Fear appeal construction in the Daily Mail Online:a critical discourse analysis of ‘Prime Minister Corbyn and the 1000 days that destroyed Britain’

The rhetorical fear appeal is a technique of political communication that seeks to elicit an emotional response in receivers with the intention of provoking them to political action desired by the rhetor. This paper examines a single example of fear appeal construction in the British press, the Mail Online’s ‘Prime Minister Corbyn and the 1000 days that Destroyed Britain’ (2015), through analysis of its use of two defining political myths, a conservative myth of declinism, and the utopia/anti-utopia binary myth. I firstly examine the origins and contemporary uses of fear appeals as techniques of political persuasion, before going on to examine how these are constructed. I then go on to analyse the Mail Online article’s use of these two powerful political myths, one, declinism, which I argue is utilised descriptively for the purposes of discourse construction, and the other, utopia/anti-utopia, which is utilised instructively. Finally, I propose a method of analysis combining recent approaches to the critical discourse analysis of myth with the cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion drawn from social psychology, in order to show how the Mail Online article is constructed as a discursive fear appeal

HUMAN NATURE OR HUMANITY: BETWEEN GENES AND VALUES

We are within nature and culture, conditioned simultaneously by genes and meanings. This form of our self-understanding is the result of fundamental modifications that happened in modern philosophical anthropology and of the impact of the natural Science. In modern philosophy three types of approaches to the human situation were constituted at different times: the idealist, the naturalist, and the culturalist, and the problem of whether humanity is natural (biological) or cultural has begun to take precedence over the issue of human supernatural roots. Both approaches are presented, their presuppositions discussed, and arguments in favor of a version of the culturalist approach. Only the culturalist approach allows us to understand our own self-constitution and, in particular, our self-reflectivity, as well as the naturalist attempts to ignore them and immerse ourselves in nature

Orientalism and the puzzle of the Aryan invasion theory

The origin of the Aryan invasion theory (AIT) is generally located in the discovery of the Indo-European and Dravidian language families. However, these discoveries cannot account for the emergence of the AIT, because the postulation of the invasion preceded the linguistic research. In its search for an alternative account of the cognitive conditions under which this theory could come into being, this article illustrates a particular way of studying the intellectual history of Orientalism. The Orientalist discourse on India is approached as a body of reflections on the western cultural experience of India. This perspective brings us to the thesis that the pre-conditions for the emergence of the AIT lay in the postulation of two entities in the Orientalist discourse on India: the ‘Hindu religion’ and its ‘caste system’. Both these notions and the AIT appeared cogent and coherent to European minds, because they mirrored internal developments within European culture and its intellectual debates, which had given shape to Europe’s experience of India

The American Myth of White Supremacy: A Review of \u3ci\u3eMyths America Lives By\u3c/i\u3e

(excerpt) In 1989 a young white woman running through New York’s Central Park was seized, brutally beaten, raped, and dumped in a ravine. Miraculously, she survived, despite extensive injuries and a complete loss of memory. Five black and brown teenagers from Harlem, labeled the Central Park Five, were quickly apprehended and, after twenty-four hours of questioning without legal counsel, confessed to the crime. Although they were all minors, some as young as fourteen, the New York Police Department publicly released their names. Angry demands for punishment filled the local and national media. In subsequent trials, all five were found guilty and swallowed up by the New York prison system. However, they were innocent

Inside and outside legality: A pluralistic and social construction of law

What is inside and what is outside the law? A question that is not easy to answer and that forces legal theory to ask itself about which are today the forms of normative production and which are the boundaries of law. Through the analysis of the deep transformations of the global legal order and of the issues related to the boundaries of law and to the forms of hybrid legality, the essay offers a pluralist and dynamic interpretation of the social genesis of law.¿Qué es lo que está dentro y lo que está fuera del derecho? Es un dilema difícil de solucionar, que obliga a la teoría jurídica a interrogarse acerca de las actuales formas de producción normativa y de los mismos confines del derecho. A través del análisis de las profundas transformaciones del orden jurídico global y de las problemáticas que atañen a los confines del derecho y a las formas de juridicidad híbrida, este ensayo se presenta como una lectura pluralista y dinámica de la génesis social del derecho

Facial recognition and visual processing as we age:Using the Thatcher illusion with famous and non-famous faces

This paper reports a study examining preferred visual processes in recognition of facial features in older vs younger age groups, using Thatcherised images of famous and non-famous people in the one study. The aims were to determine whether decline in visual system processing occurs increasingly as we grow older, and whether there is less decline in recognition of famous (or familiar) faces. Three groups (younger, middle-old and older) made up the sample of 73 people (aged 19-82 years). Visual decline in face recognition across the age groups was assessed based on the Thatcher illusion—using four famous and four non-famous faces either with normal features or with distorted features. The faces were presented one at a time on computer screen, and participants were asked to judge whether the face was distorted (eyes and/or mouth not aligned in relation to the face); in addition, time taken to decision (latency) was also measured. Decline was found in visual processing such that older individuals gave limited attention to facial details (processing faces holistically, with detail errors) and they took longer to decide. Whether the faces were famous or not did not have significant effects on the decisions and there was no interaction with age, though famous faces were given longer attention. Our visual system processes decline as we age in that we give less attention to details and more to holistic processing and so make more errors in recognition. Implications for treatment or amelioration of the effects are discussed.</jats:p