Joe Stromberg takes up linguistic cudgels on behalf of the South:

“In the February 2003 Liberty Magazine, Mr. Timothy Sandefur, lately a Lincoln Fellow at Claremont Institute, complains that in the wake of the Trent Lott affair, too many American political leaders are “minimizing the offensiveness of a Mississippi good ol’ boy who tells his audience that things wouldabin bettah if thar hain’t bin nunna dat dee-seg-ruh-gay-shun.”1

For my part, I am more taken with the offensiveness of the words I just put in italics. The effect is hideous – sort of Joel Chandler Harris + 90-proof anti-Southern venom! Luckily for us, post-colonial analysis saves the day.

If this Fellow (a singular counterpart to General Lee’s “those people”) can dress up in Hickface, what happens to all the post-colonial literature about white folks, minstrel shows, and all that? Will new theories arise? If Br’er Strauss and Br’er Jaffa ask to be thrown in the hermetic briar patch, is it all a big trick?

Mind you, the Fellow’s sally is not very funny, but perhaps he did not mean to be funny. I expect he meant to be insulting. He knows that Southerners don’t enjoy being insulted. There is a whole literature on this, including a very tedious book by Professor Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who studied under the even more tedious C. Vann Woodward.

There is an implicit syllogism here: 1. People who don’t sign on for full-bore Lincolnianism, rightly understood (= mercantilism), are bad people; and (1. B.) bad people should be insulted, and as often as possible. 2. Southerners don’t sign on for full-bore Lincolnian mercantilism. 3. Therefore, Southerners should be insulted daily, partly because they dislike it so much. It’s good for them, builds character, you know.

As Nietzsche might have said, that which doesn’t torch Atlanta or Columbia, once a week, strengthens us.

And now I read the sentence: “Things wouldabin,” etc., again. “Well, shut my mouth,” I cry, slapping myself on the knee; indeed I slap my knee a mite hard, but am somehow able to keep time with the high lonesome fiddle music that runs through the soundtrack of my post-Hillbilly mind. “How do,” I say, in the general direction of the imagined “good ol’ boy” conjured up for our contemptuous contemplation by the Fellow. How do these Northern gentry (and scalawags) find so much time to worry about little old us, when, left to our own devices, we would seldom pay any heed to them whatsoever? It is a mystery.

Perhaps Southerners’ general lack of interest in what “those people” do and say is the greatest crime of all…….

…

THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE OF HISTORY

What sociological or ideological conclusions may we draw from the above?

The Fellow has no ear for “dialect” writing. If he really wanted to present a Mississippi accent, he could sample the oeuvre of the late Jerry Clower. There he would find one variety of Mississippi speech along with ample evidence for Celtic substratum sentence-structure traceable to Ulster. My guess is he will not find this project very fetching.

It is more likely that the Fellow is just following the set “national” media rule (in place since the 1960s) whereby white Southerners’ speech must be rendered pseudo-phonetically so as to display the speakers’ boundless depravity, while all other persons will be written up as conforming in every way with the strictures of Mr. Fowler, no matter what they sound like.

George Wallace always got the Yankee pseudo-phonetic write-up, but can you imagine Ed Koch, the Rev. Al Sharpton, or Larry King written up the way they sound? Ha!

For a couple of centuries, northern interest groups and their allies have badgered and defamed Southerners. Poor old critics, I worry about them: If they finally succeed in abolishing the South, whatever will they do with themselves? Abolish the World, I suppose.

For two centuries, Yankees of a certain type were in the habit of denouncing Southerners for talking like Blacks, for eating the same food, and more of the same. They didn’t much care how this reflected on the Blacks.

Things have changed. And here’s the rub, if white Southerners are stupid for clinging to certain colonial expressions, where does that leave African-Americans who also use just as many – perhaps more – of them? If you sneer at one set of linguistic Southerners, how do you immunize another set of them from this assault?

I’m glad enough it isn’t my problem. Anyway, if the Fellow wants to hear some funny dialect material, he should listen to tapes of the late Lewis Grizzard. Old Lewis could do a good imitation of a flat, washed-out Midwestern accent. He found that regional accent amusing, I guess, but there wasn’t much venom in his depiction of it.

For venom mixed with the wisdom of the serpent you must betake yourself to New England, where fanatics grow out of the rocky soil. Maybe the Fellow will go up there sometime. Maybe he will render their speech phonetically for our edification.

Notes:

1. Timothy Sandefur, “One Cheer for Al Sharpton,” Liberty, 17, 2 (February 2003), p. 14 (my italics).
2.
John Samuel Kenyon, American Pronunciation (Ann Arbor, MI: George Wair Publishing, 1966), p. 106 (my emphasis).
3. C. T. Onions, ed., The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1955 (1933): “ain’t” (p. 38), “an’t” (p. 72), and “hain’t, haint” (p. 854).
4. H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 52.
5. Cf. Cleanth Brooks, The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1935).
6. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 256–264.

Update

On waking up this morning, I rethink this post.  True, the people below aren’t people I’d normally want to emulate. But these aren’t normal times.  So the right reaction to this is yes, but what else do you expect? Can’t expect people to leave all the legal looting to the government…

The Atlantic

“If you were making $1 million per year or more, but lost your job, would you file an unemployment claim? Nearly 3,000 American millionaires would have answered “yes” to this question in 2008, according to an article by Ryan J. Donmoyer at Bloomberg. IRS data shows that a whopping 2,840 households earning at least $1 million in 2008 also filed for government unemployment payments that year. There are two sort of immediate questions that arise from this fact: what were they thinking, and should this be allowed?”

What They Were Thinking?

To non-millionaires it might seem absurd that people who had such a staggering income recently would turn to the government for help after losing their jobs. But it shouldn’t. First, most wealthy people didn’t become that way by accident. They tend to be pretty savvy about money. So if the law entitles them to collect unemployment when laid off, then they aren’t the type to turn down free money. Only a fool would do that.”

My Comment:

If it’s foolish for millionaires to turn down government benefits, I suppose it’s insane for school teachers to.

Ah. And I thought there was something about honor in it.  Silly me. Time to make a trip to the government trough and see what I’m due for.

Well, it only confirms what I’ve said before.

Except for the rural poor and some pockets of ghetto poverty, except for children, the elderly, the sick, and some unfortunates, the rest of the people who are on the dole now are there because they aren’t willing to work at the part-time jobs out there, they’re not willing to make do with makeshift work.  and they’re not willing to change their spendthrift ways. The more they’re given, the more they’ll take.

[I rethought this. I think anger at abuse of the system shouldn’t make us forget that people really are suffering].

“Egoism, in a broader sense, has been… presented as the source of moral action. It has been said that we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, bind up the wounds of the man beaten by thieves, pour oil and wine into them, set him on our own beast and bring him to the inn, because we receive ourselves pleasure from these acts… These good acts give us pleasure, but how happens it that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct, in short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and to succor their distresses... The Creator would indeed have been a bungling artist had he intended man for a social animal without planting in him social dispositions. It is true they are not planted in every man, because there is no rule without exceptions; but it is false reasoning which converts exceptions into the general rule.”

–Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Law, 1814. ME 14:141

I don’t know exactly what Lila is referring to…but her request sounds reasonable…could you try to figure it out and ask Addison to add a line such as she suggests?

Thanks

Bill

In a message dated 1/29/2008 12:38:50 PM Eastern Standard Time, lila rajiva writes:

Mr B –

Just a word about those articles (Transit of Venus, Consuming Passions etc) which you’ve published under your name.

I am OK with it because the original pieces were written under your name. But, I should point out that they were not written solely for the DR (as your web page says) but BOTH for the DR and the book. I checked my email record. In fact, we really wrote them for the book and used them in the DR, especially CP.

Writing that it was only for the DR looks like an effort to undermine the copyright. Copyright, I should point out, isn’t affected by our agreement on acknowledgment and promoting……the copyright on all the material is still held by both of us.

The acknowledgment agreement just means we are allowing each other to cite our own work freely as a courtesy but we still accept that the essays were written for the book.

In the case of Transit, it’s all your essay and no input from me, so there is no problem even if there is a confusion.

But Consuming Passions was an essay I worked on and gave you important ideas for (homo farber etc) and it was one we wrote with the intention that it was to be used in the book. And I didn’t mind it being under your name because I knew the copyright would still be under both our names.

So it’s not fine to say it was written for the DR only. It was actually written for Mobs and published on DR.

I’d like a piece like that to have a little thing underneath saying (with the help of Lila Rajiva)…I’m not asking to share the byline, but just a little acknowledgment. Since no one ever knew I helped you on the DR for the period we wrote the book..and your readers don’t know that a lot of the essays under your name have some input from me…

Which means, if I cite my own idea later on, it will just seem – unfairly – like I was poaching on your idea.

You can publish C Passions under your name under your collected works, for eg, but I would like you to acknowledge my help on it and on the essays central to the argument (Consuming Passions, All Men are Created Equal – where it was me who originally gave you the idea of scale from the Hutterite research and argued it  was more important than the  public-private distinction).

In turn, although my solo essays contain references to do-gooders and world-improvers, I would credit you as having coined those terms in any discussions…but that’s less important, because most people who read us would recognize them anyway as your terms since it’s obvious I am imitating you.

Doesn’t mean you can’t publish the essays under your name.  But it means we need to draw up a consistent citation policy that will spare us trouble later. And Addison had better abide by it.

Hope you are OK with that. I will draw up a very detailed analysis of the whole book which will show how each part can be cited which will let you use your own work separately but also acknowledge whenever there was substantial contribution (more than editorial) from me. You will have a chance to vet it of course.

I will consult with a copyright attorney and then send it to you for future citation.

Meanwhile, just let Addison know that those essays were written for the book as much as for the DR..even more so, so he should take that line off..

So that’s something concrete you can give your assent to. Since you asked what you could do to help.

I tried to call you but you weren’t available.
Say hello to Claire. She was nice to me.

Lila

From: William Bonner

Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:11:17 -0500
Subject: Re: foreign rights

I know she thinks she’s been treated shabbily.  But when I ask how…and what can be done about it…I never get an answer that I can understand or act upon.  I just get insults.

She seems to want explanations from me for things that I don’t know anything about.  And when I tell her that I just don’t know anything about it…she believes I am lying.
(And then accuses me of lying to her for the last couple of years…about what, I’m not sure.)

Not that this is your problem…but you seem to believe that she actually has been treated shabbily.  So, I’ll assume you are a reasonable person…and just ask — How?
And if so…is there anything I can do about it?

Bill

P.S.  I’m at my phone..in London…but only for a few minutes more…I have to leave for Paris this afternoon.

From: Lila Rajiva
Sent: Sunday, January 13, 2008 9:15 PM
To: J H
Cc: Bill Bonner; T R
Subject: French contract/Dr Skousen book signing /PR issues

J –

I think we can take care of the Chinese contract this week.

Not a problem except that the Chinese agent is now charging us, a second fee, probably another10% or so, like the Germans.

So, I’m asking DELETED to put a note in that the contract is acceptable assuming reasonable fees. It’s not a deal breaker, it just means I don’t want them asking for something exorbitant like 20% after we sign. Let me know if that might be an issue.

I’ve asked DELETED to go over to your office and sign off on it, including the royalties change and acknowledgment document, whenever you both can arrange it.
[J H] No problem.
French contract:

If you are able, please tell Bill I am willing to do what is reasonably possible to help him on it.
Also, if you can, please ask him if he would consider another (more commercial) publisher?
Or even translating and publishing on our own or through something like Interlink..
It may actually be better that way. [J H] He said that if you or someone can find a publisher it’s okay with him.  He is not interested in publishing ourselves…we have no way to distribute.

PR peculiarities:

Also, a couple of odd things:

1. Wiley refused to let me do a book talk or signing in August/September in Baltimore where it would cost nothing (I had a lot of requests). But now they have Dr. Skousen talking about the book and signing it in Texas (listed on their website) in April… A reader wrote and asked…..Is that some kind of mistake…or did Bill OK it? Is it usual for third parties to sign and talk about books…isn’t that part of the promotion designated for authors? Just asking. [J H] He can’t imagine it…and it doesn’t make sense to him.  He doesn’t know anything about it.

With respect, it wasn’t what we agreed….

2. The invites to Bermuda and to Freedom Fest to me to speak on the book seem to have been canceled around the week in December when I asked for more  time to review the contracts.
Was that related? Not giving offense, just curious.[J H]  He doesn’t know anything about the invitations and has never spoken to anyone about it.

And a couple of corrections I hope can be made:

Corrections:

1. On Bill’s bio on the DR, there is still no reference/link to “Mobs” at all.. I’ve been asking for that for a few months. And it would be nice, if the page mentioned me as author too. Otherwise it really sounds like a deliberate snub. Not good PR.

Attribution isn’t promotion. It’s an ownership issue, like the title to a house. [J H] I will ask them to include this.

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/Writers/BillBonner.html

2. On the same page, the page length review by Alex Greene doesn’t credit me at all and then quotes a couple of lines I wrote (and have published on the web) as Bill’s….it was probably a mistake but I’ve asked for it to be changed a number of times[J H] He doesn’t know anything about Alex Greene’s review and nver spoke to Alex. And Bill says that quote IS from you. I will ask whoever controls the website to make the changes you requested.

http://www.investmentu.com/IUEL/2007/20070827.html

“As Bill writes, “Thus does the neocortex sputter in fits and starts from dubious assumptions to preposterous conclusions with nary a whisper of doubt in between.”

(actually, these are my lines in Ch 4)

(Also, in the review Greene still uses that quote from Faber’s from my private email..Bill told me it’s minor…maybe..).

Not sure if there are other implications for me arising from this…
Does Bill think this is fair and in keeping with our deal on the book?

Not sure what I have done really except ask for some time and clarity on things and do my best to keep my end of the bargain.

Respectfully.
Lila

______________________________________

Note on November 3, Wed.: I added this additional email exchange from the time, to show that I was already working on the Goldman Sachs connection in June 2006, that it originated in my larger research interests from my first book and my writing for Counterpunch, that Mr. Bonner was aware of this, and aware of my ongoing media activism and my professional stake in having my contributions being seen independently, not as simply ghost-writing or editorial work on behalf of Agora’s marketing of its own products. Again, no malice or harm is intended to anyone mentioned here. I post these simply to show I was telling the truth all along, didn’t exploit the company platform in anyway, didn’t insinuate myself into it in order to bust its modus operandi, didn’t manipulate or otherwise do anything self-aggrandizing, but simply negotiated a contract fairly and truthfully…and then found myself at the receiving end of a lot of abuse from several different people who are far more powerful and connected than I am...

Re: Christison CP article on Israeli lobby?

Dear Lila,

We’re honored to have such good comments from a great writer and activist
like you. Thanks so much…… It would be nice to think that
someday we truthtellers will emerge into the light of the mainstream and be
heard, but on most days this seems a forlorn hope

Keep up the good struggle anyway–just in case, as Gandhi said, we win in
the end.

Thanks so much,
Kathy & Bill Christison

—– Original Message —–
From: “Lila Rajiva”
To: kathy and bill christison
Cc: Willam Bonner; editor at dissidentvoice.org
Sent: Saturday, June 17, 2006 11:31 AM
Subject: Christison CP article on Israeli lobby

Enjoyed your critique in CP of Chomsky/Finkelstein over the
Mearsheimer/Walt piece immensely. It’s right on.

When I was researching “The Language of Empire” – on the US media – I
realized that I would have to make the Israeli lobby fairly
central….spent three chapters doing just that only to find them axed
with a lot of feeble excuses by my publisher. Nor have I heard any
alternative magazine mention the conservative Jewish organization EMET
which promoted the Iraq war, though the Wall Street Journal actually did a
piece on it.

I am currently writing about the appointment of Hank Paulson of Goldman
Sachs and even a cursory glance at the literature shows how far back its
influence over government extends and to what it tended.

It’s easy to succumb to the Marxist analysis that US foreign policy is
always only about corporate interests. But in my view, the ascendancy of
Israel’s power in the West has more to do with esoteric religious
claims…from the truth of the Darby Bible to the Lost Tribes of
Israel….to the rebuilding of Solomon’s temple. One needs to connect US
to British history to see this.

And a conspiratorial view of history is merely a view that says that
individuals act at the helm of history not as unconscious forces of a
material dialectic but also and at least equally as conscious forces in
the services of ideas.

Lila Rajiva

__________________________________

Added: November 10, 2009

It was Mr. Bonner who approached me and asked me to work with him. It took 4 months of back and forth before, with some reluctance, I agreed to.

• your writing?

8/25/05

William Bonner

From:	William Bonner
Sent:	Thu 8/25/05 1:35 PM
To:	Lrajiva

I read your piece on Baltimore real estate.

(Someone sent it to me.  I live in Europe.)

I liked the style and content.  It made me wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to meet.  I have a publishing business in Baltimore,  Agora, Inc.  We have offices all over the world (we’re a mini-multi-national).  We hope to open one in India next year, as a matter of fact.

If you are interested in freelance or salary work…it might be worth a visit.

Unfortunately, I’m based in London.  I’m in Baltimore today only (leaving at 6PM).

Of course, we can always follow up by email.

With admiration,

Bill Bonner

Added: November 11, 2005

“Playing Monopoly in Charm City” is the piece  I wrote on the housing market, which Bonner refers to in his letter below above.

One of the reasons I ended up accepting his offer, even though I had doubts about it, was that I’d actually lost quite a bit of money selling out of some mutual funds (where I held my savings), all because of something I’d read in a Daily Reckoning editorial at a certain point in time that turned out later to have been the bottom of the market. After that debacle, I started following other newsletters.

Before my loss, I’d been subscribing to a couple of Agora newsletters – NAMES DELETED.  I wasn’t unhappy with either. They were cheap (about $60 a year) and they gave me some good ideas. I never made any money from them, but, except for one stock, I didn’t really lose. And even that probably had more to do with the fact that I never followed their timing.  Since I subscribed mainly to get ideas, I didn’t think it was a bad deal at all. I enjoyed reading the DR commentary, nonetheless, and considered them to be on the cutting edge of alternative insights into the economy. I still think they are.

As for the money I lost that fall, I guess I learned a hard lesson. And I learned it well. Although it made me too terrified to trade for several years (until 2008 really), I did learn to control my emotions, an invaluable skill in recent years. So, like Ryals, I too lost money, because of Agora. The difference is that I didn’t blame them alone. Instead, I tried to get better at investing.

In any case, at the time I was hired in late 2005, I mentioned my loss to Mr. Bonner and told him that he ought to write in a less alarmist fashion.  I recall he told me then to consider his offer a partial payback. Of course, he was also opening an Indian office, and my  ethnic background, as well as my interests in international politics, propaganda, and globalization, all recommended themselves to him.

Now, before my interview, I’d googled the company and had run into the posts by Ryals.  I’d written to him and asked him what his criticism was about. He wrote back so elaborately and in such detail that I decided he might be a bit unhinged and  imagining things.

Still, I  did ask Mr. Bonner about Davidson and Stansberry. I was told that the former no longer worked there. Bonner also insisted that the Stansberry case was not a “pump and dump,” as the press had dubbed it.  That was certainly true, although my opinion was that Stansberry was nonetheless guilty of hyping, beyond what might be normal even in the newsletter business. I recall telling Mr. Bonner at the time that the first amendment would not protect blatant exaggeration when there was a large sum involved.  He shrugged and remarked that the people who bought these sorts of investments were not innocents. Many of them were speculators and touts themselves, and the rest ought to know better than to gamble. He admitted he had developed a somewhat callous attitude about such things.

Throughout, our conservation was courteous.  As anyone who knows him would vouch, Mr. Bonner, widely known in the direct-mail/online marketing business, is a very polished and persuasive individual, and when he assured me that I could work on my own, without any contact with either of the two people mentioned, I figured it would be worth giving the project a shot.

So that’s what happened. I’ve described it here at length so as to counter the false, malicious, and positively ridiculous allegations Ryals has plastered about me all over Indymedia and other sites.

There was nothing in the slightest bit nefarious about how I went to work for Agora.  I did not know Stansberry or Davidson at the time, or at any point after. I believe I’ve been in the same room as Stansberry just once. And I subscribed to a newsletter published by him. That’s it. Davidson I know nothing about, beyond what I’ve read.

As for Stansberry writing to Ryals at the same time as I did, that’s simply a coincidence. And not such a remarkable one, considering that Ryals was calling Stansberry names all over the net. It would be only natural that Stansberry, or someone like me who was about to work with the company, would find the reams of allegations interesting and write to Ryals.

Ryals also claims some kind of conspiracy because both Stansberry and I said the same thing about Davidson in our letters to him (i.e. that Davidson didn’t work at Agora any more). Well, maybe we both said so because that was precisely the case at the time. Or, at least, that was what the company was saying at the time.

Then Ryals makes a big issue about Davidson now being back at Agora. That too has an obvious explanation. Davidson seems to be an old friend of Bonner’s and has a long history with the company. A friend might well choose to honor that history over whatever happened between Davidson and the SEC. Most people tend to stick up for old friends, regardless of what they do.

So, from these perfectly innocuous events that have quite harmless explanations, Ryals – apparently out of random malice and anger over his own losses  –  concocted a grand conspiracy in which a “strange woman” (“he,” “she”, or “it,” as he puts it), of  “supposedly Indian” origin goes to bat for a far-right Anglo-American conspiracy outfit of epic proportions, all for the mind-boggling sum of $25 bucks an hour… and an advance of roughly $25,000.

Now, I’m a fairly well-off woman, with several degrees and professional skills that would pay me twice that. I’m told I’m a talented writer. I’m in no want of any kind, especially as I live quite frugally. Is it reasonable to believe that I  “sold out” for a monetary sum so piddling? Especially, when those who allegedly bought me are described as “fabulously wealthy”?

Note: This statement should not be seen as any kind of endorsement of the company, its business practices, its past record, or its networks. I have no contact with them, beyond what arises in relation to the book. I believe anyone with common sense can draw their own accurate conclusions.

Steve Horwitz, via Daily Reckoning:

“So yes, Professor Krugman, it does matter how we try to get ourselves out of depressions. The world is not upside down and vices aren’t virtues. War isn’t peace and destruction isn’t wealth-creation. The real solution to digging out of a recession is to remove the barriers to the free exchange and production that actually comprises wealth-creation. Borrowing trillions more from our grandchildren to spend on building the equivalent of pyramids or on blowing up innocents abroad only digs the hole deeper. And when one is reduced, as Krugman is, to saying we “needed Hitler and Hirohito” to get us out of that hole in the 1930s, one has abandoned morality to worship at the altar of economic aggregates.

No critic of free-market economics can ever again accuse us of being irrational and immoral when it is Paul Krugman who says destruction creates wealth, and war is an acceptable second-best path to economic growth. Don’t let Krugman’s Newspeak fool you: War and destruction are exactly what they appear to be. To argue as Krugman does is to abandon both economics and morality. Big Brother would be proud.”

And confirming that moral language is in fact the only language most men respond to, here is Ayn Rand:

“In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.”

—   Ayn Rand in  Philosophy: Who Needs It, 67.

An excellent piece by the brilliant cognitive linguist, George Lakoff at truthout.org, which argues (from a Democrat perspective) that framing debates in terms that appeal to readers’ deepest values, rather than to narrowly defined self-interest, has been the reason why Republicans have been more successful in the public debate, recently. In fact, the notion that there is a narrowly-defined “economic man” out there, ceaselessly calculating his narrowly-defined economic self-interest, is one of the many reasons that academic economics has been so little accurate in either describing what is going on in the economic world, predicting the future, or offering any prescriptions that are not simply band-aids or downright counterproductive.

“It is morality, not just the right policy, that excites voters, that moves them to action, that creates movements. Legislative action must come from a moral center, with moral language repeated over and over.

What should be avoided, besides policy-wonk and pure-policy discourse? Again, the answer comes from Neuroscience 101. Offense not defense. Argue for your values. Frame all issues in terms of your values. Avoid their language, even in arguing against them. There is a reason that I wrote a book called, “Don’t Think of an Elephant!” Don’t list their arguments and argue against them using their language. It just activates their arguments in the brains of listeners.

Don’t move to the right (Lila: that would be left, for Republicans) in your discourse or action. That will just strengthen the conservative moral system in the brains of swing thinkers. Frame your arguments from your moral position.”

Demagogue: One who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.

— H. L. Mencken

Taibbi Gives Obama Obscene Cover

“Matt Taibbi’s latest blog post demonstrates again the reality disconnect that’s required by the dual jobs of providing cover for President Obama while still trying to display lefty street cred with an attack on the latest obscene tax break for multi-millionaires. Taibbi’s post is by appearances about how a 50% tax break on hedge fund income has successfully survived Obama’s first two years and likely his entire time in office. But the focus of the piece is not Obama. He’s mentioned only once and not in a negative light, in paragraph 11: