{"id":3087,"date":"2009-05-04T08:43:12","date_gmt":"2009-05-04T13:43:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=3087"},"modified":"2009-05-04T12:29:43","modified_gmt":"2009-05-04T17:29:43","slug":"they-were-after-all-british","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2009\/05\/04\/they-were-after-all-british\/","title":{"rendered":"they were, after all, british&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p align=\"justify\"><em>&#8230; actually, George Washington was born in Virginia, but the facts aren&#8217;t always the most important thing.<\/em><\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" hspace=\"5\" height=\"144\" border=\"1\" align=\"right\" width=\"125\" src=\"http:\/\/tbn1.google.com\/images?q=tbn:5-Adk-NMEaEJnM:http:\/\/drhebert.squarespace.com\/storage\/George%2520Washington%25201782%2520painting.jpg\" \/>The recent political cycle has brought us some important new ways of thinking. At first glance, they seem less lofty, more like political &quot;campaign techniques.&quot; Two prominant versions are <strong>Drew Weston<\/strong>, author of <u><strong>The Political Brain<\/strong><\/u> and <strong>George Lakoff<\/strong> who wrote, <u><strong>Thinking points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision<\/strong><\/u> [and a lot of other books]. Lakoff is a professor of <strong>Cognitive Linguistics<\/strong> at Berkeley and a former student of Noam Chomsky. Trying to discuss his ideas gets pretty heady. For example:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">When Lakoff claims the mind is &quot;embodied&quot;, he is arguing that almost all of human cognition, up through the most abstract reasoning, depends on and makes use of such concrete and &quot;low-level&quot; facilities as the sensorimotor system and the emotions. Therefore embodiment is a rejection not only of dualism vis-a-vis mind and matter, but also of claims that human reason can be basically understood without reference to the underlying &quot;implementation details&quot;. <\/div>\n<\/ul>\n<div align=\"justify\">That&#8217;s just not the kind of thing that fits in a blog. Drew Weston is a colleague at Emory University &#8211; a psychoanalytically oriented academic psychologist. He recently gave a presentation here entitled <strong>Shrinking the Presidency<\/strong>. He showed us political ads.&nbsp; The ones filled with logic&nbsp; and facts were boring. The ones aimed more at our primitive brain &#8211; emotions, core values, our &quot;soul&quot; were compelling. I&#8217;d read both men before that talk, and maybe understood, but the talk moved me a lot closer to understanding the essence of the thing than the books. And that&#8217;s the point of it all.<\/div>\n<p align=\"justify\">It&#8217;s a familiar point to me from my profession [psychoanalyst]. It&#8217;s Sigmund Freud&#8217;s point. We humans value our higher functions &#8211; logic, ideas, argument, civilization. But what really makes us tick are things that are much more in line with what&#8217;s &quot;built in&quot; &#8211; sex, aggression, greed, envy, love, hunger &#8211; the things you feel or just know instead of the things you think. We talk about what&#8217;s good for &quot;mankind&quot; but there&#8217;s a big dose of thinking about what&#8217;s good for &quot;this man that I am&quot; underneath it all. And when we vote, we listen to the candidate&#8217;s ideas and programs for mankind, but we vote more on &quot;that&#8217;s my kind of guy\/gal.&quot;<\/p>\n<div align=\"justify\">With that in mind, here are two really important blog posts written from a different perspective but hovering around this point by <strong>Paul Rosenberg<\/strong> writing at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.openleft.com\"><font color=\"#990000\"><strong>Open Left<\/strong><\/font><\/a>. <font color=\"#990000\"><strong>Open Left<\/strong><\/font> is Chris Bowers&#8217; and Matt Stoller&#8217;s blog. I rarely quote it because I can never think of anything to add &#8211; they&#8217;re &quot;my kind of guys.&quot; But <strong>Paul Rosenberg <\/strong>is on a real roll and deserves special mention:<\/div>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div><strong><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.openleft.com\/diary\/13141\/no-obama-conservatives-are-not-just-liberals-with-a-different-set-of-ideas\">No, Obama, Conservatives Are NOT Just Liberals With A Different Set Of Ideas<\/a><\/strong>: &#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><strong><a title=\"Site: Open Left - Front Page\" href=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/%7Er\/OpenLeft-FrontPage\/%7E3\/pf_AAaTTLbA\/conservatism-as-predation\" target=\"_blank\">Conservatism As Predation<\/a><\/strong>: &#8230;<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.openleft.com\/diary\/13145\/obamas-conservative-impersonations-of-goodfaith-consensusbuilding\" target=\"_blank\">Obama&#8217;s Conservative Impersonations of Good-Faith Consensus-Building<\/a><\/strong><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>&#8230; and there&#8217;s more coming. I&#8217;m not going to summarize and comment on Paul&#8217;s posts <strong>yet<\/strong>, because he&#8217;s not done. But if you&#8217;re my &quot;kind of person&quot; and reading this, I&#8217;m just suggesting you jump on board early and read what he has to say. And as for my cryptic heading, our &quot;Revolution&quot; didn&#8217;t &quot;revolve&quot; as much as we sometimes think&#8230;  <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; actually, George Washington was born in Virginia, but the facts aren&#8217;t always the most important thing. The recent political cycle has brought us some important new ways of thinking. At first glance, they seem less lofty, more like political &quot;campaign techniques.&quot; Two prominant versions are Drew Weston, author of The Political Brain and George [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3087\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}