George Lakeoff: How the Progressive Mindset Is Holding the Left Back and Placing the World in the Right’s Lap
This is the conclusion I’ve come to as well, as far as identifying the problem — but being a lazy part time researcher of these things I didn’t know about George Lakeoff.
Notice that it is inaccurate to say the left “ceded important ground to the right”, but it is effective rhetoric in that it makes one read further.
The really big danger is that if you put enough effort into rhetoric over substance, it’s almost impossible to keep from falling into the “practical-effective rhetoric” way of thinking out of habit — i.e., you will start to believe the BS you are forced to come up with to compete effectively in politics.
George Lakoff, a cognitive science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, argues convincingly that the left makes grave mistakes with regard to how it frames issues and by doing so has ceded important ground to the right.
Shutterstock
truthdig.com July 28, 2015
From The Guardian
“The progressive mindset is screwing up the world. The progressive mindset is guaranteeing no progress on global warming. The progressive mindset is saying, ‘Yes, fracking is fine.’ The progressive mindset is saying, ‘Yes, genetically modified organisms are OK’, when, in fact, they’re horrible, and the progressive mindset doesn’t know how to describe how horrible they are. There’s a difference between progressive morality, which is great, and the progressive mindset, which is half OK and half awful.” … [George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley] cannot keep the frustration out of his voice: the left, he argues, is losing the…
View original post 631 more words
Pete's Politics and Variety 