( I made the mistake of saying anything positive about the evil countries lol.) So I mentioned off the cuff the new Cuban family code and that led to insanity. Because apparently protections for maybe even things like Poly-amorous relationships is just a gateway to polygamy?! Or can it be used like that? She's an Exmo (so am I) and a woman so I know this can be an issue they make sure of

I got into an argument where they cited the new cuban family code to have protections for Underage Marraiges. It think they used this article, from the fact they told me it was this organization and its the only one: https://www.equalitynow.org/discriminatory_law/cuba_the_family_code/

But if thats the one they were using, (which they got from a mid-argument google search to check up on it), then it was written in 2021. The problem is the family code I was talking about was the rectification made in 2022.

https://nacla.org/cubas-new-family-code-window-political-ecosystem

This argument went on for hours because of this AND THEY WERE USING AN OUT OF DATE ARTICLE THAT DIDN'T EVEN APPLY?!

Granted the way I argued was very shit, I have chosen never to argue ever again, even debates IRL are completely useless. Even if I was right, the way I argued made sure that no one would have cared. It ended with me calling them a spinless centrist with no beliefs, not fun, not good. I'm not out as any gender I want to be yet so i gave the impression of an angry Cis man defending the evil dictatorship's child brides law, but the debate was between two people who are manipulative post-libs who pretend they aren't. Even though my whole arguement was basically that the progressive forces in cuba exist and are powerful, as proven with the new law, and Cuba has a better democratic system. I trust Cuba to have the ability to change such a law if they view it as a problem WHICH THEY FUCKIN DID AND LIED TO ME USING AN OUT OF DATE ARTICLE, unlike the US which they kept comparing to and then get mad when I do the same but make Cuba look better (rightfully, viva fidel).

ALRIGHT

BUT

The fact this was a thing that existed is a rather bad thing, and is there a further problem within the society for it? Some human rights orgs have data on it being a problem: https://www.girlsnotbrides.org/learning-resources/child-marriage-atlas/regions-and-countries/cuba/#:~:text=What's%20the%20prevalence%20rate%3F,union%20before%20their%2018th%20birthday.

Of course it isn't a problem anymore, with a complete ban on all underage marriages without exceptions since the new law, but I'm still on edge.

    • Boo_Boo [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      its detrimental, especially since the moment its combative de-escalation is just forgotten and it becomes a smear fest.

        • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          So this may be my own take, but deep sophistry is all about a commitment to no truth, which means that arguments become less about being right and more about finding whatever point of the opponents argument is assumed/weak, and questioning that.

          The other advantage of sophistry is it's all about no truth except what is made, which works well with Marxist principles. We can question the assumptions of our opponents without any concern for some idea of "the good" in a platonic sense.

          The nice thing is if your audience is receptive, you can fit yourself to their receptivity. If they aren't, you don't need to feel as "attached" to ideological priors and just enjoy the ride. It's a different positionality from :posting:. The person I got a lot of my pedagogy from once described it closer to seduction, but in the ethical sense where both parties are receptive to it. When you're a sophist, it's about seducing and being seduced by the best argument simultaneously.

          Of course sometimes it's hard to adopt this position when we, for various reasons, believe our Marxist or anarchist :left-unity-4: principles. However, when trying to persuade people off the Internet, I feel like remaining open (and ready to be, as it were, filled by their argument before reflecting it back) is way more productive than an antagonistic stance.

          The basic reading list would involve something like the Gorgias and Phaedrus, Cicero's Orator, Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, then some more modern rhetorical thinkers like Kenneth Burke.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Debate is for losers. Rhetoric is a weapon. The hell with truth. No one cares about truth. Humiliate your enemy badly enough and the crowd will believe whatever you tell them.

            • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I mean I'd say rhetoric is sophistry but that's just sophistry lol.

              Also lol socrates.

              Edited to add a slightly more effort version:

              Often rhetoric is understood as ornamental. Sophistic rhetoric is all about going deeper and basically emptying your priors as to truth and such.

              This comes up in "what if a person uses rhetoric for a bad purpose" question. Non-sophists generally get tied up in platonic conceptions of the good.

              Sophists it's all about brute force and you just kinda say "well get a better argument"

              Obviously this doesn't apply to fascists, who you should just :fash-bash:

                • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  I don't think sophistry is necessarily about being false though.

                  As I said, it's about truth being made by humans versus some abstract sense of "fact" or "good" that's somehow beyond ourselves.

                  This this is entirely consistent with Marxist principles, where humans shape and make our material world. Sophistry is about freeing yourself to make the best argument at the time.

                  In a way it's far closer to kairos than any sense of ethos/pathos/logos. It's about doing what's necessary in the moment and grabbing hold of your opponent or audiences material as is necessary without concern for some abstract notion of "right".

                  Again, this isn't epistemic nihilism but openness. Being willing to shift the grounds as is necessary, since there's no absolute Archimedean point from which to position anything.

                  After all, all conceptions of truth and good are fundamentally manmade and contingent. Rhetoric is what structures (and determines) our notions of truth and good.

                  I think the difference between the sophist and the bullshitter is the bullshitter doesn't believe anything out of a nihilistic position. The sophist doesn't believe anything because they are committed to the contingent and human nature of all knowledge and truth.

                  It's basically a deeply "atheistic" position in the sense that no idea of good, truth, etc exists outside of a rhetorical and human constructedness.

                  • Mardoniush [she/her]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    This this is entirely consistent with Marxist principles, where humans shape and make our material world

                    The reverse is also true, and more foundational and important. That's why it's dialectical materialism and not dialectical idealism. Your approach is more traditionally Hegelian.

                    • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
                      ·
                      2 years ago

                      :marx-hi: you're right, and obviously we could get really materialist (i.e. mode of language in speech, posting, etc. structures argument and such as much as if not more than the actual content these days).

                    • ChestRockwell [comrade/them, any]
                      ·
                      2 years ago

                      I need to say, if this is not just an argument for but a demonstration of sophistry, you aren’t helping your case, seeing as you’re visibly grasping at straws.

                      It's not, mostly because I'm sincereposting here. In that, perhaps I'm being a shitty rhetorician, but I don't see the point of trying to do a form/content performance online. Also, the online medium doesn't allow for the kind of momentary opportunism that sophistry really thrives in. Hence why I originally mentioned it in the context of offline arguments/discussions, since online one is always communicating at a remove. I will however be lame and use ethos and cite some sources, rather than "visibly grasping at straws" in my reply.

                      The point that I have the most disagreement with you on is of course the most platonic...

                      It is permissive of being false, of “making the weaker argument the stronger” and so on. My position is that no such permissiveness is acceptable.

                      So, let's pause here. If by "weaker" and "stronger" you mean objectively or categorically, then that's just Platonism. I don't really want to go all in on an anti-Platonic debate, so if you're a Platonist let's just call it what it is and call this an impasse.

                      However, if you mean by "weaker" and "stronger" contingently determined categories, then I think we actually have common ground. In The Electronic Word Richard Lanham describes what he calls "The Q Question" - i.e. is a master of rhetoric a moral or "good" person. He suggests there are two defenses to this apparent problem (and by implication, the weaker/stronger slander).

                      1. Dodge the question and fall back on the idea of rhetoric as value neutral. This means that there are "good" and "bad" uses of rhetoric (i.e. one can support a "weaker" position and make it "stronger", etc.). Here's Lanham describing it as what he calls "The Weak Defense"

                      like Quintilian, we first deny the problem resolutely, and then construct something that I shall call "the Weak Defense." The Weak Defense argues that there are two kinds of rhetoric, good and bad. The good kind is used in good causes, the bad kind in bad causes. Our kind is the good kind; the bad kind is used by our opponents. This was Plato's solution, and Isocrates', and it has been enthusiastically embraced by humanists ever since.

                      So, in a nutshell, this is where you're positioning sophistry. It is essentially the "bad" kind of rhetoric that is ornamental, making the weaker stronger and fundamentally concerned with falsehood.

                      However, Lanham proposes an alternative, "The Strong Defense" that flips the ground. Basically, the very premise of a "weaker" or "stronger" rhetoric is constructed in a rhetorical space and thus is not a "truth" out there, but instead constantly being open to change and shifting positionalities. I'll cite Lanham again here, though I'll also give a tl;dr for folks below. The "No!" and "Yes!" are in reference to the Q Question - "Is a perfect orator a good man as well as a good orator"

                      It certainly explains why Quintilian, when he comes to address the advocate's dilemma in book 12, hides in another patch of up-market flummery. The law's answer to the "Q" question is generally taken to be "No!" And yet jurisprudence in the West from the Greeks onward has offered the opposite answer, a "Yes!" which I shall call "the Strong Defense," and which Samuel Johnson summarized with his usual absence of cant as, "Sir, you do not know it to be good or bad till the Judge determines it." The Strong Defense assumes that truth is determined by social dramas, some more formal than others but all man-made. Rhetoric in such a world is not ornamental but determinative, essentially creative. Truth once created in this way becomes referential, as in legal precedent. The court decides "what really happened" and we then measure against that. The Strong Defense implies a figure/ground shift between philosophy and rhetoric-in fact, as we shall see, a continued series of shifts. In its world, there is as much truth as we need, maybe more, but argument is open-ended, more like kiting checks than balancing books.

                      So, the sophistic position of the Strong Defense is that the weaker/stronger distinction literally is only determined after one engages in it. To put it in Lanham's terms, you have to make every argument for your sicko defendant even when you know he is guilty because if you cannot be proven wrong, then by the outcome you are not the "weaker" position. And indeed, in a real justice system, this would actually be the case (here's the point when we say death to AmeriKKKa all together and recognize that our system is nothing like the idealized version of law/justice Lanham and Johnson present). Rather than concerning ourselves with abstract conceptions of "Truth" beyond time (yes, even the eternal science of Dialectical Materialism), we can instead perform a "series of shifts" to arrive at a world where we actively re-evaluate our priors in the moment, "kiting checks" instead of "balancing books."

                      Fundamentally, the idea of the strong defense is that the very categories of "good/bad" "truth/falsehood" etc. are rhetorically determined and situated. The Marxist version of this, by the way, would be something like the dominant ideology of a culture follows from its material conditions. However, if we only concern ourselves with the dominant form of culture (truth), we blind ourselves to emergent and creative possibilities. This isn't to say they will all be right - they won't! I'm a ML for the most part, but if at some point after the revolution our anarchist comrades begin to make the case that we should dissolve the state apparatus and it's a compelling case rooted in strong arguments, why shouldn't we entertain the possibility and creatively imagine the death of the state. (Always :left-unity-4: folks).

                      I should say here again that we should never be open to fascism in any forms and, "shifting truths" again, as soon as we run into fascistic tendencies it's worth just throwing rhetoric aside and instead switching to violence, total violence (which I suppose is, in a way, a kind of rhetoric too). But when conversing in the real world, it's useful to retain a degree of ideological and rhetorical flexibility (the "openness" I was describing - emptying whatever beliefs you have to meet your audience at their level, even if it's the "weaker" level in your mind). Even if dialectical materialism is the eternal science (and personally, sincereposting again, I think it is!), if we're meeting someone at their level, why not instead appeal to a Christian moralism even if we personally don't believe in Christianity? Or an atheism if we don't believe in it? Fundamentally, your goal is to persuade someone to come to our side, so why not use every appeal and avenue in the book. So what if God is or isn't real? If we arrive with another comrade at our side, does it matter if they arrived through liberation theology or deep atheism? Just like an attorney, what's important is the result.

                      Again, this is what I mean by "emptying yourself and becoming water" - because while you may hold your deeply held convictions, from the sophistic position (which again, I'm not actually holding performing(edit) right now since I actually believe Lanham's argument) you do what must be done strategically, and in doing so you actively make what is true.

                      To be fair to Lanham, a pure weak defense or strong defense doesn't really work, and we should always be tactical. This is why I actually take your point re: empiricism and science. It doesn't make a whit of tactical sense to argue for flat earthism or anything like that, and so I don't think a deeply sophist thinker would actually defend it unless forced to in some form of "truth producing" game like a trial (i.e. defending a known pedo because your goal is ultimately to go through a process that leads to a conviction. Here, you're hoping to lose, but can't sandbag because that actually lets the pedo off).

                      To summarize, I think that if your categories of "weaker" and "stronger" are something closer to weaker and stronger (in the sense that weaker and stronger are contingent in the strongest sense), then I think that we are closer to agreement than perhaps your post would make. After all, in this case, rhetorical processes (and also material processes, let's be :marx-guns-blazing: for a moment) shape the categories of "weak" and "strong".

                      However, if your position is that no, there's absolute versions of "weak" and "strong," then you're on the side of the weak defense, and I just don't agree with that.

                      To quote Lanham again (because the analogy is entertaining)

                      Restricting rhetoric to style and delivery, Ramus solves the "Q" question by definition. Rhetoric is a cosmetic, and bad girls wear makeup as well as good ones, probably better.

                      If the art of rhetoric is merely the tools at our disposal, we impoverish ourselves from the creative and generative possibilities the Strong Defense opens up.

                      I sadly don't have time to write more, but I'm at least really enjoying our conversation (even with your barbs!). I'm entirely in earnest here, and would love to see your reply.