Tag: Blogging

> More importantly, though, is the rhetorical usefulness of playing off a smiling accusation — of treason, a capital offense — as a gag. To start, it immediately diminishes those who find it upsetting. Implicit in Sanders' defense is a taunt: What's wrong, can't take a joke? It's a conversation ender, and for Trump, one he used successfully on his way to the White House and in his first year in the job. – (none)

> But (and this is important), there’s no reason a federal employee can’t criticize a sitting president.

This isn't a Sun King. This is not a joke. It's 1939. – (rhetoric trump )

> Or it is time to call this era flat-out a return to fascism.

> For him that is not “populism” (or the U.S. version, “economic anxiety,”) nor garden-variety corruption nor even longer-term democratic distress. Instead it is the reawakening of the force that began destroying Europe a century ago, outright fascism:

The term populism, being the preferred description for a modern-day revolt of the masses, will not provide any meaningful understanding concerning that phenomenon … The use of the term populist is only one more way to cultivate the denial that the ghost of fascism is haunting our societies again and to deny the fact that liberal democracies have turned into their opposite: mass democracies deprived of the spirit of democracy. – (trump naming rhetoric categorization politics )

> People perceive risk based largely on emotion, and terrorism is unquestionably frightening.

It’s about the rhetor, not the audience, in this case. An admin that knowingly plays an audience the way the admin does is engaged in more than a trick. – (politics rhetoric ethos trump )

> The new embassy is bland, vanilla, just as a diplomatic dinner is rarely riotous and a diplomatic speech is rarely spellbinding. Its use of art and nature and decoration are somewhat Starbucks – a grande vanilla latte then – and with approximately the same relation to real architecture as that has to real coffee. Timberlake’s multiple objectives are all good and worthy, but like wishing for world peace and an end to hunger are a touch platitudinous. They also contain the occasional conflict and contradiction – most obviously between being fortified and being nice – which the architects have chosen to smooth over rather than dramatise. The basic shape of the building is a cube, which Timberlake explains as being a timeless form. It does give the embassy a presence, but – because it minimises the amount of expensive external skin in relation to the volume – it also happens to be the most efficient shape for an office building. – (london ekphrasis trump )

> Nine Elms was a shrewd choice. It was one of the only places in London where the US could dictate the evolution of a masterplan that would put its shimmering cube at the centre of a fortified arc of paranoia, its building set back behind a militarised terrain of berms, mounds and moats, and surrounded by a necklace of some of the most expensive new apartments in the city, whose developers have been eager to cash in on being part of a new high-security “diplomatic quarter”. – (rhetoric london ekphrasis )

> Insofar as a voter backlash can repudiate the bigot in the White House and his choice to stoke racial and ethnic divisions for power, the country will benefit. – (politics rhetoric trump )

>He shares their worldview as easily as he shares their language and videos. He gives their voice and values the biggest platform in politics. He is a neo-fascist sympathizer in the mainstream of American politics, sitting at the heart of the West Wing and world power. – (trump rhetoric politics )

> This article serves as the introduction to DHQ's Special Issue, "Imagining the DH Undergraduate: Special Issue in Undergraduate Education in DH." Co-editors Emily Christina Murphy and Shannon R. Smith introduce the issue–its signficance, theoretical underpinnings, structure, articles, and case studies. The special issue is organized into four thematic clusters: 1) program models; 2) disciplinarity and DH pedagogy; 3) tool development; and 4) professional concerns. – (DH pedagogy undergrad )