Thursday, December 05, 2013

Peter's Parapraxis

From Peter Beinart's bag of tweets, today:

 



Questions:


Who is "we"? 
Why bad? 
What's the "Jews" got to do with it?

Why "parapaxis" aka the Freudian slip?


"Two factors seem to play a part in bringing to consciousness the substitutive names: first, the effort of attention, and second, and inner determinant which adheres to the psychic material," Freud suggested in his book. "Besides the simple forgetting of proper names there is another forgetting which is motivated by repression," Freud explained (1901). According to Freud, unacceptable thoughts or beliefs are withheld from conscious awareness, and these slip help reveal what is hidden in the unconscious.
The term is popularly used today in a humorous way when a person makes a mistake in speech. In these situations, observers often suggest (in a comic way) that the mistake reveals some type of hidden emotion on the part of the speaker."

I have a theory based on Beinart's  more recent re-birth as the quintessential anti-Zionist Zionist (see his blog: Open Zion, for example), that he is afraid of Jews being too much in the public eye while involved in kerfuffles that may have something to do with too many complaints and rewards. You know, the type of discomfort that many Jews feel as a result of antisemitic jokes such as: What's faster than light speed?  A Jew with a coupon, har, har.

Of course Peter's shtick is that his opinions are formed by rational arguments and genuine care for Israel's Jewish character.  Which is why he is providing ample platform for any anti-Israel bashers and demonizers on his blog. Yet, for all his claimed principled position about American Jews, etc, he gets all flustered by a chubby Rabbi being embroiled in a case where free gifts abound. This, Peter muses, tweeterially, cannot be good for the Jews. How so? He doesn't explain. He cannot explain. He can only imply, and if pressed, I cannot for the life of me imagine what he could say in his defence for this pusillanimous tweet except invoke the Sixth fallacy of rhetoric: Irony. And I wouldn't have enough respect for Peter's intellectual prowess to accept that.

1 Comments:

At 5:46 AM EST, Blogger SnoopyTheGoon said...

Your analysis is bang on the money (no Joo pun intended). A typical Beinart's world view.

 

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