Tag: rhetoric

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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They Still Believe

Steve Kirsch says that according to his CDC source, the bureaucrats at the CDC still genuinely believe the vaxx is safe and effective:

He believes that everyone at the CDC is drinking the Kool-Aid. In other words, as far as he knows, they all truly believe the vaccines are safe and effective, just like my blue-pilled friends. Even the top people. If there are any dissenters, they aren’t speaking up internally. How does this happen? It’s group-think. What happens to critical thinkers? They leave. I thought for sure people like Tom Shimabukuro and John Su knew what they were doing, but they are clueless. They are just like my academic doctor friends: they truly believe that vaccines are safe and I’m nuts. Wow. Just wow. I still don’t know (yet) how they can just brush off my point that they never point out the VAERS under-reporting factor during their presentations. However, it’s true they really believe there is no corruption and no need to protect whistleblowers. Check out this comment.

My Substack is blocked at the CDC. It is considered “unsafe.”

This isn’t even remotely surprising, because MPAI. Once you are successfully programmed, whether it is in childhood or adulthood, it is very difficult to break the programming through mere exposure to the actual facts of the matter. Remember that most people speak rhetoric; Aristotle explained this more than two thousand years ago.

It’s not until the guilt and shame over inflicting massive amounts of harm and death begin to affect their emotions, and the fear of repercussions and consequences to their actions begin to sink in, that the CDC bureaucrats will be able to rationally contemplate the situation.

This also applies to your friends and family who are vaxxed, particularly parents who vaxxed their children. They will go through any amount of mental gymnastics to avoid accepting the truth about what they have done to harm those they loved most.

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Effective Rhetoric

“I hope you’re vaccinated” has been appearing in my DMs lately and I’m starting to think it’s the latest hate speech propaganda from the right. They’re essentially saying “I hope you experience severe suffering and death.” Even though the vaccines are safe, the way that they’re saying it is hateful.

Twitter, 9 September 2022

This is interesting because it demonstrates two things. First, people are gradually beginning to understand that being vaxxed is harmful and is linked in some way to a risk of dying. Second, the utilization of vaccinated status as a curse triggers an emotional reaction, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the rhetoric.

Most of the vaccinated are still coping more or less successfully, hence the statement about the safety of the vaccines. But the cracks in their neural programming are beginning to show. We’ll know the breakdown of that programming is complete when they start crying about how it’s not their fault that they’re vaccinated, how no one should be permitted to discriminate against the vaccinated, and complaining about the unfair advantages possessed by the unvaccinated.

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Play Stupid Energy Games

Win the prize of a cold, dark winter and an angry citizenry:

Russia is deliberately sabotaging the Nord Stream 1 natural gas pipeline to spite the EU, European officials have claimed, questioning Moscow’s explanation for an indefinite delay in restoring service.

State-owned energy giant Gazprom informed its European customers on Saturday that it could not safely resume operations until it had fixed “oil leaks” discovered in a major turbine during a maintenance operation.

Nord Stream was set to come back online just after midnight Saturday morning after three days of maintenance. The leaks, reportedly affecting “cables connected to speed meters of a rotor,” were discovered during a technical inspection with the turbine’s German manufacturer Siemens. Moscow had earlier warned that the pipeline’s operation was threatened by sanctions, which had created a shortage of spare parts.

However, Siemens argued the company had alternate turbines at the compressor station where the leak had been discovered and could use one of those in case of a real emergency. “Such leaks do not normally affect the operation of a turbine and can be sealed on site,” they claimed.

European Commission spokesman Charles Michel condemned what he called Russia’s “use of gas as a weapon,” declaring it would not “change the resolve of the EU” as the bloc works toward “energy independence.”

Commission press service chief Eric Mamer slammed the “fallacious pretenses” he claimed Gazprom had used to shut down the pipeline, holding it up as proof of both their “cynicism” and their “unreliability as a supplier” and suggesting Moscow “prefer[red] to flare gas instead of honoring contracts.”

German parliamentary foreign affairs committee chair Michael Roth denounced the shutdown as “part of Russia’s psychological war against us” and accused President Vladimir Putin of “violat[ing] contracts without scruples….even at the expense of his own economic interests.”

Let’s get this straight. Europe has a perfectly operational natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, that it refuses to use. Russia has, quite reasonably, decided that it’s not interested in continuing to provide natural gas to the same countries that are a) sanctioning its people and b) arming and funding the Ukrainian war against Russia on the terms of those enemies.

Can you even imagine how many contracts have been violated by the European sanctions against Russia? This anti-Russian rhetoric is as ineffective as it is retarded. Frankly, I’m astonished that the Russians didn’t shut down the pipeline months ago.

Then again, it is rather amusing to see the Russians slowly dialing up the pain while simultaneously pretending that there is nothing they can do about it. As an award-winning cruelty artist, I have to say that I tend to approve of the sadistic diplomacy they have applied to this situation.

Germany’s initial Energy Saving Ordinance, in effect for the next six months:

  • Retail stores may no longer keep their doors open throughout the day to reduce electricity consumption for air conditioning when it is hot outside — and for heating on cold winter days.
  • Public buildings and monuments have to go dark at 10 p.m.
  • Illuminated advertising must be switched off after 10p.m., with only a few exceptions. If advertisements serve traffic safety, they remain switched on, for example, at railroad underpasses. Street lamps also remain on, and store windows may continue to be illuminated.
  • Monuments and other buildings may no longer be illuminated at night. At least not for purely aesthetic reasons. However, emergency lighting will not be switched off, and illumination is permitted for cultural events and public festivals.
  • In public buildings, halls and corridors will generally no longer be heated, and the temperature in offices will be limited to a maximum of 19 degrees. In places where heavy physical work is performed, temperatures will be even lower in the future. However, the restrictions do not apply to social facilities such as hospitals, daycare centers, and schools, where higher air temperatures are essential for the “health of the people who spend time there,” according to the Economy Ministry.
  • Cutting back on warm water. Likewise, in public buildings, instantaneous water heaters or hot water tanks should be switched off if they are mainly used for washing hands. Exceptions are made for medical facilities, schools, and daycare centers. Some cities go even further. There, the showers in swimming pools and sports halls will remain unheated.
  • Private pools may no longer be heated with gas and electricity, except for rehab centers, recreational facilities, and hotels. The new regulations will initially apply until the end of February.

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Dynamic Definitions

Wikipedia locks in the Fake Biden Administrations redefinition of “recession”:

Wikipedia changed the definition of recession on their website to fit the Biden administration’s redefined language. Wikipedia then locked the page preventing individuals from updating the website, which is a tool that Wikipedia has long provided. The White House changed the definition of “recession” last week ahead of the release of Thursday’s economic report, which showed that the US has had two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. This was the standard definition, but the White House declared that the definition should be tied more closely to unemployment numbers.

This obsession with appearances and word spells goes hand in hand with civilizational collapse, because reality doesn’t care what you call it. To concern oneself with the dynamic narrative is to fail to understand the very purpose of a label; the object exists regardless of what the label happens to be.

It’s not as if there was any there there in the first place. The 2001 recession has been redefined out of existence too, not by changing the definition, but by revising the numbers, thereby eliminating one of the previous quarters of declining GDP.

Ironically, the very term “recession” was created to replace the term “depression”, and for precisely the same reason that “recession” is now being redefined. It’s all about trying to maintain those animal spirits.

Ignore the Narrative. It can only mislead you.

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