Mick Hartley on Freud, Marx and Hegel – and being antiquated.
Freud didn’t cure anyone, or come to his conclusions through the hard work of trial and error. The analytic situation was merely the backdrop for what was really going on: myth-making on a grand scale… To use [Freud’s theorising] to explain Western literature, as generations of academics have done, following Freud’s example, is to hold up a mirror and believe you’re seeing through a window.
Thomas Sowell on some economic fallacies. (h/t, Lattenomics.)
If it was really true that you could hire a woman for three quarters of what you could hire a man with exactly the same qualifications, then employers would be crazy not to hire all women. It would be insane to hire men. Not only would it be insane, it would probably put them out of the business because the ones that were smart enough to hire women would have such a cost advantage that it would be really hard for the others to compete.
Norman Geras on Seumas Milne’s latest apologia for Hamas.
Milne tactfully passes over what Hamas’s charter reveals about it: that it is a programmatically anti-Semitic organization which quotes from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and promises the killing of Jews. How is it thinkable that a Guardian journalist doesn’t notice this or, if he does, discounts it? It’s thinkable. In fact, it’s getting to be an old story. [There] was a time when it was kind of shocking.
Yet now it’s a routine pathology among a large part of the left, perhaps the larger part, and its mainstream British publication.
David
Freud was not a scientist. His writings not at all scientific. There’s more science in cheesy self-help books like “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” (and pop psychologists are from Uranus).
Freud’s greatest books, “Civilization and its Discontents”, and “The Future of an Illusion”, are general musing on society and culture. They’re closer to books like Frazer’s “Golden Bough”, I suppose.
Freud’s greatest influence may be in the areas of public relations and advertising, thanks to his cousin, Edward Bernays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
As fro Marx, Leszek Kolokowski points out the following. When preparing the second edition of “Capital (vol 1)”, Marx decided to update the statistics from the first edition. But there was a problem. It was absolutely central to the argument of the book that the real wages of the proletariat would fall. Every statistic Marx could find showed that they were, in fact, rising. So what did Marx do? He updated all the other statistics, but left the wage statistics the same as in the first edition. Any modern economist caught cheating with the statistics like that would be in serious trouble.
Georges,
“Freud was not a scientist. His writings [are] not at all scientific.”
I’m pretty sure that’s Mick’s point. It’s largely grandiose, often ludicrous, myth-making, which for some reason has had lingering appeal in certain quarters. And much the same could be said of Marx.
Welcome back, by the way. We hadn’t seen you for a while.
Thank you, David
There was a bit of a “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” row going on here. I thought I better keep my head down!
Yes, I did get more than I bargained for with that one. Or was it less than I bargained for? Either way, it surprised me. And still it rumbles on…
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2008/07/female-privileg/comments/page/5/#comments
Texas has it right. Shoot the SOB