Appeal To Fear
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Appeal To Fear
An appeal to fear (also called ''argumentum ad metum'' or ''argumentum in terrorem'') is a fallacy in which a person attempts to create support for an idea by attempting to increase fear towards an alternative. An appeal to fear is related to the broader strategy of fear appeal and is a common tactic in marketing, politics, and media (communication). Logic This fallacy has the following argument form: :Either P or Q is true. :Q is frightening. :Therefore, P is true. The argument is invalid. The appeal to emotion is used in exploiting existing fears to create support for the speaker's proposal, namely P. Also, often the false dilemma fallacy is involved, suggesting Q is the proposed idea's sole alternative. Fear, uncertainty and doubt Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) is the appeal to fear in sales or marketing; in which a company disseminates negative (and vague) information on a competitor's product. The term originated to describe misinformation tactics in the computer hardw ...
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Fallacy
A fallacy is the use of invalid or otherwise faulty reasoning, or "wrong moves," in the construction of an argument which may appear stronger than it really is if the fallacy is not spotted. The term in the Western intellectual tradition was introduced in the Aristotelian '' De Sophisticis Elenchis''. Some fallacies may be committed intentionally to manipulate or persuade by deception. Others may be committed unintentionally because of human limitations such as carelessness, cognitive or social biases and ignorance, or, potentially, as the inevitable consequence of the limitations of language and understanding of language. This includes ignorance of the right reasoning standard, but also ignorance of relevant properties of the context. For instance, the soundness of legal arguments depends on the context in which the arguments are made. Fallacies are commonly divided into "formal" and "informal." A formal fallacy is a flaw in the structure of a deductive argument which ren ...
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Monotonic Function
In mathematics, a monotonic function (or monotone function) is a function between ordered sets that preserves or reverses the given order. This concept first arose in calculus, and was later generalized to the more abstract setting of order theory. In calculus and analysis In calculus, a function f defined on a subset of the real numbers with real values is called ''monotonic'' if and only if it is either entirely non-increasing, or entirely non-decreasing. That is, as per Fig. 1, a function that increases monotonically does not exclusively have to increase, it simply must not decrease. A function is called ''monotonically increasing'' (also ''increasing'' or ''non-decreasing'') if for all x and y such that x \leq y one has f\!\left(x\right) \leq f\!\left(y\right), so f preserves the order (see Figure 1). Likewise, a function is called ''monotonically decreasing'' (also ''decreasing'' or ''non-increasing'') if, whenever x \leq y, then f\!\left(x\right) \geq f\!\left(y\ri ...
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The Terrorists Have Won
"...the terrorists have won" or "...then the terrorists win" are rhetorical phrases which were widely used in the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The phrase says "that if we pursue some particular course of action, why then, the terrorists have won" (as explained by Jeff Greenfield of CNN). Etymology The expression had been used before 2001. In 1986, an article in the Journal of the American Bar Association The American Bar Association (ABA) is a voluntary bar association of lawyers and law students, which is not specific to any jurisdiction in the United States. Founded in 1878, the ABA's most important stated activities are the setting of acad ... (ABA) reported: History In 1995, an editorial about the response to the Oklahoma City bombing in the ''Ocala Star-Banner'', of Ocala, Florida concluded: "Our response to terrorism should be carefully measured. If our First Amendment to the United States Constitution, First Amendment rights suffer as a resul ...
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Scareware
Scareware is a form of malware which uses social engineering to cause shock, anxiety, or the perception of a threat in order to manipulate users into buying unwanted software. Scareware is part of a class of malicious software that includes rogue security software, ransomware and other scam software that tricks users into believing their computer is infected with a virus, then suggests that they download and pay for fake antivirus software to remove it. Usually the virus is fictional and the software is non-functional or malware itself.'Scareware' scams trick searchers
(2009-03-23). Retrieved on 2009-03-23.
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Red Scare
A Red Scare is the promotion of a widespread fear of a potential rise of communism, anarchism or other leftist ideologies by a society or state. The term is most often used to refer to two periods in the history of the United States which are referred to by this name. The First Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War I, revolved around a perceived threat from the American labor movement, anarchist revolution, and political radicalism. The Second Red Scare, which occurred immediately after World War II, was preoccupied with the perception that national or foreign communists were infiltrating or subverting American society and the federal government. The name refers to the red flag as a common symbol of communism. First Red Scare (1917–1920) The first Red Scare in the United States accompanied the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent communist revolutions in Europe and beyond. Citizens of the United States in the years of World War I (1914-1918) ...
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Rape Culture
Rape culture is a setting, studied by several sociological theories, in which rape is pervasive and normalized due to societal attitudes about gender and sexuality. Behaviors commonly associated with rape culture include victim blaming, slut-shaming, sexual objectification, trivializing rape, denial of widespread rape, refusing to acknowledge the harm caused by sexual violence, or some combination of these. It has been used to describe and explain behavior within social groups, including prison rape and in conflict areas where war rape is used as psychological warfare. Entire societies have been alleged to be rape cultures. It is associated with rape fantasy and rape pornography. The notion of rape culture was developed by second-wave feminists, primarily in the United States, beginning in the 1960s. Critics of the concept dispute its existence or extent, arguing that the concept is too narrow or ttheiralthough there are cultures where rape is pervasive, the very idea of rape c ...
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Moral Panic
A moral panic is a widespread feeling of fear, often an irrational one, that some evil person or thing threatens the values, interests, or well-being of a community or society. It is "the process of arousing social concern over an issue", usually perpetuated by moral entrepreneurs and the mass media, and exacerbated by politicians and lawmakers. Stanley Cohen, who developed the term, states that moral panic happens when "a condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests". While the issues identified may be real, the claims "exaggerate the seriousness, extent, typicality and/or inevitability of harm". Moral panics are now studied in sociology and criminology, media studies, and cultural studies. Examples of moral panic include the belief in widespread abduction of children by predatory pedophiles; belief in ritual abuse of women and children by Satanic cults; and concerns over the effects of music lyrics ...
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List Of Fallacies
A fallacy is reasoning that is logically invalid, or that undermines the logical validity of an argument. All forms of human communication can contain fallacies. Because of their variety, fallacies are challenging to classify. They can be classified by their structure ( formal fallacies) or content (informal fallacies). Informal fallacies, the larger group, may then be subdivided into categories such as improper presumption, faulty generalization, and error in assigning causation and relevance, among others. The use of fallacies is common when the speaker's goal of achieving common agreement is more important to them than utilizing sound reasoning. When fallacies are used, the premise should be recognized as not well-grounded, the conclusion as unproven (but not necessarily false), and the argument as unsound. Formal fallacies A formal fallacy is an error in the argument's form. All formal fallacies are types of . * Appeal to probability – a statement that takes something ...
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Fear Mongering
Fearmongering, or scaremongering, is a form of manipulation that causes fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger. Theory According to evolutionary psychology, humans have a strong impulse to pay attention to danger because awareness of dangers has been important for survival throughout their evolutionary history. The effect is amplified by cultural evolution when the news media cater to people's appetite for news about dangers. The attention of citizens is a fiercely contested resource that news media, political campaigners, social reformers, advertisers, civil society organizations, missionaries, and cultural event makers compete over, according to attention economy. Social agents of all kinds are often using fearmongering as a tactic in the competition for attention, as illustrated by the examples below. Fearmongering can have strong psychological effects, which may be intended or unintended. One hypothesized effect is mean world syndrome in which people per ...
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Embrace, Extend And Extinguish
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors. Origin The strategy and phrase "embrace and extend" were first described outside Microsoft in a 1996 article in ''The New York Times'' titled "Tomorrow, the World Wide Web! Microsoft, the PC King, Wants to Reign Over the Internet", in which writer John Markoff said, "Rather than merely embrace and extend the Internet, the company's critics now fear, Microsoft intends to engulf it." The phrase "embrace and extend" also appears in a facetious motivational song by an anonymous Microsoft employee, and in an interview of Steve Ballmer by ''The New York Times''. A variant of the ph ...
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Demagogue
A demagogue (from Greek , a popular leader, a leader of a mob, from , people, populace, the commons + leading, leader) or rabble-rouser is a political leader in a democracy who gains popularity by arousing the common people against elites, especially through oratory that whips up the passions of crowds, appealing to emotion by scapegoating out-groups, exaggerating dangers to stoke fears, lying for emotional effect, or other rhetoric that tends to drown out reasoned deliberation and encourage fanatical popularity. Demagogues overturn established norms of political conduct, or promise or threaten to do so. Historian Reinhard Luthin defined ''demagogue'' as "...a politician skilled in oratory, flattery and invective; evasive in discussing vital issues; promising everything to everybody; appealing to the passions rather than the reason of the public; and arousing racial, religious, and class prejudices – a man whose lust for power without recourse to principle leads him to see ...
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Culture Of Fear
Culture of fear (or climate of fear) is the concept that people may incite fear in the general public to achieve political or workplace goals through emotional bias; it was developed as a sociological framework by Frank Furedi and has been more recently popularized by the American sociologist Barry Glassner. In politics Nazi leader Hermann Göring explains how people can be made fearful and to support a war they otherwise would oppose: In her book ''State and Opposition in Military Brazil'', Maria Helena Moreira Alves found a "culture of fear" was implemented as part of political repression since 1964. She used the term to describe methods implemented by the national security apparatus of Brazil in its effort to equate political participation with risk of arrest and torture. Cassação (English: cassation) is one such mechanism used to punish members of the military by legally declaring them dead. This enhanced the potential for political control through intensifying the ...
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