Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Lee Haslup <biglee AT haslups.com>]

Jim Allman wrote:

> It might help if we all try harder to understand the people "over 
> there," because there's a hell of a gulf between us. Same planet, 
> different worlds. Here's George Lakoff's attempt to "unpack" the tacit 
> conceptual models behind American politics:
>     http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/467716.html
>
> (Just an excerpt, but pretty cool. Has anybody here read the book? I'm 
> interested, but then I'm the kind of liberal weenie that responded to 
> Sept 11 by wanting to know more about modern Islam. Silly rabbit!)

I read the the excerpt linked to above and it is fairly interesting.  
Lakoff appears to be a thoughtful man trying to be fair.  That said, the 
excerpt does contain clues that his view of conserve thought is, shall 
we say, somewhat blurred by distance.  I could not help but notice that 
ideas attributed to conservatives, such as "freedom" or "pro-life"  or 
"civic duty" or "noblesse oblige" appear to require "quotation marks" to 
keep them from leaking out and mixing with the rest of the text, whereas 
in describing liberal thought no quotation marks are needed.

To be fair, the excerpt does talk more about conservative discourse than 
about liberal discourse and that may explain why not one liberal idea 
needs quotes.  But that would still suggest that Lakoff finds 
Conservatism the chief mystery that he is trying to explain.

BigLee