Palin: Obama Wants To Return To The "Days Before The Civil War" When People Weren't Considered Equal

[saras]

122. The words worked for someone else. Why won't they work for her?

THIS question is the profound unfairness that the Tea Party struggles with daily.

Words aren't magic spells. They need some connection with the physical world, and with others' experiences. When you start giving INDIVIDUAL words magic power (otherwise known as taboo) you lose your ability to think about that subject. This works when, like taboo works historically, it keeps people who don't understand why something like pooping in their water supply is wrong, but have to be kept from doing it anyways, from pooping in their own water. If no one in the culture has "bacteria" as a concept, "evil spirit" works better than nothing at all. If you start using it for things that aren't actually harmful, eventually someone sees through it and you have trouble, because taboo is irrational and people will kill over it.

I'd swear that the way many right-wingers talk, that they learned debate from one of my English instructors, who taught that the way to enter a professional or scientific conversation was to learn to imitate the moves they made with their language. You don't need to understand the concepts, you just need to arrange them in the proper order.