The Limits of Appealing to Disgust

The rhetoric of disgust is common in moral discourse and political propaganda. Some believe it's pernicious, for it convinces without evidence. But scientific research now suggests that disgust is typically an effect, not a cause, of moral judgment. At best the emotion on its own only sometimes slightly amplifies a moral belief one already has. Appeals to disgust are thus dialectically unhelpful in discourse that seeks to convince. When opponents of abortion use repulsive images to make their case, they convince few, even if they rally their base. When champions of animal rights show graphic depictions of the torturous conditions of animals in factory farms, they convince only those previously ignorant of the severity of such conditions. Ultimately, disgust may be less pernicious than it is useless

Gloria Steinem, Testimony Before Senate Hearings on the Equal Rights Amendment (6 May 1970)

In her testimony before the Senate ERA hearings, Gloria Steinem refuted sex‐based myths about women and championed the ERA. Situating the ERA within the larger civil rights movement, Steinem called on Congress to acknowledge women\u27s oppression as a serious political issue. She also worked to make women\u27s rights issues more appealing to a mainstream audience by talking about the ERA\u27s benefits for men and women and by emphasizing the democratic principles it embodied

Sinister Subshade: The Revival of the Ku Klux Klan in Modern America

Through the implementation of qualitative analysis this study purposes to discover if there exists possible correlation between President Trump’s assent to power and the increasing legitimacy of the Ku Klux Klan. Using Ernest Bormann’s (1972) Fantasy Theme Criticism, the Knights Party official website and the Donald J. Trump official website are systematically analyzed for dramatis personae (character), setting and action. The rhetorical visions compiled from each analysis are compared employing Ernest Bormann’s (1980) Symbolic Convergence Theory. Resulting analysis suggests little to no correlation between the two movements. The two websites provide very different rhetorical visions with no overlap. The work presented here could have profound implications for future studies of social movements and may one day help to solve the problem of surviving hate groups in America

Making the case for the UK’s drone capability: public relations as a carrier of strategic culture

The purpose of this paper is to offer critical analysis of how public relations (PR) were used to justify the use of drones by the UK Government, through the promotion of a distinct strategic culture. The paper locates governmental PR discourse on drones in the UK since 2013 within the strategic culture associated with the global war on terror

Generación de recursos lingüísticos mediante la extracción de relaciones entre conceptos

Hoy en día disponemos de una gran cantidad de información en Internet y sería muy positivo poder obtener beneficio de ella para desarrollar sistemas de generación de texto. Nuestro objetivo inicial es desarrollar un generador de recursos lingüísticos basado en asociaciones de conceptos. Un generador de lenguaje natural normalmente tiene acceso a un gran conjunto de conocimiento del que selecciona información y presenta en diferentes formas a los usuarios finales. Por lo tanto, un sistema generador de lenguaje natural debe escoger información de la base de conocimiento, decidir cómo organizarla, y determinar cómo producir el texto en lenguaje natural. El problema ante el que nos encontramos en muchas ocasiones es la desorganización de tanta información disponible en Internet, pues para que resulte útil en el desarrollo de sistemas de Generación de Lenguaje Natural, la información debe estar organizada y relacionada. Esto se está cambiando con la llegada de herramientas relacionadas con la Web Semántica. En este trabajo se va a implementar un generador que, a partir de la información obtenida de algunas de estas herramientas, aquellas relacionadas con la asociación de conceptos semánticos, desarrolle recursos lingüísticos que serán posteriormente evaluados. El objetivo final de este trabajo es conocer el valor de las asociaciones de palabras para la generación de diferentes recursos de lenguaje natural. En un primer momento se ha desarrollado un generador de adivinanzas que crea acertijos sobre conceptos representados como sustantivos comunes. Estos acertijos se basan en comparaciones entre el concepto destino (por ejemplo, un diamante) y otras entidades que comparten algunas de sus propiedades (por ejemplo, el cemento). Los acertijos resultantes se componen como una secuencia de comparaciones utilizando esta plantilla: “Qué es … tan atributo como concepto?”, donde “atributo” es una propiedad del concepto buscado que es la respuesta al acertijo, y “concepto” es una entidad diferente que comparte el valor del atributo con el concepto destino. Por ejemplo, “¿Qué es … tan duro como el cemento y tan transparente como el pelo?” es un acertijo generado para el concepto diamante por el generador de adivinanzas. Posteriormente, se analiza la relación entre asociaciones de palabras ya disponibles en diferentes recursos web y el tipo de guras retóricas que las personas emplean regularmente. El objetivo es identificar regularidades o heurísticas que pueden ser empleadas en una etapa posterior para desarrollar un generador de texto. Será estudiada la capacidad de este sistema para la generación automática de analogías, símiles y metáforas

Changing politics, changing language : The effect of institutional and communicative changes on political language measured through content analysis of Italian intra-party debates

This paper examines the changes in political language that occurred after 1989 in Italy and focuses on textual documents drafted by intra-party subgroups between 1946 and 2010 that were related to the internal debates of Italian political parties. These documents, which are addressed to party members and activists rather than the wider public, have been analyzed through quantitative text analysis of word frequencies. The results confirm that a few relevant changes occurred that involve the lexicon, tone, and content of messages. However, concepts such as left and right are still relevant, and we observed neither a strong decline in the use of ideological terms nor a wider usage of populist words. Despite the growing personalization of politics, the main political leaders are not frequently mentioned, with two exceptions: Prodi and Berlusconi. Overall, there is a distance between intra-party politics and the logic of entertainment

Managing stake and accountability in Prime Ministers' accounts of the "refugee crisis" : A longitudinal analysis

Taking a (critical) discursive psychological approach, the present study explores the identity management of the Finnish and Swedish Prime Ministers (PM) in relation to the "refugee crisis" and their countries' asylum policies. By taking a longitudinal approach and analysing the PMs' accounts of the "refugee crisis" from 1-year period, we focused on the ways rhetorical devices related to ethos, logos, and pathos were used to manage the issues of stake and accountability, as well as on the ways in which categories were worked up to serve particular functions. Our comparative analysis demonstrated significant similarities in the Finnish and Swedish PMs' talk, especially with regard to the transfer from a discourse of pathos and ethos, describing refugees in terms of individualism and humaneness, to a discourse of logos, emphasizing rationality, justifying sharpened immigration policies, and homogenizing refugees. However, the different historical paths of the two countries' immigration policies and the specific political situation had implications for the PMs' discourse. The Swedish PM could feasibly scapegoat the Sweden Democrats and the political right in opposition, whereas the Finnish PM, with the populist radical right as a government partner, engaged more heavily in distinctions between "real, needing" and "false, undeserving" refugees. We argue for the longitudinal approach in the analysis of political discourse, as such an approach allows to identify the changes and continuities in the discourse, as well as to grasp the dialogical interplay between the discourse and its context.Peer reviewe