Victimization propaganda, strengths and weaknesses

Victimization propaganda is a form of propaganda about as typical to the Left as what I would call "moral propaganda" is to the Right. Recently a conservative blogger criticized this apparent attempt by Michael J. Fox:
Michael J. Fox


Leading to this analysis mixed with irony:

First, given the ridiculous protocols of our day, I feel it’s necessary to establish the fact that my victim bona fides compare favorably to Fox’s. For those of you new to the site, I have Cystic Fibrosis. CF is a genetic disease, so I’ve had it all my life. It is no exaggeration to say that while Fox was gamboling around the set of Family Ties in the mid-1980’s, I was fighting for my life. Since then, my health has ranged from shockingly good for a CF patient to rather precarious.

I say this not to elicit anyone’s sympathy. Quite the contrary, I have willingly entered the rough and tumble of politics via the blogosphere expecting no quarter. Nor have I offered any. If I have a code, that’s it.

Liberal Democrats, on the other hand, often operate as if guided by the exact opposite principle. They think a person’s victim status means that he must necessarily be treated with kid gloves.
[...]
...I’m here to tell you that you’re not a hero just because you get sick or have bad luck. You’re not even special. Before we get off this planet, we’ll all have serious illness or serious bad luck, likely both. Sorry to say, the world isn’t full of 6 billion heroes.

(Absolute Moral Authority Revisited, by Dean Barnett)

The strength of victimization propaganda is that it tends to silence opposition, sometimes leaving only blowhards and bigots to speak, which then reinforces the Big Bully image that the propagandist is trying to associate with his opposition. Its weakness is that it doesn't necessarily create actual agreement and therefore political victory in the privacy of a voting booth, only public silence. For example, Dean Barnett notes in this instance:

Fox’s plea is presumably supposed to preempt any debate on that matter. His presence seems to defy any political antagonists to defend a fetus and deny him hope.

It doesn’t work that way, or at least it shouldn’t. Michael J. Fox has no particular monopoly on morality. Quite the contrary, his past admission that he appeared before a Senate subcommittee without having used his medication suggests an unbecoming moral flexibility. This is brutally manipulative behavior, and I’ve seen many ill people use similar means to get what they want. Such conduct is contemptible.

Here’s the part that Michael J. Fox and his abettors in the Democratic Party don’t get. A presence like Fox’s or Cleland’s can end arguments, but they don’t win them. People may be reluctant to disagree with them publicly because of the pity factor that Fox and Cleland so assiduously court, but just because people who disagree with them are cowed into silence doesn’t mean they rest in agreement.*

When all was said and done, Max Cleland lost his reelection campaign in 2002. That’s a fact the 2006 Democratic Party would do well to remember.

--Dean Barnett

The same could be noted of gay activists and their use of victimization propaganda, it's either a slow process or it is not actually working. For instance, some gay activists have lamented the fact that polls will show one thing and yet when people are in the privacy of a voting booth they vote the opposite. And despite the judiciary they have not actually succeeded in convincing people to change the definition of marriage in general. Note how victimization propaganda is structured:

The appearance of an argument can often aid an emotional appeal for other reasons. [...] Where the target of an emotional appeal is aware of the attempt at manipulation, he will tend to resist it; where he is distracted from the true nature of the appeal by a 'cover argument,' the emotional effect, paradoxically, will be all the greater. Thus, an argument can function as a distractor.
Our remarks apply primarily to the (intellectually) lower 90% or so of the general population, whose beliefs more or less never alter their emotions. This is largely true of the upper 10%, as well, but, fortunately, not entirely. The highly intelligent sometimes display the capacity, although less often the inclination, to step outside themselves and analyze their feelings, and the causes of their feelings, dispassionately, and this sometimes modulates the feelings themselves.

(After the Ball by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen :138)

As Hitler noted:

The function of propaganda does not lie in the scientific training of the individual, but in calling the masses' attention to certain facts, processes, necessities, etc., whose significance is thus for the first time placed within their field of vision.

All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction.

The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be.
[...]
The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the attention and thence to the heart of the broad masses. The fact that our bright boys do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are.

Mein Kampf

Ironically, Hitler is now sometimes used as a negative image for the negative emotional conditioning often used by those who tend to agree with proto-Nazi forms of pseudo-science based on a worldview rooted in scientism. In each case an abuse of science and a rejection of its limited scope is taking place. So disagreement with the Nazis was portrayed as a rejection of science (1), although the advance of Nazism and Nazi propaganda was not based on science. Disagreement with gay activists used to be portrayed as disagreement with science (2), yet the propaganda methods that they tend to use are not based on science, as Kirk and Madsen note. Disagreement over the use of embryonic stem-cells and opposition is also portrayed as a rejection of science, yet the propaganda typical to the proponents of using embryos to try to cure disease does not focus on empirical or scientific facts.

1. Example:

The Christian churches build on the ignorance of people and are anxious so far as possible to preserve this ignorance in as large a part of the populance as possible; only in this way can the Christian churches retain their power. In contrast, national socialism rests on scientific foundations.

(The German Churches Under
Hitler: Backround, Struggle, and Epilogue
by Ernst Helmreich
(Detriot: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979) :303) (Related post)

2. Example:

[Gay activists] can undermine the moral authority of homohating churches over less fervent adherents by portraying such institutions as antiquated backwaters, badly out of step with the times and the latest findings of psychology. Against the atavistic tug of Old Time Religion one must set the mightier pull of Science and Public Opinion... Such an 'unholy' alliance has already worked well in America against churches, on such topics as divorce and abortion.

(Kirk and Madsen :129)

Whistling in the wind...

Comment from here:
You can craft an "identity" around any type of subjective sexual desires or act of self-definition but that doesn't mean that people are actually being denied rights under objective forms of law and it will leave you with the arbitrary and subjective judgments of arbitrary judges. Note how this issue usually involves judicial activism because once a civilization is willing to try to make laws based on nebulous criteria like sexual desires and/or self-definitions based on the same then judges must arbitrate based on their own subjective definitions of the same. What is the clinical definition of gay/homosexual that the psychologists who invented such terms have generally agreed on? Look at the news article above, they still work with broad definitions that include any form of deviancy: "gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered", no matter how trivial.

Everyone has equal treatment under the law now no matter what their sexual desires are. I.e. all supposed groups of "sexual desire people" enjoy the same rights. So promiscuous people (or "At this time, I desire to marry more than one person." people) have equal rights with gay people (or "At this time, I desire to marry a person of the same sex.") and so on.

The issue is not one of equal treatment but whether or not a civilization will allow people to begin defining its basic laws based on their own sexual desires. Sexual desires have long been a part of marriage but have never been shifted to being its definining characteristic, instead the shift to defining laws and standards by your own desires and the refusal to have your desires civilized/shaped by the law is a pattern found in decadent civilizations that are declining. No one should be surprised that given American decadence (divorce, gluttony, etc.) that the notion of "gay rights" and so on has also come about. As John Adams once noted, "Have you ever found in history, one single example of a Nation thoroughly corrupted that was afterwards restored to virtue? ....And without virtue, there can be no political liberty....Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly? ....I believe no effort in favor of virtue is lost."

Effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice and folly, it seems that such things will be more common in American culture because American civilization is declining. Notions found in "gay rights" like the notion that people can and ought to self-define by their own sexual desires and work to change laws based on their own desires are only a symptom of decadence and decline that have already taken place.

A note on political science...

Perhaps one reason the debate about embryonic stem cells has become so prominent is that it combines scientific optimism and scientific despair so completely: the optimistic search for cures, the discontent that nature yields remedies for her afflictions so slowly, the resentment at Bush-administration moralists for standing in the way of scientific progress for nonscientific reasons. The greatest animus among scientists is directed at religious believers, often defined as anyone who seeks limits on scientific freedom for ethical reasons the scientists themselves do not find compelling. The deans of major research centers feel like persecuted Galileos, yet they defend their turf in the most unscientific ways: treating the paralyzed as props in the campaign for research funding, promising cures based only on preliminary experiments, caricaturing every opponent as an irrational fanatic.

For it turns out that the methods of science cannot vindicate the ends of science, and the knowledge acquired by scientific methods cannot always justify the particular experiments used to acquire it.

--Eric Cohen cf. Secondhand Smoke

ID at UofD

I missed this. I haven't kept up with much lately. I couldn't find much about it on the Udel webpage. I probably would have enjoyed the lectures and debates. I guess if the ID types failed to make absolute mincemeat of Darwinists I wouldn't have enjoyed it.

At the very beginning it is necessary to draw the Darwinian mind out of its own hypothetical goo by doing away with the degenerate epistemic standard of: "If I can imagine a little story about the past then that should be treated as scientific evidence for how things happened." If an ID type doesn't do that then the Darwinian mind will keep imagining things until it comes to imagine that its own feats of imagination are "scientific evidence." (And overwhelming at that)

Darwinism comes into conflict with religious traditions and religious stories about the past because Darwinian thinking itself is often based on little more than storytelling about the past. I.e., often it is not based on systematic thought and sound conceptual thinking tested and verified or falsified with empirical evidence.

The way that the Darwinian mind exchanges conceptual predictions about the future (that can therefore be tested) for perceptual images of the past (that will rely on untestable artistic imaginings) can be illustrated with the notion of natural selection and the way things are "fit" to a theory only after the events being described have happened. The ironic thing in science is that when a hypothesis fits itself to everything in order to survive as "science" it actually fits nothing scientifically and cannot be tested as to if it actually fits.

It often seems that the Darwinian mind feels a need to murmur about science ad naseum because hypotheses that emerge from it are not defined/"fit" in scientific ways, as is indicated by the fact that such hypotheses have often been "fit" to any set of empirical observations made.

Wasting time...

My recommendation: Company of Heroes

Screenshots:













It's a good RTS. (I.e. real time strategy game, like chess but better.) You need a good computer to run this game along with a decent graphics card of one sort or another.

It's rated M for language and flying body parts. The latter are rendered with a good physics engine:

The Darwinian mind equates science with storytelling

An interesting quote from a Darwinist:

Darwin matters because evolution matters. Evolution matters because science matters. Science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age, an epic saga about who we are, where we came from, and where we are going.

(Link)