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The statement from Ariana Huffington (in bold below) is one of the best examples of the folk theory upon which Critical Discourse Analysis is based - namely that words influence people in certain inevitable ways. It is also a good example of the sources of disaffection with the mainstream debate experienced by US conservatives as…
Read more →Google Reader (1000+) "Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking." (Clement Atlee) There is no doubt that pithy aphorisms are an important instrument in the socialisation toolkit (construction inventory) or any group (from couples, groups of friends to political parties, nations and, these days, humanity). To…
Read more →Colbert I. King - Why Obama Stands With His Church - washingtonpost.com This history comes to mind as I listen to conservative commentators, chief among them MSNBC's Pat Buchanan, brand as "racist" the slogan adopted by Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago: "Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian." I am a big supporter (including in…
Read more →LII: Constitution To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries; I had no idea that copyright was part of the US Constitution until I read about this in an LA Times Op-Ed . The article was…
Read more →Lakoff in 'Moral Politics' talks about how competing models of family influence policy and politics debates in the US. This model duality is not only present in a variety of contexts but I would claim is the very foundation of all policy discourse (argument). In other words, whereever you look at a policy controversy you…
Read more →On The Media I'm not a psychologist, but I think that at some deep level, if the situation you’re living is a lie, and the situation these boys were living was one, and, moreover, at least the father was complicit in some way in the murder of these children’s parents - that situation, I do…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Male Primogeniture Jenni discusses the law of primogeniture with Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, who has asked the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate the legality of this centuries old practice, and to royal commentator and author Charles Mosley. BBC - Radio 4 Woman's Hour -Primogeniture: Should the…
Read more →Ubuntu: Just how popular is it? - Starry Hope Productions ...Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share , at least amongst the tech community . Wikipedia: Mind share is the amount of attention required by something and the time spent thinking about something . It can also refer to…
Read more →Is It Possible To Be Half-Adopted?   Imagining someone giving away semen or an egg couldn’t possibly feel the same as imagining a parent giving a way a baby. Could it? The friend who asked whether I consider Mrs. Ramirez to be adopted is adopted herself, something she doesn’t associate with rejection but rather with…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "Not So Innocent" (October 5, 2007) RICHARD HALPERN: Right. There's often a kind of loss of innocence that takes place in the paintings themselves, which reflect on a potential loss of innocence on the part of the viewer. I think an interesting example of that is Rockwell's painting called The…
Read more →Quote Details: William Hazlitt: Without the aid of... - The Quotations Page Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. William Hazlitt   English essayist (1778 - 1830) It's always disconcerting to find that something I've been saying for years has been said a…
Read more →On The Media In the parlance of Republican-primary politics, âsanctuaryâ? â as in sanctuary city â has become a bad word. ... GEOFFREY NUNBERG: Well, sometime around 2005, 2006, you begin to hear people on the right using the word, not for these cities and movements that aimed at providing specifically political asylum, but rather…
Read more →"Be polite, be professional, be prepared to kill." Lt. Col. Nagel summarizing a new US Army counterinsurgency manual (on the Daily Show ) This quote reminds of the critique of universalist pragmatics by Anna Wierzbicka. Wierzbicka and others (e.g. Goddard) points out that concepts like politeness (let alone professionalism) are extremely culture and language specific…
Read more →The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and…
Read more →Confessions of a BBC liberal - Times Online There is a perfectly reasonable case for progressive liberal reform of penal policy. There is also a perfectly reasonable case for a stricter and more punitive penal policy. This programme was quite clearly on the side of the former and the producer/writer was a member of BBC…
Read more →Making Light: Bookstore chain puts the screws on small publishers We have concluded that we have far too many suppliers, Malarkey again. Rimmer is inappropriately borrowing language from other industries, as though A&R were a construction firm and he’d noticed they were buying their bricks from too many different brickyards. Bricks are interchangeable. Books aren’t…
Read more →Analysis: Military Shows Gains in Iraq Despite political setbacks, American commanders are clinging to a hope that stability might be built from the bottom up—with local groups joining or aiding U.S. efforts to root out extremists —rather than from the top down, where national leaders have failed to act. Commanders are encouraged by signs that…
Read more →Disfavor for Bush Hits Rare Heights - washingtonpost.com That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell's boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made information far more available, while providing easy outlets for rage and polarization. Public disapproval of…
Read more →New Statesman - Who is the real Hillary? she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action. But then she has to be, because she must balance the projection of images of supposedly masculine US power and strength with the reality of being a woman; she must be seen as…
Read more →OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response. That's the deal. It's the real "grand bargain." If you are a midlevel Verizon executive who lives…
Read more →Amazon.com: Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Hegel to Whole Foods: Books: Jonah Goldberg Goldberg draws striking parallels between historic fascism and contemporary liberal doctrines. He argues that âpolitical correctnessâ? on campuses and calls for campaign finance reform echo the Nazis' suppression of free speech; and that liberals, like their fascist forebears, dismiss the democratic…
Read more →CBC.ca Arts - Retired Czech leader Havel pens new play "Living in the world of political language was quite an inspiration" he said. "I try [in my play] to reflect the automatic political language, where you say one word to which other words are immediately added and the cluster [of words] then travels from one…
Read more →The Newshoggers: Jeri Thompson - asset or albatross? [Part Two] However, thanks to a commenter at my place , I see by common definition "trophy wife" is indeed considered to be an insult. All I can say is that I didn't mean it as such. I define the term to simply mean a marriage where…
Read more →Malfunctioning fax machine prints out bomb ClipArt, forces evacuation of area - Engadget In any normal town across America there are countless faxes sent and received which feature poorly chosen ClipArt: why then must a promotional fax like the one pictured above fail to print out correctly -- leaving only a picture of a bomb…
Read more →RealClearPolitics - Articles - Is the War on Terror Over? Do we still need to fight a war on terror? The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11. The…
Read more →The following segment from the Wikipedia entry on suicide attack is a good example of how the restrictions on mapping in conceptual integration can be negotiated even "against the grain" of the "logic" of some of the basic propositional structures behind the conceptual frame. So, the argument against 'homicide bombing' correctly points out that the…
Read more →Imus's last outrage? - The Boston Globe Imus apologized for his latest remark and was suspended for two weeks. But this time, his job could be on the line, said John DePetro, a radio talk show host who was fired by WRKO after calling gubernatorial candidate Grace Ross a "fat lesbian." "As much as mine…
Read more →Nancy Pelosi, Respectfully Maintaining Her Own Image - washingtonpost.com There are few images more discomforting than public figures thrust into foreign cultures and required to wear the host's traditional attire. Almost without exception the visitors tend to look smaller and more vulnerable. They evoke the uneasiness of children who have been dressed by a parent…
Read more →Think Progress » Gingrich: When I Said âLanguage Of Living In The Ghetto,â I Meant Hebrew (Or Maybe Yiddish) Newt Gingrich said this past weekend that the U.S. should abolish bilingual education so that people arenât speaking âthe language of living in a ghetto.â? But last night on Hannity & Colmes, Gingrich claimed his statement…
Read more →Politics, Lies, and 93 v. 8 - Swampland - TIME Brooksâs distinction is between two different conceptions of the word âpolitical.â? Or rather, like most nice clear distinctions, there actually is a spectrum of meaning. US Attorneys are supposed to be political in the sense that in performing their duties they reflect the policies of…
Read more →The metaphoric mappings that structure most of our frames are usually seen as automatic. However, more often than not, they are negotiated through discourse prior to becoming fully blended (entrenched). This image is a great example of one such mapping negotiation done almost entirely visually. This Apple Lisa ad from the 1970s has two functions…
Read more →MyDD :: Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics Roger Ailes: "And it is true that Barack Obama is on the move. I don't know if it's true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, 'Why can't we catch this guy?'" [...]Obama is a terrorist. Ha ha ha. Ailes is clearly upset that his brand is being…
Read more →Why I had to quit the John Edwards campaign | Salon News Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note…
Read more →Eugene Robinson - An Inarticulate Kickoff - washingtonpost.com What is it, exactly, that white people mean when they call a black person "articulate"? ... Biden explained Obama's appeal as a presidential candidate by calling him "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." ... It's interesting that Obama's…
Read more →Media Matters - Conservatives continue to use Fox's 24 to support hawkish policies conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham told host Bill O'Reilly: "The average American out there loves the show 24. OK? They love Jack Bauer. They love 24. In my mind that's close to a national referendum that it's OK to use tough…
Read more →Was 9/11 really that bad? - Los Angeles Times Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?…
Read more →BBC NEWS | UK | Younger Muslims 'more political' Young Muslims are much more likely than their parents to be attracted to political forms of Islam, a think tank survey has suggested. Support for Sharia law, Islamic schools and wearing the veil is much stronger among younger Muslims, a poll for the centre-right Policy Exchange…
Read more →iTWire - A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? ... The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard…
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