Ken Baer skewers George Lakoff in The Washington Monthly.
Thanks to Greg Wythe of Greg's Opinion for the tip -- and for some good commentary.
I don't want to spend the rest of my days flogging Lakoff but I think Baer gets at something important that I missed.
I've been all caught up in Lakoff's technical failings. I still am. But Baer points out the obvious -- that Lakoff's recommendations are shaped by his ideology, and his ideology is Berkeleyite hard left. My approach is different because I'm in the center, and I'm interested in forming communities around new approaches and new alignments. Lakoff doesn't want to meet in the middle -- he knows that he's right, and those other guys are wrong, and at the end of the day he wants to be a sort of equal opposite Karl Rove.
And so we disagree just slightly.
Memo to self -- it's not the words. And it's not the strategies. It's the values, stupid.
UPDATE: The LA Weekly -- in the person of Judith Lewis -- piles on. Not my set of arguments -- I'm a centrist who wants to form new communities of interest, she's a progressive who doesn't want her existing one compromised. But if nobody's happy... well, maybe a sign that this moment is passing. Thanks to Formosus, the Angry Anthropologist, for the tip.
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