Short and Sweet.
And I’m not in the mood to fix it anymore. I used a heavily customized HemingwayEx ever since I started this blog, but it’s been unmaintained for the past 7 years and I noticed recently that my homepage is now all wonky. Plus sporadically people had been complaining about readability.
Since I don’t post that much anymore, I think it’s time to go to something more standard, so I just selected one of the wordpress defaults for now. Feeling cute, might change later 😀
He’s a bullshitter! Quoth Harry Frankfurt (found via this article)
“A liar knows they are lying, which means they know what the truth is, and have a certain respect for it. But a bullshitter either doesn’t know or doesn’t care, and is fundamentally unable to handle being caught. “
Harry Frankfurt – On Bullshit
I was thinking about this when I was seeing the trumpettes valiantly arguing against the world calling Trump a liar for claiming that a living president agreed that The Wall is a good idea.
Trump didn’t lie, he was just trying to bullshit you, as he always does.
During online arguments, you often see people shout out “Ad Hominem” when you’re pointing out their problematic background. They assume this is a good comeback as they want you to evaluate their words in isolation. It’s difficult to understand why this is not an appropriate use of this logical fallacy, but redditor bardfinn states it very succintly:
Ad hominem is only a fallacy when someone is using it to construct an argument for the audience to dismiss what the subject is arguing, and when the personal qualities imported into the ad hominem aren’t relevant to what’s being presented. The ethos of someone presenting a subjective opinion is important to assessing how much credence to lend it, and whether they’re presenting their subjective experience in good faith
This is not a case of trying to persuade the audience that 2 + 2 = 5;
This is a case of “Yes, really, all of these parties in this discussion have ulterior motives for playing their parts in this little stage drama, and none of them are grounded in a realistic assessment of how the world actually works”.
Just stumbled onto this randomly
lolwut?
Also, that random anon who later claims I stole his V:TES OCTGN code as mine. Lolwut, I’ve don’t remember ever touching VTES. Do Anons really believe anything they hear?
I quite liked how this person put it after Trump instantly flip-flopped on NAFTA:
[Trump]Â walked into the control room, thinking he’s gonna change everything and it’ll be great. But the walls are plastered in tiny buttons and switches and dials and he realises he doesn’t know what 90% of them do.
There was a big new switch on the wall labelled “TPP” that was in the ‘off’ position. He said he wouldn’t turn it on, and he successfully doesn’t turn it on. That was easy. How hard could this be?
He pulls the lever marked “BORDERS” down, towards the ‘off’ position. Mission accomplished. But after a moment it springs right back up on its own. He pulls it down again, and it springs back up again. Embarrassed, he quickly moves to another part of the room.
He goes over to the dial marked “NORTH KOREA” and starts twisting it in a clockwise direction, upon which an alarm on the ceiling starts ringing and flashing red. Everyone’s watching him and he wants to look like he knows what he’s doing, so he decides to leave it in its new position and see what happens.
Then he wondered over to the big switch labelled “NAFTA”, but the crowd behind him made a huge commotion, and his assistants caught his eye and shook their heads, so he’s backing away.
Meanwhile there are a bunch of pressure gauges creeping into the red, but he hasn’t actually noticed them yet.
Donald Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man, dumb man’s idea of a smart man, and weak man’s idea of a strong man.
Saw this on reddit, and I had to share. Go read all of it.
Quoth SarcasticSadist:
Trump has demonstrated an uncanny, almost unbelievable ability to just bend the past however he wants. And you can protest all you want; nobody is really stopping him. We all get shocked in the moment – How could he have the unmitigated gall to say this shocking thing? But he delivers these shocks so regularly that nobody has time to fully process them. If a scandal blows up for more than two days, Trump will just do something else outrageous and the former story will be dropped to cover the new one. Trump is exploiting the media’s goldfish attention span. He’s overloading the news, giving them so much scandal that they don’t even have time to cover it all.
Living in the office. This is the “capitalist miracle” of South Korea. Even USSR sounds better than this shit.
As the #GamerGate nonsense plods on with more and more geek idols speaking out against it, some of the people still delusively supporting it are starting to have increasing cognitive dissonance ((not sure if this applies perfectly here but whatever)):
I’ve been recommending them to my friends for years. I really expected more from them, but it’s just another hero to add to the list. Movie bob, adam sessler, Jim sterling, Tim Schafer, joss whedon, and now extra credits, basically all of my nerd heroes hate me now.
Yes, it’s quite surprising isn’t it? Could it be time for some heavy introspection maybe? Naaaah…
Please: now allow me to grow multiple arms like Shiva the Destroyer, and further, do note that at the ends of each serpentine arm you will find a middle finger, thrust up so that each finger is straining in an angry, arthritic fashion to convey the telepathic disdain I have for your bullshit, hypocritical, falsely equivalent opinion.
Well said. Also the whole post is great. Go read it!