Tag: rhetoric
Clown World “Democracy”
Clown World’s puppet in Ukraine helpfully demonstrates that whatever it is the clowns mean by “democracy”, it isn’t “the will of the people” that most people around the world and the dictionary have historically defined it to be.
President Vladimir Zelensky has announced that the Ukrainian passports of Viktor Medvedchuk, the leader of the banned Opposition Platform – For Life party, and several other current and former opposition MPs have been revoked. Medvedchuk, Andrey Derkach, Taras Kozak and Renat Kuzmin have been stripped of their Ukrainian citizenship based on materials prepared by the country’s Security Service (SBU) and migration authorities, and in line with the constitution, Zelensky said on Tuesday.
This follows the Kiev regime’s similar action in stripping a number of Orthodox church leaders of their citizenship. In addition to further proving that Clown World’s claims that it is defending “democracy” in Ukraine to be a blatant lie, Zelensky’s actions are also highlighting the difference between a nation and a state.
The “Ukraine” that Zelensky rules is not the Ukrainian people. It’s just a political apparatus, in the same way that the “United States” is not, and has very little to do with, the American people who are the Posterity of the Founders and for whom the Constitution was written.
One cannot strip a person of his nationhood because it is his birthright and can be confirmed by external bodies through the use of genetic science. But since one observably can strip a person of his government-issued identity, this proves that the issuing body is not, and can never be, synonymous with the nation.
Regardless, the primary lesson here is that the ideal of democracy, even if perfectly realized, inevitably leads to the monstrous forms of skinsuit faux democracy as practiced in Ukraine, the USA, Brazil, and throughout the so-called democracies of East and West.
Meme of the Week 006
I’d chosen this week’s winner even before Donald Trump’s announcement that he’d be running for president again, but it’s particularly apt in light of that. It’s a powerful meme that not only points to the truth of the former president’s narcissism and complete failure of leadership, but also effectively triggers the emotions of those who continue to support the man and those who don’t alike. The only thing that prevents it from being a perfect meme is the execution of the dialogue balloon. 9/10.
Speaking of Donald Trump’s announcement, Trouble Man and Neon Revolt helpfully summarized his speech last night.
TROUBLE MAN: I’ll give you a summary of Trump’s speech so you don’t need to waste your time: “What they’re doing to our country, rigged elections, high gas prices, southern border, wars, etc. is so sad. I did the best for black and asians and hispanics. Nobody’s done better (No mention of Whites). I did such good things for israel with the Abraham accords. Nobody’s better for israel. They’ve done nothing to fix election fraud since I walked away from a hijacked election in 2020 and your countrymen are still political prisoners… But despite that, we’re still gonna pretend we have legitimate elections and I’m gonna run again in 2024!”
NEON REVOLT: No one wants to say it, but I will. Trump doesn’t sound like he has his heart in this. There’s also the glaring issue of voter fraud. I see no evidence of anything being done to deal with this, the most important issue, affecting all our elections. Right now, with this level of energy, and with the way things are rigged, this all feels like an exercise in futility.
Don’t get me wrong. The man was a very, very good president, the best of the 20th and 21st centuries combined. But that doesn’t change the fact that Donald Trump failed in his stated objective to make America great again, he failed morally when he embraced the vaxx and subjected his countrymen to its destructive consequences, and he failed as a leader when he refused to pardon the January 6th demonstrators while pardoning con artists, scammers, and rappers.
When Dialectic Exceeds Rhetoric
It renders the rhetoric toothless and useless:
Liberal MSNBC hosts and pundits worried about potential Democratic losses in the upcoming midterm elections, took to Twitter this week to stoke fears of “fascism” if voters supported Republican Party candidates.
The liberal anchors were largely reacting to a New York Times poll that found independent voters were turning to the GOP over concerns about the economy.
In a melodramatic tweet, MSNBC’s Joy Reid bashed anyone who voted Republican as choosing “literal fascism.” “It’s terrifying how many Americans will choose literal fascism, female serfdom, climate collapse and the reversal of everything from Social Security & Medicare to student loan relief bc they think giving Republicans the power to investigate Hunter Biden will bring down gas prices,” she tweeted.
I’m neither a fascist nor a communist, but I would absolutely, one hundred percent, vote for a literal Italian fascist, a Chinese neo-communist or a medieval Norman aristocrat over the global satanists who presently rule the West. Even the literal German National Socialist Workers Party was less evil, less wicked, and less murderous than the global satanists.
That is not a defense of any of those evil historical ideologies and organizations. To the contrary, it is an indictment of the current global elite, who might – perhaps – be ever so slightly less awful and wicked than the elites of the Aztec and Carthaginian empires. Possibly.
And given how compromised the corrupt and corpocratic Republicans are themselves, literal fascists are probably to be preferred to them too.
Meme of the Week
Meme of the Week
This meme submission, rated 9/10, was the winner of the Weekly Meme Review. It was a postcard produced in Vichy France in 1942. The rhetoric is so effective that it remains triggering even after seven decades.
A Tale of Two Comics
Marvel Comics on the Covid vaccinations
Arktoons on the Covid vaccinations
It’s not really a big mystery why Pew Research recently painted a target on Arkhaven, is it? And can you believe they’re STILL trying to push this worse-than-worthless poison with people literally dropping dead from it on a daily basis?
A Vast and Silent Emptiness
One tends to imagine a vast, wind-swept emptiness devoid of sound in the place of a rich interior monologue. This was posted in response to the NPC Rhetoric meme seen below.
VD: This is what a dialectical meme looks like. It’s utterly ineffective as a meme – it will probably mystify most – and yet it expresses a dialectically vital concept in rhetorical terms.
Kollins: It doesn’t appear to be dialectic at all and it would never go viral, so it’s not actually a meme. (WTF Webster’s online dictionary defines dialectical as “of, relating to, or in accordance with dialectic” which is about as useful as , “falling: of or related to a fall.”) It doesn’t convey a useful message, it isn’t catchy enough to spread and it appears as if you went full Karine Jean-Claude with that word salad of useless big words for the sake of sounding intellectual.
VD: You’re literally retarded. I am referring – obviously – to Aristotelian dialectic, as opposed to Hegelian or Maxian dialectic, and a meme does not need to go viral in order to be a meme. What part of “highly ineffective” was hard for you to understand? It would probably be a good idea for you to refrain from ever reading anything I write or post. It will be lost on you.
Literally Thoughtless
NPCs genuinely don’t have a life of the mind. When you find yourself asking someone the question “what were you thinking?” keep in mind that one of the legitimate possibilities is “literally nothing”.
I think I’m very different from most people because of one main thing. I never thought with language. Ever. I moved to Canada when I was 2 from Asia, and have been basically been around English speakers my whole life. I’m in my twenties now and I can speak it relatively well, and can understand every single word. However, growing up, I never ever thought with language. Not once did I ever think something in my mind with words like “What are my friends doing right now?” to planning things like “I’m going to do my homework right after watching this show.” I went through elementary school like this, I went through Highschool like this, I went through University like this…and I couldnt help but feel something was off about me that I couldnt put my hand on. Just last year, I had a straight up revalation, ephiphany….and this is hard to explain…but the best way that I can put it is that…I figured out that I SHOULD be thinking in language. So all of a sudden, I made a conscious effort to think things through with language. I spent a years time refining this new “skill” and it has COMPLETELY, and utterly changed my perception, my mental capabilities, and to be frank, my life. I can suddenly describe my emotions which was so insanely confusing to me before…. Since I now have this new “skill” I can only describe my past life as ….”Mindless”…”empty”…..”soul-less”….
Sadly, it appears that he is very far from alone in this regard. Consider the anecdote where half the class genuinely refuses to believe the other half’s insistence that one can think in words. Or this anecdote, which explains why memes and movies are inordinately influential:
I almost never think in language unless I actively try to, like when reading or when prompted. The flip side is I have a very vivid imagination. I never need to think things out explicitly in words because I think in visual/spatial concepts. For many years I thought the idea that people have “internal monologues” was a literary device. I didn’t think anyone actually thought in words all the time, and frankly the idea still seems weird to me.
This may sound crazy, but both science and observation make it clear that unconscious brain activity precedes conscious thought. Even my martial arts sensei used to tell us to stop thinking and trust our muscle memory, because the process of observe-decide-act was much slower than the process of react-as-trained. Often, when I was sparring at my best, I had no idea what I or my opponent were doing at the time, and we’d have to reconstruct what had happened by discussing the round afterward.
The apparent connection between wordlessness and abstract visual/spatial thinking makes me wonder if my heightened ability to see the logical – or illogical – patterns in texts may stem in part from my severe limitations with regards to spatial relations. The multilingual aspect is also intriguing, as the ability to speak a language is said to correlate highly with the unconscious use of it in one’s internal monologue as well as in one’s dreams. My high school German teacher used to tell us that you knew you had reached a comfortable conversational level in a language once you began dreaming in it, and I have found that to be true.
For example, what was once a solid conversational ability in Japanese has degraded to virtually nothing after 34 years of not speaking or hearing it. And yet, not long after I started listening to Babymetal, I was surprised to occasionally find myself making mental observations with Japanese phrases I’d regularly utilized while living in Sagamihara. The mind is truly a strange and wonderful thing.
But regardless, the extent of this wordless interior life amongst the general population underlines the importance of rhetoric, particularly visual rhetoric, as well as the strict limitations on the utility of dialectic.
Meme of the Week
The winner of this week’s Weekly Meme Review was an easy call despite some formidable competition from Jeb! and an ideologically-flexible dog. This one had it all, artwork, layout, nostalgia, emotional pull, relevance, and succinctness. And even younger viewers who don’t know who Ron Paul or the Turtles are can still feel the emotion it provides. I rated it 9/10. Don’t miss out on the next WMR, subscribe to UATV.
