Broadly speaking, the Southern and Western desert and mountain states will vote for the candidate who endorses an aggressive military, a role for religion in public life, laissez-faire economic policies, private ownership of guns and relaxed conditions for using them, less regulation and taxation, and a valorization of the traditional family.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the political preferences of certain U.S. regions, reflecting their inclination towards traditional and conservative values.
Steven Pinker points out that in the Southern and Western regions of the United States, voters are typically inclined to support candidates who advocate for a strong military presence, the influence of religion in government affairs, free-market economic policies, gun ownership rights, reduced regulations, and the promotion of traditional family values. This indicates a cultural alignment in these areas towards conservative ideologies and a shared vision for governance.
In practice
A political analyst discussing regional voting patterns might quote Pinker to illustrate conservative ideologies.
The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified.
The linguistic clumsiness of tourists and students might be the price we pay for the linguistic genius we displayed as babies, just as the decrepitude of age in the price we pay for the vigor of youth.
If we are not to abandon values such as peace and equality, or our commitments to science and truth, then we must pry these values away from claims about our psychological makeup that are vulnerable to being proven false.
We adults protect ourselves with laws, police, workplace regulations and social norms and there is no conceivable reason why children should be left more vulnerable, other that laziness or callousness in considering what life is like from their point of view.
The idea that children are passive repositories to be shaped by their parents has been massively overstated. A child's peer group is a far greater determinant of its development and achievements than parental aspiration.
Reason is non-negotiable. Try to argue against it, or to exclude it from some realm of knowledge, and you've already lost the argument, because you're using reason to make your case. ... We don't "believe" in reason.
One of our statesmen said, "The curse of this country is eloquent men."
Let me let you in on a little secret. There is no such thing as an international community. There are self-maximizing, self-interested states that will push their interests as far as possible.
Our only political party has two right wings, one called Republican, the other Democratic. But Henry Adams figured all that out back in the 1890s. "We have a single system," he wrote, and "in that system the only question is the price at which the proletariat is to be bought and sold, the bread and circuses."
In five days, you can turn the page on policies that put greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street before the hard work and sacrifice of folks on Main Street. In five days, you can choose policies that invest in our middle class, and create new jobs, and grow this economy, so that everyone has a chance to succeed, not just the CEO, but the secretary and janitor, not just the factory owner, but the men and women on the factory floor.
It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its 2008-9 attack on Gaza, with full U.S. support and illegally using U.S. weapons.
It's not enough to say that the Olympics is an athletic contest outside of politics, because it's not. The Chinese clearly are using the Olympics to recreate how they are viewed in the world and how they view themselves.
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