Shyster

A shyster (possibly derived from the German Scheißer, "shitter"[1]) is an individual who tends to be flexible with his choice of words and sensitive to the sensibilities of his audience when he discusses fiscally pertinent topics.

Translation: a shyster is accustomed to excrete torrents of bullshit over the heads of suckers, who then reward him by giving him enormous wads of cash.

Examples

A large number of ministers of religion fall into this category, particularly cult leaders and televangelists. This category also includes such creationists as are not completely insane, but are merely shilling for pseudoscience.

Extremist politicians, such as those in the right wing of today's Republican Party, or the CPUSA (especially pre-1956File:Wikipedia's W.svg), as well as politicians who pander to extremists, are often shysters; for example, Ronald Reagan announced his sympathy with creationism to win over the fundamentalist voters, and promptly got elected, later being rewarded with canonization.

The term is also sometimes applied to certain trial lawyers, particularly of the ambulance-chasing variety.

gollark: Especially GT:NH.
gollark: GregTech, from what I've heard, seems very hard.
gollark: There isn't time gating like that, although you need several billion RF stored and/or several tens of kRF/t of production to start up a reactor.
gollark: The hard part is that the electromagnets require large amounts of *somewhat* annoying to get resources (tough alloy), and the "fusion core" requires elite plating, requiring a bunch of uranium-238 and "crystal binder", which requires "calcium sulfate" which requires a large complex chemical processing setup.
gollark: NuclearCraft has fusion reactors which I've made a few times. They need a lot of resources and also *somewhat* hard to make stuff.

See also

References
  1. The term's etymology is not agreed upon. It may have derived from German, or a lawyer named Schuster, or perhaps even Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. See here.
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