arguments-sophistry-truth

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

The funniest thing about James Somerton's repeated apology videos (I'm more than willing to bet there will be a third) is that he very clearly didn't watch Hbomberguy's exposé.

If he did, he probably would not have used tactics Harris explicitly anticipated him using, e.g. throwing Nick under the bus, using Filip-esque excuses for why the plagiarism happened while not owning up to the worst of his actions (e.g. sending his fans to harass that one twitter user), and many more obvious manipulations that anyone who had seen the video should have been inoculated against.

Either he didn't see the video and had it vaguely recounted to him by Twitter Discourse[tm], or he's banking on the people seeing his apology having not seen Hbomberguy's video--a video with 18 million views as it stands, which is several times more than the entirety of the sum of the views on his remaining videos.

Either way, it shows not just his dishonesty, but his stupidity as well.

#james somerton #hbomberguy #plagiarism #rhetoric #youtube

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

Is the spiritual person a conspiracy theorist? A list of red flags

They talk about a shadowy group of people supposedly manipulating everything behind the scenes. They might refer to them by terms such as globalists, bankers, international bankers, secret rulers of the world, the elite, the cabal, Kabbalists, Talmudists, satanists, satanic pedophiles, pedophiles, generational satanists, satanic bloodlines, the Illuminati, the Babylonian Brotherhood, lizard people, Reptilians, Orions, regressives, regressive entities, Khazarians, Marxists, cultural Marxists, or leftists. Sometimes, very rarely, they'll just come right out and say "Jews."

They claim that the conspiracy has been working to conceal historical and spiritual truths from humanity.

They claim that the conspiracy uses stuff like food, entertainment, and medicine to control the masses. For example, "additives in food suppress our psychic abilities" or "Hollywood films contain subliminal messages" or "COVID vaccines were actually created to alter your DNA to make you more docile."

Also, claims that the conspiracy controls people via spiritual or technological implants, 5G, or alter programming, with or without explicit mention of Project Monarch (a conspiracy theory promoted by far right cranks such as Mark Philips and Fritz Springmeier, who used hypnosis to respectively convince Cathy O'Brien and Cisco Wheeler that they'd been put under mind control by a global satanic conspiracy).

They claim that this conspiracy is controlling the media, has fingers in every institution they disagree with, and is generally behind everything they disagree with. (EG, the conspiracy created the Catholic Church; that other New Ager they disagree with is actually controlled opposition, etc.)

They claim that the conspiracy is trying to keep people in fear.

They claim that the conspiracy harvests something from people. Blood and adrenochrome are common ones. Loosh is somewhat less common. Expect to see something else pop up eventually.

They claim that the conspiracy practices genetic engineering; EG, creating animal/human hybrids, using vaccines to genetically sever people's connection to God, etc.

They claim that true spiritual wisdom can be traced back to places like Atlantis, Lemuria, or Mu.

They claim that world governments have secretly been in contact with extraterrestrials for years.

They appeal to known frauds and cranks, including but not limited to Erich Von Daniken, Zechariah Sitchin, David Icke, David Wilcock, Graham Hancock, Jaime Maussan, Bob Lazar, Steven Greer, Richard C. Hoagland, Fritz Springmeier, and Drunvalo Melchizedek.

Appeals to forged documents, including but not limited to the alleged diary of Admiral Richard Byrd, The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, and The Urantia Book.

Appeals to channeled information, such as that provided by Edgar Cayce, Carla Rueckert, or George Van Tassel.

"But all of this has to come from somewhere, doesn't it?"

Oh, it all comes from somewhere, all right, but the where isn't what most people imagine.

A lot of the stuff above is just a modern spin on the content of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax created to justify violence against Russian Jews. The Protocols itself was plagiarized from a political satire and incorporated a lot of the post-French Revolution conspiracy theories about Freemasons and Jews being behind the French Revolution. I wrote a summary of the conspiracy tropes found in The Protocols over here.

The stuff about Satanic sacrifices and the consumption of blood, adrenochrome, loosh, or whatever are simply just variations on blood libel, an antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims Jews practice ritual cannibalism. Blood libel can be traced back to ancient Greece. (With the Greek version, I really can't help but notice the similarity to modern urban legends of gangsters kidnapping random people for initiation rituals.)

Many of these tropes can also be linked back to the early modern witch hunts. It was believed that witches sacrificed babies to Satan, practiced cannibalism, and put people under mind control by way of diabolical magic. It was also believed that some witches didn't even know they were witches; they'd go off to attend the Devil's Sabbath at night and come back in the morning without remembering a thing. In the late 20th century, this witch hunter's canard would be reinvented as the alter programming conspiracy theory when media such as the 1973 book Sibyl and its 1976 television adaptation put DID (note: the woman who inspired Sibyl did not have DID) into the public consciousness. For a more complete list of witch panic and blood libel tropes, I wrote a list over here.

Lemuria was a hypothetical landmass proposed to explain the presence of lemur fossils in Madagascar and India while being absent in continental Africa and the rest of Asia, because if lemurs evolved naturally, they wouldn't be in two separate places with no connection to each other. The discovery that India and Madagascar were once connected not only made the hypothesis obsolete, it precludes the existence of Lemuria.

The whole notion of Mu began with a horrendous mistranslation of the Troano manuscript. A man named Augustus Le Plongeon would link the mistranslation with the story of Atlantis, and use it to claim that Atlantis actually existed in the Americas. (For Plongeon, Mu and Atlantis were one and the same.) And then other people (like James Churchward) got their hands on the whole Mu thing, and put their own spins on it, and the rest is history.

Le Plongeon's ideas influence modern Atlantis mythology today; EG, the idea that it was in the Americas. Another guy who helped shape the modern Atlantis myth was Ignatius L. Donnelly, an American politician. Dude claimed that Atlanteans spread their oh-so-superior culture far and wide. He also claimed that Atlantis was the home of the Aryan people, because of course he did.

The idea that all of the world's wisdom can be traced back to Thoth/Hermes goes back to Hermeticism, a product of Greco-Egyptian syncretism. Hermeticism produced a fascinating body of mythology and an interesting way to consider the divine and its role in shaping human history, but that doesn't mean it was right. And the Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean is a modern text that has fuck-all to do with ancient Hermeticism and more to do with HP Lovecraft.

This idea that the conspiracy uses pharmaceutical drugs and vaccines for evil also has roots in Nazi Germany. The Nazi government, wanting to reserve real medicine for their soldiers, told the general populace that said medicine was the product of evil Jewish science and prescribed alternative healing modalities instead. (Said alternative healing modalities did not particularly work.) It also echoes the old conspiracy theories about Jews spreading the Black Death by poisoning wells.

The idea that the conspiracy uses genetic manipulation to create subhuman beings or sever humanity from the divine is a permutation of the Nazi conspiracy theory that Jews are trying to destroy the white race through race mixing. The idea of evil reptilian DNA goes back to the ancient serpent seed doctrine, which is indeed old, but no less pure hateful nonsense for it.

"But there's got to be somebody up to something rotten out there!"

Oh sure. But these people aren't skulking around in the shadows. They're acting pretty openly.

The Heritage Foundation has been working to push this country into Christofascism since the early 1970's. They're the ones responsible for the rise of the Moral Majority and the election of Ronald Reagan. They're also the ones behind Project 2025, which intends to bring us deeper into Christofascism. (Among many other horrible things, they intend to outlaw trans people as "pornographic.")

The Seven Mountains Mandate is another movement pushing for Christofascism. They intend to seize the "seven spheres" of society, which include education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment, and media.

There's also the ghoulish American Evangelicals who support Israel because they think that current events are going to bring about the Second Coming of Jesus and cement the formation of a global Christofascist empire. Don't let their apparent support of Jews fool you - they believe that the good Jews will become Christians and the bad ones will go to hell.

All of these people are working toward monstrously horrific goals, but none of them are part of an ancient megaconspiracy. In fact, these are the kinds of people pushing the myth of the ancient megaconspiracy. From the witch hunts to Nazi Germany to the American Evangelical movement, if history has taught us anything, the people pushing the conspiracy theories are always the bad guys.

#alt right #rhetoric

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

Whenever a conservative rants about "family values," it's important to note and expose the fact that they're only talking about their family values.

They're not talking about Indigenous American family values, families often defined less by blood and more by participation in a tribe. They're not talking about African family values, families which may have more than two parents supporting their collective children. They're not even talking about European family values, families which more often than not are multigenerational with people living under the same roof as their great-grandchildren.

No, they're talking about capitalist family values, families which objectify and make docile women, denying them education, forcing them to be barefoot and pregnant, always making more workers. Families which make men violent and brutal, denying any emotions but rage, making them perfect soldiers for war. Families which allow no deviation from cisheteronormativity on pain of ostracism or legal repercussions.

These are the kinds of families conservatives are fighting for, and these are the kinds of families conservatives want to force into everyone else.

#philosophy #politics #rhetoric #family #values #sexism #homophobia #transphobes #history #canada #europe #africa #indigenous americans

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

A good maxim use on this website: Never assume the person you are arguing with is the same age as you. On my main blog talking politics about goofy tabletop RPGs, I've made that mistake too many times.

If someone seems to be making childlike rationalizations or their reasoning is infantile, there is a damn good chance that the childlike reasoning is from a childlike child. Arguing with these people is rarely productive.

#philosophy #politics #argumentation #media literacy #ttrpg #reddit #late stage tumblrism #tumblr #tumblr issues

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

Fascism replaces politics with aesthetics

More poignantly, it replaces critical analysis of the art we hold dear with "wowee cool visuals"

Lmao, they really have no media literacy.

#politics #social media #media literacy #fallout new vegas #twitter

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

Cornell University recently did a comrpehensive study that documents exactly how platforming the ideas and personas of the "intellectual dark web" such as Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, etc., funnel people toward the alt right:

#alt right #stochastic terrorism #cornell university #pewdiepie #Intellectual dark web #Youtube #politics

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

I've seen discussions on how our (that is, internet-going media consumers) interactions with fictional characters have become increasingly problematic, more often treating inanimate fictional characters as real (e.g. reality shifting tiktok, that one post claiming writing is immoral because you're putting characters in situations without consent, etc. etc.), but I've observed the reverse to be true and equally problematic.

As we become more and more isolated online, I've noticed peoples' parasocial relations to real people become more and more conflated with their interactions with fictional characters. I remember being shocked by someone on the Godless Bird Website claiming that Joe Biden was the first "queer-coded" president, as though a real human person can have "coding" like a fictional one. The incident that compelled me to formulate this thought and then post it was an artist I follow claiming that someone had called her "trans-coded."

Something particularly confusing is that I've only really seen this kind of conflation among leftist and centrist spaces, and not among right-wing spaces. One would think that this bizarre parasocial massification would be most prominent among the political wing predisposed to irrationality, but bizarrely, I haven't seen it manifest there. Perhaps it is in a different form, or perhaps there's a reason that it's specific to the left and centre.

#philosophy #politics #parasocial relationships #fiction #joe biden #late stage tumblrism

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

Philosophy profs with undiagnosed autism, too, are among the best profs to have

#autism #philosophy #argumentation #academia

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

Psych profs who are actually philosophy profs in disguise are the best, especially when they probably have undiagnosed ADHD

#philosophy #psychology #adhd #neurodiversity

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

The more I look into modern pop philosophy, the more jaded I become. Nearly every "philosopher" bandied about on the news is a textbook (conventional) sophist. Jordan Peterson is probably the single most infuriating example of this, being an idiot with some understanding of psychology who looks like he knows what he's talking about (that is, he's a man in a suit). I think the development of the term "intellectual dark web" is a response by the kinds of people who put him and his sophist ilk on a pedestal getting mocked for calling them philosophers.

They weren't lying, that web is intellectually dark.

The straw that broke this camel's back and drove me to post this structureless rant was the agony I felt after seeing a screenshot of a twitter post calling Andrew Fucking Tate, a professional sex criminal, the "foremost philosopher of our age".

#philosophy #politics #jordan peterson #andrew tate #sophistry #popular philosophy

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

I believe that it's more than just poor reading comprehension; it's a kind of confirmation bias that should be studied. Many men take these pieces of media that criticize their preexisting worldviews and tune out the part of them that has any propositional value. They take the part that looks cool (the grimy fraternal organizations of Fight Club, the rusty post-apocalypse of New Vegas, the art deco retropunk of BioShock) almost exclusively.

German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that fascists replace politics with aesthetics. To put it concisely, they turn politics into spectacles that create strong emotional reactions instead of, for example, well-reasoned policy. Fascism, as an ideology, utterly collapses under the barest logical scrutiny, so it sells itself with emotion and aesthetics. It gets attention not by being the best player at the table, but by being the one that screams the loudest. Where leftists and liberals generally attempt to fight for policy that will enact concrete change, conservatives and especially fascists create the illusion of concrete change through inflammatory talking points and agitprop. This causes amusing friction with the actual political systems in place, such as when Ron DeSantis' crusade against "wokeness" was challenged by his inability to put a concrete definition to the intentionally vague word that, really, amounted to whatever he didn't like on an ideological level. Being a fascist, this was most ideas and groups of people.

It's been an open secret that fascism has been worming its way into society for the past while now, and I believe that this poor media comprehension among men and disproportionate focus on aesthetics is a symptom of this, as young men are the most frequently targeted demographic of the institutions that groom them to become fascists.

I gotta wonder; why do men in particular seem to have such poor reading comprehension? The low-hanging fruit is obviously guys who saw American Psycho or Fight Club and idolize their favourite "Sigma Males," but it goes deeper than that. I can't count how many dudes I've met who love bioshock and are hardcore capitalists. Fallout: New Vegas fans who Caesar is the good guy. Cyberpunk 2077 fans who'd lick Elon Musk's boot if given the chance.

I don't have an explanation, I'm genuinely confounded by how so many other men I meet can't understand the message the media they engage with is practically screaming at them

#late stage capitalism #missing the point #fight club #falling down #fascism #politics #ron desantis #aesthetics #philosophy #rhetoric #argumentation #media literacy

[arguments-sophistry-truth]

I think the reason why rhetoric is looked down on by the public when compared to logic is because of power. With using logical reasoning to persuade someone, it (at least feels like) the truth is being revealed to that person, and so if they change their beliefs or behaviour it's because they are aligning themselves with how they should be, aligning themselves with the truth.

With rhetoric, using emotion and character to persuade, though, it feels like a direct exercise of power on another person. They're using their skills to change the way other people think, not necessarily in line with truth, but in line with their values or goals.

I don't have any value judgements to make, that just seems to be an intuitive reason that factors into why logic is seen as superior to rhetoric in argumentation.

#philosophy #argumentation #logic #rhetoric #power #informal logic #communication