Tuesday, April 03, 2012

Useful image



Dennis Prager notes how badly the liberal side performed at the Supreme Court's Obamacare oral sessions and opines that liberals live in an echo chamber, not knowing their opponents' thinking. Since conservatives are evil and stupid, why bother to find out what they think and why they think like that, according to themselves, not from Noam Chomsky?

I remembered the section from Minogue, which ended with a nice image (italics mine):
The psychological mark of ideological entrapment is the feeling of
despair which accompanies the prospect of defeat in argument. Ideologies seek to
avoid such painful experiences by framing their key utterances in a vague or
tautological form, in order to make these propositions impregnable. The intellectual
mark of ideology is the presence of dogma, beliefs which have been dug deep into the
ground and surrounded by semantic barbed wire.

Slogans, catch-phrases and bumper stickers account for much of this. "Second-class citizen", "racial profiling", "marriage equality", "undocumented", and the whole linguistic panoply of PC. Semantic barbed wire --"Raciss! Sexist! etc.--designed to protect the hive mind.


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