Retired Professor, Writing Center Director, Scholar of train wrecks in public deliberation
When people think about rhetorical effectiveness, we imagine ourselves as the audience, and so we tend to universalize from our experience. If it appeals to us, we call it “effective,” as though our judgment is the only one that matters. And we condemn anyone who uses a strategy that doesn’t appeal to us as engaging … Continue reading “The one rhetoric to rule them all”
I lived in Berkeley from the mid-seventies till the mid-eighties, and in that era it had four different communist student groups. One group I thought of as Stalinist (I think they called themselves Leninists)—whatever the USSR did or had done was entirely right. If you pointed out to them that the USSR was doing (or … Continue reading “Stop calling information you don’t like “fake news.” You’re giving TMI about how you think, and it isn’t good”
Trump advocated using hydroxychloroquine; a lot of studies said it was unsafe. Now, because two of the studies that said it was unsafe have been questioned on the grounds of the motives of the people engaged in the study, many people are saying that Trump was right after all, and that shows that people who … Continue reading “Trump was wrong to advocate hydroxychloroquine”
In The Rhetoric, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E) divided public speaking into three genres: epideictic (ceremonial oratory, such as funeral orations), deliberative (policy determination, such as what takes place in the Assembly), and judicial (court cases). He said that each of these kinds of speeches has a different emphasis—judicial emphasizes guilt or innocence, deliberative speeches emphasize expediency … Continue reading “Funeral orations and pro-war rhetoric”
There is a pro-Trump website telling Trump supporters “how to win an argument with your liberal relatives.” One of the main arguments for Trump was (and is) that he would get the best people to work for and with him. So, this is the argument that the best people make for Trump, or, in other … Continue reading “Flinging claims for Trump”
I have a difficult time finding a good term to describe people who get all their information exclusively from what is sometimes called “the right-wing media sphere”—that is, Fox, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Drudge Report. I don’t like calling it “right-wing” because I think one of the reasons we’re in the mess we are is the … Continue reading “Arguing with GOP Loyalists”
So, far I’ve argued that the neighborhood mailing list exemplifies two deeply problematic ways that Americans think about political deliberation: For every policy question, there is one policy oriented toward the public good; all others are advocated by people representing special interests; [corollary: to the extent that we modify the policy that is in the … Continue reading “Democratic deliberation and dog poop in my trash”
As someone who has been teaching argumentation for a long time, I’ve found puzzling a lot of the ways that people approach and think about argument. One of them is the tendency to radicalize the opposition argument, taking an opposition argument that has hedging and modifiers (often, sometimes, rarely, frequently, occasionally, infrequently, tends) and recharacterize … Continue reading ““They always say that”: Radicalizing the opposition”
A really smart friend recently asked me about the SF Board of Supervisors Resolution about the NRA. Her question was: While I think this is a really unhelpful designation that just feeds into the persecuted minority identity I think the NRA likes to use, I’m actually also really interested in this idea of what terrorism/inciting … Continue reading “The SF Resolution, the NRA, and our culture of demagoguery”
G.K. Chesterton has an article about how some event (if memory serves, it was a fire) was framed differently by media depending on what was most politically useful. He says that the sad state of their political world was that something like a fire would be covered differently purely on the basis of whether the … Continue reading “How Trump’s tariff war shows the deep irrationality of neoliberal media”