Thread by @owenbroadcast

listening to npr on a drive, which i only do accidentally or when i feel i owe some suffering as penance, is like a masterclass in how a rhetoric-slug can attach to ur brain and burrow in so deep that youre talking for hours without ever saying anything or answering any questions

yesterday this guy was on, talking about some movie streaming service taking down some movie or something because it was now deemed culturally insensitive. and the “interviewer” asks, “some people are going to have a problem with this, what would your response be to them?”

and he says “yeah some people are going to say this is cancel culture, but nothing is being cancelled, we’re just adding a warning to the start of the video and educating people about what the movie actually contains”. cant even tell if its intentional or not but look at maneuver

such a perfect concise example of using an accelerated caricature to deflect questions. i dont even think people realize when theyre doing this, because its become so standard that deploying it just comes naturally to people. but it is a “skilled maneuver”, its a slight of hand.

it doesnt answer the question. it takes the question, puts it into a box that warps it into an absurdity, calls the absurdity absurd, and moves on.

some people dont like your cooking, what do you say to that?

“yeah, some people say i burn the food, but i never burn the food”

“some people really dislike ur drawings, what would you say to that?”

yeah, some people say i steal my ideas or that my drawings are too sexual, but ive never stolen any ideas and my drawings aren’t sexual at all.

its the perfect illusion of answering the question. but u havent

if we view “the spectacle” as an organism, something occurring organically, things start to make a lot more sense because these things dont fit neatly into “this is being done intentionally” or “this just happens”. its blurry. like in nature, things that serve a purpose “develop”

after so much time being (slightly pathologically) obsessed with “the zeitgeist” etc i would say this is part of the “function” of these accelerated exaggerated caricatures that are constantly pumped into the hivemind that have become the hallmark of talking about almost anything

theyre there to appeal to. really, they become like giant magnets that draw in anything close to them, even though theyre not real. theyre like ideological rhetorical magnets that dot the collective mental landscape and prevent peoples compasses from working accurately.

that NPR question, which happens all the time, was just such a good example. if you listen for it youll hear it all the time. people use these absurdities (if you ask them to define them within theyre worldview theyre tautologically absurd) as rhetorical shields, all the time.

fascinatingly i really think 99% of the time they dont even know theyre doing it. its natural. its a natural part of the worldview. the worldview is built on these pillars that require these accelerated caricatures to be deployed constantly. they need them to be highlighted 24/7.

thank god i have other interests because i find this way that informational systems possess people, and work “behind the scenes” to have them skillfully deploy rhetoric tricks without realizing it, so fascinating that i could easily fall into a pit of obsessing over this forever

fyi in case anyone is new to discussing all this stuff irl (which i dont really recommend, sometimes u have to) the practical application of this is that i just dont use any meme terms and if the other person uses them i say [...]

“..you know, so many people use that term to mean so many things, i dont even know what people mean anymore when they use it so, can you be more specific. like what exactly do you mean by that”. if youre trying to actually talk about something u have to remove the meme terms.