{"id":32091,"date":"2018-03-08T08:57:50","date_gmt":"2018-03-08T13:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32091"},"modified":"2018-03-08T08:57:50","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T13:57:50","slug":"a-rhetorical-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=32091","title":{"rendered":"A Rhetorical Education"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Rhetorical Education<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick.\u00a0 Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided.\u00a0 Ours is an age riven by disputes, in which debate has taken over much of the space occupied by physical violence in less restrained eras. (How many people died in the struggle that put Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton in the White House?\u00a0 During most of human history, that wouldn\u2019t have been an ironic question.)<\/p>\n

Yet this contentious age has an odd feature, and it\u2019s one I\u2019ve referenced more than once in recent posts on this blog:\u00a0 the fact that the vast majority of the rhetoric deployed in the disputes of our day is so stunningly incompetent.<\/p>\n

Consider the way that any widely discussed issue these days is debated: say, the squabble over legislation now before Congress that would make web hosting firms and content providers liable for illegal content posted by third parties. The supporters of the bills in question insist that it\u2019s all about stopping online sex trafficking, and anyone who opposes the bills as written must be in favor of sex crimes. The opponents of the bills, for their part, insist that they\u2019re just an excuse for censorship, and anyone who supports them must be trying to destroy the internet.<\/p>\n

Set aside for the moment the substantive issues involved\u2014they\u2019re real and important, but not relevant to the theme of this week\u2019s post\u2014and look at the rhetoric. Both sides have chosen the strategy of flinging over-the-top accusations at those who disagree with them. That strategy\u2019s familiar enough these days that nobody seems to have thought to ask the obvious question: does it work?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Rhetorical Education Quite a bit of the discussion on this blog and its predecessors has focused on controversial issues, the kind of thing that causes rhetoric to fly fast and thick.\u00a0 Given the themes I like to discuss in these essays, that could hardly have been avoided.\u00a0 Ours is an age riven by disputes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[13918,67,6788,15417,1758,13231,8279,1796],"class_list":["post-32091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-attitudes","tag-beliefs","tag-debate","tag-ecosophia","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-persuasion","tag-rhetoric","tag-us-congress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32091"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32092,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32091\/revisions\/32092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}