4 Comments

Well said. So well, in fact, that it convinced me to become a paid subscriber. I particularly like "create new words or descriptors with promiscuous energy." It seems to me that is precisely the intellectual work that small-scale studies that "privilege contingency and change in their narratives" aim to do. Your list is the antidote to the foolish consistency powering so much of the debate over the terms we use to have debates when we should be directing our energy toward finding concrete steps to change the minds of persuadable voters, ways to introduce the possibility of change to those too cynical to let themselves do the one thing that could make a difference in the outcome or too busy to notice the stakes.

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Thank you! I really don't want to surrender to some kind of structural inevitability or wait for the dialectic to wind itself up fully--so I feel that there's always got to be something we can do now that keeps us from going over the brink. I don't live in the future, I live right now. There is nothing gained from telling people that they are the inevitable martyrs of a foregone conclusion.

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It is that bad already. It’s soon to get worse. I’m sick of all the ostriches.

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I particularly dislike the type of ostrich that sticks its own head up its own ass and then says with muffled voice, "Everything I can see looks just fine!"

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