Metaphors, politics, and religion

An interesting debate about politics and cognitive science:

Stephen Pinker reviews and rebuts George Lakoff's Whose Freedom?
George Lakoff responds
Stephen Pinker responds (subscription only, unfortunately, and I don't plan to subscribe to the New Republic any time soon)

I don't have the energy right now to add my own thoughts, so I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader (that is, feel free to post your own thoughts, and/or guess why my thoughts are). But I thought it was worth passing on. We report, you decide!

I found this via a longish sequence of links starting with memegarden's post about an essay by Doug Muder about thiesm and atheism. He echoes my thoughts about operational definitions: he classifies people as "functional theists" and "functional atheists", which gets rid of the need for an "agnostic" category—either your actions are affected by the idea of God, or they aren't. The rest of the essay (actually a Unitarian sermon) is a little too relativistic for me, but it's an interesting read.

Anyway, Muder also writes about Lakoff's ideas, as well as those of James Ault and Thomas Frank (What's the Matter with Kansas?—and, anyone here remember The Baffler?), synthesizing them into a different model of contrasting kinds of families. libertarianhawk points out that this is conflating views about the family metaphor of government with views of actual families, and refines the model into two dimensions (rather like other two dimensional ideological graphs). My eyes kind of glazed over halfway through these essays, but it's worth skimming at least.