It blew my mind when I realized years ago that politicians didn't talk the way they do because they were stodgy bad communicators, but because they were saying something very intentional and very different from common moral values - like this video - We assume Geroge Bush means freedom for everyone when he means freedom for markets and people on top... and maybe some trickle down.

It's like a secret language that the people on top understand but at the same time it lets the average person assume their needs are being addressed. Like anytime the phrase "American interests" gets used by folks in the top of the government. You'd think that meant "our interests" but it virtually always means interests of American corporations abilities to make money overseas. If supporting a dictator (take your pick over the past 30 years) supports the ability of American corporations to make money but also massively decreases the quality of life for a person under that dictatorship it's always the "American interest" to support the dictator dispite the fact that the vast majority of americans would be more interested in supporting those people if they really knew what was going on.

I think it's in interesting that the two people who opened my mind to this stuff are both linguists - George Lakoff and Noam Chomsky. Which makes sense because it's a matter of language and meaning.

George Lakoff's book "Moral Politics" is absolutely amazing by the way - it talks about how people on the left and people on the right look at the world through different metaphors based on families they grew up in. Liberals based on nurturance, conservatives on a strict father. The reason we're so polarized is because we don't understand each other since we frame issues on different world views and words don't even mean the same things on the surface.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'free markets, freedom, iraq, liberity' to 'free markets, freedom, iraq, liberity, george lakoff' - edited by kulpims

>> ^EmptyFriend:
my friend tells me stories almost everyday of people he runs into at school who are supporting obama but when my friend asks them why they simply spout something like "cause we need change!" i don't doubt that this same kind of video could be made against obama.... not that i'd ever want to make one of these videos myself.
i don't understand what the cameraman's point was about who each person had heard of first... i've only known my wife for 4 years, but i am pretty certain i know her better than people i heard of on tv years before.


If they're saying "we need change" that's accurate even if it is just a slogan. This guy was in a crowd of republicans getting lambasted by bigotry and plain falsehoods and refusal to face contradictory statements - I'm sure it's out there but you'd be hard pressed to find that crowd of democrats. I grew up around conservatives like this and they're incapable of questioning their beliefs because they were taught from a young age that they're not allowed to question the established order. There are republicans who have thought out reasons for supporting people like McCain/Palin but they won't tell you those reasons on camera because it's purely narcissistic (wealth seeking at the expense of others) and they'd come off as evil. Liberals can follow blindly but if they do it's just laziness - by definition they're not told from a young age they have to believe anything other than you have a right to certain freedoms and try respect others. Read George Lakoff's book Moral Politics if you find this as interesting as I do.

Also the point of asking when they'd heard of Palin was to try to get them to consider that they might be putting someone very questionable up for 2nd in line to the president when they just met her.... and of course recording their acrobatics as they try to avoid the issue.

I'm aware the condition is refered to as 'Down Syndrome' in the US, and 'Down's Syndrome' practically everywhere else English is spoken. There could be an interesting reason for the transferal from 'Down's' to 'Down'.* This particular USian convention, I would argue, does a disservice to past discoverers who had been rightly honoured for their work. Taxonomical, geographic, medical, astronomical, protocol should be maintained in this spirit of homage.

The USian linguistic convention of dropping the 's' in 'Asperger's' is not the same animal. It's a predictable habit of speech, which gets transfered to the written language, wherever one 's' is directly adjacent to another. Over time it has been transcribed the way it is (mis)heard, and has entered common usage this way.

*See Metaphors We Live By; Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, University of Chicago, 1980.