connect the dots

I used to love doing connect-the-dots as a kid. It was great fun starting with a paper full of seemingly random dots and discovering the picture it made.

Here are some random points that showed up on my radar screen this past week - anybody else getting the picture?

Stephen Colbert interview w/Grover Norquest (Leave Us Alone)


Day in the Life of Joe Middle-Class Republican

Diane Rehm Show interview w/George Lakoff (The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st American Politics with an 18th Century Brain)
- progressives need to start using words that connect to the unconscious mind
- thinking is physical, if you change someone's mind, you have changed their brain
- we have a faulty implicit theory of mind based on enlightenment principles:
. people mostly think their thoughts are conscious, however 98% are unconscious
. we think reason is dispassionate, however reason requires emotion
. we believe thought is literal, but we think in conceptual terms and metaphors
- our moral systems are based on metaphors
- we need to stop trying to argue against other people's frames
- the current divide in politics is really a struggle between who's moral system will rule based on the ideal family: strict father family vs. nurturing parent family
- mutual inhibition, you can have contradictory systems about different areas, the activation of one inhibits the other
- a lot of reasoning is about caring about people, caring about your community, figuring out who you care about, empathy
- economics is based on self-interest and it's missing the way most people normally think because it does not include empathy