Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams
By: Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Tags: Black Swan, Philosophy, Politics, Virtue Signalling, UK Politics

Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams

Clearing the discourse of abuses and abusers. The more you institutionalize rules of ethical behavior that should be voluntary (say, anti-racism, anti-sexism), the more they will be used as a cover for unethical actions.

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”.

Pedophrasts prey on our maternal (and paternal) instincts.

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”.

Example: The Nayirah testimony, a false congressional testimony by 15-year-old girl who provided only her first name, Nayirah (she turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.) was a bit responsible for tipping the US into the war. Nayirah claimed that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators a Kuwaiti hospital, and leave the babies to die. Nobody dared to question the veracity of her claims. Her claims, it turned out, were all fabrications; but it’s too late to reverse the war.

Bigoteering

Originates with Tim Ferriss, describes tagging someone (or someone’s opinions) as “racist”, “chauvinist” or somethinglikeit-ist in situations where these are not warranted. This is a shoddy manipulation to exploit the stigmas accompanying such labels and force the opponent to spent time and energy explaining “why he/she is not a bigot”.

Note that it is the true victims of bigotry that are insulted by virtue-peddling bigoteers.

Example: The Lebanese government is always accused of racism by first order bigoteers whenever they discuss the case of Syrian refugees (close to 20–30% of thee population), then put on the defensive having to explain that “we are not racist, but”. Lebanese officials fail to use the argument that foreign bigoteers should have some skin in the game and try to settle some Syrian refugees in their Washington, Parisian, or London backyard. They are the one who are racist by not doing so.

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 Canaanite, Phoenician or Coptic culture and habits away from Arab domination and Arabist identitarian monoculturism) of racism, forgetting that Arabism is grounded in a fundamentally imperialist, anti-inclusive 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 — culturally and politically — 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, 2) if it leads to the statistical clustering of causes that should be random, or, to the least, uncorrelated. This heuristic can help us identify monocultures, usually artificially propped up by some lobby.

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.