By Joel Bowman, on December 13th, 2018% I take my title from Shakespear’s play, Richard III. The main character, Richard, who is about to become king of England. is not a nice person. It is no surprise that he becomes a terrible king. The play is a tragedy (everybody dies). Although the time the play was written (1593) and the time depicted in the play were very different from our political situation today, the politics of power were similar. A few centuries later, another English writer, Lord Acton, said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Although the current political situation in the States is . . . → Read More: Winter of Our Discontent
By Joel Bowman, on September 11th, 2011% In a recent article in the Huffington Post, George Lakoff (author or co-author of numerous books and articles on metaphors and other aspects of language usage), said the following about framing:
Framing is much more than mere language or messaging. A frame is a conceptual structure used to think with. Frames come in hierarchies. At the top of the hierarchies are moral frames. All politics is moral. Politicians support policies because they are right, not wrong. The problem is that there is more than one conception of what is moral. Moreover, voters tend to vote their morality, since it is what defines . . . → Read More: Framing—Again
By Joel Bowman, on July 22nd, 2011% In a recent article, Spencer Critchley discussed the difficulties a number of “conservative” Republicans are having coping with the complexities of the modern world. The part of his essay that caught my attention is the following:
The truth, as usual, is complex. But complexity is what the right-wing historical revisionists don’t like. They prefer to reduce it to binary choices of right-wrong, good-evil. We see this on the extreme left, too, where some argue that because the founders did not extend full rights to slaves, women or Native-Americans, they were no better than any other white, male oppressors. For . . . → Read More: Coping with Complexity
By Joel Bowman, on April 15th, 2011% The “Bell Curve” is the common expression for what is otherwise known as Standard Normal Distribution. The concept basically states that in any category, most members of the category will be grouped in the middle, with fewer members at the extremes. Wikipedia provides a fancy definition:
In probability theory, the normal (or Gaussian) distribution, is a continuous probability distribution that is often used as a first approximation to describe real-valued random variables that tend to cluster around a single mean value. The graph of the associated probability density function is “bell”-shaped, and is known as the Gaussian function or . . . → Read More: The Bell Curve Theory of Life
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