This is the second in a series of guest posts by Stuart J. Kaufman of the University of Delaware. Stuart advances a long-running dispute with PTJ about whether "what goes on inside people's heads" is relevant to social constructionism. PTJ doesn't think so; Stuart...
As James Poulous reminds me, 2010 ain't got nothing on 1968, let alone the long 1960s. Violent rhetoric?Worse.Societal polarization?Worse.Political violence, including assassinations?Much worse.It...
If you haven't noticed, there's a debate going on about the relationship between rhetoric and violence (meta). I basically agree with Henry Farrell's take:One can say that there is (moderate)...
John Sides at the Monkey Cage weighs in with some social science on the relationship between militant metaphors in political speech and individuals' willingness to engage in actual political...
It was full of gloom and doom, which is not what some of us might have expected from the "hope" President, but just the kind of realism the nation needs to hear. Finally someone who will ask us to step up to bat and make the sacrifices needed to turn the planet around! (And frankly the enormity of the mess we're in was hit home to me when my kids and I, desperate to see Obama sworn in during a layover in Charlotte, were told by the manager of the sports bar near our gate that the basketball game was more important than hearing this historic speech. If anyone can change this mentality that...
I have no idea what this tells us about anything important. But I do like it. McCain's concession speech Wordle is below the fold.Of course, what I'd really like to compare to Obama's victory speech is McCain's victory speech, the one we'll never hear. And I'd be interested to see how Obama's concession speech would have looked compared to the image you see above.
I started writing this post as a further contribution to the comment thread sparked by my last post, and in particular to the discussion that Janice Bially Mattern and I were having there. But my reply got too long for Haloscan to process, so I have moved it up a level and made it into a separate post. Plus, in doing so I am able to add this striking graphic, which is, I think, another example of the phenomenon we're wrestling with. Full disclosure, I found this picture over at FiveThirtyEight. Fuller disclosure, as you might guess, the discussion that Janice and I are having is itself about...
There's this video of McCain supporters in line at a rally in Pennsylvania that has been making the rounds on the 'Net (tip of the hat to Janice Bially Mattern for sending it to me). Here it is now:Figuring out what to make of this is slightly more complicated than simply having a gut reaction to it -- not the a gut reaction is unimportant, or even necessarily wrong, but in this case I think it can obscure some of what's going on in the scene. This is particularly true since the video's author is clearly drawing a contrast between the hate-filled and factually inaccurate statements of the...
Recently, I criticized Sarah Palin's pronunciation of "nuclear," and suggested that electing her would only make Americans look as if we (still) don't care how dumb our leaders appear on the global stage. At best, I expected a discussion about whether we should take such things into consideration in elections. More accurately, I expected that post to be ignored, and for most readers to latch on to the much more interesting food for thought to come in later posts that day. (Who would have thought English grammar would be more fascinating than the ethics of killer robots?)Imagine my surprise...