{"id":36199,"date":"2012-03-21T14:06:04","date_gmt":"2012-03-21T18:06:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp\/?p=36199"},"modified":"2012-03-21T14:23:55","modified_gmt":"2012-03-21T18:23:55","slug":"on-the-art-of-retortion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/2012\/03\/on-the-art-of-retortion\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Art of Retortion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"first\">&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>WRITING <\/strong>at<em><a href=\"http:\/\/orthosphere.org\/2012\/03\/20\/apologetical-weapons-retortion-2\/#more-682\"> The Orthosphere<\/a>, <\/em>Kristor examines a rhetorical weapon highly effective against modern liberalism. He writes:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Utopians are almost always intoxicated by some grand, glorious and beautiful vision, so that they tend to make sweeping statements of perfect generality. This tendency makes them, and their ideas and proposals, quite vulnerable to a rhetorical technique known as retortion. Retortion applies a doctrine to itself, to see whether it survives the treatment. If it does, the doctrine is more likely sound. If not \u2013 well, then it is dead. A doctrine that does not survive retortion is autophagic: self-devouring.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Two obvious examples:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Perhaps the simplest is the classic cant of every sophomore: There are no absolute truths. It seems so wise, right? Or, at least, it once did, until we all learned to ask, \u201cIs \u2018there are no absolute truths\u2019 absolutely true?\u201d If so, then it is false; if not, then it is false. So, there are indeed some absolute truths.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Another classic: \u201cWe ought to tolerate all points of view;\u201d which, of course, follows directly from the supposed truth of \u201cthere are no absolute truths.\u201d OK; the proper response of the traditionalist, or indeed of anyone not an idiot, is \u201cSo, I guess we ought to tolerate the point of view that we ought not to tolerate all points of view.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; WRITING at The Orthosphere, Kristor examines a rhetorical weapon highly effective against modern liberalism. He writes: Utopians are almost always intoxicated by some grand, glorious and beautiful vision, so that they tend to make sweeping statements of perfect generality. This tendency makes them, and their ideas and proposals, quite vulnerable to a rhetorical technique [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36199"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36208,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36199\/revisions\/36208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkinghousewife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}