What of these other fours?
 Post appears BELOW Table of Contents.
 This blog focuses on similarities between others' four-folds, tetrads, tetrachotomies, and mine, and includes links to online information on others’ fours in their own terms. It results from overgrowth of an old post at The Tetrast "What of these other fours?".
Table of Contents

Fours that I've
adopted or adapted:
Fours with a striking
likeness to mine:
Fours involving some
likeness to mine:
More-or-less different fours:
Unless otherwise stated within the post, first posted on Friday, December 5, 2008. Post times here are just a device to control the order of appearance. Most of the posts are based on entries in an older post "What of These Other Fours?" at The Tetrast.
Mikhail Epstein on tetrads in Soviet ideological language
Four disks against black background, 2x2 arrangement: upper left & lower right, two hammer-&-sickles, red against green star against red background, & green against red star against green background, & lower left & upper right, two Statues of Liberties, gold on storm-blue & vice versa, all traversed horizontally by a steeply zigzagging waveform suggesting troubled signal reception and maybe something going haywire, all of it against black background shaped like old Soviet-style squarish TV screen.Mikhail Epstein (often spelt "Epshtein" in library catalogs) in his “Relativistic Patterns in Totalitarian Thinking: an Inquiry into the Language of Soviet Ideology” discusses the Soviet ideolinguistic use of tetradic (I would say “tetrachotomical”) structures arising from pairs of two-value parameters. (In a few places, Epstein refers to it as the Soviet ideologists’ “tetralectics,” apparently only in order to suggest a four-pole version of “dialectics” and not in reference or allusion to any of the other particular brands of “Tetralectics” which I’ve discussed at this blog.) Epstein offers a fascinating account of the malign use of conceptual tetrachotomies — not particularly strong tetrachotomies philosophically, in my view, but there they are, they do their jobs. Basically, two opposite actions by an ally receive laudatory labels from the ideologist, and the same two opposite actions, when carried out by an enemy, receive denunciatory labels from the ideologist. For a simple example, the Soviet ideologist might systematically call Soviet boldness “brave” and Soviet caution “prudent,” and just as systematically call U.S. boldness “rash” and U.S. caution “cowardly.” (I discuss these particular concepts in “Tetrachotomies of future-oriented virtues and vices.”) One could imagine that the pattern could be found in political rhetoric more generally, though political rhetoric is not always shaped in full awareness of such inconsistency or hypocrisy as it harbors. When, in respect of the same behavior, one applies more favorable standards to one’s allies and less favorable standards to one’s adversaries, one may fall into such patterns. There is something of that aspect of the Soviet ideologist in each of us. Mikhail Epstein analyzes the malign Soviet extreme of weaponization of language and its prolongation into an insistent quadru-venomous stream of propaganda.
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