Rhetoric and Propaganda

uh last time we looked at the conception of rhetoric we looked at what it was from the perspective of socrates and plato and aristotle and we saw that it was predominantly negative we&#39;re going to look at today and see the relationship between rhetoric and this term that&#39;s become i guess for better or worse thrown around in political circles and in politics and in life in general of propaganda to what extent does rhetoric the kind of stuff that we&#39;ve been talking about and i&#39;ll give some specific examples of rhetorical devices or tools or tactics that are oftentimes used to manipulate to manufacture certain kinds of viewpoints or opinions it is an often oftentimes we&#39;ll see it&#39;s via a an appeal to emotion in a negative way not all appeals to emotion are negative we&#39;ll say more about that next time when we look at linda elder&#39;s work on critical thinking and emotional intelligence but for today we want to say a little bit more about what the rhetorical devices are that are common today uh some of which were still which were around the time were utilized to some extent uh in varying degrees uh around the time of plato and aristotle but we&#39;ve we&#39;ve i guess perfected them and i want you to be aware i&#39;m cautious as i say this uh always remembering that one student years ago who was so happy when we got to fallacies and rhetorical devices because that&#39;s what he wanted to learn because he wanted to learn how to take advantage of people so i want you to be aware that that&#39;s not the point of this but i do have in the background my question from the beginning of last class where i asked you whether or not it&#39;s ever acceptable to engage in rhetoric it&#39;s ever acceptable to engage in the kind of appeals to emotion in this case it was a scare tactic if you recall where i told you about the time i got my hair cut and then the bottle fell on my head and i got angry but of course didn&#39;t happen that way it wasn&#39;t actually anger it was a manufactured anger in order to get the owner of that uh barber shop to make a change and it succeeded but of course then i told you i was lying to you and it wasn&#39;t me it was martha nussbaum whose story that happened to uh and i think i don&#39;t know i don&#39;t remember where we were with that did you all agree that that was the wrong thing to do for me to lie to you or was it acceptable because i immediately told you afterwards that i lied to you and it was only for pedagogical purposes that&#39;s what i want you to have in the background here is it ever acceptable to utilize these kinds of modes of persuasion when as aristotle points out convincing through the traditional straight forward logical argumentative approaches just seemed to be ineffective i&#39;ll say so have that in the background as we go through this so rhetoric and propaganda should they ever be used we look at w.e.b du bois uh criteria of negro art which was written in 1926 and then a response to that from the philosopher alan locke in his art or propaganda 1928 locke is going to disagree with the boys on the use of art as a means of political persuasion but i&#39;m going to start with locke when we get to those two readings and then see du bois in a way as a kind of response to that perspective all right but before i do that i wanted to say a few things about rhetorical devices i&#39;m not going to go through all of them and i said earlier uh i don&#39;t cover fallacies all at once as i told you i i spread them out throughout the semester and in the study guide i give you a link where each of the fallacies is covered in each of the powerpoints here i&#39;m going to go through a number of particular rhetorical devices that are oftentimes used that are very common and they&#39;re tricks they&#39;re cheats they&#39;re oftentimes coupled with fallacies they are not themselves fallacies because it&#39;s not obvious that they&#39;re actually attempting to present an argument in many cases there&#39;s no attempt to presenting an argument it&#39;s just merely a strategy excuse me a technique a tactic to persuade one to a position or another but they can be used and found within a number of fallacies we already did this this is review but we&#39;re still dealing with language and how important it is we talked about slanters that&#39;s that general term that&#39;s used where languages is uh manipulated for the purposes of of a rhetorical construction there&#39;s an attempt at making something that would about otherwise be negative and awful uh either neutral or even positive that&#39;s a euphemism do you remember the opposite of a euphemism dysphemism precisely to make something seem worse and that rhetorical construction enables us to reference the same thing but with a connotation a different sense that can change viewpoints and we ended last time with this video from frank luntz this was around 2004 the persuaders which if you you can watch the whole video i think i posted a link to it for the whole thing in fact i do have it in this slide again i only focused on minute 59 to minute 108. uh there he&#39;s talking about the work that the republican poster frank luntz uh utilized uh and noting there are political pundits who do the same thing that he does in all parties it&#39;s just that he&#39;s really really really good at it he has a book from around 2007 or so uh how words that work and he&#39;s using that as a means to show here&#39;s how you can sell an idea here&#39;s how you can sell a politician here&#39;s how you can sell a change in the way that we talk we saw on the video how he focused groups ideas and words and language and he can recognize that what presuming it&#39;s a representative sample of the populace how they react to language in a commercial for example and which words modify or get at that amygdala that center of our brain or that part of our brain that is a kind of gateway to our emotional centers and as he points out human beings 80 emotional only 20 intellect i&#39;m much more interested in the emotional and we ended with that discussion last time because that&#39;s where i can persuade people i can figure out what words will best sell an idea and in around 2003 we find a memo from frank luntz where he uh addressed this question of climate change the term global warming was what was in vogue at the time and from one of the people in his uh focus group we learned that climate change quote is less frightening than global warming according to one focus group participate climate change sounds like you&#39;re going from pittsburgh to fort lauderdale while global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it climate change suggested more controllable and less emotional challenge and if you recall in the interview he&#39;s asked why did you make that change well actually he&#39;s he says what&#39;s the difference what is the difference between some people call it climate change some people call it global warming what&#39;s the difference i think there we realized there was a bit of disingenuousness on his part because his point is to change the way people and he did very successfully for whether for better or worse it&#39;s almost completely now referred to as climate change rather than global warming and maybe it&#39;s more accurate ultimately in the end but maybe global weirding is a better phrase than either of those but note the importance of this the language changed it&#39;s less catastrophic and if you&#39;re writing i don&#39;t know where he is on this today i think he&#39;s softened his views on some of this because i mean my goodness look where we are today no matter where you live you are going to be affected by climate change global warming what have you so it&#39;s it&#39;s no longer just affecting low-lying islands of impoverished people which it did for the last 30 years yeah was the switch of the term because of like politicians needed a softer phrase to like dampen yes yes if you look at who his clients were that was his intention at the time to take some of the burden off of many of the oil industries as having a kind of burden a response a responsibility with respect to climate change and by saying it&#39;s not that big of a deal or not as big a deal as the alarmists are calling it then action which is costly will not be taken and this is again 20 years ago and we might think huh i wonder if things would be a little different now if the language hadn&#39;t changed that is a tough argument to make but i think one could make it maybe there&#39;s a paper how the change of language has negatively affected in this particular issue you can pick other issues if you wish all right so now that&#39;s language and we&#39;re going to focus on language for a few for a little bit and then we&#39;ll look at rhetoric in images and see why that&#39;s so prevalent and i&#39;m just going to go through a few of these and they&#39;re they&#39;re really interesting and some of them are funny and that&#39;s not insignificant paralympics is a phrase that&#39;s a term that&#39;s not very common but what it is is very common in particular for one politician uh paralympics is where you draw attention to something in the act of doing that very thing but as you&#39;re doing it you pretend you&#39;re not you pretend to pass over it you pretend to not cover it you&#39;re being ironic in a way but you&#39;re not hiding it at all and it&#39;s kind of funny and people like it especially if you already agree with the individual if you don&#39;t agree with him then you&#39;re just kind of put off but what can you do because he&#39;s not really attacking you and i say he because it&#39;s donald trump i was going to say dummy bush but i won&#39;t say it i&#39;m not going to say it it&#39;s brilliant it&#39;s a brilliant rhetorical tactic in the sense that it works these are nicknames he uses he was running for office 2016 he had about 16 other uh republican candidates against him i&#39;ve forgotten all the nicknames marco rubio was little marco ted cruz was lying ted bush uh jeb bush was low energy jeb and dummy bush but he never but i was gonna say he never comes out and says that well of course he does but he said the same thing about um carly fiorina i promised i would not say she ran here that packard into the ground that she laid off tens of thousands of people and got viciously fired i said i will not say it so i will not say it that&#39;s clever and it&#39;s amusing people smirk at that but he&#39;s able to get out an attack while offering himself an out and by the way a quick aside about carly fiorina she was running for office in 2016 and she was on the stage with marco rubio at one point and marco rubio for some reason brought up philosophy and how we need fewer philosophers and we need more welders and philosophy is basically useless the reason i mentioned this is i was upset with that obviously and i was doubly upset that i knew carly fiorina was on that stage and i knew carly fiorina was a philosophy major and she said nothing and that upset me why would you not respond to that absurd statement that is ill-informed she knew better she could be president if she had just spoken up huh that&#39;s what i think anyway oh there&#39;s a lot more examples i can&#39;t go through all of them they&#39;re too many there are too many and he&#39;s a he&#39;s very good at doing this and politicians are good at doing this on occasion so are others but it&#39;s a tactic and it gets audiences to get onto your side or it gets them pissed off either way you cut you corral particular groups you increase the divisiveness and you do so usually presumably for one&#39;s own benefit that&#39;s paralypsis related to that to an extent is a loaded question and this is very very common these are where you&#39;re asking a question it just seems harmless i&#39;m just asking questions i&#39;m just asking questions did antifa actually play a role in uh january 6th insurrection on the capitol i don&#39;t know i&#39;m just asking questions could they have a politician from idaho recently said it&#39;s possible that they did do you have evidence for that i&#39;m just saying it&#39;s plausible and i&#39;m just asking questions wait a minute no you are making an assertion and hiding it behind a presumed question and in that question you are already putting out there the idea loaded questions are similar to another rhetorical device called a weaseler and which is also similar to one called innuendo i&#39;ll get to both of those in a moment they&#39;re kind of a family of tools so you&#39;re already prematurely assuming that an issue is settled this is a silly example dad says where&#39;s all that marijuana you were smoking what would you say to your dad if you came out you you guys were out just smoking marijuana a moment ago what would you or say you&#39;d say you smoked it all oh it was lost in a series of small pockets this is not a that&#39;s very good that&#39;s a euphemism were you smoking marijuana no it was starting small fires and i consumed them yeah that&#39;s actually not a good thing to do in california right now the virus marijuana is legal yeah oh sorry i thought you need to hand up this is a loaded question father you&#39;re assuming i have marijuana that&#39;s a loaded question are you still beating your wife what how do you respond to that no ah good you stopped a loaded question is presupposing it&#39;s smuggling in a presumption without argument and no matter how you answer it yes or no you&#39;re sort of entrapped in legal matters we call that a leading question go ahead police officers and like investigators use when they&#39;re intriguing people uh i have a colleague who who is about who is teaching um interrogation techniques actually it&#39;ll be great the team teach that i&#39;ve been fun dave saunders um i&#39;d have to ask him about that but yeah if you watch movies it seems that oftentimes that&#39;s the case tell us why you hid the bodies whoa bro i don&#39;t know why i would respond i you&#39;re assuming i&#39;m guilty or something like that yeah that&#39;s how a loaded or leading question lawyers will oftentimes you know say tell us your relationship to the rapist mrs smith said wait a minute objection your honor leading the witness that&#39;s a loaded question the whole point of the trial is to establish guilt or innocence you can&#39;t refer to the defendant as a murderer or rapist whatever until that&#39;s been established that&#39;s a leading question but notice it works strike that from the record jury really how do i do that erase it from my memory if you ask a loaded question if you ask if you engage in a weaseler where you say one thing but you&#39;re kind of not saying it fully i didn&#39;t say my opponent was a drunk i said i don&#39;t think he&#39;s a drunk but notice even that even denying it even as one did years ago now i forgot her name she was running for office in arizona she uh in her youth that had just been discovered which is what happens by the way if you&#39;re gonna run for office make sure there&#39;s nothing on your facebook pages your instagram there&#39;s no history of you doing anything but walking old ladies across the street nothing else because it was found that she dabbled in witchcraft when she was young whoever this person i forgot her name and her opponent at the time said look i don&#39;t know if my opponent was a witch that&#39;s how he said it brilliant in fact he might even added i don&#39;t think she&#39;s a witch what have you done you have already unnecessarily brought those to the politician and the idea that you might have been a witch together people who hear that make the association and even if you deny it i said she wasn&#39;t a witch doesn&#39;t matter it&#39;s already out there you&#39;ve already made a connection even in your uh denial of it so that&#39;s a kind of weaseler in the sense that you can accuse somebody of something but get out of it later by saying no no i&#39;m i said she might be a witch antifa might have been involved in uh january 6. i didn&#39;t say it was do you see that&#39;s a weasler and there&#39;s innuendo as well where i don&#39;t say something explicitly i hint at it it&#39;s a great example from the comedian i&#39;ve forgotten the name of the comedian now is that a restaurant and says i didn&#39;t say the meat was tough i said that i didn&#39;t see the horse that&#39;s normally outside implying of course we&#39;re eating horse meat but that&#39;s innuendo it&#39;s kind of indirect and that notion of indirection is going to be essential in our discussion of propaganda and different modes or methods of propaganda that might be utilized right uh okay no texting in class just a reminder okay down players there&#39;s another one this is going to be relevant too for what we&#39;re going to discuss later i&#39;ll show a potential mode of propaganda via humor that is a is an artistic approach that uh du bois does not consider which i found interesting but one of his precursors to his ideas a guy named frederick douglass does talk about that in a bit a down player is also a rhetorical device it&#39;s a kind of mockery it&#39;s a kind of ridicule it&#39;s a kind of well down playing when i put things in scare quotes like this yeah he&#39;s a real genius he went to the he got his degree which means i don&#39;t really think it&#39;s a degree from the university i could even put the university in quotes and then you can put phoenix in quotes too because it&#39;s not there really university of phoenix this is a mode of denying the uh credibility of something and you can do it without the scare quotes my daughter&#39;s just learned how to use scare quotes and she hasn&#39;t quite learned how to do it she puts them over everything and that&#39;s a distinction remind you between the use and mention distinction we can determine that we&#39;re using a word or mentioning it by putting quotes around it so for instance in your papers if you&#39;re talking about the definition of a concept of a term you are mentioning that term your language your argument is about that word and so you put that word in quotes because it is an object of it&#39;s a meta-linguistic tactic using a word if i say yeah this i stub my toe and i say or you&#39;re being a little that&#39;s using the word but if i say to my son milo do not use the word i&#39;m mentioning it do you see um but a down player is different down players i&#39;m using the equivalent of scare quotes when i say he&#39;s a real genius that&#39;s sarcasm as well which is in the next rhetorical device i have but you see in politics and it goes back this is not new we can go back to the famous vice presidential debate of 1988 between dan quayle and lloyd benson i guess lloyd benson in this famous phrase you&#39;re no jack kennedy which becomes you know like a commercial later on uh but i want you to pay attention to when the crowd gets involved and why and whether or not there&#39;s a good argument present presented what is it that they&#39;re cheering okay that&#39;s dan quayle far more experienced than many others that sought the office of vice president this country i had as much experience in the congress as jack kennedy did when he saw the presidency i will be prepared to deal with the people in the bush administration if that unfortunate event would ever occur senator benson senator i served with jack kennedy i knew jack kennedy jack kennedy was a friend of mine senator your no jack kennedy look at that crowd go wild what do they go wild for did benson come up with an amazing argument my goodness that was a valid and sound rebuttal what did he do it was a jab there&#39;s a good bit of ridicule people like that and it&#39;s unclear even if you&#39;re independent maybe you kind of like that now the question is is there an argument behind benson&#39;s claims or is it pure ridicule is it pure diversion is it pure tactic where i don&#39;t have a very good argument i&#39;m going to attack the person which of course is a fallacy what&#39;s that called ad hominem to the man we see rhetorical uh devices such as ridicule of mockery of sarcasm as negatives in this way because they&#39;re attacking the person in a way that to use sarcasm to use hyperbole i&#39;ll get to that in a second isn&#39;t automatically a fallacy unless it&#39;s employed within an argument and i&#39;m going to argue and we&#39;ll see maybe it&#39;s accessible to use this it depends on how it&#39;s done in the context in which it is done but notice he won the crowd well let&#39;s see there&#39;s more to it i think that was really uncalled for senator no i don&#39;t know why they&#39;re cheering that i can&#39;t tell if they&#39;re like well done dan quail or if they&#39;re like oh that was a shitty response you got destroyed let&#39;s and then it goes on [Applause] making the comparison senator and i&#39;m one who knew him well and frankly i think you&#39;re so far apart in the objectives you choose for your country that i did not think the comparison was well taken okay so there&#39;s an argument right he&#39;s saying you made a comparison i&#39;m responding to it of course he did so really cleverly reagan was very good at doing this too he was able to jokingly sort of folksy-like uh mock those around him uh his opponents and at one point he was running his com his competitor i forgot what it was even for was a young guy and he was quite old and some a newscaster brought that up to him a reporter said what do you think about your age you&#39;d be one of the oldest presidents blah blah blah and he says well i&#39;m not going to talk about my opponent&#39;s youth in an experience as a means of deflecting and also attacking his opponent at the same time and so we might think that what&#39;s the big deal that&#39;s not a problem it can be though uh here&#39;s an example i&#39;m using i&#39;m guilty of this of sarcasm president bush is the leader of the free world ha he was a cheerleader in college there&#39;s a bit of attacking the individual mocking them not speaking in a kind of literal way we&#39;ll talk about sarcasm in a bit later when it comes up with more our discussions are pretty cool um sarcasm is as i saw on a shirt once punching someone in the face with words which is it&#39;s quite accurate if you&#39;re if somebody&#39;s sarcastically responding to you and pointing out something that they see as a flaw and they do importantly publicly doing so that&#39;s harmful being laughed at can be deemed quite harmful and you see this oftentimes in jokes at other people&#39;s expense we engage in hyperbole overstating a claim usually making the opponent&#39;s position look worse than it really is and then attacking that misrepresentation that mischaracterization that&#39;s that exaggerated representation what&#39;s that fallacy called straw man exactly the strong man fallacy utilizes this particular rhetorical device quite often jay beebs justin bieber is the most talented musician in the history of mankind that&#39;s of course a bit of exaggeration we can make it better by saying jay beebs is a talented musician and then if i respond with no that&#39;s hyperbole too i&#39;ve engaged in sarcasm i have engaged in a bit of ridicule ridicule or mockery why do we see this where do we see this it could fall into another era in reasoning hyperbole exaggeration can oftentimes lead to what&#39;s known as the slippery slope fallacy where we exaggerate the negative consequences and i&#39;ll talk about slippery slope later on in a different lecture but in short if i say look we can&#39;t allow this one thing to happen because if this happens the next thing you know armageddon and what is armageddon the end of the world now orwell would say this kind of talk is is is dangerous it&#39;s it&#39;s foolish but you might think oh that&#39;s how everyone talks that&#39;s just how politicians are and once you start saying that then you get into the habit of thinking it doesn&#39;t matter anymore i don&#39;t watch politics i don&#39;t listen to politics i don&#39;t vote because they&#39;re all liars they&#39;re all the same they all use the same nonsense they all use the same exaggerated language they don&#39;t there are degrees and that has to be kept in mind one of the negative consequences of tuning out because so many politicians do engage in this is that we become disengaged when we could play a role in moving the country in a direction that makes sense but if we fall into this notion where it doesn&#39;t matter they&#39;re all doing it they&#39;re all using this manipulative language there&#39;s nothing that can be done about it this is a problem we need to be able to call it out look armageddon is the wrong word use the right language armageddon means the end of the world literally the unit the world is done is there an asteroid coming to hit the planet if so then you the politician can say something needs to be done the stakes could not be higher it will be armageddon if we don&#39;t stop this asteroid from hitting our planet that would be acceptable i have not once heard a politician referenced the word armageddon in a way that makes sense and there&#39;s something similar with the the the fallacy ad nazium which just came up again yesterday marjorie taylor greene has made another reference to nazi germany against your political opponents i&#39;m not going to reference it beyond that why do i have viagra written on the board i was wondering yeah it seems like totally out of the blue so speaking of armageddon viagra we need to stop armageddon by allowing our elderly men to i don&#39;t know i&#39;m trying to put that together i&#39;m trying to fit that in somehow forgive me well viagra that&#39;s the name of a pill which i think was originally intended for women to use for i&#39;ve forgotten what now which is interesting because now everyone knows that it only has one particular job it was designed they were now is being used for older gentlemen why they&#39;re gentlemen uh well you know what it&#39;s for but why do they call it why do they call it viagra is it coincidental did they just say what do we call this pill how about viagra hey that&#39;s great bill let&#39;s call it that no they focus grouped it workshopped it they paid consultants we know that they paid consultants because one of them uh helped in an interview write a paper about this very term this consultants get paid a lot of money so you better come up with something good why viagra well because vi the root here could mean vitality it could mean to compete to do battle with it rhymes with niagara untold or rather i know and also they note this why niagara niagara falls powerful water source also the location of the most heart-shaped beds in the world that&#39;s a fact that&#39;s where a lot of people go for their honeymoon now i don&#39;t know if you knew that but it does call to might it does rhyme with niagara agra the root there aggressive agriculture agriculture growth and so on that&#39;s none of that is accidental those are all rhetorical now is that acceptable we&#39;ll talk about advertising more in a moment is that not a means of manipulation is that not a means of propaganda last couple here proof surrogates we&#39;ve talked about this one already avoid this in your papers as best you can avoid this in your conversations with other people recall a surrogate mother is not the actual mother she&#39;s standing in place of the mother right a proof surrogate is not an actual proof it&#39;s other words that are in place of proof demonstration argument um it&#39;s oftentimes used and you find it with the fallacy misplacing the burden of proof oh you&#39;re gonna say that yes okay i think i&#39;ve taken some of your words more than once here today but yes you were right uh you it&#39;s uh it&#39;s by itself it&#39;s not a a fallacy unless it&#39;s part of an argument in which you say here&#39;s my position and if you don&#39;t think it&#39;s right go look at this right you don&#39;t think this fact about economics is the case we&#39;ll go that&#39;s economics 101 man when people say that they&#39;re not making a case they&#39;re using a proof surrogate that&#39;s just economics 101 which is another way of saying you need to go back take economics 101 then come back and you can respond to what i just said which is ridiculous make your case don&#39;t tell me i need to go back to this class because otherwise that&#39;s a proof surrogate and what&#39;s approved surrogate ah that&#39;s logic 101 bruh so don&#39;t do that right and studies show is the probably the most common proof surrogate study show then fill in your conclusion doesn&#39;t work give the study but don&#39;t just give the study show why that study proves your point supports your point how is that study performed what does it show question so would like based writing like how do you are you supposed to avoid this or just like uh with empathy-based writing or with enthymemes ah so avoid enthymemes that&#39;s the logical part of me the positive propagandist the w.e.b du bois part of me says that bentham means in public speaking in conversation with your friends uh that you may want to be haranguing and cajoling into believing something because you feel it&#39;s the best thing that they agree with you maybe then it is okay to engage in an enemy it&#39;s okay to leave out a premise or two presuming they would fill it in themselves we talked a little about that with jokes last time i would be cautious in that and that&#39;s a good question the writing um curriculum is anthony based what writing curriculum like um so that&#39;s where it came from it&#39;s enthymeme based because you filled in too much of the detail well it&#39;s a so um if your job is if your goal is to persuade then maybe filling in the details and being perceived as overly pedantic and saying premise one premise two and here&#39;s another premise which my opponent now don&#39;t use opponent which my interlocutor actually don&#39;t use that word either speaking of pedantic which that dude used uh leaves this out this is a key premise that if this is not made explicit we don&#39;t see how it leads to the conclusion we don&#39;t see how those other claims are connected to the conclusion in certain cases all men immortal therefore socrates is going to die do we need to add all the socrates as a man i like you to get into the habit of doing that because the other way is more common it&#39;s much more common to leave things out to leave things unsaid and therefore we need to kind of train ourselves to get into the habit of especially with issues that are controversial where we need to make explicit the premises that we think of the case or that are the case to leave the conclusion that we want others to see and follow the logic it&#39;s hard to follow the logic if it&#39;s not made explicit having said all that we&#39;re going to see a view of positive propaganda that may push the emphatic uh approach yeah so when in an argument with someone you need to address them what&#39;s what ask them their name go with that yeah yeah i&#39;m speaking to generalizations there uh socrates and his play or plato&#39;s dialogues they&#39;re called interlocutors people are talking in politics they&#39;re called opponents and in their typical argument as war they&#39;re seen as enemies none of that is helpful and even when you don&#39;t make that explicit it&#39;s kind of in the background and we want to avoid that so knowing their name go with that first yeah that&#39;s very good question yeah go ahead would everybody knows relate to like a man good it could or appeal to popularity so every red blooded american knows in the fill in the blank psychologically that could be effective in the sense that i don&#39;t want to be part of the minority that doesn&#39;t know and so that&#39;s not an argument you haven&#39;t defended your claim by saying it&#39;s a popularly held belief and it may not be a popular held belief everyone knows the earth is flat knows that this politician didn&#39;t win the election or did win the election and so forth that doesn&#39;t help so uh give the justification give the argument take on if you&#39;re presenting a case for something you need to take on the burden of it okay there are others and if they come up i&#39;ll reference them as we go rhetorical devices that is tricks little cheats if you will and and here are some that we&#39;ll see in images and images are probably the most common form of rhetorical device the most predominant on the internet at least for a number of reasons number one they&#39;re easily replicatable and spreadable such as memes are and we&#39;re visual we&#39;re visual creatures we know that because most of our brain is comprised of the occipital cortex which takes up about 30 percent of our brains so visually that&#39;s our predominant mode of perception uh and evolutionarily speaking we are mostly you think that reptilian part of our brain that&#39;s that&#39;s predominant it&#39;s hard to put that aside language and especially written words that&#39;s extremely new in our evolutionary history and this is actually interesting with respect to remembering things we remember images we remember visual representations and this may be obvious why to help us get around and navigate our surroundings if we get lost we can remember things visually it&#39;s harder to remember directions first you take a right on this street then you go left and you you&#39;ll see a boulder on the right go past that i mean that&#39;s hard to remember and it&#39;s fascinating to learn about memory contests memory championships where people go and it&#39;s amazing that this is a thing uh and compete with each other to see who can remember the most random bits of information like hundreds and hundreds of random digits how do you do that and a lot of them use what&#39;s known as the memory palace mechanism um this i learned about from a book called i forgot the name of it which is ironic einstein it&#39;s hilarious i can&#39;t believe that just happened einstein and somebody moonwalk into oh my god timeout that&#39;s crazy you know is anyone who i&#39;m talking about oh i can&#39;t say no don&#39;t don&#39;t look at me while i&#39;m typing einstein and some oh my god i&#39;m nervous moonwalk let&#39;s just find it moonwalking with einstein there it is joshua 4. what did i say so i didn&#39;t learn much from reading this the art and science of remembering everything anyway he references simonides the famous poet who utilizes this the memory palace is where you go back to your your home when you were a kid the home you spent most of your time in you can remember every room you can remember every nook and cranny if you can then associate a complex a new concept that&#39;s abstract and hard to recall hard to concretize kind of a make an association how this is done is described in the book with a place in your room and so when you&#39;re going through your memory powers you&#39;re trying to remember the new concept you are literally excuse me you are in your mind going through your home and seeing that concept tied to something that you have a concrete memory of visually so my point is we&#39;re visual creatures predominantly i was thinking uh that&#39;s how the the the memory palace uh sort of meant for whatever that you&#39;re using there to sort of how words work isn&#39;t that the association with other words like the associating of concepts like with words it would be you first hear the word so it has to be like uh yeah like an auditory visual memory but you&#39;re still making associations between one word another word like you&#39;re making associates with images would you say that that&#39;s how we remember language that&#39;s very good that&#39;s very interesting i don&#39;t know so remember frank luntz nobody knows what an estate is which is another saying nothing really comes to mind imagistically to borrow from orwell remember oral was talking how important it is start with the image right uh try to get the best word that encapsulates represents that image don&#39;t start searching for words to try to make it fit after the fact because then you&#39;re just going to then eventually end up with slogans with cliches with unthought out prefabricated nonsense go with the images first death tax that brings to mind immediately if viscerally we all know what it what it means to to get taxed when you die and so that is one says that&#39;s a clarification not an advocate obviously to obfuscate means to purposely make things less clear then if you look into what the death tax is slash estate tax why does a state tax sound wealthy well because it applies to people who have an estate that they would then give to their bequeath to their children for example if that estate is worth over 10 million dollars which to me i mean i know we&#39;re in santa barbara but that sounds wealthy and then that&#39;s taxed at a very high rate but it&#39;s only everything after 10 million dollars so it&#39;s unclear that that rhetorical construction clarifies rather than happy skates and the images that it brings up of course matter here i don&#39;t have to think boom image and he looks like an idiot so we know what this national opinion poll it says here&#39;s rhetoric in pictures do you like president bush and by the way this was a pop-up years ago this thing used to keep moving back and forth depends on no that&#39;s coincidental and then i noticed free laptop if you look at the asterisk it says see details and i did and there was no free laptop i&#39;ll just let you know now what do they think you were to answer how would you answer this poll of course not because look at him he&#39;s an idiot how is he an idiot look at his face but wait a minute what if he&#39;s just in the middle of saying a word there which of course he is he didn&#39;t walk around looking like that is that the only picture of the president of the united states you could find of course not that was done on purpose and this is a silly example who cares about a pop-up on your screen but if it&#39;s the cover of newsweek magazine if you click on this by the way it&#39;ll send you to the story about michelle bachman michelle bachmann was a conservative running for president some years ago newsweek is a liberal leaning magazine and they were pushing the narrative that michelle bachmann was unhinged was was crazy this is the cover of their magazine how many pictures do you think they take for the cover of their magazine hundreds and out of all those hundreds we said yep that&#39;s the best you can do obviously that&#39;s pushing a narrative and it says a lot more it pushes it much easier than here&#39;s an argument that we think she might not be totally saying the images work and they work well problematically here&#39;s an example of o.j simpson 1994 there&#39;s his mug shot that&#39;s the untouched image here&#39;s times time magazine&#39;s picture they were asked why did you change your cover and of course they denied it immediately but look they&#39;re different oh we don&#39;t know how that happened you don&#39;t know how that&#39;s the cover of your magazine there can be mistakes of course but this was pushing at the time and by the way it&#39;s still the case today they were pushing a narrative that&#39;s built on the stereotype that the darker the skin the more likely one is guilty that has been a stereotype that&#39;s been around since before the civil war and it was utilized then by time magazine we see rhetoric in pictures with contemporary politics here&#39;s the joker or it&#39;s president obama uh and the images here to borrow from the philosophers of aesthetics no carol the images of politicians in particular or other famous people or just anyone that you want to target if you can dehumanize them and this is in a way dehumanizing it&#39;s much easier to get a lot of people to hate them and if you can get a lot of people to hate someone you&#39;re more likely to get a lot of people to engage in violence against them again are these the best pictures i could find of hillary clinton and donald trump no yes no we&#39;ll see there we go this is a problem if you watch cnn or if you watch msnbc and they reference donald trump this picture msnbc in particular i&#39;ve seen this picture multitude of times without them saying anything you can sense where their bias lies and it&#39;s imagistically represented it&#39;s bias that doesn&#39;t mean it&#39;s fake news just to anticipate if you watch fox news you don&#39;t see trump looking like this you see clinton looking like that the images are representative in many respects of the position that people hold and sometimes it&#39;s unclear sometimes it&#39;s it&#39;s it&#39;s subconscious but it works sorry uh question yes okay are you ever gonna do thanksgiving am i ever gonna use banksy yeah yes boom banksy but not yet that&#39;s interesting you raise that first the devil fish by john tanil so this has been around for a long time the use of artistic rendering the use of images you can&#39;t really see this but if you click on the link it&#39;ll take you to a description where the in this case the immigrants that were the threat were the irish and they were terrorists they were taking jobs their tentacles were all over the place and the image of them being um inhuman lacking humanity makes it much easier to treat them as less than human this is the case with jews during the world war during world war ii the only reason no the necessary condition for there to have been the holocaust for that to have even been possible was first the propaganda campaign that was driven by anti-semitism and was explicit and was used using propaganda we know it was propaganda because it came from the ministry of propaganda they didn&#39;t hide it those are the good old days when you knew what was propaganda because joseph goebbels was the minister of propaganda fascinating and the images here they say more than an argument could because in an argument you can represent the case here you might imagine hitler or gerbil saying here&#39;s why germany lost world war one the jews here&#39;s why germany is in decline economically the jews what what&#39;s the evidence for that what&#39;s the argument for that how are you not just scapegoating an entire group of people how do you respond to that give and take argumentation goes back and forth images don&#39;t the images the dehumanizing images and you see this throughout conflicts in all of history but now it&#39;s worse because we have the internet and we have the capacity to spread images incredibly quickly and the images enable us to perceive and they stick with us more the negatives and we see them as less than human and in order to execute an entire group of people it&#39;s very hard to justify that to yourself much less anyone else unless you can unless you&#39;ve already succeeded in stereotyping them to the extent that they&#39;re seen as less than human stereotypes are not just you know an occasional hasty generalization we&#39;ll talk more about stereotypes next week they are the backbone the propagandistic backbone that justifies mistreatment and genocide you don&#39;t engage in genocide without having first the the soil uh uh watered with stereotypes you&#39;ll see that with slavery as well you go the other direction we have positive imagery there&#39;s captain america everyone has their own version of this most countries do except for england they&#39;re a little bit self-deprecatory they have when when the world cup was going to be in england they were like oh this is a terrible idea it&#39;s going to it&#39;s going to fail horribly so they don&#39;t have their they don&#39;t have a captain england i don&#39;t think do they uh captain carter what is it captain carter well that&#39;s captain carter that&#39;s comfortable what captain carter is the female version of that and she has like oh uh right right right right oh okay well there we go american creations ah let&#39;s see there we go again so in any case i want to skip a little bit through advertisements because i&#39;m going to return to this with with credibility claims and private sources but you mentioned banksy and i want to say a little bit is advertising of means of propaganda and banksy does think so related to our reading from dubois i think banksy is okay with responding in kind yeah advertising is propaganda and what&#39;s the best way to respond to that counter propaganda or as du bois will put it positive propaganda and what does he do he takes the image banksy does of coca-cola which you are inundated with this all the time milo my son asked why does coca-cola advertise doesn&#39;t everybody already know about coca-cola why are they still spending millions of dollars advertising their product good question banksy says this in the image of coca-cola which he has adopted for himself people are taking the piss out of you every day if we don&#39;t know who banksy is but he&#39;s probably english that&#39;s a english type phrase there it sounds like i&#39;ll just take i&#39;m just giving you taking the piss out of you know what that means they butt into your life take a cheap shot at you and then disappear they leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small they make flippant comments from buses that imply you&#39;re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else they are on tv making your girlfriend feel inadequate they have access to the most sophisticated technology in the world that has ever known and they bully you with it they are the advertisers and they are laughing at you you however are forbidden to touch them trademarks intellectual property copyright law these mean advertisers can say what they like whenever they like it with total impunity that he says any advert another english turn or phrase any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours it&#39;s yours to take to rearrange and reuse which is what he&#39;s doing here you could do whatever you like with it asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head you owe the companies nothing less than nothing you especially don&#39;t owe them any courtesy they owe you they have rearranged the world to put themselves in front of you they never asked for your permission don&#39;t even start asking for theirs and here&#39;s the danger of utilizing this mechanism this method others can do it too you can as banksy&#39;s doing himself rearranging the propagandistic work from the corporatist monoliths and this happens to him whatever tip x is it&#39;s not coca-cola but they did the same thing they took his words and in selling their product which is an eraser of some sort they just took his entire speech there that he had in the coca-cola bottle and erased it with their little marker it&#39;s not even a good job no but this is significant it&#39;s a sh it&#39;s crap and it&#39;s not artistically done it&#39;s not cleverly done that&#39;s relevant in how the propaganda the counter propaganda is engaged in this is pretty good if you go to banksy&#39;s dismal land as opposed to disneyland he&#39;s not a big fan of the corporate profiteering of this company and i have to say where am i it&#39;s pretty awful when your kids insist i&#39;ve got to have that got to have that product of disney because i saw a commercial every damn day and the marketing is to the children so that the children bug the parents and so that the parents feel like when they don&#39;t give in to their children who&#39;s been marketed to and we know that they market to children because people who work in that business come out of it and say my god our whole job was to get children hooked so that they would upset their parents to get them cajole them harangue them to use dubois language to purchase these crappily made toys that will become obsolete within days and am i a good parent do i stop and say here&#39;s a lesson no i sometimes buy the and then i tell them afterwards see that gun that you bought that nerf gun that ar-15 you bought lola it doesn&#39;t work anymore does it no it was not an ar-15 it&#39;s a little nerf guns for my will anyway check this out it&#39;s a bemusement part which means you confused just like when you confront socrates or are confronted by socrates you&#39;re left a little bit bemused confused that&#39;s not necessarily a negative yes is this all around no uh it&#39;s in england and i doubt i doubt i feel like disneyland would probably like jump down this well you know one of the things that says that are prohibited here are cameras uh a list of things and and also lawyers from disney you&#39;re not they&#39;re not allowed here right and sold there was a painting sold by banksy well i would buy that and i could obviously if i wanted to multiple times the many times over uh but there was a painting sold at christie&#39;s auction for over a million dollars i don&#39;t remember how much it was absurd amount of money and after it was purchased they&#39;re about to take it off the wall it started to uh shred itself in the in the uh canvas in the frame was a shredder somehow i don&#39;t know how that works it&#39;s brilliant and it and you see a video of the people freaking out trying to stop it from shredding the painting that just cost a million dollars or more and they did not succeed in saving it didn&#39;t it increase the value of the shredding probably probably all right so here&#39;s our questions questions isn&#39;t all of this rhetorical devices appeal to language in a way that gets at our emotions they get its own amygdala that bypasses our cognitive functioning uh the images that we just saw and many others isn&#39;t that all just propaganda and isn&#39;t all propaganda back according to allan lock philosopher who you read for today yes propaganda is dangerous it&#39;s problematic even when attempted to be used by or for what or otherwise positive ends or can there be as w du bois puts it in his work a criteria of evil art page 220 can there be something called positive propaganda that would work ultimately the voice says yes which one of them is correct it&#39;s not obvious uh i start with uh alan locke philosopher trained at harvard rhodes scholar father of the harlem renaissance and click on that you&#39;ll see click on that you see more of his background click here you&#39;ll see some of the artwork of the renaissance the harlem renaissance images poetry music and so forth uh but not humor that&#39;s what i&#39;m going to focus on in a moment locke is concerned he&#39;s a philosopher who focuses on issues of value aesthetics but he also writes a bit about relativism and his concerns of finding a kind of balance between these the dangers of absolutism of a universal presumption of truth in particular with ethics as well uh versus an anything goes relativism uh we&#39;ll talk about relativism he&#39;ll probably come up again uh in a couple weeks when we look at skepticism and relativism but notice the reading that you have from him is called art or propaganda they cannot be at the same time this is in response to dubois and yet i&#39;m going to start with it uh this is 1928 davois&#39;s 1926 is reading the reading criteria of negro art du bois is speaking to the naacp which he played a role in beginning starting their dispute is over the role of artistic expression the role of artistic rendering and artistic meaning a very broad conception in the very broadest terms lock is concerned he says genius and talent must choose art and put aside propaganda he doesn&#39;t go so far as to say art for art&#39;s sake or that there are only if we&#39;re going to engage in artistic renderings it ought to be pure art that only appeals to the universal in human nature he does say that in some of his readings not in the text that you have here but there&#39;s a debate going on what is art supposed to do does it represent a perspective of reality perspective of the world the perspective of social reality and of oneself from an individual subjectivity or is it meant to give a representation of what humanity is of what the world is in a universalizing sense locke leans more toward the second person he&#39;s concerned that if we take art as a means of expression to push a particular agenda it backfires in fact he puts it my chief objection to propaganda is that it perpetuates the position of group inferiority and here&#39;s the key even in crying out against it it is one-sided and often pre-judging there&#39;s a lot to say about that it&#39;s like that last part there it&#39;s a little confusing what he&#39;s arguing against is the mode of presentation the mode of representation that has been used by those in power against people like him who have been oppressed again he&#39;s writing in around the 19 teens 1920s this is during jim crow era which had spread not just in the south it was all over the united states he&#39;s writing at a time in which lynchings were very very common what are lynchings lynchings are public executions you could be lynched if you were a black man being seen as guilty of reckless eyeballing which is to say you were looking improperly as my daughter at my wife at my mom whatever and there&#39;s no court of law here that establishes yeah you looked at that person that&#39;s ridiculous but the stereotypes that were pushed that were part of the culture the darker the skin the more guilty one is uh uh you are walking wow black you are guilty because of that you could be hung and hung publicly and hung in front of hundreds of people people who bring their children to watch the hanging we know this because they&#39;re pictures of young white children watching with their parents smiling as the man hangs from a tree you have to have done significant work collectively culturally to infuse the populace through propaganda through stereotype through the kinds of things he&#39;s concerned about block is concerned about that dehumanizes you cannot say it&#39;s almost impossible to imagine the stereotypes not being present the propaganda not being present to give rise to that possibility this is the environment into which they&#39;re writing and that they&#39;re living locke is concerned that the same the to use to use the master&#39;s tools to borrow from a phrase from the writer audrey lord is only going to perpetuate the same stereotypes in an effort to attack those stereotypes we&#39;re actually using them and they get lost in fact this is why i&#39;ll reference dave chappelle in a little bit this is why dave chappelle left his very lucy lucrative show in 2005 i guess it was i&#39;m not sure if i remember the date the chappelle show he made he was giving a skit in which he was playing off of racial stereotypes and the intent in most of his skits as they were was to braze those stereotypes to consciousness and explode them to blow them up speaking of explosion but he noticed a white i don&#39;t remember who the guy was a stage hand or somebody a white guy laughing but he noticed the laughter was the wrong kind of laughter and he explained this later on that it was misconstrued that instead of attacking the stereotypes the way he presented it his particular mode of propaganda to push locke&#39;s perspective actually perpetuated the thing he was trying to undermine the thing he was trying to undo he ends his reading kind of uh enigmatically with literature and art should have david as their patron saint and that might have struck you because we remember david we talked about king david with the susan stebing article we talked about the use of story and narrative and i assume he&#39;s talking about the subversive david against goliath the giant and not king david who basically was a murderer and rapist uh later on and i think that&#39;s the case that&#39;s who he&#39;s talking about but what is the relevance of this is it subversive is uh one&#39;s mode of artistic rendering always coming from below why would david be the patron saint did anyone get caught on that analogy any thoughts on why he thinks david should be the patron saint of the artists well he thinks that art should work towards liberation of the oppressed and david&#39;s sort of story is uh an encapsulation of that in allegory so if david&#39;s the paid for the saying of art then all art would be working towards the whole david which would be the liberation of being past over their like uh absurdly powerful masters or that&#39;s right exactly but what is a problem with that how does that not lead us to a duboisian reading of propaganda in other words he ends with or this is a representation of of uh locke&#39;s conception of what is the ideal for art in general the primary responsibility and function of the artist is to express his own individuality and that could come from one&#39;s perspective uh of being on the margins of society or being oppressed but in doing so to communicate something of a universal human appeal so there is a little bit of it i don&#39;t think locke and du bois are completely at odds with each other go ahead oh well i think it&#39;s still possible to relate yourself as like an individual to the universal because the university doesn&#39;t exist independent of your subjectivity you&#39;re always sort of relating yourself into a symbolic position to it and so i think both could both of these views could work simultaneously so how can they work okay at the time that they&#39;re writing though and the question here is how is it possible to express individuality when the expression of the individual artist and du bois is talking about that much of his writing is simply denied in other words here&#39;s what your perspective is you&#39;re trying to write about a perspective that goes outside of what we expect of an african-american of a black artist you shouldn&#39;t be allowed to do that you&#39;re only talking about your own particular viewpoint that doesn&#39;t get to what lock sees is the importance of representing human nature of representing that which is universal and has human appeal the problem is and this is by the way still an issue with artistic rendering in movies and tv shows that they you get the pilot or you don&#39;t because of the appeal and there&#39;s the marketing element of it of course but that&#39;s tied to who we expect to get something out of us and so you want to then appeal to as many as possible and you&#39;re saying well the only understanding the only way we have a conception of what is universal is if we look at individuals and is that not what you were saying sort of i i just think that it&#39;s impossible to create a piece of art without your subjectivity i see no matter how you view the universal it&#39;s always through your subjective position so right hmm even yes there&#39;s impressionism there&#39;s monet what is this impression sunrise are you seeing that painting it&#39;s that&#39;s not what a sunrise looks like it&#39;s not a universal representation of it but is that even possible and here i think locke is is actually while he talks about universal as he pushes for a kind of relativism in general it&#39;s hard to avoid the essential subjectivity that comes to any kind of artistic expression and here i think is where du bois comes in um well that&#39;s not the voice this is i should mention this earlier uh in his push for a positive propaganda uh not this this is joseph goebbels we know what his propaganda was done we know what his intentions were and and their success let me control the media and i and i will turn any nation into a herd of pigs well i&#39;m not entirely sure what that means but it probably was to the extent that they were successful with the holocaust and able to do that with knowledge the populist was aware of what was going on to a large extent that&#39;s obviously the negative conception of it but it hasn&#39;t always been negative we see martin luther king utilizing this term in his sermon in 1954 propaganda propagandizing christianity he says if if hitler can do all of this with an evil idea it seems that we could rock the world with the truth of the saving power of the gospel if advertisers back to advertisement as potential propaganda can convince men that they can&#39;t do without their products this has been a problem even before the internet of course then we ought to be able to convince men of the productive power of god in christ the term propaganda wasn&#39;t always negative go back to the 1500s when the catholic church used it as a means of proselytizing propagandizing the good word the gospel it was seen as a positive unless you were one of the heathens to which the gospel did not appeal in any case this term has a kind of resurrection du bois is writing at a time as we mentioned in which he was seen as a second class citizen and he recognizes himself as an american citizen because he&#39;s lived through right reconstruction he has a whole work on reconstruction where he gives um as historians today realize a much more accurate interpretation of what happened during reconstruction and why there were so many failures it wasn&#39;t because of as many historians around the time he was writing said because of the slaves the black folk could not rule themselves they were better off being slaves many historians argued at the time he showed why where that was mistaken and how that was a flawed interpretation of the historical events of reconstruction and you can find that text online it&#39;s enormous but it covers in great depth according to contemporary historians a more accurate representation of what happened but he&#39;s writing at a time in which he has been deemed rights and by the expressed ideals of the nation seen as a citizen but as he puts in 1903 in the souls from black folk he has this peculiar sensation he calls it double consciousness of looking at oneself through the eyes of others of measuring one soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity that double consciousness is recognizing at once how i see myself as a human being as a man as a husband and so forth and how others see me how others portray me it&#39;s both a negative this double consciousness this double seeing this multiple perspective taking it&#39;s both a negative because i see how others see me in contempt and pity and it&#39;s a positive epistemically in the sense that it forces out of survival the need for survival it forces those who are oppressed who are marginalized to see from different perspectives for fear of losing their lives i need to know du bois would say what it is like to be seen by other people i need to know what the perspective of others is about me and that didn&#39;t change and hasn&#39;t changed we go back to chris rock to anticipate some comedians responses chris rock in the late 90s was publicly open about this on oprah i think it was where he has to have that talk chris rock very famous very wealthy very powerful man has to have that talk with his seven to eight-year-old son about how he perceives himself and talking to his eight-year-old child that eight-year-old child needs to be aware of how he is being perceived by others he has to in other words learn how to take on the perspective of others when he the eight-year-old boy is walking through a grocery store a convenience store or a class or school or is in front of the police chris rock is very aware of the dangers of this i don&#39;t have to have that talk with my kid this will be important when i talk about um uh dave chappelle and so it&#39;s an epistemic benefit i can see more because i have to i have to be able to recognize other people&#39;s perspectives and that can benefit du bois things one&#39;s representation art art is a means of representing something in the world and as we noted a moment ago think of it in terms of a perspective but the more perspectives i can take the more perspectives i can genuinely understand perhaps the broader appeal my particular artistic rendering can be and here we get his famous phrase from the reading thus all art is propaganda and ever must be despite the whaling of purists the purest would be those who say we ought to make art for art&#39;s sake it ought not be used to tell immoral people get upset with overly moralizing stories movies and so forth that he says no i stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art i have for writing has always been used for propaganda for the gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy and he goes further i don&#39;t give a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda but i do care when propaganda is combined to one side confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent what does that mean you&#39;re going to tell me i&#39;m not allowed to appeal to the same mechanisms the same use the same tools and if you want the same weapon as those who have oppressed me i&#39;m to be put up with the history of what is that famous g w f griffiths movie birth of a nation i&#39;m just supposed to accept all that as if that&#39;s an objective universal accurate rendition of how the united states was and is and i&#39;m not allowed to respond in kind i&#39;m not allowed to respond in a way that presents my world view in a way that enables even the people who are oppressors because argument hasn&#39;t worked evidence hasn&#39;t worked straightforward presentation doesn&#39;t work as jason stanley puts it in his work from 2015 how propaganda works and by the way he has a rewritten chapter in it after 2016. why that might be of interest only a good guy with propaganda can stop a bad guy with propaganda to borrow from wayne lapierre of the nra w.a du bois quote recognizes that an indirect method is required to stir in this case white interest one that appeals to white folk yet will somehow call attention to the black perspective the boys is calling for a certain kind of undermining propaganda the propaganda that du bois uses the term he uses is positive propaganda and he uses he does this through the medium of art in a way that is not direct it&#39;s not confrontational in that sense it&#39;s not argumentative that doesn&#39;t mean there isn&#39;t argument behind it but it is an indirect approach that appeals to emotion that can uh appeal to uh uh how do i put it not lies but exaggeration uh uses utilizes hyperbole as a lot of art does and in fact i think we see a precursor in this guy frederick douglass an early positive propagandist who in his autobiographies notes how he uses humor this will transition us into a contemporary interpretation of potentially positive propaganda why does he use humor what in the world was funny to a slave to someone who was removed from his family cut off from his mother denied the right to read which he points out in his autobiographies is interesting it&#39;s telling the stereotypes against african-americans against blacks at the time were that they were ignorant they were animals they were to be used as tools and yet douglas points out there are laws on the books that teaching slaves to read that law already presupposes the slaves humanity because you do not have laws against teaching cattle to read he says and he&#39;s being immune almost humorous here as well he&#39;s pointing out the inconsistencies of the stereotypes that maintain slavery and the later on the second class citizenship of those who are different colors you&#39;ve already admitted the humanity by having these laws these inconsistencies are absurd but i&#39;m not going to point them out by way of argument says douglas in his 5th of july speech and there&#39;s a lot there you can click on the link there to find the whole speech it&#39;s 1852 um after the fourth of july which is what is that day of independence of freedom would you have me argue he says that man is entitled to liberty that he&#39;s the rightful owner of his own body you&#39;ve already declared it that&#39;s part of our ideals that&#39;s part of our declaration of independence must i argue the wrongfulness of slavery is that a question for republicans is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation as a matter of fact with great difficulty involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice hard to be understood how should i look today in the presence of americans dividing and subdividing a discourse to show that men have a natural right to freedom to do so would be to make myself look ridiculous and offer an insult to your understanding i&#39;m a human being here&#39;s my argument that i&#39;m a human being really you&#39;re gonna make an argument for that that&#39;s absurd there&#39;s not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him at a time like this and here&#39;s the point scorching irony not convincing argument is needed aristotle told us there are certain individuals certain situations in which argument isn&#39;t going to work teaching is not going to work i think douglas is embodying this perspective here straightforward argument doesn&#39;t seem to have worked go ahead oh uh i don&#39;t know how to make this necessarily a relevant point but it brought to mind uh something i had heard about exactly that logical argument and sort of uh conscious knowing not being enough to change your behavior it&#39;s like why people struggle with addiction or why people knowing a certain company is uh it&#39;s like they sort of disavow the uh the wrongness of their actions uh it&#39;s it&#39;s while consciously knowing that yeah there is a named tamar gendler who coins the term a leaf as opposed to as opposed to be leaf i don&#39;t have time to go into that distinction now but she would argue we need some kind of pre-reflective and here there&#39;s another philosopher named uh forgotten the first name it&#39;s al-saji she writes on phenomenology and that we need to advocate for a kind of pre-reflective hesitation and that&#39;s with respect to racism that is to say that phenomenology of experiencing an immediate and prior to cognition prior to thinking it through and consciously preserving presenting it a kind of immediate habituation of how we react and so i&#39;ll give you more about in fact it may come up later when we talk about stereotypes the concept of a leaf it&#39;s where i act as if i believe something but if you asked me i would say nope i don&#39;t there&#39;s a weird disconnect and she would have a response to that related to this i would argue wanda sykes i&#39;m not going to play this here but wanda sykes a positive propagandist in her comedic performance she does what we&#39;ll see chappelle do something similar represent from her perspective the african-american perspective in a humorous way that brings in audiences wider audience than might be the case if she were just writing a paper a white paper as they&#39;re sometimes called interestingly uh and she jokingly refers to but she does it with argument in the background it&#39;s not like there&#39;s no good reasons to present her position if you know what it&#39;s going on in the last 10 years with the opioid crisis it&#39;s a health crisis that&#39;s what it&#39;s called it&#39;s an addiction crisis that&#39;s a health issue that is correct but it&#39;s not much different than the crack cocaine crisis in the 1980s but what was that crisis called that was a problem of poor choices of criminal behavior and what do you do with people who suffer from crack cocaine addiction you imprison them and who are the people who were suffering from crack cocaine predominantly black men black people uh white people were suffering from cocaine addiction but it was powder cocaine the same stuff ultimately but the punishment the law in order punishment 100 times the sentence if you got caught with crack than if you got caught with powder that was in the laws was it coincidental that seems almost impossible to imagine the opioid crisis has missed wanda sykes says the african american population she argues somewhat jokingly but not really because doctors don&#39;t prescribe as much pain medication to black patients why because there is a stereotype that black people do not feel as much pain that&#39;s astonishing to have to even say that out loud but there if i may engage in a proof surrogate significant studies multiple studies that show that that&#39;s the case we see it with dave chappelle we&#39;ll end with this there&#39;s a book coming out soon dave chappelle and philosophy there&#39;s a bit from 2000 i give you the link here i&#39;m not going to go through it all right now but in this bit in 2000 dave chappelle is with his white friend chip i don&#39;t know if he has a white friend named chip or if that&#39;s just part of the story i don&#39;t think he does but that&#39;s actually somewhat significant he&#39;s not telling the truth as such but he&#39;s not lying either and in the story which did or didn&#39;t happen it&#39;s still illustrative of his personal experiences uh he&#39;s with his white friend chip they&#39;re lost because they&#39;re both high chip is driving chip takes a long comfortable drag of his joint and then says god damn it it&#39;s the cops in front of him and then he takes another drag of his of his of his uh joint and says i&#39;m gonna go ask him for directions and chappelle&#39;s like no don&#39;t do it and the white guy gets out chip goes out he stumbles over to the cops starts touching him saying excuse me you&#39;re not supposed to touch police officers whether you&#39;re high or not so there&#39;s one lesson and he say excuse me where&#39;s third street and the officer turns and says uh you&#39;re on it take it easy get out of here that&#39;s it that&#39;s the story and then dave chappelle says i know some of you white folks out there that&#39;s not terribly amazing but you asked some of those black fellas here that is incredible and the whole point of this is to go back to stanley and how propaganda works he says what normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary it makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been end quote the bit here which you can watch it&#39;s much better to watch it than what i&#39;ve represented at first glance appears to present an everyday normal experience but chappelle wants us to view it as intolerable well his positive propagandistic comedy does as shelly says of poetry is transform what has become morally ordinary normalized and accepted through negative propaganda that we talked about before into something extraordinary that should compel us to say that that is incredible that&#39;s what positive propaganda does and if it&#39;s just propaganda and there&#39;s no argument underneath it i think there&#39;s a problem and i don&#39;t know that dubois would push pure propaganda we&#39;re out of time and that&#39;s the last slide so that&#39;s okay consider this we&#39;re not done with issues of emotion our next reading is from uh linda elder where is it yeah critical thinking and emotional intelligence uh just one through six and nine through eleven you should have time to catch up this weekend please do so

uh last time we looked at the conception of rhetoric we looked at what it was from the perspective of socrates and plato and aristotle and we saw that it was predominantly negative we&amp;#39;re going to look at today and see the relationship between rhetoric and this term that&amp;#39;s become i guess for better or worse thrown around in political circles and in politics and in life in general of propaganda to what extent does rhetoric the kind of stuff that we&amp;#39;ve been talking about and i&amp;#39;ll give some specific examples of rhetorical devices or tools or tactics that are oftentimes used to manipulate to manufacture certain kinds of viewpoints or opinions it is an often oftentimes we&amp;#39;ll see it&amp;#39;s via a an appeal to emotion in a negative way not all appeals to emotion are negative we&amp;#39;ll say more about that next time when we look at linda elder&amp;#39;s work on critical thinking and emotional intelligence but for today we want to say a little bit more about what the rhetorical devices are that are common today uh some of which were still which were around the time were utilized to some extent uh in varying degrees uh around the time of plato and aristotle but we&amp;#39;ve we&amp;#39;ve i guess perfected them and i want you to be aware i&amp;#39;m cautious as i say this uh always remembering that one student years ago who was so happy when we got to fallacies and rhetorical devices because that&amp;#39;s what he wanted to learn because he wanted to learn how to take advantage of people so i want you to be aware that that&amp;#39;s not the point of this but i do have in the background my question from the beginning of last class where i asked you whether or not it&amp;#39;s ever acceptable to engage in rhetoric it&amp;#39;s ever acceptable to engage in the kind of appeals to emotion in this case it was a scare tactic if you recall where i told you about the time i got my hair cut and then the bottle fell on my head and i got angry but of course didn&amp;#39;t happen that way it wasn&amp;#39;t actually anger it was a manufactured anger in order to get the owner of that uh barber shop to make a change and it succeeded but of course then i told you i was lying to you and it wasn&amp;#39;t me it was martha nussbaum whose story that happened to uh and i think i don&amp;#39;t know i don&amp;#39;t remember where we were with that did you all agree that that was the wrong thing to do for me to lie to you or was it acceptable because i immediately told you afterwards that i lied to you and it was only for pedagogical purposes that&amp;#39;s what i want you to have in the background here is it ever acceptable to utilize these kinds of modes of persuasion when as aristotle points out convincing through the traditional straight forward logical argumentative approaches just seemed to be ineffective i&amp;#39;ll say so have that in the background as we go through this so rhetoric and propaganda should they ever be used we look at w.e.b du bois uh criteria of negro art which was written in 1926 and then a response to that from the philosopher alan locke in his art or propaganda 1928 locke is going to disagree with the boys on the use of art as a means of political persuasion but i&amp;#39;m going to start with locke when we get to those two readings and then see du bois in a way as a kind of response to that perspective all right but before i do that i wanted to say a few things about rhetorical devices i&amp;#39;m not going to go through all of them and i said earlier uh i don&amp;#39;t cover fallacies all at once as i told you i i spread them out throughout the semester and in the study guide i give you a link where each of the fallacies is covered in each of the powerpoints here i&amp;#39;m going to go through a number of particular rhetorical devices that are oftentimes used that are very common and they&amp;#39;re tricks they&amp;#39;re cheats they&amp;#39;re oftentimes coupled with fallacies they are not themselves fallacies because it&amp;#39;s not obvious that they&amp;#39;re actually attempting to present an argument in many cases there&amp;#39;s no attempt to presenting an argument it&amp;#39;s just merely a strategy excuse me a technique a tactic to persuade one to a position or another but they can be used and found within a number of fallacies we already did this this is review but we&amp;#39;re still dealing with language and how important it is we talked about slanters that&amp;#39;s that general term that&amp;#39;s used where languages is uh manipulated for the purposes of of a rhetorical construction there&amp;#39;s an attempt at making something that would about otherwise be negative and awful uh either neutral or even positive that&amp;#39;s a euphemism do you remember the opposite of a euphemism dysphemism precisely to make something seem worse and that rhetorical construction enables us to reference the same thing but with a connotation a different sense that can change viewpoints and we ended last time with this video from frank luntz this was around 2004 the persuaders which if you you can watch the whole video i think i posted a link to it for the whole thing in fact i do have it in this slide again i only focused on minute 59 to minute 108. uh there he&amp;#39;s talking about the work that the republican poster frank luntz uh utilized uh and noting there are political pundits who do the same thing that he does in all parties it&amp;#39;s just that he&amp;#39;s really really really good at it he has a book from around 2007 or so uh how words that work and he&amp;#39;s using that as a means to show here&amp;#39;s how you can sell an idea here&amp;#39;s how you can sell a politician here&amp;#39;s how you can sell a change in the way that we talk we saw on the video how he focused groups ideas and words and language and he can recognize that what presuming it&amp;#39;s a representative sample of the populace how they react to language in a commercial for example and which words modify or get at that amygdala that center of our brain or that part of our brain that is a kind of gateway to our emotional centers and as he points out human beings 80 emotional only 20 intellect i&amp;#39;m much more interested in the emotional and we ended with that discussion last time because that&amp;#39;s where i can persuade people i can figure out what words will best sell an idea and in around 2003 we find a memo from frank luntz where he uh addressed this question of climate change the term global warming was what was in vogue at the time and from one of the people in his uh focus group we learned that climate change quote is less frightening than global warming according to one focus group participate climate change sounds like you&amp;#39;re going from pittsburgh to fort lauderdale while global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it climate change suggested more controllable and less emotional challenge and if you recall in the interview he&amp;#39;s asked why did you make that change well actually he&amp;#39;s he says what&amp;#39;s the difference what is the difference between some people call it climate change some people call it global warming what&amp;#39;s the difference i think there we realized there was a bit of disingenuousness on his part because his point is to change the way people and he did very successfully for whether for better or worse it&amp;#39;s almost completely now referred to as climate change rather than global warming and maybe it&amp;#39;s more accurate ultimately in the end but maybe global weirding is a better phrase than either of those but note the importance of this the language changed it&amp;#39;s less catastrophic and if you&amp;#39;re writing i don&amp;#39;t know where he is on this today i think he&amp;#39;s softened his views on some of this because i mean my goodness look where we are today no matter where you live you are going to be affected by climate change global warming what have you so it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s no longer just affecting low-lying islands of impoverished people which it did for the last 30 years yeah was the switch of the term because of like politicians needed a softer phrase to like dampen yes yes if you look at who his clients were that was his intention at the time to take some of the burden off of many of the oil industries as having a kind of burden a response a responsibility with respect to climate change and by saying it&amp;#39;s not that big of a deal or not as big a deal as the alarmists are calling it then action which is costly will not be taken and this is again 20 years ago and we might think huh i wonder if things would be a little different now if the language hadn&amp;#39;t changed that is a tough argument to make but i think one could make it maybe there&amp;#39;s a paper how the change of language has negatively affected in this particular issue you can pick other issues if you wish all right so now that&amp;#39;s language and we&amp;#39;re going to focus on language for a few for a little bit and then we&amp;#39;ll look at rhetoric in images and see why that&amp;#39;s so prevalent and i&amp;#39;m just going to go through a few of these and they&amp;#39;re they&amp;#39;re really interesting and some of them are funny and that&amp;#39;s not insignificant paralympics is a phrase that&amp;#39;s a term that&amp;#39;s not very common but what it is is very common in particular for one politician uh paralympics is where you draw attention to something in the act of doing that very thing but as you&amp;#39;re doing it you pretend you&amp;#39;re not you pretend to pass over it you pretend to not cover it you&amp;#39;re being ironic in a way but you&amp;#39;re not hiding it at all and it&amp;#39;s kind of funny and people like it especially if you already agree with the individual if you don&amp;#39;t agree with him then you&amp;#39;re just kind of put off but what can you do because he&amp;#39;s not really attacking you and i say he because it&amp;#39;s donald trump i was going to say dummy bush but i won&amp;#39;t say it i&amp;#39;m not going to say it it&amp;#39;s brilliant it&amp;#39;s a brilliant rhetorical tactic in the sense that it works these are nicknames he uses he was running for office 2016 he had about 16 other uh republican candidates against him i&amp;#39;ve forgotten all the nicknames marco rubio was little marco ted cruz was lying ted bush uh jeb bush was low energy jeb and dummy bush but he never but i was gonna say he never comes out and says that well of course he does but he said the same thing about um carly fiorina i promised i would not say she ran here that packard into the ground that she laid off tens of thousands of people and got viciously fired i said i will not say it so i will not say it that&amp;#39;s clever and it&amp;#39;s amusing people smirk at that but he&amp;#39;s able to get out an attack while offering himself an out and by the way a quick aside about carly fiorina she was running for office in 2016 and she was on the stage with marco rubio at one point and marco rubio for some reason brought up philosophy and how we need fewer philosophers and we need more welders and philosophy is basically useless the reason i mentioned this is i was upset with that obviously and i was doubly upset that i knew carly fiorina was on that stage and i knew carly fiorina was a philosophy major and she said nothing and that upset me why would you not respond to that absurd statement that is ill-informed she knew better she could be president if she had just spoken up huh that&amp;#39;s what i think anyway oh there&amp;#39;s a lot more examples i can&amp;#39;t go through all of them they&amp;#39;re too many there are too many and he&amp;#39;s a he&amp;#39;s very good at doing this and politicians are good at doing this on occasion so are others but it&amp;#39;s a tactic and it gets audiences to get onto your side or it gets them pissed off either way you cut you corral particular groups you increase the divisiveness and you do so usually presumably for one&amp;#39;s own benefit that&amp;#39;s paralypsis related to that to an extent is a loaded question and this is very very common these are where you&amp;#39;re asking a question it just seems harmless i&amp;#39;m just asking questions i&amp;#39;m just asking questions did antifa actually play a role in uh january 6th insurrection on the capitol i don&amp;#39;t know i&amp;#39;m just asking questions could they have a politician from idaho recently said it&amp;#39;s possible that they did do you have evidence for that i&amp;#39;m just saying it&amp;#39;s plausible and i&amp;#39;m just asking questions wait a minute no you are making an assertion and hiding it behind a presumed question and in that question you are already putting out there the idea loaded questions are similar to another rhetorical device called a weaseler and which is also similar to one called innuendo i&amp;#39;ll get to both of those in a moment they&amp;#39;re kind of a family of tools so you&amp;#39;re already prematurely assuming that an issue is settled this is a silly example dad says where&amp;#39;s all that marijuana you were smoking what would you say to your dad if you came out you you guys were out just smoking marijuana a moment ago what would you or say you&amp;#39;d say you smoked it all oh it was lost in a series of small pockets this is not a that&amp;#39;s very good that&amp;#39;s a euphemism were you smoking marijuana no it was starting small fires and i consumed them yeah that&amp;#39;s actually not a good thing to do in california right now the virus marijuana is legal yeah oh sorry i thought you need to hand up this is a loaded question father you&amp;#39;re assuming i have marijuana that&amp;#39;s a loaded question are you still beating your wife what how do you respond to that no ah good you stopped a loaded question is presupposing it&amp;#39;s smuggling in a presumption without argument and no matter how you answer it yes or no you&amp;#39;re sort of entrapped in legal matters we call that a leading question go ahead police officers and like investigators use when they&amp;#39;re intriguing people uh i have a colleague who who is about who is teaching um interrogation techniques actually it&amp;#39;ll be great the team teach that i&amp;#39;ve been fun dave saunders um i&amp;#39;d have to ask him about that but yeah if you watch movies it seems that oftentimes that&amp;#39;s the case tell us why you hid the bodies whoa bro i don&amp;#39;t know why i would respond i you&amp;#39;re assuming i&amp;#39;m guilty or something like that yeah that&amp;#39;s how a loaded or leading question lawyers will oftentimes you know say tell us your relationship to the rapist mrs smith said wait a minute objection your honor leading the witness that&amp;#39;s a loaded question the whole point of the trial is to establish guilt or innocence you can&amp;#39;t refer to the defendant as a murderer or rapist whatever until that&amp;#39;s been established that&amp;#39;s a leading question but notice it works strike that from the record jury really how do i do that erase it from my memory if you ask a loaded question if you ask if you engage in a weaseler where you say one thing but you&amp;#39;re kind of not saying it fully i didn&amp;#39;t say my opponent was a drunk i said i don&amp;#39;t think he&amp;#39;s a drunk but notice even that even denying it even as one did years ago now i forgot her name she was running for office in arizona she uh in her youth that had just been discovered which is what happens by the way if you&amp;#39;re gonna run for office make sure there&amp;#39;s nothing on your facebook pages your instagram there&amp;#39;s no history of you doing anything but walking old ladies across the street nothing else because it was found that she dabbled in witchcraft when she was young whoever this person i forgot her name and her opponent at the time said look i don&amp;#39;t know if my opponent was a witch that&amp;#39;s how he said it brilliant in fact he might even added i don&amp;#39;t think she&amp;#39;s a witch what have you done you have already unnecessarily brought those to the politician and the idea that you might have been a witch together people who hear that make the association and even if you deny it i said she wasn&amp;#39;t a witch doesn&amp;#39;t matter it&amp;#39;s already out there you&amp;#39;ve already made a connection even in your uh denial of it so that&amp;#39;s a kind of weaseler in the sense that you can accuse somebody of something but get out of it later by saying no no i&amp;#39;m i said she might be a witch antifa might have been involved in uh january 6. i didn&amp;#39;t say it was do you see that&amp;#39;s a weasler and there&amp;#39;s innuendo as well where i don&amp;#39;t say something explicitly i hint at it it&amp;#39;s a great example from the comedian i&amp;#39;ve forgotten the name of the comedian now is that a restaurant and says i didn&amp;#39;t say the meat was tough i said that i didn&amp;#39;t see the horse that&amp;#39;s normally outside implying of course we&amp;#39;re eating horse meat but that&amp;#39;s innuendo it&amp;#39;s kind of indirect and that notion of indirection is going to be essential in our discussion of propaganda and different modes or methods of propaganda that might be utilized right uh okay no texting in class just a reminder okay down players there&amp;#39;s another one this is going to be relevant too for what we&amp;#39;re going to discuss later i&amp;#39;ll show a potential mode of propaganda via humor that is a is an artistic approach that uh du bois does not consider which i found interesting but one of his precursors to his ideas a guy named frederick douglass does talk about that in a bit a down player is also a rhetorical device it&amp;#39;s a kind of mockery it&amp;#39;s a kind of ridicule it&amp;#39;s a kind of well down playing when i put things in scare quotes like this yeah he&amp;#39;s a real genius he went to the he got his degree which means i don&amp;#39;t really think it&amp;#39;s a degree from the university i could even put the university in quotes and then you can put phoenix in quotes too because it&amp;#39;s not there really university of phoenix this is a mode of denying the uh credibility of something and you can do it without the scare quotes my daughter&amp;#39;s just learned how to use scare quotes and she hasn&amp;#39;t quite learned how to do it she puts them over everything and that&amp;#39;s a distinction remind you between the use and mention distinction we can determine that we&amp;#39;re using a word or mentioning it by putting quotes around it so for instance in your papers if you&amp;#39;re talking about the definition of a concept of a term you are mentioning that term your language your argument is about that word and so you put that word in quotes because it is an object of it&amp;#39;s a meta-linguistic tactic using a word if i say yeah this i stub my toe and i say or you&amp;#39;re being a little that&amp;#39;s using the word but if i say to my son milo do not use the word i&amp;#39;m mentioning it do you see um but a down player is different down players i&amp;#39;m using the equivalent of scare quotes when i say he&amp;#39;s a real genius that&amp;#39;s sarcasm as well which is in the next rhetorical device i have but you see in politics and it goes back this is not new we can go back to the famous vice presidential debate of 1988 between dan quayle and lloyd benson i guess lloyd benson in this famous phrase you&amp;#39;re no jack kennedy which becomes you know like a commercial later on uh but i want you to pay attention to when the crowd gets involved and why and whether or not there&amp;#39;s a good argument present presented what is it that they&amp;#39;re cheering okay that&amp;#39;s dan quayle far more experienced than many others that sought the office of vice president this country i had as much experience in the congress as jack kennedy did when he saw the presidency i will be prepared to deal with the people in the bush administration if that unfortunate event would ever occur senator benson senator i served with jack kennedy i knew jack kennedy jack kennedy was a friend of mine senator your no jack kennedy look at that crowd go wild what do they go wild for did benson come up with an amazing argument my goodness that was a valid and sound rebuttal what did he do it was a jab there&amp;#39;s a good bit of ridicule people like that and it&amp;#39;s unclear even if you&amp;#39;re independent maybe you kind of like that now the question is is there an argument behind benson&amp;#39;s claims or is it pure ridicule is it pure diversion is it pure tactic where i don&amp;#39;t have a very good argument i&amp;#39;m going to attack the person which of course is a fallacy what&amp;#39;s that called ad hominem to the man we see rhetorical uh devices such as ridicule of mockery of sarcasm as negatives in this way because they&amp;#39;re attacking the person in a way that to use sarcasm to use hyperbole i&amp;#39;ll get to that in a second isn&amp;#39;t automatically a fallacy unless it&amp;#39;s employed within an argument and i&amp;#39;m going to argue and we&amp;#39;ll see maybe it&amp;#39;s accessible to use this it depends on how it&amp;#39;s done in the context in which it is done but notice he won the crowd well let&amp;#39;s see there&amp;#39;s more to it i think that was really uncalled for senator no i don&amp;#39;t know why they&amp;#39;re cheering that i can&amp;#39;t tell if they&amp;#39;re like well done dan quail or if they&amp;#39;re like oh that was a shitty response you got destroyed let&amp;#39;s and then it goes on [Applause] making the comparison senator and i&amp;#39;m one who knew him well and frankly i think you&amp;#39;re so far apart in the objectives you choose for your country that i did not think the comparison was well taken okay so there&amp;#39;s an argument right he&amp;#39;s saying you made a comparison i&amp;#39;m responding to it of course he did so really cleverly reagan was very good at doing this too he was able to jokingly sort of folksy-like uh mock those around him uh his opponents and at one point he was running his com his competitor i forgot what it was even for was a young guy and he was quite old and some a newscaster brought that up to him a reporter said what do you think about your age you&amp;#39;d be one of the oldest presidents blah blah blah and he says well i&amp;#39;m not going to talk about my opponent&amp;#39;s youth in an experience as a means of deflecting and also attacking his opponent at the same time and so we might think that what&amp;#39;s the big deal that&amp;#39;s not a problem it can be though uh here&amp;#39;s an example i&amp;#39;m using i&amp;#39;m guilty of this of sarcasm president bush is the leader of the free world ha he was a cheerleader in college there&amp;#39;s a bit of attacking the individual mocking them not speaking in a kind of literal way we&amp;#39;ll talk about sarcasm in a bit later when it comes up with more our discussions are pretty cool um sarcasm is as i saw on a shirt once punching someone in the face with words which is it&amp;#39;s quite accurate if you&amp;#39;re if somebody&amp;#39;s sarcastically responding to you and pointing out something that they see as a flaw and they do importantly publicly doing so that&amp;#39;s harmful being laughed at can be deemed quite harmful and you see this oftentimes in jokes at other people&amp;#39;s expense we engage in hyperbole overstating a claim usually making the opponent&amp;#39;s position look worse than it really is and then attacking that misrepresentation that mischaracterization that&amp;#39;s that exaggerated representation what&amp;#39;s that fallacy called straw man exactly the strong man fallacy utilizes this particular rhetorical device quite often jay beebs justin bieber is the most talented musician in the history of mankind that&amp;#39;s of course a bit of exaggeration we can make it better by saying jay beebs is a talented musician and then if i respond with no that&amp;#39;s hyperbole too i&amp;#39;ve engaged in sarcasm i have engaged in a bit of ridicule ridicule or mockery why do we see this where do we see this it could fall into another era in reasoning hyperbole exaggeration can oftentimes lead to what&amp;#39;s known as the slippery slope fallacy where we exaggerate the negative consequences and i&amp;#39;ll talk about slippery slope later on in a different lecture but in short if i say look we can&amp;#39;t allow this one thing to happen because if this happens the next thing you know armageddon and what is armageddon the end of the world now orwell would say this kind of talk is is is dangerous it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s foolish but you might think oh that&amp;#39;s how everyone talks that&amp;#39;s just how politicians are and once you start saying that then you get into the habit of thinking it doesn&amp;#39;t matter anymore i don&amp;#39;t watch politics i don&amp;#39;t listen to politics i don&amp;#39;t vote because they&amp;#39;re all liars they&amp;#39;re all the same they all use the same nonsense they all use the same exaggerated language they don&amp;#39;t there are degrees and that has to be kept in mind one of the negative consequences of tuning out because so many politicians do engage in this is that we become disengaged when we could play a role in moving the country in a direction that makes sense but if we fall into this notion where it doesn&amp;#39;t matter they&amp;#39;re all doing it they&amp;#39;re all using this manipulative language there&amp;#39;s nothing that can be done about it this is a problem we need to be able to call it out look armageddon is the wrong word use the right language armageddon means the end of the world literally the unit the world is done is there an asteroid coming to hit the planet if so then you the politician can say something needs to be done the stakes could not be higher it will be armageddon if we don&amp;#39;t stop this asteroid from hitting our planet that would be acceptable i have not once heard a politician referenced the word armageddon in a way that makes sense and there&amp;#39;s something similar with the the the fallacy ad nazium which just came up again yesterday marjorie taylor greene has made another reference to nazi germany against your political opponents i&amp;#39;m not going to reference it beyond that why do i have viagra written on the board i was wondering yeah it seems like totally out of the blue so speaking of armageddon viagra we need to stop armageddon by allowing our elderly men to i don&amp;#39;t know i&amp;#39;m trying to put that together i&amp;#39;m trying to fit that in somehow forgive me well viagra that&amp;#39;s the name of a pill which i think was originally intended for women to use for i&amp;#39;ve forgotten what now which is interesting because now everyone knows that it only has one particular job it was designed they were now is being used for older gentlemen why they&amp;#39;re gentlemen uh well you know what it&amp;#39;s for but why do they call it why do they call it viagra is it coincidental did they just say what do we call this pill how about viagra hey that&amp;#39;s great bill let&amp;#39;s call it that no they focus grouped it workshopped it they paid consultants we know that they paid consultants because one of them uh helped in an interview write a paper about this very term this consultants get paid a lot of money so you better come up with something good why viagra well because vi the root here could mean vitality it could mean to compete to do battle with it rhymes with niagara untold or rather i know and also they note this why niagara niagara falls powerful water source also the location of the most heart-shaped beds in the world that&amp;#39;s a fact that&amp;#39;s where a lot of people go for their honeymoon now i don&amp;#39;t know if you knew that but it does call to might it does rhyme with niagara agra the root there aggressive agriculture agriculture growth and so on that&amp;#39;s none of that is accidental those are all rhetorical now is that acceptable we&amp;#39;ll talk about advertising more in a moment is that not a means of manipulation is that not a means of propaganda last couple here proof surrogates we&amp;#39;ve talked about this one already avoid this in your papers as best you can avoid this in your conversations with other people recall a surrogate mother is not the actual mother she&amp;#39;s standing in place of the mother right a proof surrogate is not an actual proof it&amp;#39;s other words that are in place of proof demonstration argument um it&amp;#39;s oftentimes used and you find it with the fallacy misplacing the burden of proof oh you&amp;#39;re gonna say that yes okay i think i&amp;#39;ve taken some of your words more than once here today but yes you were right uh you it&amp;#39;s uh it&amp;#39;s by itself it&amp;#39;s not a a fallacy unless it&amp;#39;s part of an argument in which you say here&amp;#39;s my position and if you don&amp;#39;t think it&amp;#39;s right go look at this right you don&amp;#39;t think this fact about economics is the case we&amp;#39;ll go that&amp;#39;s economics 101 man when people say that they&amp;#39;re not making a case they&amp;#39;re using a proof surrogate that&amp;#39;s just economics 101 which is another way of saying you need to go back take economics 101 then come back and you can respond to what i just said which is ridiculous make your case don&amp;#39;t tell me i need to go back to this class because otherwise that&amp;#39;s a proof surrogate and what&amp;#39;s approved surrogate ah that&amp;#39;s logic 101 bruh so don&amp;#39;t do that right and studies show is the probably the most common proof surrogate study show then fill in your conclusion doesn&amp;#39;t work give the study but don&amp;#39;t just give the study show why that study proves your point supports your point how is that study performed what does it show question so would like based writing like how do you are you supposed to avoid this or just like uh with empathy-based writing or with enthymemes ah so avoid enthymemes that&amp;#39;s the logical part of me the positive propagandist the w.e.b du bois part of me says that bentham means in public speaking in conversation with your friends uh that you may want to be haranguing and cajoling into believing something because you feel it&amp;#39;s the best thing that they agree with you maybe then it is okay to engage in an enemy it&amp;#39;s okay to leave out a premise or two presuming they would fill it in themselves we talked a little about that with jokes last time i would be cautious in that and that&amp;#39;s a good question the writing um curriculum is anthony based what writing curriculum like um so that&amp;#39;s where it came from it&amp;#39;s enthymeme based because you filled in too much of the detail well it&amp;#39;s a so um if your job is if your goal is to persuade then maybe filling in the details and being perceived as overly pedantic and saying premise one premise two and here&amp;#39;s another premise which my opponent now don&amp;#39;t use opponent which my interlocutor actually don&amp;#39;t use that word either speaking of pedantic which that dude used uh leaves this out this is a key premise that if this is not made explicit we don&amp;#39;t see how it leads to the conclusion we don&amp;#39;t see how those other claims are connected to the conclusion in certain cases all men immortal therefore socrates is going to die do we need to add all the socrates as a man i like you to get into the habit of doing that because the other way is more common it&amp;#39;s much more common to leave things out to leave things unsaid and therefore we need to kind of train ourselves to get into the habit of especially with issues that are controversial where we need to make explicit the premises that we think of the case or that are the case to leave the conclusion that we want others to see and follow the logic it&amp;#39;s hard to follow the logic if it&amp;#39;s not made explicit having said all that we&amp;#39;re going to see a view of positive propaganda that may push the emphatic uh approach yeah so when in an argument with someone you need to address them what&amp;#39;s what ask them their name go with that yeah yeah i&amp;#39;m speaking to generalizations there uh socrates and his play or plato&amp;#39;s dialogues they&amp;#39;re called interlocutors people are talking in politics they&amp;#39;re called opponents and in their typical argument as war they&amp;#39;re seen as enemies none of that is helpful and even when you don&amp;#39;t make that explicit it&amp;#39;s kind of in the background and we want to avoid that so knowing their name go with that first yeah that&amp;#39;s very good question yeah go ahead would everybody knows relate to like a man good it could or appeal to popularity so every red blooded american knows in the fill in the blank psychologically that could be effective in the sense that i don&amp;#39;t want to be part of the minority that doesn&amp;#39;t know and so that&amp;#39;s not an argument you haven&amp;#39;t defended your claim by saying it&amp;#39;s a popularly held belief and it may not be a popular held belief everyone knows the earth is flat knows that this politician didn&amp;#39;t win the election or did win the election and so forth that doesn&amp;#39;t help so uh give the justification give the argument take on if you&amp;#39;re presenting a case for something you need to take on the burden of it okay there are others and if they come up i&amp;#39;ll reference them as we go rhetorical devices that is tricks little cheats if you will and and here are some that we&amp;#39;ll see in images and images are probably the most common form of rhetorical device the most predominant on the internet at least for a number of reasons number one they&amp;#39;re easily replicatable and spreadable such as memes are and we&amp;#39;re visual we&amp;#39;re visual creatures we know that because most of our brain is comprised of the occipital cortex which takes up about 30 percent of our brains so visually that&amp;#39;s our predominant mode of perception uh and evolutionarily speaking we are mostly you think that reptilian part of our brain that&amp;#39;s that&amp;#39;s predominant it&amp;#39;s hard to put that aside language and especially written words that&amp;#39;s extremely new in our evolutionary history and this is actually interesting with respect to remembering things we remember images we remember visual representations and this may be obvious why to help us get around and navigate our surroundings if we get lost we can remember things visually it&amp;#39;s harder to remember directions first you take a right on this street then you go left and you you&amp;#39;ll see a boulder on the right go past that i mean that&amp;#39;s hard to remember and it&amp;#39;s fascinating to learn about memory contests memory championships where people go and it&amp;#39;s amazing that this is a thing uh and compete with each other to see who can remember the most random bits of information like hundreds and hundreds of random digits how do you do that and a lot of them use what&amp;#39;s known as the memory palace mechanism um this i learned about from a book called i forgot the name of it which is ironic einstein it&amp;#39;s hilarious i can&amp;#39;t believe that just happened einstein and somebody moonwalk into oh my god timeout that&amp;#39;s crazy you know is anyone who i&amp;#39;m talking about oh i can&amp;#39;t say no don&amp;#39;t don&amp;#39;t look at me while i&amp;#39;m typing einstein and some oh my god i&amp;#39;m nervous moonwalk let&amp;#39;s just find it moonwalking with einstein there it is joshua 4. what did i say so i didn&amp;#39;t learn much from reading this the art and science of remembering everything anyway he references simonides the famous poet who utilizes this the memory palace is where you go back to your your home when you were a kid the home you spent most of your time in you can remember every room you can remember every nook and cranny if you can then associate a complex a new concept that&amp;#39;s abstract and hard to recall hard to concretize kind of a make an association how this is done is described in the book with a place in your room and so when you&amp;#39;re going through your memory powers you&amp;#39;re trying to remember the new concept you are literally excuse me you are in your mind going through your home and seeing that concept tied to something that you have a concrete memory of visually so my point is we&amp;#39;re visual creatures predominantly i was thinking uh that&amp;#39;s how the the the memory palace uh sort of meant for whatever that you&amp;#39;re using there to sort of how words work isn&amp;#39;t that the association with other words like the associating of concepts like with words it would be you first hear the word so it has to be like uh yeah like an auditory visual memory but you&amp;#39;re still making associations between one word another word like you&amp;#39;re making associates with images would you say that that&amp;#39;s how we remember language that&amp;#39;s very good that&amp;#39;s very interesting i don&amp;#39;t know so remember frank luntz nobody knows what an estate is which is another saying nothing really comes to mind imagistically to borrow from orwell remember oral was talking how important it is start with the image right uh try to get the best word that encapsulates represents that image don&amp;#39;t start searching for words to try to make it fit after the fact because then you&amp;#39;re just going to then eventually end up with slogans with cliches with unthought out prefabricated nonsense go with the images first death tax that brings to mind immediately if viscerally we all know what it what it means to to get taxed when you die and so that is one says that&amp;#39;s a clarification not an advocate obviously to obfuscate means to purposely make things less clear then if you look into what the death tax is slash estate tax why does a state tax sound wealthy well because it applies to people who have an estate that they would then give to their bequeath to their children for example if that estate is worth over 10 million dollars which to me i mean i know we&amp;#39;re in santa barbara but that sounds wealthy and then that&amp;#39;s taxed at a very high rate but it&amp;#39;s only everything after 10 million dollars so it&amp;#39;s unclear that that rhetorical construction clarifies rather than happy skates and the images that it brings up of course matter here i don&amp;#39;t have to think boom image and he looks like an idiot so we know what this national opinion poll it says here&amp;#39;s rhetoric in pictures do you like president bush and by the way this was a pop-up years ago this thing used to keep moving back and forth depends on no that&amp;#39;s coincidental and then i noticed free laptop if you look at the asterisk it says see details and i did and there was no free laptop i&amp;#39;ll just let you know now what do they think you were to answer how would you answer this poll of course not because look at him he&amp;#39;s an idiot how is he an idiot look at his face but wait a minute what if he&amp;#39;s just in the middle of saying a word there which of course he is he didn&amp;#39;t walk around looking like that is that the only picture of the president of the united states you could find of course not that was done on purpose and this is a silly example who cares about a pop-up on your screen but if it&amp;#39;s the cover of newsweek magazine if you click on this by the way it&amp;#39;ll send you to the story about michelle bachman michelle bachmann was a conservative running for president some years ago newsweek is a liberal leaning magazine and they were pushing the narrative that michelle bachmann was unhinged was was crazy this is the cover of their magazine how many pictures do you think they take for the cover of their magazine hundreds and out of all those hundreds we said yep that&amp;#39;s the best you can do obviously that&amp;#39;s pushing a narrative and it says a lot more it pushes it much easier than here&amp;#39;s an argument that we think she might not be totally saying the images work and they work well problematically here&amp;#39;s an example of o.j simpson 1994 there&amp;#39;s his mug shot that&amp;#39;s the untouched image here&amp;#39;s times time magazine&amp;#39;s picture they were asked why did you change your cover and of course they denied it immediately but look they&amp;#39;re different oh we don&amp;#39;t know how that happened you don&amp;#39;t know how that&amp;#39;s the cover of your magazine there can be mistakes of course but this was pushing at the time and by the way it&amp;#39;s still the case today they were pushing a narrative that&amp;#39;s built on the stereotype that the darker the skin the more likely one is guilty that has been a stereotype that&amp;#39;s been around since before the civil war and it was utilized then by time magazine we see rhetoric in pictures with contemporary politics here&amp;#39;s the joker or it&amp;#39;s president obama uh and the images here to borrow from the philosophers of aesthetics no carol the images of politicians in particular or other famous people or just anyone that you want to target if you can dehumanize them and this is in a way dehumanizing it&amp;#39;s much easier to get a lot of people to hate them and if you can get a lot of people to hate someone you&amp;#39;re more likely to get a lot of people to engage in violence against them again are these the best pictures i could find of hillary clinton and donald trump no yes no we&amp;#39;ll see there we go this is a problem if you watch cnn or if you watch msnbc and they reference donald trump this picture msnbc in particular i&amp;#39;ve seen this picture multitude of times without them saying anything you can sense where their bias lies and it&amp;#39;s imagistically represented it&amp;#39;s bias that doesn&amp;#39;t mean it&amp;#39;s fake news just to anticipate if you watch fox news you don&amp;#39;t see trump looking like this you see clinton looking like that the images are representative in many respects of the position that people hold and sometimes it&amp;#39;s unclear sometimes it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s subconscious but it works sorry uh question yes okay are you ever gonna do thanksgiving am i ever gonna use banksy yeah yes boom banksy but not yet that&amp;#39;s interesting you raise that first the devil fish by john tanil so this has been around for a long time the use of artistic rendering the use of images you can&amp;#39;t really see this but if you click on the link it&amp;#39;ll take you to a description where the in this case the immigrants that were the threat were the irish and they were terrorists they were taking jobs their tentacles were all over the place and the image of them being um inhuman lacking humanity makes it much easier to treat them as less than human this is the case with jews during the world war during world war ii the only reason no the necessary condition for there to have been the holocaust for that to have even been possible was first the propaganda campaign that was driven by anti-semitism and was explicit and was used using propaganda we know it was propaganda because it came from the ministry of propaganda they didn&amp;#39;t hide it those are the good old days when you knew what was propaganda because joseph goebbels was the minister of propaganda fascinating and the images here they say more than an argument could because in an argument you can represent the case here you might imagine hitler or gerbil saying here&amp;#39;s why germany lost world war one the jews here&amp;#39;s why germany is in decline economically the jews what what&amp;#39;s the evidence for that what&amp;#39;s the argument for that how are you not just scapegoating an entire group of people how do you respond to that give and take argumentation goes back and forth images don&amp;#39;t the images the dehumanizing images and you see this throughout conflicts in all of history but now it&amp;#39;s worse because we have the internet and we have the capacity to spread images incredibly quickly and the images enable us to perceive and they stick with us more the negatives and we see them as less than human and in order to execute an entire group of people it&amp;#39;s very hard to justify that to yourself much less anyone else unless you can unless you&amp;#39;ve already succeeded in stereotyping them to the extent that they&amp;#39;re seen as less than human stereotypes are not just you know an occasional hasty generalization we&amp;#39;ll talk more about stereotypes next week they are the backbone the propagandistic backbone that justifies mistreatment and genocide you don&amp;#39;t engage in genocide without having first the the soil uh uh watered with stereotypes you&amp;#39;ll see that with slavery as well you go the other direction we have positive imagery there&amp;#39;s captain america everyone has their own version of this most countries do except for england they&amp;#39;re a little bit self-deprecatory they have when when the world cup was going to be in england they were like oh this is a terrible idea it&amp;#39;s going to it&amp;#39;s going to fail horribly so they don&amp;#39;t have their they don&amp;#39;t have a captain england i don&amp;#39;t think do they uh captain carter what is it captain carter well that&amp;#39;s captain carter that&amp;#39;s comfortable what captain carter is the female version of that and she has like oh uh right right right right oh okay well there we go american creations ah let&amp;#39;s see there we go again so in any case i want to skip a little bit through advertisements because i&amp;#39;m going to return to this with with credibility claims and private sources but you mentioned banksy and i want to say a little bit is advertising of means of propaganda and banksy does think so related to our reading from dubois i think banksy is okay with responding in kind yeah advertising is propaganda and what&amp;#39;s the best way to respond to that counter propaganda or as du bois will put it positive propaganda and what does he do he takes the image banksy does of coca-cola which you are inundated with this all the time milo my son asked why does coca-cola advertise doesn&amp;#39;t everybody already know about coca-cola why are they still spending millions of dollars advertising their product good question banksy says this in the image of coca-cola which he has adopted for himself people are taking the piss out of you every day if we don&amp;#39;t know who banksy is but he&amp;#39;s probably english that&amp;#39;s a english type phrase there it sounds like i&amp;#39;ll just take i&amp;#39;m just giving you taking the piss out of you know what that means they butt into your life take a cheap shot at you and then disappear they leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small they make flippant comments from buses that imply you&amp;#39;re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else they are on tv making your girlfriend feel inadequate they have access to the most sophisticated technology in the world that has ever known and they bully you with it they are the advertisers and they are laughing at you you however are forbidden to touch them trademarks intellectual property copyright law these mean advertisers can say what they like whenever they like it with total impunity  that he says any advert another english turn or phrase any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours it&amp;#39;s yours to take to rearrange and reuse which is what he&amp;#39;s doing here you could do whatever you like with it asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head you owe the companies nothing less than nothing you especially don&amp;#39;t owe them any courtesy they owe you they have rearranged the world to put themselves in front of you they never asked for your permission don&amp;#39;t even start asking for theirs and here&amp;#39;s the danger of utilizing this mechanism this method others can do it too you can as banksy&amp;#39;s doing himself rearranging the propagandistic work from the corporatist monoliths and this happens to him whatever tip x is it&amp;#39;s not coca-cola but they did the same thing they took his words and in selling their product which is an eraser of some sort they just took his entire speech there that he had in the coca-cola bottle and erased it with their little marker it&amp;#39;s not even a good job no but this is significant it&amp;#39;s a sh it&amp;#39;s crap and it&amp;#39;s not artistically done it&amp;#39;s not cleverly done that&amp;#39;s relevant in how the propaganda the counter propaganda is engaged in this is pretty good if you go to banksy&amp;#39;s dismal land as opposed to disneyland he&amp;#39;s not a big fan of the corporate profiteering of this company and i have to say where am i it&amp;#39;s pretty awful when your kids insist i&amp;#39;ve got to have that got to have that product of disney because i saw a commercial every damn day and the marketing is to the children so that the children bug the parents and so that the parents feel like when they don&amp;#39;t give in to their children who&amp;#39;s been marketed to and we know that they market to children because people who work in that business come out of it and say my god our whole job was to get children hooked so that they would upset their parents to get them cajole them harangue them to use dubois language to purchase these crappily made toys that will become obsolete within days and am i a good parent do i stop and say here&amp;#39;s a lesson no i sometimes buy the and then i tell them afterwards see that gun that you bought that nerf gun that ar-15 you bought lola it doesn&amp;#39;t work anymore does it no it was not an ar-15 it&amp;#39;s a little nerf guns for my will anyway check this out it&amp;#39;s a bemusement part which means you confused just like when you confront socrates or are confronted by socrates you&amp;#39;re left a little bit bemused confused that&amp;#39;s not necessarily a negative yes is this all around no uh it&amp;#39;s in england and i doubt i doubt i feel like disneyland would probably like jump down this well you know one of the things that says that are prohibited here are cameras uh a list of things and and also lawyers from disney you&amp;#39;re not they&amp;#39;re not allowed here right and sold there was a painting sold by banksy well i would buy that and i could obviously if i wanted to multiple times the many times over uh but there was a painting sold at christie&amp;#39;s auction for over a million dollars i don&amp;#39;t remember how much it was absurd amount of money and after it was purchased they&amp;#39;re about to take it off the wall it started to uh shred itself in the in the uh canvas in the frame was a shredder somehow i don&amp;#39;t know how that works it&amp;#39;s brilliant and it and you see a video of the people freaking out trying to stop it from shredding the painting that just cost a million dollars or more and they did not succeed in saving it didn&amp;#39;t it increase the value of the shredding probably probably all right so here&amp;#39;s our questions questions isn&amp;#39;t all of this rhetorical devices appeal to language in a way that gets at our emotions they get its own amygdala that bypasses our cognitive functioning uh the images that we just saw and many others isn&amp;#39;t that all just propaganda and isn&amp;#39;t all propaganda back according to allan lock philosopher who you read for today yes propaganda is dangerous it&amp;#39;s problematic even when attempted to be used by or for what or otherwise positive ends or can there be as w du bois puts it in his work a criteria of evil art page 220 can there be something called positive propaganda that would work ultimately the voice says yes which one of them is correct it&amp;#39;s not obvious uh i start with uh alan locke philosopher trained at harvard rhodes scholar father of the harlem renaissance and click on that you&amp;#39;ll see click on that you see more of his background click here you&amp;#39;ll see some of the artwork of the renaissance the harlem renaissance images poetry music and so forth uh but not humor that&amp;#39;s what i&amp;#39;m going to focus on in a moment locke is concerned he&amp;#39;s a philosopher who focuses on issues of value aesthetics but he also writes a bit about relativism and his concerns of finding a kind of balance between these the dangers of absolutism of a universal presumption of truth in particular with ethics as well uh versus an anything goes relativism uh we&amp;#39;ll talk about relativism he&amp;#39;ll probably come up again uh in a couple weeks when we look at skepticism and relativism but notice the reading that you have from him is called art or propaganda they cannot be at the same time this is in response to dubois and yet i&amp;#39;m going to start with it uh this is 1928 davois&amp;#39;s 1926 is reading the reading criteria of negro art du bois is speaking to the naacp which he played a role in beginning starting their dispute is over the role of artistic expression the role of artistic rendering and artistic meaning a very broad conception in the very broadest terms lock is concerned he says genius and talent must choose art and put aside propaganda he doesn&amp;#39;t go so far as to say art for art&amp;#39;s sake or that there are only if we&amp;#39;re going to engage in artistic renderings it ought to be pure art that only appeals to the universal in human nature he does say that in some of his readings not in the text that you have here but there&amp;#39;s a debate going on what is art supposed to do does it represent a perspective of reality perspective of the world the perspective of social reality and of oneself from an individual subjectivity or is it meant to give a representation of what humanity is of what the world is in a universalizing sense locke leans more toward the second person he&amp;#39;s concerned that if we take art as a means of expression to push a particular agenda it backfires in fact he puts it my chief objection to propaganda is that it perpetuates the position of group inferiority and here&amp;#39;s the key even in crying out against it it is one-sided and often pre-judging there&amp;#39;s a lot to say about that it&amp;#39;s like that last part there it&amp;#39;s a little confusing what he&amp;#39;s arguing against is the mode of presentation the mode of representation that has been used by those in power against people like him who have been oppressed again he&amp;#39;s writing in around the 19 teens 1920s this is during jim crow era which had spread not just in the south it was all over the united states he&amp;#39;s writing at a time in which lynchings were very very common what are lynchings lynchings are public executions you could be lynched if you were a black man being seen as guilty of reckless eyeballing which is to say you were looking improperly as my daughter at my wife at my mom whatever and there&amp;#39;s no court of law here that establishes yeah you looked at that person that&amp;#39;s ridiculous but the stereotypes that were pushed that were part of the culture the darker the skin the more guilty one is uh uh you are walking wow black you are guilty because of that you could be hung and hung publicly and hung in front of hundreds of people people who bring their children to watch the hanging we know this because they&amp;#39;re pictures of young white children watching with their parents smiling as the man hangs from a tree you have to have done significant work collectively culturally to infuse the populace through propaganda through stereotype through the kinds of things he&amp;#39;s concerned about block is concerned about that dehumanizes you cannot say it&amp;#39;s almost impossible to imagine the stereotypes not being present the propaganda not being present to give rise to that possibility this is the environment into which they&amp;#39;re writing and that they&amp;#39;re living locke is concerned that the same the to use to use the master&amp;#39;s tools to borrow from a phrase from the writer audrey lord is only going to perpetuate the same stereotypes in an effort to attack those stereotypes we&amp;#39;re actually using them and they get lost in fact this is why i&amp;#39;ll reference dave chappelle in a little bit this is why dave chappelle left his very lucy lucrative show in 2005 i guess it was i&amp;#39;m not sure if i remember the date the chappelle show he made he was giving a skit in which he was playing off of racial stereotypes and the intent in most of his skits as they were was to braze those stereotypes to consciousness and explode them to blow them up speaking of explosion but he noticed a white i don&amp;#39;t remember who the guy was a stage hand or somebody a white guy laughing but he noticed the laughter was the wrong kind of laughter and he explained this later on that it was misconstrued that instead of attacking the stereotypes the way he presented it his particular mode of propaganda to push locke&amp;#39;s perspective actually perpetuated the thing he was trying to undermine the thing he was trying to undo he ends his reading kind of uh enigmatically with literature and art should have david as their patron saint and that might have struck you because we remember david we talked about king david with the susan stebing article we talked about the use of story and narrative and i assume he&amp;#39;s talking about the subversive david against goliath the giant and not king david who basically was a murderer and rapist uh later on and i think that&amp;#39;s the case that&amp;#39;s who he&amp;#39;s talking about but what is the relevance of this is it subversive is uh one&amp;#39;s mode of artistic rendering always coming from below why would david be the patron saint did anyone get caught on that analogy any thoughts on why he thinks david should be the patron saint of the artists well he thinks that art should work towards liberation of the oppressed and david&amp;#39;s sort of story is uh an encapsulation of that in allegory so if david&amp;#39;s the paid for the saying of art then all art would be working towards the whole david which would be the liberation of being past over their like uh absurdly powerful masters or that&amp;#39;s right exactly but what is a problem with that how does that not lead us to a duboisian reading of propaganda in other words he ends with or this is a representation of of uh locke&amp;#39;s conception of what is the ideal for art in general the primary responsibility and function of the artist is to express his own individuality and that could come from one&amp;#39;s perspective uh of being on the margins of society or being oppressed but in doing so to communicate something of a universal human appeal so there is a little bit of it i don&amp;#39;t think locke and du bois are completely at odds with each other go ahead oh well i think it&amp;#39;s still possible to relate yourself as like an individual to the universal because the university doesn&amp;#39;t exist independent of your subjectivity you&amp;#39;re always sort of relating yourself into a symbolic position to it and so i think both could both of these views could work simultaneously so how can they work okay at the time that they&amp;#39;re writing though and the question here is how is it possible to express individuality when the expression of the individual artist and du bois is talking about that much of his writing is simply denied in other words here&amp;#39;s what your perspective is you&amp;#39;re trying to write about a perspective that goes outside of what we expect of an african-american of a black artist you shouldn&amp;#39;t be allowed to do that you&amp;#39;re only talking about your own particular viewpoint that doesn&amp;#39;t get to what lock sees is the importance of representing human nature of representing that which is universal and has human appeal the problem is and this is by the way still an issue with artistic rendering in movies and tv shows that they you get the pilot or you don&amp;#39;t because of the appeal and there&amp;#39;s the marketing element of it of course but that&amp;#39;s tied to who we expect to get something out of us and so you want to then appeal to as many as possible and you&amp;#39;re saying well the only understanding the only way we have a conception of what is universal is if we look at individuals and is that not what you were saying sort of i i just think that it&amp;#39;s impossible to create a piece of art without your subjectivity i see no matter how you view the universal it&amp;#39;s always through your subjective position so right hmm even yes there&amp;#39;s impressionism there&amp;#39;s monet what is this impression sunrise are you seeing that painting it&amp;#39;s that&amp;#39;s not what a sunrise looks like it&amp;#39;s not a universal representation of it but is that even possible and here i think locke is is actually while he talks about universal as he pushes for a kind of relativism in general it&amp;#39;s hard to avoid the essential subjectivity that comes to any kind of artistic expression and here i think is where du bois comes in um well that&amp;#39;s not the voice this is i should mention this earlier uh in his push for a positive propaganda uh not this this is joseph goebbels we know what his propaganda was done we know what his intentions were and and their success let me control the media and i and i will turn any nation into a herd of pigs well i&amp;#39;m not entirely sure what that means but it probably was to the extent that they were successful with the holocaust and able to do that with knowledge the populist was aware of what was going on to a large extent that&amp;#39;s obviously the negative conception of it but it hasn&amp;#39;t always been negative we see martin luther king utilizing this term in his sermon in 1954 propaganda propagandizing christianity he says if if hitler can do all of this with an evil idea it seems that we could rock the world with the truth of the saving power of the gospel if advertisers back to advertisement as potential propaganda can convince men that they can&amp;#39;t do without their products this has been a problem even before the internet of course then we ought to be able to convince men of the productive power of god in christ the term propaganda wasn&amp;#39;t always negative go back to the 1500s when the catholic church used it as a means of proselytizing propagandizing the good word the gospel it was seen as a positive unless you were one of the heathens to which the gospel did not appeal in any case this term has a kind of resurrection du bois is writing at a time as we mentioned in which he was seen as a second class citizen and he recognizes himself as an american citizen because he&amp;#39;s lived through right reconstruction he has a whole work on reconstruction where he gives um as historians today realize a much more accurate interpretation of what happened during reconstruction and why there were so many failures it wasn&amp;#39;t because of as many historians around the time he was writing said because of the slaves the black folk could not rule themselves they were better off being slaves many historians argued at the time he showed why where that was mistaken and how that was a flawed interpretation of the historical events of reconstruction and you can find that text online it&amp;#39;s enormous but it covers in great depth according to contemporary historians a more accurate representation of what happened but he&amp;#39;s writing at a time in which he has been deemed rights and by the expressed ideals of the nation seen as a citizen but as he puts in 1903 in the souls from black folk he has this peculiar sensation he calls it double consciousness of looking at oneself through the eyes of others of measuring one soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity that double consciousness is recognizing at once how i see myself as a human being as a man as a husband and so forth and how others see me how others portray me it&amp;#39;s both a negative this double consciousness this double seeing this multiple perspective taking it&amp;#39;s both a negative because i see how others see me in contempt and pity and it&amp;#39;s a positive epistemically in the sense that it forces out of survival the need for survival it forces those who are oppressed who are marginalized to see from different perspectives for fear of losing their lives i need to know du bois would say what it is like to be seen by other people i need to know what the perspective of others is about me and that didn&amp;#39;t change and hasn&amp;#39;t changed we go back to chris rock to anticipate some comedians responses chris rock in the late 90s was publicly open about this on oprah i think it was where he has to have that talk chris rock very famous very wealthy very powerful man has to have that talk with his seven to eight-year-old son about how he perceives himself and talking to his eight-year-old child that eight-year-old child needs to be aware of how he is being perceived by others he has to in other words learn how to take on the perspective of others when he the eight-year-old boy is walking through a grocery store a convenience store or a class or school or is in front of the police chris rock is very aware of the dangers of this i don&amp;#39;t have to have that talk with my kid this will be important when i talk about um uh dave chappelle and so it&amp;#39;s an epistemic benefit i can see more because i have to i have to be able to recognize other people&amp;#39;s perspectives and that can benefit du bois things one&amp;#39;s representation art art is a means of representing something in the world and as we noted a moment ago think of it in terms of a perspective but the more perspectives i can take the more perspectives i can genuinely understand perhaps the broader appeal my particular artistic rendering can be and here we get his famous phrase from the reading thus all art is propaganda and ever must be despite the whaling of purists the purest would be those who say we ought to make art for art&amp;#39;s sake it ought not be used to tell immoral people get upset with overly moralizing stories movies and so forth that he says no i stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art i have for writing has always been used for propaganda for the gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy and he goes further i don&amp;#39;t give a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda but i do care when propaganda is combined to one side confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent what does that mean you&amp;#39;re going to tell me i&amp;#39;m not allowed to appeal to the same mechanisms the same use the same tools and if you want the same weapon as those who have oppressed me i&amp;#39;m to be put up with the history of what is that famous g w f griffiths movie birth of a nation i&amp;#39;m just supposed to accept all that as if that&amp;#39;s an objective universal accurate rendition of how the united states was and is and i&amp;#39;m not allowed to respond in kind i&amp;#39;m not allowed to respond in a way that presents my world view in a way that enables even the people who are oppressors because argument hasn&amp;#39;t worked evidence hasn&amp;#39;t worked straightforward presentation doesn&amp;#39;t work as jason stanley puts it in his work from 2015 how propaganda works and by the way he has a rewritten chapter in it after 2016. why that might be of interest only a good guy with propaganda can stop a bad guy with propaganda to borrow from wayne lapierre of the nra w.a du bois quote recognizes that an indirect method is required to stir in this case white interest one that appeals to white folk yet will somehow call attention to the black perspective the boys is calling for a certain kind of undermining propaganda the propaganda that du bois uses the term he uses is positive propaganda and he uses he does this through the medium of art in a way that is not direct it&amp;#39;s not confrontational in that sense it&amp;#39;s not argumentative that doesn&amp;#39;t mean there isn&amp;#39;t argument behind it but it is an indirect approach that appeals to emotion that can uh appeal to uh uh how do i put it not lies but exaggeration uh uses utilizes hyperbole as a lot of art does and in fact i think we see a precursor in this guy frederick douglass an early positive propagandist who in his autobiographies notes how he uses humor this will transition us into a contemporary interpretation of potentially positive propaganda why does he use humor what in the world was funny to a slave to someone who was removed from his family cut off from his mother denied the right to read which he points out in his autobiographies is interesting it&amp;#39;s telling the stereotypes against african-americans against blacks at the time were that they were ignorant they were animals they were to be used as tools and yet douglas points out there are laws on the books that teaching slaves to read that law already presupposes the slaves humanity because you do not have laws against teaching cattle to read he says and he&amp;#39;s being immune almost humorous here as well he&amp;#39;s pointing out the inconsistencies of the stereotypes that maintain slavery and the later on the second class citizenship of those who are different colors you&amp;#39;ve already admitted the humanity by having these laws these inconsistencies are absurd but i&amp;#39;m not going to point them out by way of argument says douglas in his 5th of july speech and there&amp;#39;s a lot there you can click on the link there to find the whole speech it&amp;#39;s 1852 um after the fourth of july which is what is that day of independence of freedom would you have me argue he says that man is entitled to liberty that he&amp;#39;s the rightful owner of his own body you&amp;#39;ve already declared it that&amp;#39;s part of our ideals that&amp;#39;s part of our declaration of independence must i argue the wrongfulness of slavery is that a question for republicans is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation as a matter of fact with great difficulty involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice hard to be understood how should i look today in the presence of americans dividing and subdividing a discourse to show that men have a natural right to freedom to do so would be to make myself look ridiculous and offer an insult to your understanding i&amp;#39;m a human being here&amp;#39;s my argument that i&amp;#39;m a human being really you&amp;#39;re gonna make an argument for that that&amp;#39;s absurd there&amp;#39;s not a man beneath the canopy of heaven that does not know that slavery is wrong for him at a time like this and here&amp;#39;s the point scorching irony not convincing argument is needed aristotle told us there are certain individuals certain situations in which argument isn&amp;#39;t going to work teaching is not going to work i think douglas is embodying this perspective here straightforward argument doesn&amp;#39;t seem to have worked go ahead oh uh i don&amp;#39;t know how to make this necessarily a relevant point but it brought to mind uh something i had heard about exactly that logical argument and sort of uh conscious knowing not being enough to change your behavior it&amp;#39;s like why people struggle with addiction or why people knowing a certain company is uh it&amp;#39;s like they sort of disavow the uh the wrongness of their actions uh it&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s while consciously knowing that yeah there is a named tamar gendler who coins the term a leaf as opposed to as opposed to be leaf i don&amp;#39;t have time to go into that distinction now but she would argue we need some kind of pre-reflective and here there&amp;#39;s another philosopher named uh forgotten the first name it&amp;#39;s al-saji she writes on phenomenology and that we need to advocate for a kind of pre-reflective hesitation and that&amp;#39;s with respect to racism that is to say that phenomenology of experiencing an immediate and prior to cognition prior to thinking it through and consciously preserving presenting it a kind of immediate habituation of how we react and so i&amp;#39;ll give you more about in fact it may come up later when we talk about stereotypes the concept of a leaf it&amp;#39;s where i act as if i believe something but if you asked me i would say nope i don&amp;#39;t there&amp;#39;s a weird disconnect and she would have a response to that related to this i would argue wanda sykes i&amp;#39;m not going to play this here but wanda sykes a positive propagandist in her comedic performance she does what we&amp;#39;ll see chappelle do something similar represent from her perspective the african-american perspective in a humorous way that brings in audiences wider audience than might be the case if she were just writing a paper a white paper as they&amp;#39;re sometimes called interestingly uh and she jokingly refers to but she does it with argument in the background it&amp;#39;s not like there&amp;#39;s no good reasons to present her position if you know what it&amp;#39;s going on in the last 10 years with the opioid crisis it&amp;#39;s a health crisis that&amp;#39;s what it&amp;#39;s called it&amp;#39;s an addiction crisis that&amp;#39;s a health issue that is correct but it&amp;#39;s not much different than the crack cocaine crisis in the 1980s but what was that crisis called that was a problem of poor choices of criminal behavior and what do you do with people who suffer from crack cocaine addiction you imprison them and who are the people who were suffering from crack cocaine predominantly black men black people uh white people were suffering from cocaine addiction but it was powder cocaine the same stuff ultimately but the punishment the law in order punishment 100 times the sentence if you got caught with crack than if you got caught with powder that was in the laws was it coincidental that seems almost impossible to imagine the opioid crisis has missed wanda sykes says the african american population she argues somewhat jokingly but not really because doctors don&amp;#39;t prescribe as much pain medication to black patients why because there is a stereotype that black people do not feel as much pain that&amp;#39;s astonishing to have to even say that out loud but there if i may engage in a proof surrogate significant studies multiple studies that show that that&amp;#39;s the case we see it with dave chappelle we&amp;#39;ll end with this there&amp;#39;s a book coming out soon dave chappelle and philosophy there&amp;#39;s a bit from 2000 i give you the link here i&amp;#39;m not going to go through it all right now but in this bit in 2000 dave chappelle is with his white friend chip i don&amp;#39;t know if he has a white friend named chip or if that&amp;#39;s just part of the story i don&amp;#39;t think he does but that&amp;#39;s actually somewhat significant he&amp;#39;s not telling the truth as such but he&amp;#39;s not lying either and in the story which did or didn&amp;#39;t happen it&amp;#39;s still illustrative of his personal experiences uh he&amp;#39;s with his white friend chip they&amp;#39;re lost because they&amp;#39;re both high chip is driving chip takes a long comfortable drag of his joint and then says god damn it it&amp;#39;s the cops in front of him and then he takes another drag of his of his of his uh joint and says i&amp;#39;m gonna go ask him for directions and chappelle&amp;#39;s like no don&amp;#39;t do it and the white guy gets out chip goes out he stumbles over to the cops starts touching him saying excuse me you&amp;#39;re not supposed to touch police officers whether you&amp;#39;re high or not so there&amp;#39;s one lesson and he say excuse me where&amp;#39;s third street and the officer turns and says uh you&amp;#39;re on it take it easy get out of here that&amp;#39;s it that&amp;#39;s the story and then dave chappelle says i know some of you white folks out there that&amp;#39;s not terribly amazing but you asked some of those black fellas here that is incredible and the whole point of this is to go back to stanley and how propaganda works he says what normalization does is transform the morally extraordinary into the ordinary it makes us able to tolerate what was once intolerable by making it seem as if this is the way things have always been end quote the bit here which you can watch it&amp;#39;s much better to watch it than what i&amp;#39;ve represented at first glance appears to present an everyday normal experience but chappelle wants us to view it as intolerable well his positive propagandistic comedy does as shelly says of poetry is transform what has become morally ordinary normalized and accepted through negative propaganda that we talked about before into something extraordinary that should compel us to say that that is  incredible that&amp;#39;s what positive propaganda does and if it&amp;#39;s just propaganda and there&amp;#39;s no argument underneath it i think there&amp;#39;s a problem and i don&amp;#39;t know that dubois would push pure propaganda we&amp;#39;re out of time and that&amp;#39;s the last slide so that&amp;#39;s okay consider this we&amp;#39;re not done with issues of emotion our next reading is from uh linda elder where is it yeah critical thinking and emotional intelligence uh just one through six and nine through eleven you should have time to catch up this weekend please do so

Transcript for:Rhetoric and Propaganda

Transcript for:
Rhetoric and Propaganda