In There’s Nothing Virtuous About Finding Common Ground, Tayari Jones asks “When we revisit our shameful past, ask yourself, Where was the middle? Rather than chattel slavery, perhaps we could agree on a nice program of indentured servitude? “ Or maybe we can “compromise” on abortion and just let rich people get them? Yeah, NO. As …
Continue reading "Halfway between moral and immoral = nowhere"
The media is still continuing the same behavior that normalized Trump and allowed him to walk right into office with less qualifications than a 9th grade class president. They are helping Trump block out rational conversation about real issues by treating his insane tweets as real news. Yesterday they spent all day talking about his crazy “wire tapping” story! (It’s either totally invented or proof that a court found reasonable suspicion of him last year. If the latter, let’s talk about the many suspicious ties to Russia.)
Stop reading his tweets. Stop sharing his tweets, even to criticize them. Stop treating them like they matter or like he matters. He is an unhinged loser and a complete puppet of the White supremacist Steve Bannon. Stop acting like his childish rants are the most important news of the day.
George Lakoff is a linguistics professor and my favorite explainer of political values and communication strategy. Last week he wrote a great summary of where we are now.
Read: A Minority President: Why the Polls Failed, And What the Majority Can Do
Continue reading "A Minority President"Cross-posted at http://www.hastac.org/blogs/ruby-sinreich/new-media-and-movement Last week I had the immense pleasure of attending and participating in “The Unfinished Work”: Advancing New Strategies in the Struggle for Civil Rights a conference honoring civil rights pioneer Julius Chambers. The event was attended by several generations of leaders including many former staffers from the NAACPs Legal Defense Fund (one …
Continue reading "New media and the civil rights movement"My boss Marty, who is a great communicator himself, read this article by the lingust George Lakoff on The Framing of Immigration, and came up with this great redux: 1. The US is dealing with an “Economic Refugee Crisis” that is pushing 800,000 people a year across our borders. 2. We are dealing with a …
Continue reading "Economic Refugee Crisis"UPDATE: Notes and links from the class added 6/8/05.
Tomorrow morning I will be leading a presentation called “Your Nonprofit: Online” at BlueCross BlueShield of NC’s Healthy Community Institute. After the session I will post any additional notes, thoughts and links here on this page.
Here’s a PDF (3.2 MB) of the presentation. And here’s my favorite part…
Continue reading "Your nonprofit – Online"Finally, a way to interact with the brilliant thinkers at the Rockridge Institute (home of my favorite linguist, George Lakoff). It’s basically a multi-author blog with registration required for comments, I don’t know why they call it a “forum.” Anyway, this is yet another interactive community-building resource that I can keep up with via RSS, …
Continue reading "Rock Ridge"Trust me, I am no Deaniac cheerleader. As I have written many times, the Democratic Party has to stand up for for progessive values or sit down and get the hell out of the way. With the increasing consolidation of power in the Whitehouse and the clear indication that Bush is unrestrained by morals, international law, or the Constitution of the United States, it is imperative that we have some national leaders who speak out against this in a credible way.
Continue reading "Dean for America, again"
I have had a lot of strong feelings in the past week about this country. The level of division is staggering. One friend tells me that people have been moving geographically into ideological enclaves in recent decades, which helps to explain why not only do we disagree so strongly with each other in this country, …
Continue reading "This is it!"(9:47) Things are getting a little less scripted and a little more interesting now… The moderator said the word “Halliburton!” Yay (have a drink)… WOW! She just nailed Cheney on gay marriage referred to his lesbian daughter (not in so many words, of course)… Edwards is extra-outing her now, even though he stops way short …
Continue reading "Deep Veeps"