The way these self-confident charlatans talk, you’d think they believe every thing they don’t like must be its own ideology, complete with ivory-tower academics dispensing it from a great height.
I’m seeing a bit of this kind of referential language elsewhere too, decrying such bugbears as ‘evolutionism’ and ‘abortionism’- which, when you think about it, seems contrived to give people who read the title and don’t read content the impression that there are whole fields of study, replete with cult followings, devoted to these things.
Rhetoric of this kind has a way of getting people to file away contingent-possible notions (that is, it might or might not be a thing but I don’t have time to understand it now so I’m filing a placeholder in my head for later) Having those things filed away in your head has a way of putting you on the fence about whether they’re true or real or not (they’re neither true nor false, just contingent)- and when you’re on the fence, partisanship can readily decide the matter without having to supply any evidence.
The purpose of rhetoric like this is not to inform, but to flood its audience with contingent-possible bullshit, to exhaust their critical capacity and render them receptive to even the most counterfactual nonsense you can contrive.
The way these self-confident charlatans talk, you’d think they believe every thing they don’t like must be its own ideology, complete with ivory-tower academics dispensing it from a great height.
I’m seeing a bit of this kind of referential language elsewhere too, decrying such bugbears as ‘evolutionism’ and ‘abortionism’- which, when you think about it, seems contrived to give people who read the title and don’t read content the impression that there are whole fields of study, replete with cult followings, devoted to these things.
Rhetoric of this kind has a way of getting people to file away contingent-possible notions (that is, it might or might not be a thing but I don’t have time to understand it now so I’m filing a placeholder in my head for later) Having those things filed away in your head has a way of putting you on the fence about whether they’re true or real or not (they’re neither true nor false, just contingent)- and when you’re on the fence, partisanship can readily decide the matter without having to supply any evidence.
The purpose of rhetoric like this is not to inform, but to flood its audience with contingent-possible bullshit, to exhaust their critical capacity and render them receptive to even the most counterfactual nonsense you can contrive.