© Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo'The Charlatan' by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1756
Pedophrasty
Definition: Argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole, as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting. Often done with the aid of pictures.
Can also describe the exploitation of babies by professional beggars who rent them from their parents and use them as potent appendage in their trade(remember that children tend to grow and need to be replaced).
Pedophrasty is effective as it provides arguments to strike before the evidence is formed. People are moved into "doing something".
Pedophrasty has its most effects on actors, journalists and similar types who are intellectually insecure, deprived of critical judgment, and afraid of being classified as violators of some norm of political correctness. For instance, pedophrasty has been commonly used in the Syrian war by such propagandists as Julian Roepke continuously supplying the German public with pictures of dead children. Or the various lobbies hired by Saudi Barbaria (and allies), such as the Middle East Institute in Washington DC, to promote Sunni Islamist policies under the cover of "think tanks".
15-year-old Nayirah al-Ṣabah testifies in front of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus that she witnessed Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators. Her testimony would later be used to justify America’s involvement in the first Gulf War.
Bigoteering
© Rachel KaplanTim Ferris
Note that it is the true victims of racism that are insulted by virtue-peddling bigoteers.
Example: Both the Kurds who are asking for independence and the Arabs who refuse to grant it accuse one another of "racism". Likewise, Arabists accuse localists (such as those who claim Phoenician or Coptic culture and habits away from Arab domination) of racism, forgetting that Arabism is grounded in a fundamentally imperialist and supremacist ideology. A localist wants others to leave him alone (leave me alone, I leave you alone, thus executing the moral symmetry of the silver rule), while Arabists want non-Sunni minorities to be their dhimmi servants or second class citizens under the cover of "nonsectarianism".
Second Order Bigoteering: in addition to bigoteering, siding with one party in a conflict based on race or gender without even investigating the source of the problem, as commonly practices by the children book author J.K. Rowling or the podcaster Mike Duncan - such as siding automatically with the professional BS operator Mary Beard in an intellectual conflict with a man, simply because Mary Beard was a woman, without understanding the nature of the dispute, then spinning arguments to explain their support.
Nabothizing
Production of false accusation, just as Jezebel did to dispossess Naboth.
In many legal systems, since Hammurabi's code, calumnies and false accusations are punished as if the accuser committed the infractions himself. (Obviously, there is a need for symmetry: penalties for crimes are proportion to the crime, hence inflicting such penalty on an innocent person should be penalized under the same logic).
In combination with bigoteering: a false accusation of bigotry, particularly if the accuser knows it is not the case, should cause a penalty to the bigoteer as if he/she were bigots themselves.
Note that "false accuser" was the original meaning of the Greek word sycophant before drifting in the English language.
Partializing
Exploiting the unsavory attributes of one party in a conflict without revealing those of the other party . Example: "He is a dictator", giving the illusion that the alternative is the Swedish parliament not some worse faction.
The problem can take absurd proportions: in the Syrian War, it was used by interventionistas describing the "dictator" without mentioning that his opponents are Al-Qaeda head-cutters.
You can detect partializing and dishonest thinking when the same people arguing for the removal of some dictator praise Saudi Barbaria forgetting to use the argument in such cases.
Inconsistency within Monocultures
I have shown a narrative to be fallacious
1) if it is logically incompatible with other narratives also held true by the same agents,This heuristic can help us identify monocultures, usually artificially propped up by some lobby.
2) if it leads to the statistical clustering of causes that should be random, or, to the least, uncorrelated.
For lobbyists and their useful idiots, as we saw in partializing, will be inconsistent somewhere in their narratives: there is a cluster for the advocacy of both GMOs and Glyphosate, when there is no particular logical link between the two positions. Well, there is a link: Monsanto sells both; and GMOs are actually an excuse to sell high doses of glyphosate.
Likewise, on finds some nonrandom clustering of people who decry civilian casualties in Aleppo but forget about it in Mosul.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the Editor of INCERTO, Opacity, and East Med Project: History, Philology, and Genetics
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