{"id":20876,"date":"2023-01-18T16:53:15","date_gmt":"2023-01-18T21:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20876"},"modified":"2023-01-18T16:53:15","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T21:53:15","slug":"losing-the-rhetorical-struggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2023\/01\/18\/losing-the-rhetorical-struggle\/","title":{"rendered":"Losing the Rhetorical Struggle"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Whenever I see somebody posting\/tweeting\/whatever something like \u201cThere are no pronouns in the Bible\u201d or \u201cWilliam Shakespeare didn\u2019t write about drag queens\u201d or \u201cChildren\u2019s books shouldn\u2019t have drugs and violence\u2014why can\u2019t kids read good old-fashioned books like <cite>Alice in Wonderland<\/cite> and <cite>Treasure Island<\/cite>?\u201d I assume that the person who is saying that knows exactly what they are doing, and that they are deliberately making the most outrageously and obviously false version of their claim in order to Make Liberals Mad.\r\n<p>And thus, people who go to the trouble of refuting the claim on its deliberately-false merits are helping the person who posted it. The actual argument is \u201cLiberals are out of touch with Real Americans\u201d, and anyone who responds with a factually-correct lecture is just demonstrating how out of touch they are. Right?\r\n<p>And I often have the sinking feeling that the person who shook that particular hornet\u2019s nest is feeling extra smug when responses are of the form \u201cWhat an idiot this person is! How mentally superior we are to them!\u201d at the same time that they are being utterly trounced in the rhetorical conflict by the aforementioned idiot.\r\n<p>Do I know what to do about that? I do not. Ignoring trolls doesn\u2019t particularly work, certainly not in any persuasive sense. Arguing with them certainly doesn\u2019t work. I don\u2019t know what might work\u2014or even what I mean by <i>work<\/i> here. When the actual argument is \u201cLiberals are out of touch with Real Americans\u201d, the actual counterargument is \u201cReal Americans are different, one to another, and that\u2019s what makes America awesome\u201d (and other places as well, obviously).\r\n<p><I>Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I><br>-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger could be wrong in the basic assumption, of course, but it's not clear how much that would even matter.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20877,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20876\/revisions\/20877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}