On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 07:49:53 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote: >Mike Palij wrote: >>can they ever get it right? > >Whatever one's position on conservatism and authoritarianism, >the real howler is characterizing Adorno as a "neo-Freudian."
When I read this I was wondering whether it was now worse to be called a "Freudian" instead of a "Marxist". >He was a Frankfurt-school Marxist sociologist. Of course there >was some "Freudishness" in the mix (as there was in a great deal >of mid-century European intellectual culture), but calling him a >"neo-Freudian" would put him in the same category as people >like Melanie Klein and Erich Fromm (who did write about >authoritarianism from an explicitly neo-Freudian perspective). Wasn't Else Frankel-Brunswick supposed to provide the descriptiion of the psychological mechanisms (clearly psychoanalytic) that presumably would explain where authoritarian personality tendencies came from? I'm not familiar with her background but her follow-up in Christie & Jahoda's critical evaluation of the Authorian Personality research project seems to make her the authority on these matters. >>See the article/review below. Outside of the immediately >>obvious "hindsight bias" (aka "I knew all along bias") what >>other errors of commission and ommission are made? > >Mike, you seem to have mistaken this peice for an attempt to >convey information. Actually, I thought that it was supposed to be a simple book review. The real problem was that the reviewer clearly knows very little about the actual research, especially by Altemeyer, and, since he can't really address the technical or theoretical details, deals with it on a purely political level. >It is not. It is, instead, a character-smear piece of the kind >raised to high art by American talk-radio and then perfected >by Karl Rove for election campaigns. Its function is to supply >like-minded folks with a couple of nasty (truth notwithstanding) >personal cracks in their pocket should an actual discussion of, >in this case, Dean's book, come up in everyday conversation. >These serve to simultaneously undermine the credibility of the >individual whose work is being discussed AND change the >topic of conversation (forcing the person who wishes to offer >any kind of defense to appear awkward or even "obsessed" >by having to explicitly change the topic *back* to what is now a > previous one). One sees the technique used regularly on "Fox >News" and by CNN's more obnoxious personalities (Tucker >Carlson -- who was dumped soon after Jon Stewart nailed him >on a similar misdirective rhetorical technique, Lou Dobbs, etc.) I believe that term that is becoming associated with this approach is "swiftboating", for obvious reasons. I wonder how long before some students start adopting this as a writing style to deal with topics that they disagree with. http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_07_17/print/reviewprint.html -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
