Bullshit
Bullshit (also known as bollocks in the UK), often shortened to BS, is nonsensical claptrap, or words without any particular connection to reality. Bullshit may be used as a means of obfuscation, or it may simply be a way to pass time or fill space on a page. There's a lot of it, and it is often an indicator that someone is trying to mislead and/or they don't know what they are talking about.
| Cogito ergo sum Logic and rhetoric |
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| Key articles |
| General logic |
| Bad logic |
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v - t - e |
| —Harry Frankfurt |
According to programmer Alberto Brandolini:[1]
“”The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. |
Damn straight.
Bullshitting
“”If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit! |
| —Unknown (not W.C. Fields) |
Bullshitting is, in a way, an art form. It's not exactly lying as when you're bullshitting you may in fact be telling the truth in a completely slanted or useless form, or you may simply be saying nothing at all.
Bullshitting on the Internet is becoming easier due to the prevalence of Google and Wikipedia. Someone posting on the internet has more than enough time between posts to type whatever they want to talk about into Google or Wikipedia and appear as an immediate genius to others reading the post. The drawback to this is that everyone can do it, so someone with a genuine knowledge of a subject can still tend to win out. (Thank goodness!)
One common way of Bullshitting is writing jargon or gobbledygook to reach the word count on an essay.
Bullshit and philosophy
“”Dole office clerk: "What work do you do?"
Comicus: "I'm a standup philosopher." |
| —Mel Brooks (comicus) and Bea Arthur (clerk), History of the World, Part I, at a Roman unemployment office[2] |
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his essay On Bullshit, attempts a rigorous philosophical definition of bullshit. For Frankfurt, this consists of drawing a sharp distinction between a bullshitter and a liar; the difference being that a liar cares enough about the truth to state known falsehoods — or, at a minimum, respects reality enough to feel a need to evade it. A bullshitter, on the other hand, does not care about whether statements are true or false, because some other goal is paramount — and truth is a secondary consideration, if it is granted any relevance at all. "Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this," Frankfurt writes, "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."[3]
A common claim among neo-Nazis is that the Holocaust never happened, that many millions of people purportedly killed in Eastern Europe were in fact not killed, that this massacre was a fabrication of Allied propagandists. Now this is a factual claim, of which demonstrating the truth value is quite possible. And, it being demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that these people actually were killed, neo-Nazis have become roundly recognized as liars when it comes to this topic.
The New Republic's Senior Editor, Jeet Heer, applied Frankfurt's thesis to Donald Trump to demonstrate that, contrary to common and frequent accusations, Trump is not a liar. Rather, he's a "bullshit artist." Heer writes that Trump would take us to "a post-truth world" in which "subjectivity is all, where reality is simply what he says." [4] Which, of course, would be total bullshit.
Bullshit!
Penn & Teller: Bullshit! is a skeptical television show on the Showtime network hosted by magicians Penn & Teller. The original series concentrated on debunking crank ideas from ESP to alternative medicine. While generally well-received by the skeptical community, it has been criticized for the presenters' tendency to let their libertarian politics interfere with their rationalist message, for example, with the episodes "Prostitution" and "Drugs" as well as their poor fact-checking, for instance, misquoting Thomas Jefferson.[5] Penn and Teller should've stuck to making rabbits appear out of hats, instead of making Ayn Rand quotes appear on teenagers' Facebook profiles.
Later series concentrated less on actual crank practices, and more on concepts such as "family values" or "profanity," although some basic crank-refuting remained, such as episodes on cryptozoology and New Age "Medicine."
-isms
There are bullshit terms tossed around by those who don't like the way reality actually works. These are generally terms which have a real base word, but adds the suffix "-ism" to express that the idea must be a philosophical or religious notion. Such isms include "scientism," "Darwinism," and "evolutionism." When someone starts using such terms over mainstream scholarship, they are usually full of bullshit.
Real bullshit
Bullshit is also the solid waste material from Bos taurus (cattle) of the male gender. It is not nice to step in, but makes good fertilizer. It is often compared to money in that it can be beneficial to spread it thinly over a large area, but highly toxic (not to mention disgusting) when too much is concentrated in one place. This usage differs from the metaphorical usage discussed above in that metaphorical bullshit, while toxic in high concentrations, is toxic in low concentrations as well. Genuine bovine bullshit figures prominently as an ingredient, reagent, and fuel in Ayurvedic medicine as well.
Polite euphemisms for bullshit, in the literal or figurative sense, include "bovine feces", "bovine excrement", "bovine scat" and "bovine stool", the last two of which even preserves the initials.
It is also used in third world countries as a cheap source of fuel for fires. It's necessary that it be made extremely dry by laying it out in the sun.
In Rwanda dried cow dung (presumably from either gender of cattle) is used in the traditional art form of imigongo. During the 1994 Rwandan Genocide the art form was nearly lost.
Academic qualifications explained
- BS — bullshit.
- MS — more shit.
- PhD — piled higher and deeper.
- MD — much deeper.
- Dr — dilated rectum.
- See also anti-intellectualism, anti-science, credentialism and professor of nothing
- Scatology or coprology — in biology, the study of feces; in paleontology, the study of some really old shit: coprolites and urolites; in literature, the study of the obscene.
See also
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For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about shit. |
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For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about Bullshit. |
- Argumentum ex culo
- Ben Stein
- Creationism
- Deepity
- Fake news
- Feces therapy
- Management speak
- Technobabble
External links
- "6 Subtle Ways The News Media Disguises Bullshit As Fact", Cracked
- How to Detect Bullshit, Scott Berkun
- High-Minded Bullshit, Pop Matters
- Brandolini’s law, Ordre Spontané
- Calling Bullshit a video course in bullshit detection by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West of the University of Washington Information School
Bibliography
- Frankfurt, Harry G., On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 2005, ISBN 0691122946.
- Law, Stephen. Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole, Prometheus, 2011, ISBN 1616144114.
- Penny, Laura.Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit, Crown, 2005, ISBN 1400081033.
References
- The 'bullshit asymmetry' (The original referrer of the concept is unknown, but it alludes to Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. Mike the Mad Biologist made note of an "asymmetric advantage of bullshit" in 2009, while an Italian blogger also postulated the so-called "teoria della montagna di merda" — which in turn sounds very similar to Bullshit Mountain. Brandolini considers it a corollary of the contributions of Daniel Kahneman.)
- Unemployment Insurance History Of The World by cujofriend (Jun 24, 2008) YouTube.
- Description of On Bullshit at Princeton University Press
- https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar
- As seen here