The Left Can’t Meme

It’s an old meme at this point that the left can’t meme. I had a great discussion last week with Brian Niemeier about his book, Don’t Give Money to People Who Hate You, and in it the subject of memeology of the left came up: I mentioned a former friend that had an image of her turned into a meme, so she started trying to make her own memes of herself as some sort of gatcha. The results were as you would expect – a wall of text trying to explain something crowding out (and thus reducing the impact of)…

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The Logic (and Strategy) of the Witch Test

If you don’t know about Brian Niemeier’s “Witch Test,” here’s a succinct rundown of it: The response to this is to say: Proclaim that Jesus is the Christ, and God has raised Him from the dead! The resulting discussion can go a number of different ways. It’s called the “Witch Test” because a witch will be unable to proclaim the divinity of Christ. This isn’t to say it always identifies real honest-to-goodness witches, but it is useful. Recently I’ve had some people push back on the use of this, attempting to say it is some sort of logical fallacy. It…

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Errors of Addition

Let us examine the two most common types of thinking errors that occur within the human mind, as I have witnessed and experienced as a writer, critic, philosopher, and political commentator. These are errors not of argument (though they can cause poor argumentation), but in understanding. The first is the error of Addition, which is where one adds information to a set of data or facts. The second is the error of Ignorance¸ in which one ignores or down-plays information that is relevant to a subject or judgment. Of these two errors, ignorance is the one that has over the…

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