Rhetoric Resistance

Rhetoric resistance is necessary, because it's stupidity resistance.

Sophism killed the West. It's an ongoing terminal infection that started in 1100, as I've elaborated previously. Sophism can be described as intentionally inflicting stupidity on someone else. Nobody would use rhetoric if it wasn't possible to design it to be more convincing than logic, which means Sophism works.

Which means you need to make Sophism not work on you, which means being as resistant as possible to rhetoric.

In short rhetoric is a crime and you need security.

The practice is simple. Whenever you hear a statement,* do the experiment, as part of a Set 1. Check whether it's true, then compare whether it was convincing. If it was convincing and untrue, it's rhetoric, not epistemology, and you need to learn to resist that rhetorical move. 

*This includes statements you say to yourself. Meditate enough to develop mindfulness, watch what you're thinking, check it for rhetoric solecisms, then practice not being convinced by lies until you're not convinced by that lie anymore. Recognize the rhetorical style or trope, and set up a trigger to remind you to tell it to fuck off, and keep trying until it's habitual and automatic. Rinse. Repeat. 

When I tried it, I became impossible to fool, or so close it's indistinguishable. I certainly didn't start out that way. By now, when I see a new style of convincing, I'm automatically aware I shouldn't find it convincing until I've checked, even if I can't immediately see any other reason to doubt.

How degenerate is my blog audience? Do I need to explain how to stringently test something for truth? It's hard to test something too stringently. It's always worth checking again to see if it replicates, for example. (If it doesn't, go meta.) Every time I thought I had done enough, I checked the "I've done enough," thought for epistemic validity, and found I was wrong. Haha, oops. You can really put the thumbscrews on statements, and it's super fun if you think of it that way. Attack it viciously and ferociously. Predator mindset. It will survive, if it's true.

P.S. Christianity is fundamentally a Sophist structure, having arisen and adapted to a Sophist/Fascist society. The "Dark" ages discredited Sophism and they were relatively healthy for a few hundred years, but ultimately the Sophism was dormant, not dead. Know them by their fruits: read a newspaper. This is the natural, logical endpoint of Christian society (and I am 89.9% convinced Yeshua intended exactly this).

P.P.S. Journalism is irresponsible. We can also see journalists use rhetoric exclusively, meaning journalists are inherently AAA-grade criminals.

P.P.P.S. For completeness I will mention: if rhetoric made you perform wise actions it would be logic instead. Truth => good ideas => prudent action. If it's called rhetoric it's trying to make you have bad ideas and thus do something dumb.