taker Jimmy Kimmel’s response to Aaron Rodgers’s one-liner about Kimmel being worried about the Epstein client list coming out.

“Did you hear this story about me and Aaron Rodgers, the former quarterback for the Packers? All right, so, what happened is he’s a Jets quarterback now. He went on a show on ESPN, The Pat McAfee Show, and out of the blue insinuated that I was nervous because the Jeffrey Epstein list was coming out. He said I was hoping it wouldn’t, and that he was going to pop a bottle of something to celebrate when he did. And then it did come out and of course my name wasn’t on it and isn’t on it and won’t ever be on — I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein, I’ve never met Jeffrey Epstein, I’m not on the list, I wasn’t on a plane or an island or anything ever and I suggested that if Aaron wanted to make false and very damaging statements like that that we should do it in court so he could share his proof with like a judge. Because, you know, when you hear a guy who won a Super Bowl and did all the State Farm commercials say something like this, a lot of people believe it.

“And I know this because I hear from these people often. My wife hears from them. My kids hear from them. My poor mailman hears from these people. And now we’re hearing from lots more of them, thanks to Aaron Rodgers, who I guess believes one of two things. Either he actually believes my name was gonna be on Epstein’s list, which is insane. Or the more likely scenario is he doesn’t actually believe that, he just said it because he’s mad at me for making fun of his top knot and his lies about being vaccinated. He’s particularly upset I think because I made fun of the fact that he floated this wacko idea that the UFO sightings that were in the news in February were being reported to distract us from the Epstein list. That was Aaron’s theory that he said, and I mocked [him].”

“So he saw that and maybe to retaliate, he decided to insinuate that I am a pedophile. This is how these nuts do it now. You don’t like Trump, you’re a pedophile. It’s their go-to move, and it shows you how much they actually care about pedophilia.

“But here’s the thing, I spent years doing sports. I’ve seen guys like him before. Aaron Rodgers has a very high opinion of himself. Because he had success on a football field, he believes himself to be an extraordinary being. He genuinely thinks that because God gave him the ability to throw a ball, he’s smarter than everybody else. The idea that his brain is just average is unfathomable to him. We learned during COVID somehow he knows more about science than scientists.

“A guy who went to community college, then got into Cal on a football scholarship, and didn’t graduate. Someone who never spent a minute studying the human body is an expert in the field of immunology. He just put on a magic helmet and that ‘G’ made him a genius. Aaron got two As on his report card. They were both in the word Aaron, OK? And can you imagine that this hamster-brained man knows what the government is up to because he’s a quarterback doing research on YouTube and listening to podcasts?

“I looked it up. This is actually a thing. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. In other words, Aaron Rodgers is too arrogant to know how ignorant he is. They let him host Jeopardy! for two weeks. Now he knows everything.

“And by the way, I’m not one of those people that thinks athletes and members of the sports media should stick to talking about sports. I think Aaron Rodgers has the right to express any opinion he wants. But saying someone is a pedophile isn’t an opinion nor is it trash talk, sorry Pat McAfee.

“And as far as the ‘well, you say things about people all the time’ argument goes, yes, I do. It’s not the same. It’s not even close to the same. We don’t make up lies. In fact, we have a team of people who work very hard to work to sift through facts and reputable sources before I make a joke, and that’s an important distinction. A joke about someone. Even when that someone is Donald Trump. Even a person who lies from the minute he wakes up until the minute he’s smearing orange makeup on his My Pillow at night, even he deserves that consideration. And we give it to him, because the truth still matters.

“And when I do get something wrong, which happens on rare occasions, you know what I do? I apologize for it. Which is what Aaron Rodgers should do. Which is what a decent person would do. But I bet he won’t. If he does, you know what I’ll do, I’ll accept his apology and move on. But he probably won’t do that.”

I note that it was the conspiracy theorist Rodgers, not the mainstream mouthpiece Kimmel, who was correct about the vaxx. Kimmel has also repeatedly lied about Donald Trump; his claim to have “a team of people who work very hard to work to sift through facts and reputable sources” simply underlines how full of falsehood and nonsense he is. The observable reality is that Kimmel is just another no-talent Narrative cheerleader who says what he is told to say, and it is logical to conclude that he has paid some price in exchange for being given the massively privileged position that he holds.

I don’t know what that price was. I doubt that Rodgers does either. But you don’t reach a certain level of success on your own without becoming aware of people who are reaching, and exceeding, that level of success without any genuine accomplishments or talent of their own to explain it.

And perhaps more importantly, you don’t assemble your speechwriters and collectively produce a wall of text to rebut a false non-accusation if you have a clear conscience, no matter what people didn’t actually accuse you of doing. I’d have been more inclined to believe Kimmel entirely innocent of any satanic shenanigans if he’d simply made a crack about evidence derived from ayahuasca visions being inadmissible in court and left it at that.

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The Coining of the Term: Midwit

Along with “Sigma Male” and “Gamma”, the term “midwit” appears to have become increasingly popular on the Internet, thanks chiefly to what is now known as “the Midwit Meme”. I was certainly surprised to hear a comedian use it on Simon Evans’s show on GB News this week. And, needless to say, it hasn’t taken long for people “helping” others to understand it to begin explaining it incorrectly.

Tablet: A midwit is typically described as someone with an IQ score between 85 and 115

No, this is incorrect. A midwit has an IQ in the 105 to 120 range. The very need for the term is derived from the observation that the individual so described possesses a level of intelligence that is sufficiently above average to inspire him to overrate himself. The Tablet redefinition is based on the visuals of the meme rather than the core concept.

The Spectator: According to something called the Meming Wiki, “midwit” has been “in use on 4chan and other online spaces since around 2013.”

For those who happen to have an interest in etymological history, I believe the Meming Wiki is correct and the neologism was first coined on 17 February 2012. It’s rather amusing to learn that one of my favorite memes, and one which I have myself utilized on occasion, may have been inspired in some way by the term.

As we often see on this blog, those who possess above-average intelligence and trouble to occasionally read newspapers and magazines tend to genuinely be under the erroneous impression that they possess superlative intelligence. But while having an IQ between one and two standard deviations above the norm is unusual, it is hardly rare, and in historical terms it is distinctly pedestrian.

The astonishing thing about Miss Wright’s confession isn’t that she was clueless and solipsistic little snob, but rather, that she still appears to believe that she is highly intelligent on the basis of familiarity with the works of a trivial and silly science fiction writer with a poor grasp of history. If she had any brains at all worth noting, then she wouldn’t have needed someone else to point out that clever people are everywhere; in addition to the ease with which this can be observed in the material world, even a basic knowledge of intelligence statistics would indicate that this must be the case.

If this erstwhile pirate wench had simply noted that Mensa, with its 130/132 IQ floor, potentially represents the top 2 percent of the population, she would have known that there are some 6.2 MILLION Americans who are significantly above the “read a book” level that she sets as a significant benchmark.

The difference between the mid-wit and the genuinely intelligent is usually fairly easy to identify. The mid-witted individual tends to compare himself to those below the average and concludes that because he isn’t like them, he must be a genius.

The Tragedy of the Mid-Witted, 17 February 2012

It took nearly two years before the term “midwittery” first appeared here on the blog, although I seem to recall it being used in casual conversation several times before first being utilized in the post Mailvox: Answers for MJ 1 on 1 February 2014:

As for the idea that an all-powerful and all-loving God should wish to stop and be able to stop evil, to say nothing of the idea that the existence of evil therefore disproves the existence of such a god, well, that doesn’t even rise to the level of midwittery. One has to have a truly average mind and remain ignorant of basic Biblical knowledge to find either of those concepts even remotely convincing.

It’s far from impossible that someone else may have previously utilized what is a fairly basic term in some other context, but given the way it is regularly attached to the specific 115-IQ range identified, it appears that the neologism was coined here. However, I think it is probably a stretch to assume, as The Spectator does, that the dismissive term “mid” is derived from midwit, although I suppose it is possible.

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Australia Abandons Free Speech

It’s fascinating how these states that literally go to war and invade other countries over “freedom” so rapidly abandon it in certain circumstances:

Laws banning the Nazi salute and the display or sale of symbols associated with terror groups came into effect in Australia on Monday as the government responds to a rise in antisemitic incidents following the Israel-Gaza war.

The law makes it an offense punishable by up to 12 months in prison to publicly perform the Nazi salute or display the Nazi swastika or the double-sig rune associated with the Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary group.

The sale and trade of these symbols is similarly prohibited.

Well, that should certainly put an end to the risk that the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei will rise from the ashes of its defeat after 79 years and take power Down Under! Thank goodness Australian politicians are on guard against the risk of a political blitzkrieg. It’s rather like how the EU is all about “democracy”, unless the people vote against the dictates of their unelected superstate.

Clown World is just relentlessly fake and gay. Never, ever, believe a single thing that the clowns say about their supposed principles or motivations. It is nothing but lies all the way down to the Hell out of which they climbed.

You may be interested to note that the Bing AI image generator is now blocking prompts that contain the phrase “rainbow wigs”. The original prompt for this image was: demonic clowns wearing rainbow wigs climbing out of a huge fiery pit. Dark fantasy style, red glow. It was blocked, and based on some additional experimentation, I believe it was the connection of “demonic” with “rainbow”.

Clown World fears memes because Clown World relies upon lies and memes point toward the truth. So, as Sun Tzu said: meme them until they block your prompt, then meme them some more.

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An Unexpected Hitler

We’ve seen a lot of Hitlers over the last few decades, from Milosovic to Xi, but this appears to be the first Israeli Prime Minister Hitler.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is no different from Adolf Hitler, Türkiye’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has said, condemning Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

Erdogan fired the new diplomatic broadside at Netanyahu on Wednesday when he delivered an opening speech at an award ceremony in Ankara. West Jerusalem now has “Nazi camps” of its own to hold Palestinians in, the president stated, implying the campaign in Gaza was as bad – or even worse – than the Holocaust committed by Nazi Germany.

“We’ve seen the Nazi camps of Israel. How does this happen? They used to speak ill about Hitler, but how are you any different than Hitler?” Erdogan stated.

It will be interesting to see if the rhetoric sticks or not. It might, if it gets picked up by the Chinese media, which is rapidly becoming as influential on a global basis as the US-based media.

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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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