Loosely put, rhetoric is the art of persuasion. More specifically, on Aristotle’s definition, rhetoric is “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.” We all use rhetoric to convince others of some thing or other,… Read More ›
Political Rhetoric
Understanding Political Rhetoric and How It Works With Our Mental states to Persuade or Disuade
Rhetoric is, broadly put, the art of persuasion. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we’re all persuaded by rhetorical tactics and use them ourselves to persuade others. Some people find this notion unconscionable, as if there is some cognitive… Read More ›
Thoughtlets .xviii.
Words such as ‘matters’, ‘dangerous’, and even ‘good’, require an indexical, by which is meant these words require a to or a for. Once you flesh in the indexical you open questions such as why, how, and so what? Some… Read More ›
Thoughtlets .viii.
Stand in one room while the television is on in the other. Now see if you can distinguish the voices of Rachel Maddow (MSNBC) and Tucker Carlson (Fox News). I can’t. Notice that it’s not just their voices that are… Read More ›
6.2.c.i. The Political Rhetor and The Future. Future Generations: The end of ‘my’ world versus the end of ‘the’ world.
In this entry, I examine a broad swath of the conceptual territory underpinning future generations. Since this topic is particularly content-dense, I’ve decided to break this blog entry into several posts under a few different subheadings. Before reading on, I… Read More ›
Aristotle and Pam on The Political Rhetor. Series. 6.1. Intro.
“The political orator* aims at establishing the expediency** or the harmfulness of a proposed course of action; if he urges its acceptance, he does so on the grounds it will do good; if he urges its rejection, he does so… Read More ›
Fist Pumping.
I’ve here in mind the fist-pumping variety of politically vocal people, those certain that one side is leading us to another dark ages and the other to a totalitarian state. It appears that for some “left and right” thinking is… Read More ›
The Political Rhetor and the Future. 6.2.b. Children.
Preparing for the future must begin, as always, with our children. Ronald Wilson Regan, State of the Union [USA] 1987, 27 January 1987. Children have little to no political voice. They can neither vote nor hold public office. But think… Read More ›
The Political Rhetor and the Future. 6.2.a. The Poor.
If you haven’t read 6.1, I recommend you do so before reading 6.2.. 6.2. has turned into quite a lengthy project. So, I’ve broken it down into 6.2.a. The Poor, 6.2.b. Children, and 6.2.c. Future Generations. Subsequent posts in this… Read More ›
The Art of Rhetoric: Working through the challenges and disagreements that arise from our shared lives. Series 4.3.
In my previous post, I suggest Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion are complementary reads. Why? Because a study of Haidt’s moral theory alongside Kahneman’s work on our… Read More ›
pam-mentations.com 