Talk:Moral Politics (book)

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It'd be nice if there were articles on cognitive linguistics and/or conceptual metaphor

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The following note and incomplete text don't really belong in the article, until they can be developed further. -- Ryguasu

Lakoff's own descriptive/proscriptive distinction, esp. RE Rawls (p 37) (p. 21)

(One or both of these claims about Jane Jacobs may be blatantly false. Could the author of the original Jane Jacobs observations correct this?)

Jane Jacobs, in her 'Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerece and Politics, shows how identical policies are rationalized in different ways for audiences of different interest groups. Lakoff's model helps explain why this might be an effective strategy. Lakoff also claims that, as of the date of writing, conservatives had much better stradegies for providing a palatable rationalization for their constrituents than did liberals, which was to explain some of their successes.

Jane Jacobs, in her 'Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerece and Politics, discusses how conservative politicians exploit "the logos", or male fascination with beauty, violence, and moral certainty, in order to gain power.

...

self-righteousness: p. 59

fairness: p 60

central problems: the author is an idiot

1. There is one cluster of beliefs that most conservatives share (including some kind of condemnation of abortion, a positive emphasis on military spending, and a fixed-percentage income tax) and another cluster that most liberals share (including some kind of support for abortion, a negative emphasis on military spending, and a progressive income tax). What is the explanation for this clustering? What "unifies each of the lists of moral priorities?" , such "mix and match" views seem comparatively rare. How come?
   • uh, why do most liberals believe that 2+2=4? well, it seems like the more probable belief.... the real question is why do people think some dude should get payed 10 mil a year to throw a baseball while someone who saves lives every day gets payed $10/hour, or that they have some kind of inherent right to make choices for other people, or that being by far the biggest military super power in the world somehow still leaves us miltarily vulnerable? THESE are the questions that really make one pause. good luck trying to make a conservative seriously consider them. therein lies the difference.
2. Liberals and conservatives usually not only disagree with one another but view the "other side" as largely incoherent. Many liberals, for example, see building more prisons a completely ineffective and illogical solution to crime, while many conservatives view it as the obvious solution. Why can't the one side even begin to understand the other?
   • whereas conservatives only the static aspect, liberals understand the dynamic nature of crime: liberals understand that more prisons don't do anything at all to styme or limit the development of new criminals, so that rate of crime will always be, as it was before, the growth rate of new criminals minus the rate at which criminals are incarcerated. this rate is unaffected by the number of prisons. build more prisons and if you work to fill them up you might for a while decrease the crime rate, but it won't take long before it reaches equilibrium again. what you need to do is change the equilibrium point. conservatives don't even understand what this means.
3. Why do liberals and conservatives tend to use the same words to mean different things? For example, a liberal might use the term "big government" to condemn the military, but, to a conservative, the term "big government" has nothing to do with the military, even though the military is a significant government institution.
   • because conservatives don't know that gvt. spending is like 50% military spending so they have their proportions all screwed up, either that or they don't care about the proportions, which means that, by definition they are being irrational and apparently they're fine with that. i guess you could call that a difference in values.
4. Why do liberals and conservatives make different issues the focus of campaigns? For example, why did the Republican leaders emphasize "family values" so much in their 1994 campaign, and why was similar emphasis not made by Democrats? Don't liberals also have families and a moral framework for reasoning about families?
   • because liberals know that the federal government isn't going to affect the way you raise your children or what your family is like so the whole point is moot - the association is farcicle and an obvious (and lame) political trick and they're not going to insult their constituent's intelligence by doing it nor with they stoop that low. they consider exploiting something so sacred for personal political gain to be morally reprehensible. they look at conservatives doing that and they say "really? you've got to be kidding me!" in sum, liberals have higher standards for themselves when it comes to honesty and morality.

In sum, the "central problems" seem like a bunch of really stupid questions with really obvious answers. One gets the feeling that the author should have done a bit more research before writing the book. Kevin Baas^talk 19:36, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't think the "central problems" summary does a very good job of explaining the basis of the ideas of the book. It reads to me like a conservative biased (in Lakoff's definition) interpretation of the ideas, which explains why it made such a nice straw man for Kevin_Baas to slay. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.203.139.173 (talk) 00:01, 14 December 2012 (UTC)