Tag: rhetoric

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Weekly Meme Review 01

Congratulations to the poster of the winning meme of the first Weekly Meme Review on the Darkstream. I believe I gave it 9/10. Effective implementation of a classic meme structure, solid art, subtle but comprehensible message, relevant, points toward truth, and definitely amusing.

Don’t send me any more memes now, as we’ve got enough for the next two weeks. When I’m ready for some new submissions, I’ll let you know. Subscribe to UATV so you won’t miss the next review; we laughed, we cried, much better than CATS.

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Release the Memes

I’ll be doing the inaugural Weekly Meme Review on the Darkstream later this week. Therefore, please send me your best, or your worst, memes to be reviewed and rated for rhetorical effectiveness. Send one (1) meme only; sending more than one meme will ensure that ALL of them are ignored.

Email the meme, in JPG or PNG format, to voxday AT gmail DOT com with the subject header WEEKLY MEME REVIEW. And please email it today, I don’t want to have them coming in sporadically at any time during the week. These can be, but do not have to be, memes of your own construction. They can be old or new, relevant to the weekly news cycle or not.

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How to Trigger Trauma

It’s ever so much easier than you would tend to imagine.

High school is a difficult time for most kids. They’re becoming self aware. Exploring who they are, what their place in society is and what their interests are. If that’s not bad enough they also suddenly get raging hormones and have to learn how to deal with their sexuality.

High school is a period in which everyone feels insecure. Fitting in and being popular are very important. It is a place of navel gazing where everyone is constantly trying to see where they stand in the human hierarchy and where the opinion of others is super important.

In hindsight we know all of this is silly, but during high school we all feel the pressure. We’re placed in a lot of uncomfortable positions and we develop coping mechanisms to deal with them.

In hindsight we know all of this is silly, at least objectively we do. But humans aren’t really objective. They’re emotional. High school is a time of many emotions and most of us never process them. We never learnt healthy ways of processing things as kids so high school doesn’t get processed.

For many high school was not a good time. They weren’t a popular kid. They didn’t get the girl. Nobody looked up to them. Perhaps they even got bullied or excluded from the group (the worst thing that can happen to any 15 year old).

That’s a lot of repressed trauma/issues. So when I posted that photo of the stereotypical popular couple, it stinged for a lot of people. The couple on the photo represent the archetypical popular kids. They’re good looking, athletic, popular, probably from wealthy families, etc. They’re the kids everyone wishes they were. They seemingly had it all, and worst of all, it didn’t even seem to cost them any effort.

Which is why I tweeted that this photo invokes primal reactions in people. They are the couple everyone wishes they were in high school They represent the summun of popularity and success in high school. Those who fell short this ideal cannot help but feel the sting of envy. Even if they are way past their high school years.

Simply because they never dealt with their teenage emotions. Their self image took serious blows during their high school period and left wounds which never properly healed. My tweets resonated with their pain and it caused them to become very upset.

One of the things I’ve found fascinating about online culture is the way that damaged people not only don’t hesitate to expose their psychological scars to complete strangers, but more often than not, are completely unaware that they are doing so. As with the physical martial arts, it is very, very difficult to attempt a psychological attack on someone else without opening up and exposing your own psychology to them.

Hence my amusement when a self-appointed critic calls me “fat” or an “incel”, asserts that I’m insecure about my intelligence, or claims that Spacebunny doesn’t exist; the less an attack is focused on observable attributes or behaviors, the more likely it is that the attacker is engaging in psychological projection and revealing their own insecurities.

A psychologically healthy individual will tend to have a response to the image of a pretty cheerleader kissing her football-playing boyfriend that ranges from the positive to the indifferent. But a psychologically unhealthy individual will be readily traumatized by the mere sight of that which is good, that which is beautiful, or that which is true.

So, if you find yourself tending to react with negativity towards that which is positive, it would probably be a good idea to contemplate why that is, and what youthful trauma is troubling you.

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