Here come the Red Shirts, marching into meetings while sitting in chairs or standing against the walls. They call themselves “Patriots” who “take back their country” to restore Abe Lincoln’s ideal “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” so that they shall not “perish from the earth.” Beat the drum slowly, these […]
A little tough truth? They start crying for tact and kindness? These partial-birth abortions who look like adults but never reach spiritual or mental maturity just can’t take much. They yowl like newborn babies! No wonder you can’t discuss facts with ‘em, reality hurts too much. Exposing conceptual disorder or inept thinking causes too much […]
Quoting from David Berreby’s US AND THEM: The Science Of Identity, 2005/2008 (p. xxiii): “It is not what people *are* that matters; it is what they are *persuaded* they are… As David Kilcullen, the U.S. State Department’s counter-insurgency specialist, noted in 2006, persuasion is the essence of the problem. [Persuasion here is not a verb […]
(Adapted from the Foreword to my book, HARD LOOKS, 2009.) Conservatives were not always disconnected from reality and the larger, human community. They were honest, hard-working folks who obeyed the law and the broad, unwritten rules of decency. At times, they behaved admirably. They practiced charity toward others while refusing to “be their brothers’ keepers,” […]
In England, white male patriarchism rose as the British and other empires expanded colonial rule and exploitation world-wide. Rational framework was needed to explain how tiny numbers of western men deserved to control vast, eastern and New World populations and wealth. Combining a vulgarized version of Darwin’s theory of evolution (“survival of the fittest”), Galton’s […]
AquaAdvantage’s genetically modified salmon (the new “Frankenfish”) possibly about to burst on to market shelves, reveals two kinds of “conservative” attitude in conflict with each other. We think of business conservatives single-mindedly seeking profit from ever more efficient production, distribution and sales by cutting costs, either raising profit margins or edging out competition with new […]
“…No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to ask for whom the bell tolls; know it tolls for thee.” –John Donne [English poet, 1572-1631.] An image often suggested as a model portraying the selfhood of extreme conservatives is that of a […]