I’ve been thinking since I wrote “The Uncanny John Mearsheimer,” in which I by the way proposed Jewish anti-Semitism and black-for-white passing as Ur forms of the uncanny, that anti-Semitism is one of the Ur forms of hatred – the group form. Hatred of the other, expressed as demonization, is a primal emotion. In the […]
The Uncanny John Mearsheimer
. Popularly understood as something eerie, strange, and supernatural, the uncanny in Freud retains that sense of the strange, yet adds to it the contrary feeling of the familiar. This clash of contrarieties is profoundly unsettling. [T]his uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and […]
Mainstreaming Bias
Among the most common complaints of those at the political edges – those on left or right who perceive themselves not to hold the reigns of institutional power – is that the mainstream media, along with other power centers, shapes our perceptions. It shapes and distorts our perception of reality in varied ways, including selection […]
The Pernicious Anti-Israeli Propaganda of Global Policy Forum
In Propaganda and Persuasion, Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell define the former as the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist. Elaborates Richard Alan Nelson in A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, Propaganda is […]
The State Solution: Yes, for South Sudan; No, for Israel
Hedar Sela has an incisive piece at The Propagandist that sharply zeroes in on the true nature of the so-called “one-state solution.” (H/T CiFWatch). Readers of political commentary on the Middle East will frequently see reference to the ‘one-state solution’ in relation to the Arab-Israeli conflict. What perhaps is often not sufficiently clear is what […]