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hypocrisy

The Scope and Limits of Satire: How to Be Offended Skillfully

June 28, 2021

Society

hypocrisy, satire, social masses, social media, society

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Let’s get this out of the way: Are there limits in satire? My answer to that is “No”. But we have to be careful defining satire in the first place.

Just like love or success – my two favorite examples – many people use the concept of satire to mean something entirely different. Doing so, they use “satire” without limits for purposes beyond the scope of satire.

In this post we’ll take a look at the dynamics of satire, its limits (which there shouldn’t be), and everything else you need to know so that you can offend yourself skillfully!

limits of satire
Satire has no limits, as long as it’s genuine satire, with a specific scope and purpose
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Appeal to Hypocrisy: the Tu Quoque Fallacy

December 27, 2018

Philosophy

fallacy, hypocrisy, idiocy, ignorance, reason, society

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Articles on fallacies are popular on the Home for Fiction blog. We’ve talked about the Appeal to Nature fallacy, the Bandwagon fallacy, and the Only Game in Town fallacy. Today I’ll talk to you about the Appeal to Hypocrisy fallacy, also known as “Tu Quoque”. The term is Latin and means “You, too”. I will use the terms interchangeably in this article, they mean exactly the same thing.

As with all fallacies, the Appeal to Hypocrisy is an attempt to ameliorate one’s argument with parameters that do not stand the test of argumentation and logic. Generally speaking, a person committing a fallacy might do it inadvertently; that is to say, without intent. Here’s an example:

Everyone at the office agrees, the boss is stupid.

This feels like a very natural thing to say. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it, right? And yet, though the statement might still be true, it’s not argumentatively solid. The mere fact that every employee agrees, doesn’t prove that the boss is indeed stupid. This is an example of the Bandwagon fallacy.

Conversely, it is uncommon that a person would commit the Appeal to Hypocrisy fallacy unknowingly. The nature of this fallacy is such that the person deploying it in an argument is usually fully aware that his/her argument is weak, and the fallacy is committed precisely to create distraction.

appeal to hypocrisy
Just because someone is a hypocrite, it does not remove the validity of their argument
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Hypocrisy Today: a Literary Excerpt

November 27, 2018

Fiction

excerpt, fiction, hypocrisy, musings

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It almost sounds like the name of a newspaper, doesn’t it? Hypocrisy Today. I don’t know if patterns of human behavior are timeless or not, maybe they are. Or, perhaps, it is only their drives that are unchangeable.

In other words, maybe love, hate, and the desire for power are eternal, whereas courtship, warfare, and hypocrisy depend on a given culture and society. Hypocrisy today might not be the same as it once was.

If something has changed in the way hypocrisy today propagates, that is certainly the levels of audacity it can reach. To put it simply, there used to be a fig leaf covering hypocritical actions. Politicians didn’t dare to lie blatantly. This has changed, drastically.

As any self-respecting author, fiction is for me a way to express the inexpressible, to channel a savage need to understand reality. And so, I’ve been lately working on a novel that is partly about hypocrisy in today’s world.

Instead of writing an article about it, here’s an excerpt from this upcoming novelI am referring to Illiterary Fiction. I have slightly modified it for online use.

hypocrisy today
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