Rhetoric | Read Write Collect

Replied to https://daily-ink.davidtruss.com/ad-hominem-attacks-on-social-media/ (daily-ink.davidtruss.com)

Ad hominem attacks are great for convincing people who are already agreeable, while angering or being fully dismissed by those that disagree. What does this accomplish?

David, this reminds me of Venkatesh Rao’s post on the Internet of Beefs. He too questions what is actually gained. The intriguing thing though is that he also argues that ‘we are all already interpolated’ (to borrow from Althusser.)

Liked It’s Not About the “Heat” of the Rhetoric, It’s About Its Toxicity by Mike Caulfield (Hapgood)

Meanwhile, post by post, click by click, people of all ages are being slowly groomed into conspiracy cultures that turn fear into violence and authoritarian rule. Once people’s reality is warped in this way, bringing them back is difficult, and yet we are moving at a snail’s pace on educational and technological fronts. The media is still talking about the problem as if the core was people being impolite. The world slowly slides toward a dark future, across the globe. We have educational solutions (just read the rest of this blog) but they remain un-deployed or under-deployed.