Politics
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Quote of the Day: Christopher Lasch
A culture organized around mass consumption encourages narcissism–which we can define, for the moment, as a disposition to see the world as a mirror, more particularly as a projection of one's own fears and desires–not because it makes people grasping and self-assertive but because it makes them weak and dependent. It undermines their confidence in
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Quote of the Day: Connecticut Post
If Democrats continue with their right-wing conservative educational policies, they will alienate the teachers and teacher unions that have traditionally been the party's staunchest supporters. More importantly, these misguided policies and initiatives will deal a severe blow to public education and to the quality of the teaching profession as well as to the morale of
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Why Obama & Not Stein
The problem isn't Obama; it's the national Democrats, who as a group have become the Whigs of our time. They've become detached from their working and middle class base, they don't know who they are, and they have no passionately held principles or moral compass. They're wimps in a knife fight for the soul of
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There Is No Normal Anymore.
One of the peculiar characteristics of the time in which we live is that on one level everything seems to be normal. Life goes on pretty much the way it always has for the last fifty years—adults go to work, children go to school, we get around in cars and watch a lot of TV—there
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Florida Debate
Sums it up:
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Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments (repost)
All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking
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Why Groupthink Works
In politics (and social life) what one person thinks doesn't matter as much as what the group thinks. If you understand the thinking of the group, you almost always understand the thinking of the individual. The higher the stakes, the more intense the groupthink. The more ambiguous the issue, the greater the individual's reliance on
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Hofstra Debate
The essential message of the Romney campaign has been: If you’re economically frustrated, don’t ask questions — just vote the incumbent out. It’s not necessarily a bad strategy, but for it to work, Romney needs to meet a basic threshold of acceptability to swing voters. And it’s possible that he simply failed at this seemingly
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The Great Technocratic Society
David Brooks's wrote a column several years ago, that I have to say I agree with to a large extent–culture matters. I think that a fundamental mistake of both the left and the right, for different reasons, is to look at the problems surrounding poverty primarily in economic terms. The economic is obviously a factor, but it's