RHETORIC

Definitions:

1. Rhetoric – “Rhetoric is the art of using language to communicate effectively and persuasively. It involves three audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos . . .” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric
2. Logos – “Originally a word meaning “word,” “speech,” “account,” or “reason,” it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), who used the term for the principle of order and knowledge.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos
3. Pathos – ” . . . represents an appeal to the audience’s emotions.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathos
4. Ethos – ” . . . is an English word based on a Greek word and denotes the guiding beliefs or ideals that characterize a community, a nation or an ideology.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos
5. Spin – “In public relations, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through providing an interpretation of an event or campaign to persuade public opinion in favor or against a certain organization or public figure.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_(public_relations)
6. Public Relations – “Public relations (PR) is a field concerned with maintaining a public image for businesses, non-profit organizations or high-profile people, such as celebrities and politicians.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations
7. Propaganda – “Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda
8. Truth – “Truth can have a variety of meanings, such as the state of being in accord with a particular fact or reality, or being in accord with the body of real things, real events or actualities.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth
9. “The cake is a lie” - Roughly translates to “your promised reward is merely a fictitious motivator”.  http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-cake-is-a-lie–5

Ways in which rhetoric is used:

1. To promote a particular ideology
2. To promote a particular belief system
3. To promote a particular person
4. To promote a particular product
5. To enhance potentially shaky logic
6. To hide evidence that might adversely affect a particular person
7. To hide evidence that might adversely affect a particular product
8. To hide evidence that might adversely affect a particular belief system
9. To hide evidence that might adversely affect a particular potentially shaky logic

Potential uses of rhetoric:

1. Politics – Probably the most noted and notable area of human endeavor in the United States, today, particularly with respect to campaigning. Most frequent use is the highly emotionally loaded and logically shaky negative campaign advertisements used by politicians against each other in the quest for votes. The use of selective evidence, which may or may not pertain to the opposing candidate, the hiding of the promoted candidates failings or even going so far as to attempt to show that those failings are actually not failings (see spin, above).
2. Advertisements – The longest lasting use of rhetoric in America, and the one that has developed the furthest, despite attempts to control some of the more blatant abuses of it. Advertisements routinely tout the benefits of a particular product while down-playing or omitting the negative aspects of the produce. This is seen most clearly in the advertising of prescription medications where the side effects are quickly read off or put in fine print at the end of the advertisement. The logic that it hides is that it is attempting to get the patient to recommend a particular medicine to a doctor (backwards, isn’t it) in order for the pharmaceutical company to make more money. When looking at the side effects many of the pharmaceutical advertisements I’ve seen have demonstrated that the particular product should not be licensed for human consumption, and may actually be more detrimental than no medication at all.
3. Public Relations (external) – The image of a company, the face and personality that the company attempts to project to the buying public, is highly important. Thus, many man-hours and dollars are dedicated to promoting that image, despite various public evidence to the contrary (see spin, above).
4. Public Relations (internal) (aka Propaganda) – This is the information (or should I use the term “disinformation”) disseminated to the employees concerning the company. Some of this information may include the PR used externally. It may also include justifications or rationalities for behavior that employees see but that the general public does not see. One way of determining if the company is dealing with rationalizations and justifications is to look in the material an employee signs for evidence of the company wanting to control all external communications about the company, such as, “employees are not permitted to make public statements about the company” (see spin, above).
5. Public Relations (personal) – May also be known as “Publicist” or some other fancy name, but the results are the same: putting a public image on a public or famous person. Such persons include politicians, but may also include Actors/Actresses, religious leaders, celebrities in sports, and others.
6. Religion – Or belief system. I emphasize this because religion, in it’s aspect as the purveyor of the existence of a god, is not supported by any evidence but, rather, by the belief of its adherents. Of the rest of what religion is, a lot depends on the religion. The rest of religion is actually an attempt to instill an ethos in it’s constituents. I, personally, have issues with the ethos of most religions that I’ve investigated, in that they are a high-level approach with no grounding in the whole basis for the ethos. But that’s another story, and ONLY a personal opinion. It still comes down to rhetoric being used to promote something for which there is no evidence, and relying on the emotionally laden language of the shaman to get his/her point across.

And now, I have the unfortunate task of putting together the common element found in all of the items listed between the bottom of the definitions and this point:

“The cake is a lie”

The one common element is that each of the points attempts to doctor the facts; to present a pleasant face in one direction and a negative face in the other. In short, the use of rhetoric is to present a lie to the world as if it were the truth. In this day and age, one could even say that rhetoric is a lie.

Rhetoric’s original purpose was to persuade. In a sense, it still is. But the uses to which rhetoric has been applied now do more than just persuade. Most rhetoric used today is actually used to hide evidence: facts – that which can be pointed to directly. Without evidence there is no hope of getting a complete picture of what a person, company, product, or religion is really all about. Euphemisms such as “sanitization”, “spin”, “spoon feeding” and others are all attempts to apply rhetoric to actual facts in an effort to make them more palatable. The reason for hiding evidence is to manipulate people in one way or another. Often, that manipulation is for the purpose of power – either as control over people directly, such as politicians or religious figures, or through money, such as companies and celebrities would require. At no time is it to the benefit of “the people”, in other words the collective individuals toward which it is aimed. “Your promised reward is merely a fictitious motivator”, the crude definition of The cake is a lie, is the end result. One could easily substitute the word “manipulator” for the word “motivator” in the above statement.

Loosely speaking, rhetoric’s purpose can still be defined as “to persuade”. But only if one defines “loosely” as the byproduct of a particularly intense bout of gastroenteritis. In short, rhetoric has been reduced to the level of a degree in philosophy – a B.A. In BS. It is no longer just a case of slinging mud. Now, it is a case of slinging that which, after a significant period of decomposition and the addition of a certain amount of liquid, may become mud. It is useful only in fertilizing gardens. And, it should be noted, that the enrichment of gardens only serves to benefit the owner of the garden.

Make your own demotivational poster at FakePosters.com

We have cats, so we’re well acquainted with having to clean up after them.  This fake poster is a bit of a laugh at ourselves – a reverse representation of the cause of some of our cleaning up.

In all seriousness I don’t go around licking cats (nor does my wife).  We have more respect than that for the dignity of our feline friends.  Besides, it’s more fun watching cats, that are oh! so aware of their dignity, make fools of themselves.

There are times when I’m disgusted . . .

Dear Commercial Enterprises on the Internet:

I very often go to sites where I’m expected to just allow cookies, regardless of who sets them or what they contain. The tracking of visitors to your websites is an inappropriate invasion of individual privacy.  It is therefore immoral, unethical, and probably fattening (at least to your wallets at my expense).

I find that, in many cases, if I want to find out information about an area I’m expected to give you my name and address (and sometimes phone number) before I can access the information.  VERIZON!  TAKE NOTE:  you don’t need my name and address.  Your thinly veiled attempt to gather personal information is repulsive to me.  It’s enough to know that I’m within 20 miles of a particular target location.

I continually get advertisements from businesses.  Some of them I do business with, some of them I don’t.  In most cases I go looking for a way to opt out of the incessant barrage of emails only to find out that there is NO WAY that I can stop them.  I DON’T NEED NOOK or KINDLE or whatever your lousy ebook reader is called.  I am perfectly capable of turning pages.  And, when all else fails, can read most ebook formats on my computer with ease.  I also don’t need to be given an “early upgrade” by Verizon so that you can get rid of the lousy 3G garbage that you weren’t able to sell in the last year, in advance of your coming out with a lousy 4G series of phones.

There are times when I’m disgusted.  There are many advantages to being able to investigate a business on the Internet:  the ability to look up products and prices comes readily to mind.  Also the ability to locate outlets or to determine availability of products.  But some  businesses go WAY too far, to the point where I long for the time when business were forbidden to be on the internet.

Is there ANY ethics in business?  No, not that I’ve seen.

eLive Installation

I recently downloaded the most recent eLive LiveCD (eLive Topaz).   The website caused me to believe that it might be advantageous to me both because it involved a window manager that I had been interested in back in the early days of Linux and because it appeared to lack PulseAudio.  I was well familiar with downloading and burning .iso images to disk and, indeed, had no problems with it.

Yesterday afternoon (Saturday, June 5, 2010) I took the opportunity to boot into the cd to see what it had to offer.  It looked good.  Crisp, clean, fast, configurable, and it was based on Debian, so I was assured of being able to get programs that I wanted without any trouble.  I spent some time playing with it, getting a good feel of it, and felt comfortable with the way it behaved.  So, I decided to install it.

And that’s when I ran into some problems, not that I knew it at first.  Normal procedures seemed to proceed normally – Select language, keyboard, etc., pick where I wanted to put it (manual partitioning) – and then it happened:  a box popped up that caused me to seriously wonder about the mental state of the developers of eLive.  The small window indicated that I needed to go to a particular URL and enter a particular code (no copy and paste available in the box, which meant that my poor, tired, old eyes would have to be absolutely sure that I entered the code manually exactly as it appeared in the box).  Upon entering that code and paying an unspecified sum of money I would be emailed the actual installer.

Um . . . pardon me, but there is a small problem with that.  Well, actually, there are a number of problems with that, and they aren’t small:

1. I’m in the middle of an installation procedure.  My email program is on a different partition.  Which means that I need to drop out of the installation after supplying the information and money, reboot into the other partition, bring up the email client and save out the installer.
2. I have already partitioned the particular area of my hard drive where I intend to install eLive, an area that had held a previous installation which I no longer wanted but was the LAST installation that I had done.  Needless to say, Grub was screwed – I could no longer boot into the active, stable partition that held the email client.
3. At no time had I been informed as to the actual amount that eLive expected me to pay them for the installer.  It simply stated that it was a small amount or write an article praising eLive in order to obtain an invitation.  (see http://www.elivecd.org/codes )  Well, that’s just hunkie-dorie.  I’m supposed to agree to pay an unspecified amount in order to obtain an installer for something that, though it looks good, I’m unsure as to it’s actual suitability?  Or write an article about a product praising it when I’m not sure it will even fulfill my needs?  Can anyone see the absurdity of this?
4. In addition, this comes perilously close to violating the GPL by applying additional requirements on top of the specified license.

However, that’s not the worst.  The worst is the lack of intelligent planning on the part of the developers:

1. Expecting one to obtain an email on a partition which has no email client installed and configured.  Therefore
2. Expecting one to drop out of an installation and go to a different partition to obtain the installer, when
3. Grub has already been destroyed by the part of the installation already completed, and in addition
4. To PAY for this round-robin of absurdity.

Were this a paper in a Logic class, I would immediately give it the following grade:

Once Upon A Time . . .

Remember when those words were the start of some of the stories you liked the most?  Or maybe you don’t.  Are you old enough to remember fairy tales?  Perhaps the stories you grew up with were more modern versions of the fairy tale.  Stories that went by the label “Science Fiction” or “Fantasy”.  Stories that suggested some past or future time with imaginative happenings.  Stories with a strong character involved in a conflict with something dark and sinister that had to be overcome.  Or stories of technological advances beyond those of the real world, and how they could help or hinder people’s lives.  Stories of fantastic creatures from other planets or planes with which we contest, or with whom we make friends.  Even modern fairy tales:  stories that go further to codify the abilities and limitations of those unearthly creatures we’ve come to know as elves, fairies, “fair fold”, “Lords and Ladies”.  Creatures against whom we strive or with whose aid we advance.  In short, stories that examined one or more elements of society and how it interacts, usually with some sort of moral code attached to it.  Depending on the complexity of the society and the abilities of the author, the moral or ethical code might be blatant or might be disguised in the workings of the characters.  But it was there.

Moral stories have been part of the development of civilizations and societies all the way back to pre-historic times, perhaps even including pre-historic times.  But, of course, being pre-historic (or before history began to be documented), we may never know for sure.  But more modern than pre-historic ones still exist, and are still read.  Everything from the tales of Greek Heroes or the collected stories of the Brothers Grimm, through the more futuristic stories of Verne and Wells, to the writings of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein, and on to those of Lackey, McCaffrey, Modesitt and others.  They all have one thing in common.  They all take one or more aspects of society as we know it and examine it.  Some do so in an effort to tell the reader how to live – how to be a better person.  Others poke holes in strongly held beliefs in an attempt to show where civilization has gone wrong or where it can be improved by those things in which we believe and by which we live.  The stories may use adventure or romance as the tools through which the lives of contemporary people are examined, but placing the events in future, past, or alternate times.  But they are moral stories just the same.  The intent is to cause the reader to examine, even subconsciously, the moral and ethical values by which one lives.

Why?  Why this obsession with how a person should live, or what a person should believe?  Could it be because there is no set, standardized way to live or absolute codification of what to believe?  Look around at the variety of religious beliefs that exist and how there is often no way to combine them because of the way they negate each other.  Look at the number of laws created by the vast number of countries and how they often conflict with each other.  Even within any particular society there are conflicts of belief and “interpretations” of law, sometimes “interpretations” that appear to be directly opposite what the written word would indicate.

There are people who have tried to pare down language in an attempt to avoid confusion:  inventing new words and/or restricting words to only one meaning.  Some of them have been philosophers, such as Wittgenstein.  Others have been Psychologists like Freud and Jung.  But you see this same attempt to nail down language in many specialties, too.  Lawyers have their own language that they manipulate to their needs.  So do many businesses.  And, of course, there’s computer programming with its array of programming languages.  To make it worse these languages have a tendency to use common words, words that are used in ordinary communication, in uncommon ways.  Trying to explain a concept or function that is found in a specialized language to a person that is not part of that restricted environment or society becomes extremely difficult because of the double meanings.  Double meanings.  Double-speak!  Very Orwellian in its complexity.  Thus 1984 came and went “not with a bang, but with a whimper,” and left us all On The Beach.  To make it worse, the practitioners of such splinter groups tend to look down on outsiders as illiterate or unintelligent, and view their narrow niche as the “one true way”.

Authors are a little different.  They see all this complexity and diversity, and use it as a means of entertaining people.  Of course, the entertainment has a purpose:  making money.  Writing, after all, is like any other profession.  The purpose is to earn money with which to purchase food, clothing, shelter and entertainment.  And what they write must be entertaining else the general public won’t buy it.  So they take as their stock-in-trade the conflicts that their target audience can dimly see but are associated with,  and manipulate them into entertaining stories.  By this method they acquire gilt by association.

There is another category of fairy tales, though, that is insidious, dangerous to individuals and societies, and should be fought with everything that one has and is.  It is the “disinformation” that those who would have power over you use to obtain that power.  The tools used are words.  Common words that they twist to their purposes.  Words that make them appear good and virtuous – but the key word there is “appear”.  Appearances can be deceiving:  I’m sure you’ve heard that before.  Disinformation – deceiving appearances – basically lies.

One sub-category is in advertising and salesmanship.  Building up a product or service, making it appear to be the greatest thing or relying on flash and dazzle to influence one to purchase it.  I’m sure you’ve seen sex used to sell a product:  Buy THIS car because you’ll get the girls; drink THIS beer because the girls will think you’re manly.  You’ve seen advertisements aimed at children, especially in the realm of sugared cereals and fast food.  These advertisements ignore the fact that the cars promoted are gas-guzzlers; that beer isn’t good for you in large quantities; and that the cereals and fast foods contribute to childhood obesity.

Some religions are nearly as bad, though they use more words and less hard-sell.  Boiled down to their basics the religions are saying that they are the ones that respect family values, or are the most popular, or are the religion that intelligent people follow.  Popularity can be dismissed immediately simply because it is based on figures that can be made to lie very easily, depending on the comparisons one choses to use.  Family values is almost as easy to dismiss:  WHOSE values are you espousing?  What are they?  What constitutes a family?  And as for the argument for intelligence, well, this is the most insidious of all because one is only intelligent in that religion’s eyes if one follows what they believe.

Politics is another area of belief.  Politicians want people to vote for them based on promises that they make – sometimes such far-reaching promises that no rational person should believe that they can accomplish them.  Or politicians want people to vote for them because they are “better” than the competition.  Oh, really?  Then why are all politicians classed along with “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves”?

Belief – why didn’t my mother list that as one of the dirty words when I was growing up?  People can believe just about anything, but that doesn’t make it right.  I can believe that I’m a millionaire, but my bank account will quickly convince me otherwise.  Yet there is another category of modern fairy tale that is entirely destructive.  It is a three-pronged attack on a product, service, or belief structure.  It utilizes fear as one prong, as in, “If you don’t do this the bad guys will get you.”  Or, “Nice place you have here.  It would be too bad if something happened to it.”  A second prong is uncertainty:  “Are you sure that’s going to work?” is one form of lack of knowledge being exploited.  Another is to suggest that one has something with which to threaten another, without specifying what it is that one has.  The third prong is doubt.  Like uncertainty it is an element of lack of knowledge.  But here the lack, the uncertainty, is used to cause a possibly fatal pause in taking action by actually lying by direct or implied methods, without supplying concrete information to back up one’s claims.

And with that, we come to the only sure cure for FUD:  knowledge.  Notice I didn’t say TRUTH.  Of all the definitions I’ve heard for that word, the only one that came close to a comprehensive explanation was philosophical, and way to lengthy to put in here.  Knowledge, though, was the heart of the definition and one which anyone can understand.  Knowledge combats FUD by demonstrating that FUD is simply a lie – a statement without any factual backing, and used to create divisiveness and distrust.  It is a means by which individuals, companies, organizations, religions, politicians and any others who wish to control others apply their will.  An author of a particular set of fairy tales  designated as Discworld, Terry Pratchett,wrote a book entitled “TRUTH”.  In it he used as the motto of a newspaper the phrase, “The truth shall make ye fret”.  Knowledge, evidence, performs the same function on FUD.  It shines a light on the dim, murky shallows of the FUDsters exposing their comments for what they are: LIES.  It also serves to lower the respect one might have for such individuals or organizations.

So, the next time you hear some comment, first ask for verification – knowledge.  Then verify the verification – ensure that what information is supplied is as accurate and appropriate as possible, and supplied by a source that is not aligned with either side of the issue.  Would you believe the statement of a drug company (one that is in a position to make money from a drug) that it is safe to use?  Of course not.  Their information might be tainted by their interest in making money.  The same goes for other organizations.

This same sort of thing has actually been demonstrated in the SCO Group vs. Novell trial that has just finished.  The SCO Group had maintained, over the course of 7 years, that it owned the copyrights to UNIX.  The verdict of the court was that they did not.  The verdict was supported by evidence – knowledge.  There, the SCO Group was attempting to take away rights of Linux users by claiming that portions of UNIX were incorporated in Linux illegally, and wanted to charge Linux users for what was essentially free for the users to use and change.  Without the copyrights to UNIX the SCO Group has no standing to support their accusations.  Their entire argument was nothing but FUD.

So watch – be ever observant.  Whenever someone wants to take something away from you, whether your money or your rights, ask for knowledge – ask for verifiable evidence to support their claims.

Hello world!

Welcome to Tyche Enterprises.

Tyche Enterprises is NOT a company, corporation, “legal entity”, organization, or other entity involved in advertising or pushing a product or service.

Tyche Enterprises IS a lie.  A lie developed because at one time various software companies required that one be a company in order to determine whether or not the software met one’s needs.  Since I didn’t believe in involving the company I worked for, at that time, in unwanted emails and/or other contact simply because I was researching software for them (and doing the research at home, by the way), I invented Tyche Enterprises to keep those companies happy.

In the days to come you will find that this is a dumping ground for various philosophical discussions – ideas or questions that come to mind as time goes on.  Feel free to join such discussions