/rhetoric/ thread

If we want to communicate our ideas, it's incredibly important for us to learn how to speak, how to write, and how to debate.

So let's use this thread to compile material that can help us develop these skills and improve ourselves in that direction.

I'll start posting with a Hitchens-Buckley video that I always talk about here. I think it's a great display of how to convey radical ideas in a tone that can resonate with the general audience, and also a great example of how to hold your own with two or more people who will endlessly ask you sarcastic, rhetorical questions about your radical positions, which is a scenario many of us will find ourselves in.

youtube.com/watch?v=AeGKcX-JHNE

Second, I'd like to throw in a speech by Mussolini. It's important to remind ourselves that he developed his oratorical style preaching socialist ideas before 1914, and the tone and cadence he carried with himself until the end owes to this tradition, and that we should dissect it and learn with it because Mussolini was greatly successful as a socialist agitator. I think the best lesson you can learn with him is how to instill courage and a fighting spirit in people, because if you're really going to ask people to fight the establishment, you'll need that, and the tone of a dry academic or geography teacher won't do. He learned this style with the Left and later used these oratorical tricks to instill courage against "national enemies", so we might as well steal them back. To make it easier to digest, here's a speech he made when he and Hitler were beefing where he disses Nazism.


youtube.com/watch?v=auCoZq13VL8

I'd like to finish with Trotsky, whose literary gifts I fear many people here will miss out of dislike for him as a politician or theorist. But I think his hability to convey Marxist ideas remains unmatched. Keep in mind he might have had the most diverse audience of all Socialists, ever: he regularly preached to peasants in Russia, workers in Germany, academics and intellectuals all over Europe, and pragmatic, untheoretical, skeptical audiences in the US and the UK, all with success. I'll leave here two works aimed at introducing Marx and Dialectics to the general audiences.

marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/04/marxism.htm
marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm

So chime in, post some good material and let's learn with each other.

Other urls found in this thread:

gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=5C0A5E5E7220450516028C4F13B9D319
orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ
youtu.be/AeGKcX-JHNE?t=672
youtu.be/0k9aTeoDBxw?list=PL2B7A580134E23948
youtube.com/watch?v=6O6uacXDAHg
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

I wish I could contribute, it's sad to expect that this thread will get less responses than the millionth thread about idpol or others that don't have much potential.

Early on in the first video, Hitchens says that in order to believe that liberal ideology is 'cracking up' (in 1985), you have to think that Nixon's 1972 victory was a good thing. I really don't understand how that follows, and I don't understand why Hitchens prefaced this remark by talking about the 1980 election. He certainly is a smooth speaker though.

...

Hitchens: I don't think that's a terribly good comparison
Tyrrell: It's good enough
Hitchens: For you.

The texts that always struck me with its rhetorical skill was Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" and Demosthenes's speech against Phillip of Macedon. I am not too knowledgeable on the subject of rhetoric and I don't know the academic consensus on the quality of said texts as rhetorical pieces, but I always felt something reading them. Many fascist leaders are good orators. Hitler, Mussolini, Trump, etc. I believe nailed the composure (Trump may be pushing it), but it is all hot air and falls apart against anyone that is already predisposed against their ideals. The texts I mentioned above (and all rhetoric) appeal to me by stating and building upon axioms in such a way that would implicate that your cause has the answers to the listener's many questions. So telling people to read X or using overly, overly complex ideas to unprepared normies will never work. I might just be stating the obvious here. If anything this post could act as a bump.


That would imply that we are knowledgeable about the subject and are not autistic.

Pic related is an express course in rhetoric, can't get simpler and more complete than this.

Got some kind of link bud? Can't find it. We also might as well continue this thread anyways. I find that people are more involved if they communicate with other comrades rather than just throwing a book in their face and telling them this book holds all of your answers. Which holds true on the subject of rhetoric as well. :^)

Sorry but the site I downloaded it only has a dead link and the pdf is buried in an old hard drive

eloquence is a topic that interests me a lot but sadly my arguments are always weak, what do I do?

gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=5C0A5E5E7220450516028C4F13B9D319

Read more to acquire fuller arguments?

Gracias.


I think I mentioned in my post above that a very effective method is to use/build on axioms and how your ideology provides the answer, but as well.

I think that what he's trying to say is that if you're a conservative, but think that Nixon who is a Democrat is a good thing, than you can say that the liberal ideology is falling apart. Probably.

orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit
A very good essay by George Orwell about how stupid political rhetoric often is.

Also, if you find the debate over Latinized English as interesting as I do, you should read Uncleftish Beholding, as it brings the idea to it's logical endpoint.
groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ

1. Avoid passive weasel language (e.g. "mistakes were made" -by whom?).

2. Avoid foreign words and phrases when equivalent ones exist in your language (e.g. using Weltanschauung when talking about how somebody views the world, Welt means world and Anschauung means view, it doesn't become a more profound concept by saying it in German).

3. Shorter is better as a rule of thumb. You know a long word and a short word that basically mean the same to you, pick the short one. If you can say the same thing you mean without nested negations that cancel out, then just say it that way.

4. Start strong and end strong. A classic tip that as far as I know goes back all the way to the Ancient Greeks is that when you have several arguments to argue for a thing, and some you think are stronger than others, put a strong one at the beginning and another strong one at the end. People tend to especially remember the beginning and end of a speech, so that's where to put the most important stuff.

5. Put numbers and names on your claims. A modern tip from clickbait science is that bitches love numbered lists. If you explicitly give numbers and names to your arguments, people are way more likely to remember them. During the debate with an opponent you can pressure them into retracing the structure of your arguments rather than going all adhom and feels. You can then say things like: "Let's get back on topic. Address the point about…"

Came here to post this

Are the classics worth the read?

yeah

Fucking what? He's possibly the worst of the right wing fedora lords. This board is going to shit if he's considered a remotely positive example.

Hitchens was a socialist for the better part of his younger years and then became a liberal hawk with age. I personally have given him much more slack now being that his last words were "Capitalism, downfall." which may or may not show the last vestiges of spirit he had concerning it. Besides the point, we have Mussolini as a example, why you mad?

bump

youtu.be/AeGKcX-JHNE?t=672

Thanks for that fascinating Hitchens debate, OP. Got any more political Hitch recommendations? (no aethism, plz)

Because the board was already full of fascist apologists with the tankies, but now I guess we have liberal apologists too.

We are studying them to learn rhetoric, not to turn this into a debate about ideology. You little shit.

bump.

become knowledgeable then! =(

bump

Do a leap of faith in front of a train, u faget

Wait, you're gay?

This is a rhetoric thread. Convince him to do it. :^)

bump

still waiting user

he user too wise for he gotdamn thread

bump.

bump

I personally think this is a better example.

youtu.be/0k9aTeoDBxw?list=PL2B7A580134E23948

I always thought ayn rand was good at rhetoric.
youtube.com/watch?v=6O6uacXDAHg

a wop bop a do bop a wop bang bump

Are you even in the right board?

You can rent "Figures of Speech" on Amazon for $6. I'm going to get it right after I finish "Civics for Democracy" by Ralph Nader


Yeah why do you ask.