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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

New Book For The New Year

When I was in Half Moon Bay just before Christmas, I went to my favourite bookshop (Coastside Books, who as far as I can tell have no web site - they are a few blocks down on the west side of Main Street) and as ever left with a new book. It's one I would recommend to every American progressive (and it's pretty helpful for the rest of us too).

Written by a group of people at the Rockridge Institute, including George Lakoff, it's called Thinking Points: A Progressive's Handbook [US|UK] and at $10 it is an absolute must-buy. It is clear, easy to read, persuasive and riddled with useful, transferrable concepts that actually help clarify political outlooks across the spectrum. I almost unreservedly recommend it - my (small) reservations include use of examples with a short shelf-life.

Especially useful are the thinking tools that clarify the way people can use the same words ("freedom", "equality" and so on) yet mean opposite things without any failure of integrity. I would very much like to see some thinking about open source done from this perspective - is anyone aware of such work? Superficially it seems to me that the Free Software and Open Source movements are the "contested variants" of the root "software freedom" concept and that some decent linguistic analysis would really help us gain unity.

Labels: book, Lakoff, politics, progressive, USA

posted at 3:23 PM (UK) | |