Frames for Life, Liberation, & Belonging - Othering and Belonging. Frames shape how a story is told: what is emphasized and deemphasized, included and excluded.
If the frame is individualism, then unions, community land trusts, and cooperative businesses are the stories of witches and thieves. If the frame is meritocracy, then affirmative action, reparations, maximum income, and guaranteed basic income are scientific impossibilities. If the frame is competition, then carbon taxes, the Environmental Protection Agency, free education, universal health care, and open borders are going the wrong direction down a one-way street.
Languaging. Emergence of Noopolitik. The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information StrategyBy John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt.
SmartMeme. Meme Wars. THE WHITE REVIEW – The new book, Meme Wars, comes at an interesting time for Adbusters.
Whilst the foundation and magazine were an important voice within the anti- and alter-globalisation movements, there was a sense that those movements had lost a popular traction by the financial crash of 2008. And yet Adbusters has since played a role in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, setting the tone in terms of horizontal decision-making and accessible activism. Now, this book seems to address a quite narrow audience of prospective economics students. Is that a tongue-in-cheek conceit to focus the book away from the collapsing ideology of neoliberal economics, or is the intention to shift a new generation of economists away from that still dominant paradigm? THE WHITE REVIEW – Is that quite a profound shift in the Adbusters project?
KALLE LASN – We’ve always worked on two levels. KALLE LASN – What you’re saying still feels a little bit like the old left talking. Nail to professor’s door. Winning the Story Wars - The Hero's Journey. The End Of The World Isn't As Likely As Humans Fighting Back. Dystopias make for boring futurism.
While it’s certainly true that one can tell a compelling dramatic story about the end of the world, as a mechanism of foresight, apocaphilia is trite at best, counter-productive at worst. Yet world-ending scenarios are easy to find, especially coming from advocates for various social-economic-global changes. As one of those advocates, I’m well aware of the need to avoid taking the easy route of wearing a figurative sign reading The End Is Nigh. We want people to take the risks we describe seriously, so there is an understandable temptation to stretch a challenging forecast to its horrific extremes—but ultimately, it’s a bad idea. Here’s why: It’s simplistic William Gibson famously said "the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed. " If your dystopian scenario includes the phrase "we’re all doomed" or otherwise implies the Globally Scary Threat will affect us all equally, it’s probably bad futurism. Culture Hacking: America's next big industry? George Lakoff - Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision.
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The Issue Trap. We hear it said all the time: Progressives won’t unite behind any set of ideas. We all have different ideas and care about different issues. The truth is that progressives do agree at the level of values and that there is a real basis for progressive unity. Progressive values cut across issues. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. A common mistaken ideology has convinced many progressives that they must “move to the right” to get more votes. 8. Progressives also paint conservative leaders as incompetent and not very smart, based on a misunderstanding of the conservative agenda. 9. Why You're Stuck in a Narrative. For some reason the narrative fallacy does not seem to get as much play as the other major cognitive fallacies.
Apart from discussions of "The Black Swan", I never see it mentioned anywhere. Perhaps this is because it's not considered a "real" bias, or because it's an amalgamation of several lower-level biases, or because it's difficult to do controlled studies for. Systems of Languaging. The Origins of Office Speak. Undoing Power. Undoing Power Klaus Krippendorff The Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger. This short but provocative book should be of interest to quite a range of philosophers and scholars, ranging from specialists in Hobbes, Hegel or Heidegger to philosophers of language and literary theorists, and even to moral theorists.
The Overton Window. Special essays that can be e-mailed to you!
“Civil Society: Moral Arguments for Limiting Government”: The Overton Window model suggests that the key to changing government policy lies in changing the views of the public. This, however, takes more than facts and logic. As Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman argues in this essay, winning the battle for people’s hearts and minds through “economic analysis alone is like bringing a knife to a gun fight.” Moving the Overton Window. When I tell people that I'm an atheist, I'm often asked if I think that fiery rhetoric and sharp critiques of religion, like the kind found in the writing of trailblazers like Richard Dawkins, is harming the cause by offending believers who might otherwise have been sympathetic.
