this is a great example of the hammer thing:

Rick Perry mentions Galileo. Makes Robin think of Calhoun talking about Galileo. Makes Robin think of book. Makes Robin repost an earlier item about Calhoun comparing slaveholder and Galileo.

He complains that others churn out their pet theories about why Perry said what he said, but then he mention *his* pet theory only presenting it as something other than his pet theory. His theory is important and explanatory, natch. Their’s are pet theories. ROFL.

I think the slipperiness is evident there. He never directly says that the reason why Perry said that is that there is this long tradition of trotting out Galileo to defend their ideas. He just implies it. Who the hell knows with Perry but in any event, you’d really need to trace the intellectual pedigree of this Galileo defense to know for certain, which he doesn’t do in that instance. Instead, it just lets it hang there, shaping the reader’s interpretation toward that view. He massages the reader that way, dealing in platitudes.

naomi wolf thinks that the u.s gubmint orchestrated the occupy crackdowns. therefore, she’s a typical american who happens to hold the view that centralized authority is bad, local authority good.

i skimmed his book on fear, to which he points, but what strikes me as odd is that he makes this claim about u.s. ideology which isn’t actually supported by the articles. plus, i suspect he’s quite wrong that people in the u.s. only see a problem with tyranny as big federal central government. especially if you are talking historically, particularly where the felt experience of community-based oppression is obvious in, say, the Port Huron Statement or in the popular literature of the 50s/60s about the repressiveness of suburbia, about the conformity of gray flannel suits, the longing for escape from the demand for uniformity of thought in business, the desire to be a free thinker, to rebel against social mores that no one experiences abstractly but in the form of judgment, ostracism, ridicule on a very personal level. The theme of the repressiveness of small town american life is ubiquitous in film, right alongside the same theme that small town life is morally redemptive for those imprisoned by the soulless city or the striving suburb.

CoreyRobin corey robin
@Avanworden Perhaps you should read it a second time. Nowhere do I state that as fact or otherwise.
Nov 29, 1:58 AM via web
In reply to…

Avanworden alphonsevanworden
@CoreyRobin your posts states as fact that neither DHS nor any fed agency is enacting a policy re OWS. How can we verify your assertion?
Nov 29, 1:55 AM via web

re this bizarre little shell game of a para:

It’s not surprising that faced with the crackdown of OWS protests, [Naomi] Wolf would immediately turn to a theory of national, centralized repression. It’s part of our national DNA, on the left and the right, to assume that tyranny works that way. We’ve inherited a theory that holds, in the words of the Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, that “liberty and localism work together.” Nothing, as Holland so ably if inadvertently demonstrates in his demolition of Wolf, could be further from the truth.

http://coreyrobin.com/2011/11/27/the-occupy-crackdowns-why-naomi-wolf-got-it-wrong/

How does the demolition of Wolf’s piece prove anything except that the Guardian is a badly edited paper? By a kind of conman’s prattle that, as you note, is characteristic of his work.

i found he considers it trolling and insulting to be asked about the grounds for his sweeping slippery assertions.

the occ was an action organization
not a deliberative convention
not a proto party
and yet to call it a movement misses the coherence
the local occs as replications

a parallel?
perhaps the march on washington “industrial ” armies in the great depression of 1894
now reduced to one name …coxey ..and his army
itself unprecidented

or the lunch counter actions

these are actions
no nee for a demand the action embodies the demand

are you that confirmed in your views ??

why must we first refute
the necessity of an existing …long existing institutional reality

might not you need first to establish its possible contingency ?