My only complaint is associating these rhetorical techniques with "wingnuts". They are actually used by all ideologues.

That, of course, is absolutely true. It also serves very nicely to illustrate part of the idea I had in writing this diary.

You see, consistently and exclusively using the term "wingnut" was a deliberate stylistic choice. An example, if you will, of points 8, 2 and 11 from above.

It's not intellectually tasteful. When I'm being idealistic, I even call these tactics deceitful. But they work. And we desperately need to stop losing. Now. In fact, we need to stop losing yesterday.

Your comment, by the way, was in violation of the "avoid friendly fire" tactic I pointed out at the end of the diary :-P

I say this only half in snark, because it really is something progressives are very bad at. If I had a € for every time progressives have taken an intellectually consistent, morally admirable and tactically and strategically execrable position on some issue, I'd be rich enough to be in the liberal-conservative demographic [1].

I say it only half seriously, though, because ET isn't mass media, so different rules apply here. Anyone who's read this deep into the thread without having his or her eyes glaze over is probably not in the target audience for this kind of propaganda anyway.

There is some good evidence that the ideologically blind have certain personality traits which makes them incapable of engaging in rational debate.

I think you're giving the wingnuts far too much credit (the whole benefit of the doubt thing is another one of those progressive traits that're strengths intellectually and a weaknesses tactically). Yes, there are some of them who are simply clinically insane. But the genuinely insane (let's call them "clinical wingnuts") are strongly supplemented by professional propaganda firms and paid opinion-shapers (let's call those "mendacious wingnuts").

The mendacious wingnuts aren't incapable of engaging in rational debate. They just don't do it, because their princely salaries depend on them doing the exact opposite. I'm pretty sure someone like Michael Behe is capable of engaging in a rational debate. He is, after all, a tenured professor at a reputable university. You don't generally get to that position by being a close-minded fool. But he has decided - for whatever reason (and your guess is as good as mine) - that Intelligent Design is more important than intellectual honesty.

Of course, in practise it makes little difference whether you are talking to a clinical or mendacious wingnut. Except that the apparatchiks usually get their script right, while the clinicals tend to make more Freudian slips.

I recommend reading the free, online book by psychologist Robert Altemeyer.

Been there, done that, didn't get any T-shirt. It's a good book, and I recommend it. But it's kind of tangential to the discussion of effective propaganda, because it deals almost exclusively with the pathological conservative, rather than the mendacious conservative.

After you read his book, you will see why engaging in debates with such people is a waste of time.

But as I hope I've made clear, I don't argue that we should debate the wingnuts. I argue that we should defeat them.

- Jake

[1] As an aside, "liberal-conservative" - like "judeo-christian" - is another example of item 11 in action. "Liberals" and "conservatives" are two distinct groups. But bundling them together like this serves to build the image of the right wing as a monolithic entity. Which in turn makes it easier to further conflate the liberal-conservatives with the bat-shit insane wingnuts (notice the use of tactics 2 and 5 here), thus smearing the liberal-conservatives by association.

Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam

Just a thought.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude