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Can we quit having wars on things ? Everything we have a war against gets worse.
by geggam 9y ago
Can we quit having wars on things ? Everything we have a war against gets worse.
- sp332 9y agoIt's not a real war. LBJ noted that war seems to get heaps of money shoveled on it while basic domestic stuff goes unfunded. So declaring a war on poverty is a way to anchor the amount of money spent up where people think of funding wars instead of down where they think of funding welfare programs.
- dang 9y agoAll true, but I think geggam still has a point. What if framing these things as wars is somehow part of why they don't work?
- 3131s 9y agoYou might find this paper interesting, into explores the idea of framing things as war: https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson80.pdf https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson... There's a book from the same authors that contains a more expansive list of metaphors and examples.
- blacksmith_tb 9y agoTrue, but it also sets expectations that can't be met - we won't 'win' these wars, poverty won't 'surrender' and whether or not progress is made, we won't 'lose' this war either.
- eeZah7Ux 9y agoAlso, using the word "war" to address waste, poverty, terrorism, "drugs" and so on normalizes the idea that war is a good and necessary thing. In most other cultures people don't use the word war metaphorically because it's seen as a terrible thing.