Modest Proposal

Jonathan Swift's satirical work A Modest Proposal is particularly successful at lambasting careless attitudes towards the poor because Swift's proposal that poor children be sold as food for the upper classes is rendered in the language of pseudo-scientific argument and economics. When deployed elsewhere, this combination of tone, appeals to authority, and abrogation of evidence is precisely the kind of language used to support various misguided, outdated, or bigoted ideologies, such as any number of various "scientific" works purporting to demonstrate the superiority of whites over blacks, or men over women, for example. In Swift's case, however, the tone he adopts and the logical fallacies he engages in function precisely to reveal themselves, so that Swift's use of these common tactics is a means of pointing them out and revealing that they are in fact tactics, or rhetorical methods used to support an otherwise insupportable argument. By performing...
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