The Rhetoric Report
December 1st, 2006
copyright c 2006 by Evan Pritchard
Resonance Magazine


This blogzine is not just about rhetoric, (the art of using heightened speech to motivate people) its about what might be called "raunchy rhetoric," the unbridled abuse of the art of elevated speech to motivate people in the wrong direction.

As debate is essential to democracy, the abuse of debate is the main enemy of democracy, and abusive rhetoric is the devil's toolkit! (How's that for rhetoric? I managed to demonize the devil himself!)

These bombasitc verb-bombs, weapons of mass deception, are quite rampant these days, especially since the midterm elections, and I am hoping to receive lots of articles from readers with sourced quotes from our elected officials in Washington and witty but respectful comebacks to their statements, complete with a chilling clinical analysis of their technique. In other words, all you BSDs, (Bull Shit Detectors) let's hear from you as you catch these slick politicians in the act.

All rhetoric has three essential factors, recognized by the ancient Greeks as Pathos, Ethos, and Logos; in other words, emotional appeal, appeal to morals and ethics, and appeal to logic and reason.

Raunchy Rhetoric abuses these three in some effective way to skew the results or conclusions of the debate: to appeal to the base emotions such as greed, hatred, vanity, anger, prejudice, etc.; to use flawed logic in every case so that the conclusion comes out wrong (2+2 =5) and those conclusions lead to ethicially questionable outcomes, possibly leading to moral dillemmas, which is of course avoided in the discussion, placing certain ethical problems outside the realm of "fair" discussion.