Below the squiggly is my excerpts from an article that just blew me away (http://www.theguardian.com/...). I think it may be the basis of my whole campaign, if I can properly digest it. Anybody know what NLP from 30 years ago stood for?
... the left has cleaved moderately well to established principles around the politics of the individual – women are equal, racism is wrong, homophobia is wrong. But everything else: a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, the essential dignity of all humans, even if they're foreign people or young people, education as a public good, the natural world as a treasure rather than an instrument of our convenience, the existence of motives besides profit, the pointlessness and poison of privatisation, the profundity, worth and purpose of pooling resources … this stuff is an embarrassment to centre-left parties...
In the strict-father worldview, he explains, "The father is the ultimate authority, he knows right from wrong, his job is to protect the family and so he's the strongest person, and because he knows right from wrong, his authority is deserved. His children are born bad, because they just do what feels good, they don't do what's right. They have to be trained out of feelgood liberalism into doing what's right. You have to punish the kids painfully enough that they'll start doing what's right and they'll get discipline. If they're disciplined, they go out into the world, and they earn a living. If they're not earning a living, they're not disciplined, therefore they can't be moral and they deserve their poverty."
The nurturant-family model is the progressive view: in it, the ideals are empathy, interdependence, co-operation, communication, authority that is legitimate and proves its legitimacy with its openness to interrogation.
If all political belief originates from one of two wellsprings, if the last thing you should do to propagate your belief is to water it down, if backing it up with facts just weakens it
...Todd Akin, the Republican who notoriously opposed abortion even for rape victims, on the basis that proper victims didn't normally get pregnant because "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down". ... "You have to go up a level, to the moral level. You have to say, this is somebody who's interested in male domination. That's what liberals are afraid to do."
...falling into the trap of trying to dispel welfare "myths", instead of talking about a social security system of which we should be proud.
You want to defend the right to have an abortion, you want to stop privatisation, you want to protect the natural world – as Lakoff has often written, these are not three separate arguments, they are all part of the same worldview.
"...as soon as you monetise something in nature, a cost-benefit analysis will come in. Nature always loses, because nature goes on for ever."
"They don't understand their own moral system or the other guy's, they don't know what's at stake, they don't know about framing, they don't know about metaphors, they don't understand the extent to which emotion is rational, they don't understand how vital emotion is, they try to hide their emotion. They do everything wrong because they're miseducated. And they're proud of that miseducation. Oxford philosophy reigns supreme, right? Oxford philosophy is killing the world."
[from the comments] NLP was kind of a cult, and was rejected by academics, but it explained a number of things that Lakoff and other academic researchers have chosen to ignore.