How to Help Trump, by George Lakoff

[Igel]

5. That's the frame.

But like much of that variety of cog ling, it only accounts for the facts it wants to.

Give them a counter-example or 20 and you get one of several responses. A claim that it's irrelevant to the real truth; an appeal to authority; or a quick redefinition of key terms.

Lakoff would have Lenin and Mao and the SWP be classified as "conservatives." Or redefine "conservative" in a way that makes most political discussion meaningless, without bothering to point out that what's already been said has been rendered moot, if not falsified. Or those are just random occurrences without any bearing on the present because, well, things are different in undefinable ways.

At least the earlier practitioners of "fuzzy" cog link like Sebeok knew the limits of their analysis. Lakoff never did and after the linguistics wars were done he carved out a guerrilla's niche for himself, like the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis found its niche and can't be shaken if though the supposed factual basis for the thing was long ago found to be fatally ridden with errors.

Lakoff did get in a nice plug for his book, though.