Moving the Overton Window | Daylight Atheism When I tell people that I'm an atheist, I'm often asked if I think that fiery rhetoric and sharp critiques of religion, like the kind found in the writing of trailblazers like Richard Dawkins, is harming the cause by offending believers who might otherwise have been sympathetic. The implication is that, if we focus our attacks only on the worst fundamentalists, we'll gain public support and approval, but if we criticize faith in general, we'll never get anywhere. I don't believe this is true, and to explain why, I usually invoke the concept of the Overton window. This is an idea first conceived by the political scientist (who else) Joseph Overton, which holds that, for any political issue, there's a range of socially acceptable positions that's narrower than the range of possible positions. Positions within the Overton window are seen as mainstream and uncontroversial, while those outside it are viewed as shocking, upsetting, and dangerously radical. Image credit: Luiza Leite
Dear Librarian: Writing a Persuasive Letter ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, videos, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you. More Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals. More Teacher Resources by Grade Your students can save their work with Student Interactives. More Home › Classroom Resources › Lesson Plans Lesson Plan Overview Featured Resources From Theory to Practice In Emily's Runaway Imagination by Beverly Cleary, the character of Mama writes to the State Librarian, asking for help starting a library in their town. back to top Persuasion Map Printout: This printable sheet guides students in mapping out their thesis, main reasons, examples, and conclusion for a persuasive writing assignment. Further Reading Wollman-Bonilla, Julie. 2000.
The Overton Window Special essays that can be e-mailed to you! “Civil Society: Moral Arguments for Limiting Government”: The Overton Window model suggests that the key to changing government policy lies in changing the views of the public. This, however, takes more than facts and logic. As Mackinac Center President Joseph G. Lehman argues in this essay, winning the battle for people’s hearts and minds through “economic analysis alone is like bringing a knife to a gun fight.” E-mail me free copies of this and the other special essays! “The Inspiring Story of Thomas Clarkson”: There may be no greater example of shifting the Overton Window than the story of the man most responsible for ending slavery in the British Empire: Thomas Clarkson. “Government, Poverty and Self-Reliance”: The Overton Window model tells us that when society unites behind sound principles, its political servants will too. “Investing in Ideas”: If the views of society shift the Overton Window, then what shifts the views of society?
Navajo creation story – The First World “Nihodilhil” (Black World) Navajo origin stories begin with a First World of darkness (Nihodilhil). From this Dark World the Dine began a journey of emergence into the world of the present. It had four corners, and over these appeared four clouds. These four clouds contained within themselves the elements of the First World. Creation Story Poster- Ni’hodilhil First World Illustrations by Theresa Breznau. © 2013 Heritage Language Resource Center. Thing in the Black World 1. 1., Divine Spirit 2. The Black Cloud represented the Female Being or Substance. In the East, at the place where the Black Cloud and the White Cloud met, First Man, was formed ; and with him was formed the white corn, perfect in shape, with kernels covering the whole ear. The First World was small in size, a floating island in mist or water. On it there grew one tree, a pine tree, which was later brought to the present world for firewood. Man was not, however, in his present form. This ear of corn was also perfect. This made eight people.
George Lakoff - Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision 1. The Issue Trap. We hear it said all the time: Progressives won’t unite behind any set of ideas. We all have different ideas and care about different issues. The truth is that progressives do agree at the level of values and that there is a real basis for progressive unity. Progressive values cut across issues. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. A common mistaken ideology has convinced many progressives that they must “move to the right” to get more votes. 8. Progressives also paint conservative leaders as incompetent and not very smart, based on a misunderstanding of the conservative agenda. 9. 10. Spin, on the other hand, is the dishonest use of surface linguistic frames to hide the truth. 11. 12.
oyate - Home Why You're Stuck in a Narrative For some reason the narrative fallacy does not seem to get as much play as the other major cognitive fallacies. Apart from discussions of "The Black Swan", I never see it mentioned anywhere. Perhaps this is because it's not considered a "real" bias, or because it's an amalgamation of several lower-level biases, or because it's difficult to do controlled studies for. Regardless, I feel it's one of the more pernicious and damaging fallacies, and as such deserves an internet-indexable discussion. From Taleb's "The Black Swan" The narrative fallacy addresses our limited ability to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship upon them. Essentially, the narrative fallacy is our tendency to turn everything we see into a story - a linear chain of cause and effect, with a beginning and an end. You can see the results of this 'good enough' solution in the design and function of our brain.
Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel, and Heidegger This short but provocative book should be of interest to quite a range of philosophers and scholars, ranging from specialists in Hobbes, Hegel or Heidegger to philosophers of language and literary theorists, and even to moral theorists. The thematic questions of the book are exciting and fresh: (1) how are rhetoric and metaphor essential to the textual presentations of the topic of conscience in these philosophers and (2) how are rhetoric and metaphor essential to the very nature of conscience itself? The philosophical orientation that guides Feldman's work is largely derived from Derrida; the work, however, does not rely on Derrida, but is a series of independent studies of the thought -- and the texts -- of Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger. The interpretations are in each case well-grounded in the original texts and reflect familiarity with a good deal of contemporary English, German and French scholarship on those figures, as well as on the topics of conscience and rhetoric in general.
Reading :: Emergence of Noopolitik The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward an American Information StrategyBy John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt This RAND report is an earlier, longer version of Arquilla and Ronfeldt's FirstMonday article "The Promise of Noopolitik." Like that later article, this report argues that strategists need to shift the US' grand strategy away from realpolitik and toward noopolitik: "the form of statecraft that we argue will come to be associated with the noosphere, the broadest informational realm of the mind" (p.x). Arquilla and Ronfeldt go on to carefully discuss these ideas, acknowledging that realpolitik and noopolitik will coexist for decades (p.5), but also pointing out that "realpolitik, which stresses the hard, material dimensions of power and treats states as the determinants of world order," makes less sense in a world in which states are not dominant (p.29).
Undoing Power Undoing Power Klaus Krippendorff The Annenberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia From: Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12, 2: 101-132, 1995 "Liberation is a way of talking about power." --- Bruce A. "Philosophers merely interpreted the world ... the point is to change it." --- Karl Marx, 1845 (1978, p.7) This essay speaks into power -- not about what the powerless lack or what the powerful have too much of and in terms of which empowerment would mean appropriating it from Others. As the deliberately ambiguous title, "undoing power," suggests, this essay not only explores the undoability of power, it also shows, to the extend that a written paper can, the power to "undo" such phenomena, whether as critical social scientists or in everyday life. In pursuit of these aims, I will start with an experiment in perception. Doing Ordinary Languaging Frankly, I much prefer talking to writing. Eskimo-indian Some Discourses on Power "Power" is first of all a word.
The End Of The World Isn't As Likely As Humans Fighting Back Dystopias make for boring futurism. While it’s certainly true that one can tell a compelling dramatic story about the end of the world, as a mechanism of foresight, apocaphilia is trite at best, counter-productive at worst. Yet world-ending scenarios are easy to find, especially coming from advocates for various social-economic-global changes. As one of those advocates, I’m well aware of the need to avoid taking the easy route of wearing a figurative sign reading The End Is Nigh. We want people to take the risks we describe seriously, so there is an understandable temptation to stretch a challenging forecast to its horrific extremes—but ultimately, it’s a bad idea. It’s simplistic William Gibson famously said "the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed." If your dystopian scenario includes the phrase "we’re all doomed" or otherwise implies the Globally Scary Threat will affect us all equally, it’s probably bad futurism. It’s lazy It backfires
Meme Wars THE WHITE REVIEW – The new book, Meme Wars, comes at an interesting time for Adbusters. Whilst the foundation and magazine were an important voice within the anti- and alter-globalisation movements, there was a sense that those movements had lost a popular traction by the financial crash of 2008. And yet Adbusters has since played a role in the early days of Occupy Wall Street, setting the tone in terms of horizontal decision-making and accessible activism. KALLE LASN – Well, in all our brainstorming sessions we keep saying that we’ve been around now for over twenty five years now and had all kinds of social marketing campaigns and a number of ‘cracks of the whip’, and yet somehow nothing has ever really gained traction. There is hope … the global situation remains explosive and anything can happen … students, especially economics students, could suddenly wake up to the fact that their future doesn’t compute and become the spearhead of a larger movement. Nail to professor’s door
Frames for Life, Liberation, & Belonging - Othering and Belonging Frames shape how a story is told: what is emphasized and deemphasized, included and excluded. If the frame is individualism, then unions, community land trusts, and cooperative businesses are the stories of witches and thieves. If the frame is meritocracy, then affirmative action, reparations, maximum income, and guaranteed basic income are scientific impossibilities. Worldviews are broad umbrellas of meaning; they can be subconscious and conscious, fluid and deeply rooted, widely spread and individualized. While stories are shaped by frames, frames themselves are governed by the worldviews of the storyteller. Worldviews and frames also have long lives, frequently much longer than the stories that drive daily attention and focus. In the domineering presence of destructive frames and worldviews, insurgent stories—those from the bottom and the cracks—have mastered the art of anti-gravity. “The world we want is one where many worlds fit.” Transition Art by Firelei Báez Liberation Belonging Play