Reply #194: Back in 1993...

[Mudcat]

I was active duty Army stationed in Hawaii, and a military friend introduced me to Rush Limbaugh's show. I also started listening to G Gordon Liddy, read Thomas Sowell, George Will, and WF Buckley. I noticed that they frequently refuted folks like Chomsky, Michael Kinsley, and Paul Krugman, so I started reading their works as well. Then started listening to NPR.

Limbaugh always seemed like a low-end comic to me. I remember looking at my Army friend with incredulity and saying "But this guys actually believes in homeopathic medicine--how can you take what he says seriously?"

I've been reading The Nation for about a year now. I still regularly read the Wall Street Journal's opinion page.

A big intellectual break for me came after reading a book by Robert Anton Wilson--that led to reading his webpage on E-Prime (here, if you have an interest in that work: http://nobeliefs.com/eprime.htm )--which in turn led to reading about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I now "translate" all political writings heavily laden with the verbs "is/are/were" into the writers' perspectives, rather than accepting what they say as descriptive of some universal reality. Makes all the difference, for me, in how I perceive the world and the people in it.

I have also noticed that conservatives tend to fear new ideas, and liberals tend to embrace new ideas--not always, just a tendency, but that seems to me to reflect the difference between living a life primarily from fear, and living a life primarily from the joy of discovery. I find I much prefer the latter!