| "If you don’t think there is anything that really needs preemption, then that is your argument. The rest is specious nonsense." |
The late Dr. Freud of Vienna still has much to answer for. Where would Wingnut City be if one could not replace argument with diagnosis?
Though Freudianity as high-and-dry social scientizing be almost extinct, yet the vulgar errors that it was always so prone to give rise to have not gone away pari passu. The present specimen is not your average bastard or hybrid offspring of a dying mythology, it is really quite a remarkable ‘mischievment’ [1].
From the outset, Freudianity was abused in the gutt..., in der Gasse, that is, as Contender #6 abuses it here: "I need not respond to you, sir, because you are sick and it is only your sickness that I can hear speakin’."
What makes this neocomradely specimen bastard or hybrid is that previous malpractitioners invariably dismissed everythin’ their victims, or rather, their victims’ diseases, had to say for themselves. To single out part of the contents of the conceptual garbage bag as worthy of re-cyclin’ is neo- indeed! Even those who do not find the sweet puppies of the Commentariat as endlessly entertaining to watch as I do ought to admit that, like poor Jean-Jacques, au mois elle est différent!
Exactly what new criterion or weekly standard does this individual neocomradess apply as she works her way through material that most of her own crew would dismiss as ‘pathological’ trash from stem to stern?
That is not an easy question, unfortunately. Possibly I do not get the hang of so flabbergastin’ a neo-ism right at first glance? Perhaps.
The (apparent) substance of her nifty ploy puts me in mind of an old joke -- Mr. Thurber’s, it may have been -- at the expense of St. Rudyard Kiplin’s If: "If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs / Maybe you simply don’t understand the situation."
It looks as if Neocomradess #6 will attend to your argument quâ argument as long as it concerns whether or not you "think there is anything that really needs preemption," though she pretty plainly would consider you an imbecile if you were to deny the Tel Avîv government its imprescriptible right to engage in preëmptive self-retaliations. That is what she says, at any rate, although there is a small obstacle to taking it at face value, considering that she makes nothin’ like an argument herself.
Nevertheless, the general structure of her mental Umwelt seems tolerably clear: there are two (2) nonpathological views about "How Obama's America might threaten" the Israël of M. de Netanyahu: one may think, mistakenly but not dementedly, either (1) that Jewish Statism is not in fact very seriously threatened, or else (2) take the line of Neocomradess J. E. Dyer and Ms. Chicken Little, in which case you are not only sane but (by their account) sensible. If you want to talk about any other aspect of neo-Levantine affairs, however, you had better lie back on the couch and get yourself freudianated before you do something regrettable.
I see that I have got the neocomradely tone slightly wrong: she barks "The rest is specious nonsense!" at her figurative patient, a move which I daresay Dr. Freud would never have made. Though the great man did indeed suffer from a certain fascination with medicine as pure science, he never altogether lost sight of it as a so-called "caring profession" also. [2]
Considered as rhetoric, and in that slightly sub-par sense ‘argument’, this shiny new toy turns out to be not really quite so brand new after all. Back during Impeachmentgate, Wingnut City and Rio Limbaugh kept informin’ everybody not deaf that "All you need to know about X is Y."
Contender #6 does not word her own oracle that way, but surely it is clear that she might do so if she chose? To assign values to her unknowns mechanically produces a somewhat clunky formulation, "All you need to know about (( a potential Obama threat to Hyperzion )) is (( whether there is anything that really needs preemption )). Naturally one might add that it is evil Qommies and not, Father Zeus forbid!, the holy Homeland™ that may require some preëmptive self-retaliatin’ against. But to stick that in explicitly turns serious clunkiness into terminal ditto, nicht wahr?
Since this is not my oracle that we disconstruct, I shall leave merely cosmetic fix-ups to actual purveyors and purchasers of the ideoproduct in question. However it seems more than cosmetic that the neoclunkinesses should seemingly boil down into one or two maxims that are both familiar and reasonably stylishly expressed, namely Not kennt kein Gebot! and Salus populi suprema lex.
To boil the syrup down further for the benefit of impeachsters und auch für die Gasse überhaupt is not difficult:
| "All you need to know about (( the survival of Wunnerful Us )) is (( whether or not We survive )). |
As usual with the sweet puppies of the Commentariat, a certain element of spoof naturally enters in as soon as one attempts to reword their own mindwash for them. Still, although I may seem to have reduced the magnificent oracle of #6 to sheer tautology, this is not really the case at present, is it? Certain Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg and M. Tullius Cicero, or whichever modern Prussians or antique Romans the German and Latin versions are to be attributed to, did not think that they were saying something along the lines of "The whole is greater than any of its parts." [3] But God knows best.
Happy days.
___
[1] ‘Mischievement’ was Prof. Kaufmann of Princeton’s little joke for the parapraxis of the labóratory ratfink translators of Freud.
There are several different layers of dead thought superposed hereabouts, so the noëtic archaeologists of Princess Posterity will have to excavate the ideofossils with scrupulous attention to detail.
Prof. K. was perhaps half-way down Freudianity’s slippery slope (the segment from 1939 to 2009): it never crossed his mind that the defendant could be other than a Very Great Man, but at the same time, the VGM himself would presumably not have much relished being praised with Kaufmannite praise, i.e., as a mere Geisteswissenschaftler rather than as the Newton of Noëtics.
The earlier part of this rake's progress was before the present keyboard’s time, but the second half is memorable enough. Dr. Bettleheim of Autistostán marks the three-quarters point, I'd say: he praised the VGM as even greater still because he was not really a white-coated labóratory ratfink at all. By the time Dr. B. had finished with his patient / victim / client, anybody who had the cultural misfortune to inhabit our own holy Homeland™ could be pardoned for seeing scarcely any daylight between Dr. Freud and Herr Geheimrat von Goethe. Getting to that point required lots and lots of colonial or provincial ignorance of Old Euro Kultur , but that commodity has never been lacking chez nous.
Who's left? As far as I know, Prof. Gay is still active for the VGM's fame and glory, but this advocate must be quite elderly by now [4]. In any case, he, too, has never been inclined to boost his favorite product as Naturwissenschaft.
[2] I recognize what a wimpy and wishy-washy and bleedin’-heart notion that cliché refers to, but cannot see any way to dodge it entirely without suggesting that Dr. Freud was a sort of Dr. Rappacini or Dr. Frankenstein or who engaged in freudianizing to advance his own interests exclusively. (Perhaps if he had lived to hear of Chicagonomics . . . ?)
[3] Now that I have typed the words out, it strikes me that it would not be hard to make out that that particular mathematical ‘tautology’ was almost exactly what these celebrated statespersons had in mind in 1914 ABCE and 63 BCE respectively, taking context and circumstances into account. Oh, well!
[4] His age will be eighty-six in two months.
No comments:
Post a Comment