Know Your Values and Frame the Debate

This is an updated (2014) version of the 2004 original by Lakoff, a cognitive scientist at Berkeley.

Basic idea: conservative leaders have been better at framing issues than liberal counterparts ( Read more... )

Many people have recently opined about the justifiability of punching a Nazi(*) in the face. A surprising (to me) number of people are for it.

(*)To clarify, unless we're talking about these six Nazis, at best there are 'neo-Nazis' these days, or 'jerks with hateful ideas who are dangerously close to the levers of power'.I test the Nazi punch ( Read more... )

I am not a geologist, and I can see how some actual knowledge of the different local conditions and geology would be important, but allow me to bloviate.

There have been some recent earthquakes in and around the Inglewood Oil Field, but we have been assured that they are not linked to drilling, fracking, water-injection or any other thing that the ( Read more... )

I was invited to a small FB group for political discussion - just a couple dozen members, and not that many active ones. While there are some reasonable people there, there are also a couple people that I would like to think were trolls or paid shills of the Koch Brothers or something. But I fear they are sincere. And these are probably people ( Read more... )

It's sort of the inverse of the straw man fallacy.

Person 1: "I believe X."
Fallacy dude: "Well, that is indeed an option, but no one could seriously believe that."

Example captured in the wild: "So you seem to be suggesting that St. Peters Basillica and the Taj Mahal are the result of natural processes alone. In my original post I suggested ( Read more... )