A flurry of articles, many from the pages at Salon, have attacked the Republican candidates for their attack on the moderators of the recent CNBC debate, and on the media in general. William Saletan, in Reality Sucks, insists the issue is not a division between the press and the public …
Our whole family sat around the television watching the concluding episode of The Fugitive. We each guessed who we thought had done the murder that the fugitive had spent so long pursuing while avoiding the law. Toward the end of the show, right before the commercial break, one of the …
Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the first part of his career attempting to provide a definitive foundation for logic, meaning, and language. This work was best represented by Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written with Bertrand Russell. In it they attempt to give mathematical precision to human experience. Wittgenstein was altered by his experiences in …
George Lakoff (Moral Politics) and Corey Robin (The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burkes to Sarah Palin) offer a similar take on the conservative mind. For Lakoff, one of the defining elements of conservatism is competition; without competition, there would be no conservatism. It is through competition that the individual …
David Brooks, in his column The Spirit of Enterprise, attributes the wealth of nations like Germany and the US to their habits, values and social capital. “It’s because many people in these countries…believe in a simple moral formula: effort should lead to reward as often as possible.” One reader writing in …
It seems like Robert Reich is channeling George Lakoff. In a recent article, The Rebirth of Social Darwinism, Reich describes the Republicans as harkening back to the social Darwinism of the late 1800’s. What’s striking is the language he uses, and the language he quotes. “To [William Graham] Sumner [professor of …
I was reading a recent article by Phil Kerpen entitled ‘Occupy’ Movement Is Not What Democracy Looks Like. In the article Mr. Kerpen makes two major points. One is that democracy means free elections and culminates in representative democracy; the other is that the OWS movement is undemocratic, that it is about …
In his book Moral Politics, George Lakoff presents a short description of Work as viewed from the conservative and the liberal frames of reference. His description reads like a manifesto comparing the Tea Party with OWS. In the book he describes the conservative view of work as Work Reward metaphor as …
I confess I haven’t gotten around to reading the book, but I was interested in one things in the wiki page review of George Lakoff’s book Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think. The review notes conservatives understanding of the Country is a Family metaphor. It got me to thinking, …