I turned on my crystal radio set the other week and tuned it to an empty frequency. After listening long and hard to the squeaks and whistles, until sleep deprivation had finally taken hold of me, the following transmission eventually emerged from the white noise, which was only to be expected. After all, the Secret Masters are masters indeed of generating something that looks like signal from immense amounts of noise - like those pulsars, natural phenomena, that emerged from the background to almost convince (now-)Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell that she was receiving signals from intelligent space aliens. Of course, there was no such intelligence behind the pseudo-signal at all, and their often isn't any intelligence in the transmissions of the Secret Masters either. (Unlike Professor Bell Burnell with her pulsars, nobody else has been able to hear the unhuman voices that I heard from the white noise of my crystal radio set. I can't understand why.)
So, take your sanity in your own hands (as I do every day since I threw away my medication) and pray that you are never forced to endure...
Hello class, and thanks for turning up so promptly again. You certainly are the best students I've ever had. I hope you enjoyed last week's session on 'Vitriol and Sarcasm - the pros and cons'. Don't forget, you need to let us know by next week which Overlord or Overlords you're going to subsume yourself in once you've forfeited your mind to the blogosphere. As with all deities, they might not even notice you exist, insignificant as you are, and they might not realise that we consider them Overlords at all, but they need your worship just the same. And there are so many ways you can worship your Overlord: from being a stormtrooper against dissident thinkers all the way down to being a gullible punter with an ever open pocketbook.
In today's session I'm going to introduce you to one short but clear example of an excellent rhetorical technique that you must master over the coming weeks. I know that your brains have already started to atrophy after so much exposure to the toxic fumes of the blogosphere, but you must get this technique into your primitive lizard brain before the more advanced areas of your cortex are destroyed. Only by having our techniques fully embedded before you turn into a fully blown Blog Zombie will you be able to function after your transition into that better state of being.
In previous weeks we've looked at the bloggings of Dr Cory Oral and Joe Scampi. This week we look at the last of our expert rhetoricians, Charlie Chaff, author of Bestiality Sky, Tequila Sunrise and many other pieces. Each of these three is an excellent rhetorician whose work we've taken and adapted for our own purposes. I strongly recommend that you do likewise, hence this final session today. If only they knew how we use their techniques!
Charlie Chaff is a noted blogger (the EgoPope), techno-pundit and occasional fiction writer. It's not his fiction that concerns us today, but the area that he is most famous for: his blogging. The subject of his rhetoric is a man known as Dr Berk, who has apparently had many run-ins with Chaff throughout the years. Charlie Chaff had, and still has, a lot to say about his nemesis Dr Berk. In today's session we are going to look at just one of his pronouncements, for to study Chaff's whole body of Berkiana would take many months. We are going to concentrate solely on Chaff's reply number 217 on his own blog at the end of November in 2007. This is where he discusses the alleged failings of Dr Berk and the Speculative Fantabulation Workers' Guild. [**]
As Charlie Chaff says in this reply, "You'll just have to take my word for it that things are going on in the background that I can't tell you about. Joe Scampi is currently detailing some of his own accusations about Dr Berk's indiscretions elsewhere, but because of English libel law I can't tell you what these accusations or indiscretions are or where to find Joe's details about them. For myself, I always worry that Berk has stolen my watch after we've shaken hands."
Pay attention all of you, for you will never see a clearer example of pure rhetorical genius at work. What an excellent use of vagueness Chaff shows here! Not only doesn't he make any definite allegations about Dr Berk, but instead he points us to another source of allegations (Joe Scampi) to back-up his non-allegations, a source that we can't find or access, no matter how we try! And believe me, I did try. In other words, Charlie Chaff makes no identifiable allegations, just allegations of allegations. Marvellous! It's like pulling yourself up, not by your own bootstraps, but by somebody else's INVISIBLE bootstraps! Reasoning such as this would be dismissed in a physical courtroom with barely a thought, but in the virtual court of the blogosphere it goes unnoticed. And why? Because of Charlie Chaff's panache, that's why. That and his vast credibility as a master of reason in the blogosphere. His army of Blog Zombies help as well, to keep up the noise and obscure anybody else's signal. [Audience laughs.]
Yes, such audacity as Charlie Chaff displays really does deserve our applause. This and all the other techniques we've taught you over the last few weeks are well worth studying, for you'll need them if you are to become effective Blog Zombies in the coming months, once your upper cortex has leaked out of your ears, and the empty space filled with your Overlord's transceiver.
But we need to get back to our chosen sample, Chaff's statements about Dr Berk. Given the vague nature of Chaff's pronouncements, we can conclude that Dr Berk's supposed faults aren't known or even unknown, but UNKNOWABLE. ('Unknown unknowns', as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it). Thanks to English libel laws, Berk's 'faults' are potentially unknowable FOREVER. Let's consider what this particular brand of reasoning could lead to.
Back in the fifties, we were scared of the Reds we KNEW about over there in the Soviet Union. We were also scared about those who, UNKNOWN to us, were Reds under the bed at home. At least Senator McCarthy promised to root out all these unknown Reds for us. But Chaffian logic, with its emphasis on 'unknowability', would let us go one step further than McCarthy ever dared. That is, that there are Reds we can NEVER identify and allegations we can NEVER prove, no matter how many hearings or trials we hold. As long as we can point our fingers in some vague and ever-changing direction for our source of non-evidence, we could make as many vague accusations and arrest as many people as we liked! This is a truly breathtaking extension of the principles of Oppression. Well done, Charlie Chaff!
But Chaff is English, so I'll conclude with a trip closer to his home, to a person who quite possibly inspired his rhetorical technique. If we look closely at Chaff's words above, they are very similar in structure to those used by the English Prime Minister Tony Blair before Gulf War 2.0. To paraphrase him in the debate about going to war, he told his Parliament, "The intelligence services have lots of information about Iraq's military status but for security reasons we can't tell you anything else. You'll just have to trust me that there ARE weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and they CAN be deployed in 45 minutes." The damage in Iraq is still being dealt with by people other than Blair, who has left them to tidy up his mess. He has moved on to the million dollar lecture circuit and the comfortable life of a diplomat. Let's hope that such a future awaits Charlie Chaff. He deserves it.
Of course, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So, class, what might that tell you about the so-called allegations against poor old Dr Berk? [Laughs.]
Thank you.
[Projected on board] Next week: 'Power Corrupts' - setting yourself up as the Tinpot Dictator of your own kingdom in the blogosphere.
[**Lucian: If my decoding of this transmission is correct, then this blog entry has dropped from the bottom of Charlie Chaff's blog. To see it, you will have to look at the oldest comment page you can currently see and you will then see options that take you backward and forward in time. Follow the options back through time.]
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United We Stand, Divided They Fall | The Tools of Oppression | 21st Century Rhetoric for Blog Zombies | Our Enemies Must Die So That We Might Live! | Fixlets and Scampi's future | Bio of a Space Tyrant | Power Corrupts | Contacts and copyright