Free Speech versus Qualified Speech

Free Speech: Everyone has a right to their opinion and the freedom to express it.

Qualified Speech: Must earn its right to be featured at venues by the following qualifications:

• All claims must be proven valid and supported by evidence.
• An efficient balance between comprehension and conciseness. 
• No logical fallacies allowed.
• No cognitive biases allowed.
• No myths or superstitions.
• No restating a phrase ad nauseum.
• No weasel words (glittering genealities).
• No jargon or arcane words or phrases (for public venues)

Disqualified Speech: Hate Speech

• Language that dehumanizes, disparages, marginalizes, or otherwise lends to ostracizing other people.
• Language that elicits incorrect inferences or implies a call to commit crimes or violence against other people.

Score Keeping Political Rhetoric

Candidates running for various offices in the 2020 election cycle must validate the emotions of the voter (pathos), confirm the understanding of the voter's suffering (ethos) and provide a real solution to the voter's problems (logos). Seems reasonable, right? Why doesn't it happen? Easy, the pathos, ethos and logos are substituted for other rhetoric.

• Pathos: Demonstrate empathy, affirm and validate the feelings of voters.
• The candidate tries too hard to look "local" instead of owning his or her class status.
• The candidate has more photo ops with famous celebrities in a bid for popularity, but popularity is not the same as affinity.
• Ethos: Demonstrate context, understand the technical details of the problems.
• The candidate responds by referring to a problem as "the problem" or "your pain."
• Logos: Use critical thinking skills and logic to arrive at a solution for the problems.
• The candidate speaks in "glittering generalities" or platitudes.
• The candidate focuses on one or two specific issues that can be easily solved already.
• The candidate avoids an issue on which he or she is known to equivocate or an issue he or she voted against that is supported by most voters.

Or, the candidate simply lies.

For a complete list of Rhetorical terms, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_rhetorical_terms

Your Mental Answering Machine

I've been around people who get frustrated with family and friends who suffer from Alzheimer's and Dementia. They show visible symptoms of pain and increasing blood pressure. They do this to themselves unnecessarily. They can choose not to be upset, but they don't realize this.

Most people typically blame others or their situation for the way they feel. Seasonal Affective Disorder is apparently a real thing, but I don't buy into it because I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder across the board. The difference though, is that I am keenly aware of it. I didn't get diagnosed until I was over 45 years old.

People who are not aware of, or diligent about their own mental states are highly susceptible to cognitive biases and certain logical fallacies, beginning with the Fundamental Attribution Error or Attribution bias, or Misattribution of Arousal. (Arousal in the sense of something getting one's attention, not sexual.)

We are all guilty of saying someone or something makes us angry, or the weather makes us sad, or we allow ourselves to feel loneliness in the absence of loved ones. The key is that we allow ourselves to feel mental anguish. Our brains only receive sensory input, what we do with it is up to us.

A lexicon of criticism

I'm always searching for the right word to critique posts. Every subculture has its own euphemisms and favorite words to describe other subcultures. But this isn't about The Language of Youth Subculture, because it's outdated already. I'll be taking most of my definitions from https://www.vocabulary.com/

This is about long-standing technical words used to describe discourse, like screed, pablum, glib, platitude, tripe, etc. These terms are subjective, but their purpose may eventually be revealed. This is currently in its messy collection stage.

Proximal Superiority

A symptom of low self-esteem where a person is obsessed with finding flaws in other people around him or her for the most mundane reasons, in order to maintain an illusory sense of superiority.

• An employee becomes upset that a new employee started at the same wage as his current wage because he started at a lower wage when he was new, not realizing that the state raised the minimum wage.
• Gossips about other people.
• Bullies other people with destructive criticism instead of constructive criticism.

We live in a culture where insults are revered over constructive criticism.

We are sold the idea that destructive criticism is permissible in society. We live vicariously through the lives of celebrities who brutalize people.

Nature versus Nurture

The debate about Nature versus Nurture is a perfect example of a logical fallacy known as a false dichotomy. The human character is made up of both hormones (Nature) and history (Nurture).

HORMONES (Nature)	HISTORY (Nurture)
Joyful Days: The 4 "Happy Hormones" Power of Positivity: 5 Signs Your Anger Is Because of Your Hormones Mental Help.net: Physiology of Anger Science Daily: What happens when we get angry? Anxiety, Depression and Other Disorders (DSM5)	Operant Conditioning (B.F. Skinner) Simply Psychology: Skinner - Operant Conditioning Wikipedia: Operant Conditioning Wikipedia: Classical Conditioning

Your hormone levels and availability of receptors are inherited and regulated based on the programming of your genetics. Your history includes what you learn from your parents, school, church, your friends and the mass media.

Hormones and history play a role in lifestyle choices and affiliation. For instance, you are either generally happy or not. You may not be a happy person generally so you develop habits that contribute to the release of extra dopamine, such as certain drugs, alcohol, gambling, sky-diving, trolling on the Internet or other forms of risk-taking, running or other forms of intense exercise.

Masters and Johnson discovered that human sexuality is on a spectrum between homosexuality and heterosexuality, instead of the long-held either-or thinking. It's not a lifestyle choice, it's a genetic trait. People cannot be recruited into or out of homosexuality who are not already predisposed.

When you hate someone, a group or a situation, you are falsely attributing your hormone imbalance as being caused by that external source. Hate is a symptom of chronic personal frustration which indicates a hormone imbalance.

Your economic circumstances may contribute to your personal frustration and you may deal with your feelings through the aforementioned habits, or you can remember that you own your feelings.

Abject Consumerism

What are things most consumers don't think about most of the time?

• The working conditions of the laborers who cultivate, raise, mine, refine, forge, build, transport, display, advertise and sell, the goods consumers want.
• Wages
• Benefits
• Hours per shift, week, month or pay period.
• Physical safety standards
• Discrimination, favoritism, cronyism, sexual harassment.
• The impact on the environment where the raw materials are extracted.
• Erosion, flooding, fertilizer runoff, animal feces runoff, chemical contamination, air pollution, adjacent property values, 
• The waste generated by what is left over after the goods are consumed.
• Plastic in the oceans and landfills. chemicals seeping into rivers, aquifers and water tables.
• The sustainability of the resources from which the goods derive.
• Over-fishing depleted the main source of food in Somalia, leaving many with no choice but to become pirates.
• Deforestation of the Amazon and Canada.
• Depletion of soil nutrients.
• Drying up water reservoirs and rivers.