“Propagandfication” and “Othereststream Poetry.”

The first is from the following post I just sent off to a site where I’m arguing against wacks who believe Shakespeare was an imposter and had called a post by one of them full of sludge, whereupon he questioned the appropriateness of my use of the term:

As a verosopher, I consider sludge by authorship wacks to be groundless assertions and badly-supported arguments that have been refuted hundreds of times by the sane.  Among them are such assertions as one you favor: “No one wrote a eulogy to Shakespeare after he died until 1623.”  The Water poet did.  Basse almost certainly did.  Maybe one or two others.  Read David Kathman’s essay on this at his and Terry Ross’s site.  I quote much of what he says in it in my book.

But even if we did not have the Water poet’s poem, or any other poem to Shakespeare until 1623, the assertion would be what I call a propagandification, which is a statement which some propagandist presents as true although we lack sufficient data to determine whether it is genuinely true or not.  If we had no poems dedicated to Shakespeare until 1623, a scholar of integrity would NOT say, “No one wrote a eulogy to Shakespeare after he died until 1623,” he would say, “No poem dedicated to Shakespeare after he died until 1623 has survived.”  If not an authorship wack, he would add that there is no reason to expect that any would, or even that any would necessarily have been written, although he would guess that some were but were withheld for publication in the First Folio.  He would certainly not consider the lack of poems to mean much beside all the evidence there IS for Shakespeare.  Absence of evidence can be useful when the identity of an author is obscure due to scarcity of data, but a monument, a collection of plays with the author’s name and picture in it, and known associates of his confirming his identity, forty or so books from when he was alive with his name on the title-page, mentions of him as a writer by a number of writers of his time, and much else is not scarcity of evidence.

The second occurred to me this morning when I was contemplating how “otherstream poetry” has lost the meaning I gave it–because so many use it for poetry I consider standard, like simple neo-Ashberianism.
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My latest coinage means “the propagandistic techniques of cranks, kooks and others advancing totally insane theories of verosophy such as the idea that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote the works attributed to him.”  It came to me while thinking about the contributions of Oxfordian Steve Steinberg to the thread here about the Oxfordian movie, Anonymous.  In reply to a post of mine trying for the third or fourth time to explain an argument against a contention of his, he told me that in order to explain something, I had to know something.  Here’s what I wrote back:

* * *

Good one, Steve, but somewhat off the mark.  Nonetheless, it’s gotten me to try to explain something to you again.  What I’m going to try to explain to you is how bad your tendency almost always to dodge problems with your position makes you look.  No, I realize that first I must explain to you that you DO this, for I fear I believe you don’t realize you do.  I will use this short back&forth of ours to do so.

First off, I describe a problem I have with your position: your contention that Shakespeare of Stratford would not have been exposed to a more or less standard curriculum is wrong.  You called the presumption that English schools of the time had any kind of standard curriculum a “myth” (debasing one of the world’s most precious terms by misusing it as a synonym for “error,” and implied synonym for “lie” the way so many propagandists moronically do).

At this point, you derided me for claiming that Latin, a single scholastic subject, could mean “curriculum,” or collection of subjects.  Or so I interpreted you to be doing.  You ignored the full context of my post which, I feel, should have made my point clear.  In any case, you made no attempt to figure out what my point was, if you truly failed to understand it, nor ask me what it was.  You EVADED the problem I had tried to bring to your attention.

2. Still, maybe I WAS (Italics intended) unclear.   If I was, my next post should have helped you, although it was sarcastically put.  Here is where your nature as a propagandistic evader of problems to your case came fully to the fore: as I probably not fully accurately recall, you continued not to understand my point; more important, you spread the conversation all over the place, a standardly propagandistic ploy of anti-Stratfordians (and probably unconscious) to draw one’s opponents into irrelevancies, and away from whatever point they are advancing, which you can’t deal effectively with.

3. I restated my point.  Your response to this was simply to tell me I don’t know anything–which, by the way, is another standardly propagandistic ploy of anti-Stratfordians: insulting one’s opponent maximally, consciously or unconsciously aware that making someone angry is a good way to distract him from his central intention.

Okay, now to give you an easy chance to show that you can respond to a description of something that may be wrong with your case without doing what I have claimed you do habitually: I will re-state as clearly as I can what’s wrong with your idea about what Shakespeare would have learned at his grammar school.  All you have to do is say what you disagree with in my statement and why–AND avoid telling me what a jerk Baldwin was (and I am), et cetera.  You must avoid the temptation otherwise to tackle about my characterization of you above, too.  In other words, I want you to demonstrate that you can argue unevasively, not just say you can.  But if you actually attend focusedly to my point, I will be glad to discuss my characterization of the way you operate in a different thread.

Good one, Steve, but somewhat off the mark.  Nonetheless, it’s gotten me to try to explain something to you again.  What I’m going to try to explain to you is how bad your tendency almost always to dodge problems with your position makes you look.  No, I realize that first I must explain to you that you DO this, for I fear I believe you don’t realize you do.  I will use this short back&forth of ours to do so.

First off, I describe a problem I have with your position: your contention that Shakespeare of Stratford would not have been exposed to a more or less standard curriculum is wrong.  You called the presumption that English schools of the time had any kind of standard curriculum a “myth” (debasing one of the world’s most precious terms by misusing it as a synonym for “error,” and implied synonym for “lie” the way so many propagandists moronically do).

At this point, you derided me for claiming that Latin, a single scholastic subject, could mean “curriculum,” or collection of subjects.  Or so I interpreted you to be doing.  You ignored the full context of my post which, I feel, should have made my point clear.  In any case, you made no attempt to figure out what my point was, if you truly failed to understand it, nor ask me what it was.  You EVADED the problem I had tried to bring to your attention.

2. Still, maybe I WAS (Italics intended) unclear.   If I was, my next post should have helped you, although it was sarcastically put.  Here is where your nature as a propagandistic evader of problems to your case came fully to the fore: as I probably not fully accurately recall, you continued not to understand my point; more important, you spread the conversation all over the place, a standardly propagandistic ploy of anti-Stratfordians (and probably unconscious) to draw one’s opponents into irrelevancies, and away from whatever point they are advancing, which you can’t deal effectively with.

3. I restated my point.  Your response to this was simply to tell me I don’t know anything–which, by the way, is another standardly propagandistic ploy of anti-Stratfordians: insulting one’s opponent maximally, consciously or unconsciously aware that making someone angry is a good way to distract him from his central intention.

Okay, now to give you an easy chance to show that you can respond to a description of something that may be wrong with your case without doing what I have claimed you do habitually: I will re-state as clearly as I can what’s wrong with your idea about what Shakespeare would have learned at his grammar school.  All you have to do is say what you disagree with in my statement and why–AND avoid telling me what a jerk Baldwin was (and I am), et cetera.  You must avoid the temptation otherwise to tackle about my characterization of you above, too.  In other words, I want you to demonstrate that you can argue unevasively, not just say you can.  But if you actually attend focusedly to my point, I will be glad to discuss my characterization of the way you operate in a different thread.

* * *

I then added a second post in which I warned that “I now have a new plan: using quotations from this enormous thread as the basis of a monograph on what I’m tentatively calling ‘Wackagandistic Techniques.’ So be careful what you type. If I actually go through with this, and I only get seriously involved in about two percent of the projects I tell people I’m going to, and finish less than one percent of those, I will post it and make changes to misquotations–or accurate quotations of passages their authors didn’t mean. In other words, I’ll try to be fair, though never not nasty.”

I chose to quote my first post because I think it pretty good–although way off-topic for this blog.  Beware: I will no doubt be using this blog for more matter concerned with wackagandism.  I find that there’s nothing I enjoy more than writing about mental dysfunctionality.  What I write has to be valuable: either because it’s insightful or because it epitomizes mental dysfunctionality.

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