In a rare break from party infighting, Monday’s Republican primary debate saw the candidates unite in their derision of “ObamaContent,” the president’s newly unveiled theory of linguistic meaning. The theory, which relies upon the practice of a speaker’s linguistic community to fix the semantic content of many words, was attacked as “socialized meaning” by the debate participants.
via Republicans attack ObamaContent as “socialized meaning” « fauxphilnews.
This is just the right making use of the left’s strategy (from Chomsky etc.). Just as they have adopted every other strategy after some frustrating internal hand wringing about their feelings about the ethics of it. And so we continue the cycle of degenerative discourse. The underlying issue remains the same. We either use the caretaker strategy, which is a synonym for subsidizing the birth rates of the lower classes, or we use the aristocratic strategy which is a synonym for constraining the birth rates of the lower classes. The ‘framing’ in political discourse consists of using every possible distraction to avoid the underlying issue: that norms are dependent upon the behavioral ability of the majority and therefore the right’s concept of freedom requires individual accountability and the suppression of the birth rates of the lower classes in order to achieve improvements in the body politic. The left’s concept of freedom requires redistribution, tolerance for impulsivity over discipline, and an authoritarian government to perform administration of it. It is possible to create a compromise between these two worlds, but not while the ‘framing’ is conducted by either the right or the left as a means of avoiding the underlying problem.