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| "I am your father" |
This is all the more clear when we consider the observations of psychologists and other behavior and brain scientists who have pointed out: "What links Strict Father family-based morality to politics is a common metaphor, shared by conservatives and liberals alike -- the Nation-as-Family metaphor, in which the nation is seen as a family, the government as a parent and the citizens as children. This metaphor turns family-based morality into political morality, providing the link between conservative family values and conservative political policies. The Strict Father model, which brings together the conservative metaphors for morality, is what unites the various conservative political positions into a coherent whole when it is imposed on political life by the Nation-as-Family metaphor" (Lakoff).
There are many reasons for the usage of a metaphorical concept, one of those reasons is to explain that great harm can be done without there being a malicious intent to do mass destruction by those who inhabit offices of power:
Two years ago, on a gorgeous November day, 12,000 activists surrounded the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Signs we carried featured quotes from Barack Obama in 2008: "Time to end the tyranny of oil"; "In my administration, the rise of the oceans will begin to slow."(McKibben @ Rolling Stone). Perhaps this post should have been placed in the psychopaths series (When You Are Governed By Psychopaths, When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 2, When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 3, or When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 4) or (MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact, MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact - 2, MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact - 3, MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact - 4, or MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact - 5).
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Our hope was that we could inspire him to keep those promises. Even then, there were plenty of cynics who said Obama and his insiders were too closely tied to the fossil-fuel industry to take climate change seriously. But in the two years since, it's looked more and more like they were right – that in our hope for action we were willing ourselves to overlook the black-and-white proof of how he really feels.
If you want to understand how people will remember the Obama climate legacy, a few facts tell the tale: By the time Obama leaves office, the U.S. will pass Saudi Arabia as the planet's biggest oil producer and Russia as the world's biggest producer of oil and gas combined. In the same years, even as we've begun to burn less coal at home, our coal exports have climbed to record highs. We are, despite slight declines in our domestic emissions, a global-warming machine: At the moment when physics tell us we should be jamming on the carbon brakes, America is revving the engine.
The direction nations are heading is going to destroy civilization as we know it, and that is clear evidence of psychopaths or criminally negligent officials at the helm.
The previous post in this series is here.