What the Redskins Name Says About the Liberal Brain


Ed Hudgins

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Ed,

Naturally, I agree with everything you said about the Redskin issue.

Given the status of our society and the media's role, I see such issues as a diversion and a distraction from the more crucial issues of our day. We are not on the verge of bankruptcy as a country. The country is actually bankrupt now as it doesn't have the money to pay off its debt. The politicians in charge lie about the extent of the national debt claiming it has now reached some $17 trillion. It is known that this sum does not include the unfunded mandates or promises made in the near future for the retirement, medical care and disabilities of those who will soon be entitled to receive such dole extorted from the tax payers and borrowed from those foolish enough to loan money by purchasing US Treasury Bonds, Bills and Notes. If those amounts are taken into consideration then the national debt exceeds $200 trillion according to the Professor of Economics named Kotlikoff recently in an article in the Boston Globe.

You know that if there is one idea that I think every young college student, and everyone else in the world of any age who wonders what is wrong with the world, should know, it is that the founders of America tried to assure that their progeny would never have to endure any form of tyranny by the central government they were creating over the then sovereign nations which the thirteen colonies had become when they beat the British at Yorktown in 1781. The founders, as representatives of those sovereign states, only granted certain explicit and enumerated powers to the government to be over them, all other powers were to be reserved to the states or the people.

Among those enumerated powers one does not find authorization for any form of retirement plan, nor a medical insurance plan, nor a disability plan, nor justification for the many regulatory agencies of the executive branch, nor for the printing of a non redeemable paper currency, nor for a central bank with the authority to monopolize the currency of the country.

I trust that the Atlas Society is seeing to it that the members and new recruits in both the StudentsForLiberty.org and YALiberty.org are being made aware of these points and the fact that every law maker takes an oath to be found in the Constitution itself to uphold these limited powers, suggesting that all future aspirants to hold office in the Congress or the Senate should be asked just what the oath means to him or her and just what they intend to do to bring our government's laws in line with those limits which ought to solve our debt crisis.

One thing I would suggest is that any interest owed to the Federal Reserve Bank should not be honored at all and the Fed should be abolished altogether after its audit reveals to which entities have received the bailouts which so enraged American taxpayers.

Thanks for all you do.

GG

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Gulch is famous for using every opportunity to push one issue. A while back it was the Ron Paul candidacy. Now it is the Federal Reserve. What is most distressing (if true) is that he claims to be a medical doctor: Gulch8, MD. "According to the tests your iron count is too high. I recommend getting rid of the Federal Reserve."

In the mean time, on another board, I addressed these issues. MSK launched this discussion once before here, just a couple of weeks ago. My perception is that while Braves and Warriors are acceptable (to me), Redskins is an insult.

To say that it is 80 years old is to excuse any injustice originating in the New Deal of the 1930s. Or anything much older. A recent article about modern slavery comes to mind. If slavery is ages old, then why are liberals so upset? Well, they are, and everyone else should be, too. Same here.

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I did not get Ed`s comments because I could not hear them, but his hand gestures were eloquent and I assume he agrees generally with Michael.

We had this issue here with many junior and minor pro hockey teams. What the league did, mostly, was ask the First nations members and team fans if they thought the name was insulting. When more did than didn`t they changed the name. Of course the team owners had the last word.

I agree with Jonathan that many team names should be changed. What is with the glorification of natural disasters that cause such tragedy...does no one remember Katrina, or that many skiers are now permanent features of the snowy landscape, leaving behind grieving loved ones... Carolina and Colorado should be ashamed of themselves.

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OMr Gaede,

As you have revealed through word patterns which I am expert in detecting, that you have knowledge of Lord Stanley thread, I invite you to join the team name change discussion which is scattered over many places just now.

As a resident of Arizona you are likely paying through your hard earned tax dollars in some way or other to support the Glendale Folly, which has no business playing hockey in the desert and obviously will never do enough business to justify staying there. Do you think Coyotes is appropriate enough a name for mean, ruthless scavengers or is naming the team after them, a slur on coyotes, and should PETA get involved.....

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Ed,

I got a kick out of your body language and intonation when you said the kerfuffle over the Redskins name is due to... (pause for effect)... "the liberal brain."

:smile:

There was just the right amount of disdain and amusement. It cracked me up. In fact, it tickled an underground association in my mind and made me think of Ayn Rand's speculation about the non-conceptual mind being the missing link between apes and humans. :smile:

I have no doubt "the liberal brain" (in your tone of voice) qualifies as a missing link along with other fundamentalists. :smile:

MM mentioned that we have had a good discussion on the Redskin name issue.

MSK launched this discussion once before here, just a couple of weeks ago.


To take advantage of his plug (thanks MM), here is the link. I normally don't point you to my stuff, but I think you might find the discussion interesting.

Redskins Love the Redskins

About "the liberal brain," I think storytelling is the strongest force at work. No story is more potent than the story we tell ourselves. And, if we hear an outside story that is not relevant to our inner stories, we ignore them. That includes any logic that goes with it. Relevance is key. And one of the determinants of this relevance (on an individual level) is what stage of life he is in.

I have been studying a guy named Joseph Riggio, who deals with precisely this. I believe some of his ideas are brilliant and some full of crap. Here is something I like a lot, from an email I recently sent to a good friend:

Riggio was talking about themes for stories and mentioned something I believe is highly important. If a person does not find the story relevant to his core interests, he will not pay any attention to it.

One of the ways Riggio arrives at this core interest is what he calls an "organizing principle" for a stage of life. I have modified it a bit (and will probably modify it more later for my own use), but here are the organizing principles roughly in the manner he laid out:

Infant: His reaction to the world is "Woah!" Intense curiosity. And figuring out what hurts and what feels good. Everything he does is informed by that core theme. (This stage is purely my observation. Riggio did not mention it.)

Child: (Riggio started here.) The child is worried about how he fits into the family and his surroundings. He is learning about rules. This is obviously not all-inclusive, but it is a major theme of this stage.

Adolescent: He is concerned with how to break free from the family toward independence. This can become a double-edged sword because he can also want to stick around, especially for the parental love (which he loves to hate) and goodies. So this is a period of great conflict. Teenage angst.

Young adult: He is concerned with who he is as an individual and what the meaning of his life is. He has achieved some independence from his family and needs to get his bearings now that he is out in the world.

Mature adult: He goes through an intense stage of gathering and consuming. Producing, too, if you are into Rand. emo1.gif

Early old age: He is now concerned with contributing, passing on his experience, leaving a legacy.

Old age: He starts to mellow out and see people he cares about die off. He starts to appreciate the beauty and preciousness of life and take on an attitude of accepting it all, that it's all good.

Very old age: He starts making peace with his own death.

A lot of fireworks happen when a person gets stuck in an earlier stage due to abuse, poor choice, or whatever, but biologically moves on to a later stage. An example Riggio used is what happens with a lot of business executives. As teenagers, they learned to exercise their independence--but still keep the goodies--by emotional blackmail. And for whatever reason, they did not move on (thematically, that is). Now they are in a business environment where they should be gathering and consuming, but their life theme is still stuck at the earlier time. So they constantly threaten the people around them with leaving if they don't get their way, or firing those under them. They are unnecessarily difficult to those they deal with.

All this is important to relevance of story to the person. If a person is in the contribution stage, adventure stories hold little interest for him. If he is in the "Who am I?" stage, a story about the subtle nuances of the beauty of life will leave him impatient and probably bored. Riggio pointed out that we all have books we read when we were younger that did not appeal to us. But when we picked them up later, they hit home. The point is that they were not relevant to the stage of life we were in, and it got even more irrelevant if there were complications from being emotionally stuck in an earlier stage.

I like this idea. I sense it is not the whole story, but there is definitely much truth to it.


I believe "the liberal brain" you talked about is locked into an adolescent stage of development where the teenager learns he can get benefits from his parents by shaming them, usually with their hypocrisy. The story he tells himself is finally he has a weapon to fight authority with, but still stay safe. And it works. It allows him to be a hero to himself.

So any story that ignores shaming others to get control of them does not resonate with "the liberal brain." This particular brain has no use for moral superiority unless it comes with power over others. If there's no guilt-and-shame payoff that expands his status and standing, he feels morality is a waste of time.

I'm oversimplifying (and not all liberals have "the liberal brain"), but I've been doing a lot of thinking about the story wars and I believe this point is critical if we want to reach them.

I'm going to experiment with this a little. From my studies (a tiny part of which you can see in my quote above), I learned that the human developmental stage beyond adolescent rebellion is a person going out in the world on his own and starting to wonder "who am I?" and "where do I fit in?" and "am I going to be all right on my own?".

Imagine a story war that receives the standard victimization plotline from "the liberal brain," but responds without defensiveness and without conflicting over shame or hypocrisy. Instead, it starts where "the liberal brain" is at, and by baby-steps, takes him to the next phase, the edge of the abyss, and lets him look over the cliff of individuation as his parents walk away. I think that will scare the holy shit out of him. :smile:

He will forget about his favorite "victims" and "oppressed" in a heartbeat as he tries to deal with the terror. :smile:

In fact, that is exactly what Ayn Rand did in her storytelling, albeit she played the shame game, too. But she had producers--the metaphorical parents if we are using a teen perspective--walk away and leave the "teens" to look out into the dark with no one to say it's going to be all right, and no one to shame into making it all right again.

More stories like that need to be told if the culture is to be changed. And for the ending of the story, whether the author destroys such a character, leaves him dangling or shows him a path will vary with each story. It doesn't matter. The point of the story is to contain a strong throughline from protected adolescent rebellion ("the liberal brain") to what being out on his own is like.

(As an aside, I always mean "him and her" when I say "him" in these cases. I've tried different forms of getting around this, but I haven't found one that feels right yet. I am pronoun and gender challenged. :smile: )

I'm going to do some quality thinking on this.

Michael

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Do that quality thinking, Michael. My liberal brain does not recognise anything here from my own life. But I suppose my Masters have successfully washed it out.

The terms "liberal" and "brain" are self contradictory.

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Gulch is famous for using every opportunity to push one issue. A while back it was the Ron Paul candidacy. Now it is the Federal Reserve. What is most distressing (if true) is that he claims to be a medical doctor: Gulch8, MD. "According to the tests your iron count is too high. I recommend getting rid of the Federal Reserve."

In the mean time, on another board, I addressed these issues. MSK launched this discussion once before here, just a couple of weeks ago. My perception is that while Braves and Warriors are acceptable (to me), Redskins is an insult.

To say that it is 80 years old is to excuse any injustice originating in the New Deal of the 1930s. Or anything much older. A recent article about modern slavery comes to mind. If slavery is ages old, then why are liberals so upset? Well, they are, and everyone else should be, too. Same here.

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Gulch is famous for using every opportunity to push one issue. A while back it was the Ron Paul candidacy. Now it is the Federal Reserve. What is most distressing (if true) is that he claims to be a medical doctor: Gulch8, MD. "According to the tests your iron count is too high. I recommend getting rid of the Federal Reserve."

In the mean time, on another board, I addressed these issues. MSK launched this discussion once before here, just a couple of weeks ago. My perception is that while Braves and Warriors are acceptable (to me), Redskins is an insult.

To say that it is 80 years old is to excuse any injustice originating in the New Deal of the 1930s. Or anything much older. A recent article about modern slavery comes to mind. If slavery is ages old, then why are liberals so upset? Well, they are, and everyone else should be, too. Same here.

Here Carol. Write what you want in the space provided:

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__________________________________________________________________________________

Brant

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actually no, I drivelled on that an old thread and on topic. I actually addressed you Brant on this topic, about the Coyotes and I am sure it posted OK on this thread... I don't see any trees outside the room, honest. Just telephone poles.

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Here is a perfect example of the mindset I was talking about in "the liberal brain."

In this example, Chris Hayes is trying to thunder out in righteous indignation. His adolescent voice and nerdy look makes the underlying teenage angst frame more visible than it normally is in similar public statements from others. (Video doesn't embed.)

Hayes: Sheldon Adelson Recommends Nuking Iran As A Warning

Nerdy, nerdy, nerdy. You can almost see Hayes as a model in an acne remedy commercial.

He even uses the word bullying--with Iran being the bullied victim. Iran! :smile:

Talk about clueless...

Also, there is the gravy lacing his message with light antisemitism that is culturally cool among more "reassonable" Progressives, but that is not the main theme, which is sticking his tongue out at dad (metaphorically speaking).

I actually agree with Hayes that Adelson is talking crap about using nukes to send a message to another country. Bombing with a nuke is an act of war. I won't even try to justify Adelson's remark except to say he runs gambling businesses, so he likely sees the world in those terms, bluffing and so forth. But still, crap is crap and Adelson talked crap.

But look how Hayes acts. He's on a soapbox all lathered up. Notice that there is no righteous anger out of Hayes about Iran's developing nuke capabilities. On the other hand, Hayes is not stupid. I think he believes Iran would use nukes irrationally if they got them. Talk about crap, how about Iran nuking some country in the name of Allah for crap? That's crap if I ever saw it. So why the lack of indignation in Hayes treating that crap?

I believe it's because of distance from the teenage angst perspective. Adelson is our dad. He's here. The Iranian Cleric is someone else's dad. That family is over there. We don't have to worry about them. They are too far away, geographically and culturally, to play emotional blackmail on their dad. So just blank them out.

In fact, if the Iranian mullahs had a soccer team called the Redskins, that wouldn't even be on the radar of "the liberal brain." (That's forced, I know. But I gotta tie this post into the thread theme somehow. :smile: )

Michael

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actually no, I drivelled on that an old thread and on topic. I actually addressed you Brant on this topic, about the Coyotes and I am sure it posted OK on this thread... I don't see any trees outside the room, honest. Just telephone poles.

aha found jt! # seven here on the right thread! Your dastardly attempts to gaslight me will never succeed, because my heart is pure.

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Carol,

Oh God... you know what gaslight means...

The lady knows her brainwashing techniques...

:smile:

Michael

I think she just sends her brain out for a dry cleaning once and awhile...

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actually no, I drivelled on that an old thread and on topic. I actually addressed you Brant on this topic, about the Coyotes and I am sure it posted OK on this thread... I don't see any trees outside the room, honest. Just telephone poles.

aha found jt! # seven here on the right thread! Your dastardly attempts to gaslight me will never succeed, because my heart is pure.

definition of gaslighting / definition of gaslight

by J. E. Brown

gaslighting A common form of brainwashing in which an abuser tries to falsely convince the victim that the victim is defective, for any purpose whatsoever, such as making the victim more pliable and easily controlled, or making the victim more emotional and therefore more needy and dependent. {You're reading "Definition of Gaslighting" by J. E. Brown.}

Often done by friends and family members, who claim (and may even believe) that they are trying to be helpful. The gaslighting abuser sees himself or herself as a nurturing parental figure in relation to the victim, and uses gaslighting as a means for keeping the victim in that relationship, perhaps as punishment for the victim's attempt to break out of the dependent role.

Example 1: If an abusive person says hurtful things and makes you cry, and then, instead of apologizing and taking responsibility, starts recommending treatments for what he or she calls "your depression" or "your mood swings," you are in the presence of a gaslighter.

Quick Survey:
Suppose your partner says "
I Need More Space
." What does it mean?

Example 2: If someone insults you or criticizes you, and then pretends it was a joke and asks "Don't you have a sense of humor?", that's gaslighting.

Perception blaming is a common form of gaslighting, and a common technique for evading the consequences of one's actions. Example: "I'm sorry you perceived my words that way; it wasn't my intention." Translation: "You are perceptually defective. Everyone else in the world can read my mind; if you can't, there must be something wrong with you. Or so I'd like you to believe." Unspoken Message: "My intention should change your actions (even though it didn't change mine)." This presupposes the reasoning "Most people are judged for their actions; but *I* want to be judged for my unseen intentions." For more about this double standard, see Definition of Conceit. {Read this comp1ete article at http://jebrown.us/Relationshop/Definitions/gaslighting.html .}

Etymology: Term is named after the film Gaslight (1944), in which the villain used the technique.

Related: Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP).

Synonyms, nonstandard: gaslight syndrome; gaslighting syndrome. Gaslighting consists of only one type of behavior, and so, is not really a syndrome. http://jebrown.us/Relationshop/Definitions/gaslighting.html

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actually no, I drivelled on that an old thread and on topic. I actually addressed you Brant on this topic, about the Coyotes and I am sure it posted OK on this thread... I don't see any trees outside the room, honest. Just telephone poles.

aha found jt! # seven here on the right thread! Your dastardly attempts to gaslight me will never succeed, because my heart is pure.

Moi?

My "gaslight" is pure too.

Evul never felt so goody, goody, goody!

--Brant

If you only knew the power of the gaslight!--join me and we will rule OL as Brante and Cararol! (We already do, heh, heh)

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Gee, I didn't think this post would be all that controversial on OL!

The millions of people cheering the "Redskins" don't see the word as a slur and those supposedly insulted don't see it as a slur. That just leaves the question of why anyone wants us to see it as a slur. The word is intrinsically a slur, out of all context? It's a slur in some Platonic-Kantian other realm? Or liberals just need to be morally indignant about something.

By the way daunce lynam, turn up the volume on your speakers and using the little icon at the bottom left on the youtube video so you can hear my sonorous voice!

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If this gaslighting stuff is true then Barbara Branden got it from Nathaniel and Ayn in the 1950s and all those supposed trials in the 1960s were of the same ilk. Students of Objectivism--everyone studying the philosophy as taught by the anointed Objectivists through NBI--were gaslighted as not enough--their ignorance made them not enough--to be Objectivists, so many seem to have compensated by projecting Randian heroism hiding the seemingly worst of their not enoughs (themselves). I saw it all around me and I wasn't immune although there was a scale of devolvement. The ironical thing about many Randian fictional heroes is their lack of heroic struggling so where was the heroism? (It went on strike, but nobody marched.)

--Brant

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