Tribal 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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Red and Blue America
America is more complex, obviously. But I think it's fair to say that there are two poles that define our politics, and every election cycle we find that we're split rather evenly between them. Call these poles Republican and Democrat or Conservative and Liberal, Reactionary and Progressive, or Red and Blue. They are ways of describing
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Retrieving a “Better Angels” Ethos
This review of Jonathan Haidt's new book The Righteous Mind is worth a read (h/t MMc). In my class we talk a lot about rhetorical technique and how every message has a mix of logos, pathos, and ethos. Universities are logos-centric, but the rest of the world is not. Most people make judgments based on emotion
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Tribal America (work in progress)
Just talking about party affiliation doesn't work anymore, because anybody with any sense realizes the party system doesn't serve the American people anymore. The party system as it exists now is egregiously top heavy and dysfunctional. The current system is neither responsive nor effective; it's a joke. It's made our country ungovernable, and something else