The Truth About Bullshit

[Mr.Conley]

You're babbling now, Mr.Conley. At least try to give your replies some obscure relevance to the conversation.

Alright, to review:
I asked you your opinion.

You said the article was a joke.

I asked you why.

You said you read the article

I sarcastically said that was a good rebuttal.

You said you were, "just giving you a straight answer to your question,"

I said you are going to have to give some more justification.

You just said I'm sidetracking the conversation by asking for said justification.



Now I don't know about you, but asking an argument more detailed then, "
[I support this conclusion] by reading that bullshit article you posted," isn't without, "some obscure relevance to the conversation".

You're going to have to do better than that.

Do you have anything to say to support you position?

But you didn't POST "On Bullshit". You posted a "tried - unsuccessfully - to be sneaky" hit piece that used "On Bullshit" as a point of departure. You have an agenda, Mr.Conley; you're just not terribly clever about it.

Must there be a hidden conspiracy everywhere? You're sounding almost like rtwng. Only this time it's the liberals.

I would love to post "On Bullshit." The problem is that the essay is available only in print and I don't feel like typing all 70-odd-whatever-number-of-pages-the-thing-is all at once. This essay was the best substitute I could find.

Out of curiosity, what is my agenda? Am I nothing but a pawn of the evil liberals? Am I here for no reason other than to slowly destroy your undying faith in the Republican party? What is it musicman?

Ah, good - you've abandoned all pretense of having any respect for me whatsoever. I much prefer fresh air and the light of day.

Okay, now I know your drunk. I'll talk to you tomorrow. Get some sleep.

Immaterial. This is not what you initially posted. This is not what you tried to slide in under the door. And, "what you're trying to get across" couldn't be any clearer if it was a buttonhook in the well water.

Out of curiosity, you do understand what at least the wikipedia article is saying, right? Do you get what the premise states? We can quibble all you want about whatever it is your trying to insinuate, but you understand what the articles are describing.

 

[sitarro]

Musicman is correct Conley.... sorry, you're wrong, that's just how it is.,,, and I aint drunk.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Husicman is correct Conley.... sorry, you're wrong, that's just how it is.,,, and I aint drunk.

I'm sorry, but unless you or Husicman can offer some argument that I've got some sort of alterior motive here, I'm disinclined to believe you.

 

[musicman]

You fancy yourself a "stealth progressive" - moving freely among the ignorant masses, cleverly disgused as one of them, sowing seeds of discontent. You're about as subtle as a bare ass on a flagpole. This is the second time you've tried to pull this shit. If you think you're not going to get called on it every time, YOU'RE the one who's drunk. Get some rest, now. We'll be talking some more, I'm sure.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Nighty night then. Talk to you later.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Jesus, it's almost 4! Make that good morning. Wow. F**king Civ 4 downloads take FOREVER.

 

[musicman]

Nighty night then. Talk to you later.

Bank on it.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Are you pissed at me or something?

 

[musicman]

Are you pissed at me or something?

Nothing personal, Mr.Conley. As the movie mobsters are fond of saying, "It's just business".

 

[theHawk]

Originally Posted by wikipedia
In his 1986 essay On Bullshit, philosopher Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University characterizes bullshit as a form of falsehood distinct from lying. The liar, Frankfurt holds, knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The bullshitter, on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking to impress:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Hmm, so maybe Liberals aren't liars, maybe they're just all bullshiters!

 

[KarlMarx]

In your opinion, is there anything bad in the world that "the left" is not responsible for?

Just out of curiosity.

Athlete's foot.... but that's a big "maybe"

 

[KarlMarx]

So I assume that's one vote that "the liberals" are responsible for everything bad that has ever happened in the world.

Liberals - that term has changed meaning since I was a kid. It used to be that a liberal was someone who believed in the goals of the Progressive Movement but was still pro-America. Now the term means someone that wants to re-invent society according the vision of Karl Marx.

The goals of the Progressive Movement were to make society better by getting government involved. That was good, up to a point, but then the Progressives could not stop finding injustices, real and invented, nor could they resist the temptation to expand government in order to make their Utopian vision a reality.

But the Founding Fathers, when they wrote the Constitution, knew that the best government for a free people was a limited one. That is why there are enumerated powers in the Constitution. That is why the checks and balances. But the price of limited government is that individuals will be expected to take care of themselves and it will be up to the citizenry to make the world a better place.

Liberals want to expand government, they seem to want to regulate everything, that comes at a price of diminishing our freedoms.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Hmm, so maybe Liberals aren't liars, maybe they're just all bullshiters!

That's the general idea. However, I wouldn't say all people on either side are bullshiters, but a good number of people in each camp are.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Athlete's foot.... but that's a big "maybe"

Personally, I don't think that liberals are responsible for the Black Death either. That and the 100 Years War.

I have nothing to back that with though.

 

[Hagbard Celine]

Actually, liberal minds are responsible for all of the good leaps forward in our history. Nobody ever revolutionized society by "conserving" the status quo.

 

[Mr.Conley]

You fancy yourself a "stealth progressive" - moving freely among the ignorant masses, cleverly disgused as one of them, sowing seeds of discontent. You're about as subtle as a bare ass on a flagpole. This is the second time you've tried to pull this shit. If you think you're not going to get called on it every time, YOU'RE the one who's drunk. Get some rest, now. We'll be talking some more, I'm sure.

I"d just like to note that this post bears to relation to what we've been talking about. You failed to respond to anything in my rebuttal. It appears you've run out of ideas, and, backed into the corner with nothing left, went for the jugular. You've abandoned any and all attempts at rational argument, instead prefering to engage in a pissing contest. If you don't have anything to say other than that the bullshit article is bullshit, alongside your standard personal attacks, then we really have nothing to discuss.

 

[Mr.Conley]

Actually, liberal minds are responsible for all of the good leaps forward in our history. Nobody ever revolutionized society by "conserving" the status quo.

Not really relevant. Do you get the idea of bullshit though?

 

[musicman]

I"d just like to note that this post bears to relation to what we've been talking about. You failed to respond to anything in my rebuttal. It appears you've run out of ideas, and, backed into the corner with nothing left, went for the jugular. You've abandoned any and all attempts at rational argument, instead prefering to engage in a pissing contest. If you don't have anything to say other than that the bullshit article is bullshit, alongside your standard personal attacks, then we really have nothing to discuss.

I have not attacked you personally. If you're having trouble discerning the difference between lively discussion and personal attacks, dig up some of your posts to me on the topic of New Orleans. THOSE are personal attacks.

I am not going to expend my finite resources of time, energy, and joy, taking a machete to every tangled clump of disingenuousness with which you have tried to confound rational discourse in this particular thread. Sometimes, I enjoy that pursuit; lately, I'm kind of busy with other things. I just want you to rest assured that your ilk is going to experience less and less success with this sort of sneaky intellectual dishonesty. Others, perhaps more savvy than I, and certainly with more time on their hands, have made it their business to home in on liberal propaganda, and expose its beating heart - the lie. Until liberalism finds a way to muzzle the Internet, its days of wielding any meaningful power are over; you know that, don't you? Liberalism is a lie at its very root; it can only survive, then, in an atmosphere where it controls the flow of information.

In the meantime, I'll do my humble bit to keep my little corner of the world clean. Every time to try to slide one of your bullshit propaganda pieces in under the door, I'll try to be there with a spotlight. See you around.

 

[KarlMarx]

Personally, I don't think that liberals are responsible for the Black Death either. That and the 100 Years War.

I have nothing to back that with though.

Not responsible for the Black Death? You mean to say, when they say it was spread by rats... they weren't talking about liberals?

 

[musicman]

Mr.Conley's instruction manual:

"The clutch-brake pedal on the Caterpillar 3000-lb. capacity forklift is a great aid to operating efficiency. George Bush drinks the blood of infants. This pedal enables the operator to simultaneously slow or stop the forklift AND disengage the transmission - allowing him to maneuver the height/pitch/angle of the forks without completely stopping the truck to change gears...".