Woody's World

From Ancient Greece to the late 19th century, rhetoric played a central role in  Western education in  training orators, lawyers, counsellors, historians,  statesmen, and poets. Even high school students were  taught rhetoric.   Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic. It is one  of the three ancient arts  of  discourse. It's aim is to study the capacities of writers  or speakers needed to inform, persuade, or  motivate particular audiences in  specific situations.   Rhetoric typically provides a method for understanding, discovering, and  developing arguments for  particular situations.  According to the art of rhetoric, " argument " is  the activity of logic thus any profitable (good, true, competent,) argument is a manifestation of the  reasoning process.  With the loss of rhetoric in  our modern education system we have also lost or  modified the meanings of  some of our words related to it. For instance, our modern i

  I saw a recent article posted on Social Media by a a news aggregation site called "Raw Story". Of course their stories are anything but 'raw'. In fact they aggregate news from AFP and Reuters as well as summarizes news from other sources.   Just like most of the mass media these days, they cite another media outlet (Vanity Fair) who cites two more outlets (Bloomberg & Axios) who then consist of statements like "an anonymous source...", "someone close to the White House said...", or my favorite line the Axios article: "One person who spoke with the president interpreted his thinking this way"   This from Media Bias/Fact check site: "Overall, we rate Raw Story Left Biased based on story selection that favors the left and Mixed for factual reporting due to half-true, false and unproven claims, as well as promotion of mild pseudoscience misinformation."   I see media bias and people's bias going in a