AnonymousUnknown author (see talk page), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
These are the ways many of the people you see in the media and politics lie and try to deceive you, not all but an awful lot of them come from the left unsurprisingly.
First up is the Kafka trap. the term comes from the book, The Trial by Franz Kafka where the protagonist is arrested and charged with unspecified crimes, He can’t deny the crime because he doesn’t know what it is and to ask what he is supposed to have committed is evidence of his guilt.
This is commonly used by the SJW types, they accuse you of racism sexism transphobia or some other ism or phobism they’ve made up
That’s racist they say. Unless you admit to the accusation you will be greeted with one or more of these.
“Your refusal to acknowledge that you are guilty of racism, confirms that you are guilty of racism”
“Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of racism, you are guilty because you have benefited from the racist behaviour of others in the system”
“The act of demanding a definition of racism that can be consequentially checked and falsified proves you are racist”
“Designated victims of racism who question any part of the theory of racism demonstrate by doing so that they are not authentic members of the victim class, so their experience can be discounted and their thoughts dismissed as internalized racism”
and then of course to top it all off even if your innocence were to be proven in a court of law that would be evidence of how you are benefitting from a racist system.
So you’re now trapped in a circular argument whereby the only possible conclusion is your guilt. this is popular debating style in Universities these days.
the logical conclusion of this of course is that there are only two types of people, those who are guilty of the crime by way of admission and those guilty by denial which would make the accuser equally guilty. However life’s too short generally speaking to engage with these fuckwits.
Next up comes proof by verbosity.
As WC Fields said Íf you cant baffle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit”
PBV is the art of making an argument so convoluted, complicated and jargon filled as to be incomprehensible to the listener just because you happen to have swallowed a dictionary,or be in the know about all the buzzwords of a subject, you might not even understand the words you are using but you can be sure the listener won’t either and you hope the listener misses the gaps in what you are saying whilst trying to comprehend every other word. I think we’ve all listened to lawyers throw in the odd latin phrases here and again on discussions and debates. this is to make you believe that the person is an expert and knows more than you do on this subject.
An example of such is this.
“In the Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe or CTMU, the set of all sets, and the real universe to which it corresponds, take the name (SCSPL) of the required extension of set theory. SCSPL, which stands for Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language, is just a totally intrinsic, i.e. completely self-contained, language that is comprehensively and coherently (self-distributively) self-descriptive, and can thus be model-theoretically identified as its own universe or referent domain. Theory and object go by the same name because unlike conventional ZF or NBG set theory, SCSPL hologically infuses sets and their elements with the distributed (syntactic, metalogical) component of the theoretical framework containing and governing them, namely SCSPL syntax itself, replacing ordinary set-theoretic objects with SCSPL syntactic operators.” By Chris Langan.
Now you probably have no idea what that means, well it means exactly the same as i wrote in the previous paragraph but only to Chris Langan.
Hoares dictum also applies with PBV, named after computer scientist C A Hoare, you can make a program so obviously simple there are no errors or you can make it so complicated there are no obvious errors.
the same applies to arguments.
Next up is my favourite, Gish Gallop, this particularly used by the enfantes terrible of the left during programs like question time and Vine, and other ‘debate’ shows,Professional homosexual Owen Jones uses this a lot as does the unemployed clown Femi it’s also a favourite of O’Brien on his LBC show.
The idea is that you scatter gun a whole series of straw man points that you want to make into as short a timespan as possible thus proving that you have come armed with the ‘facts’ they will most likely be half truths and often not true at all but you have made the points you wanted to make and the audience will be impressed with that
it takes an awful lot more time to unpack a misleading claim than it does to make it, so your opponent has to either spend some of their time refuting maybe one or two of the 15 points you have made in which case you claim the win because they didn’t refute 13 of them and the other person loses the opportunity to make their own point, Of course constant interruptions are the norm from the people who use this style of debate and if the other person decides to ignore you and just put across their own case you can claim the win by claiming they had no counter arguments.
Finally a favourite of the media, Appeals to anonymous authority, examples being.
Sources say.
Studies show
People are saying
It’s been said that
Statistics show
Scientists say.
There’s really only one way to deal with this if you are one of us and that is to treat it with extreme scepticism, if you’re on the receiving end of it on say twitter or elsewhere where you are involved in the debate there’s only one way to deal with it and that is,
who are your sources?
show me the studies
who said that
show me the statistics
name them.
So in conclusion there’s an awful lot of people out there talking an awful lot of shit and lying to you.
© Wycombewanderer 2021
