shit, i already had an 18K reply written in finnish (which i will mail you). i will translate those parts that i deem fit for public display

or what the fuck, i'll just see what happens. please say if you think it doesn't relate closely enough to what you might want to discuss, and we'll drop it

So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained
inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory.

well offhand i could think that if you checked some of the material that has been written by social psychologists i bet you could find a lot of stuff also with some developed ideas related to this topic

far as I am aware, very little work has been done on this subject. I have not undertaken a survey of the literature, partly because I do not
know how to go about it. To be sure, there is one quite obvious place to

yeah, it's better to leave the hard and time-consuming groundwork for others and concentrate yourself on writing whatever comes to
your mind!

look the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED has an entry for bullshit

btw: in the natural history of the screwdriver i just read, the writer started by checking the dictionary, i think it was encyclopedia britannica or some such thing. according to EB the first source naming the screwdriver is from the 1800s. but when the writer of the essay (because it's just an essay, and as such is just as much a story about writing the thing as letting the reader know about the actual facts) went through more material, he found pictures of screwdrivers in sources from the middle ages. back then the name of the tool was turnscrew, though

so you could think, well screwdriver is a screwdriver, and as far as the first mentioning is concerned, turnscrew is a different matter. but if you don't know this turnscrew thing beforehand, you could be forgiven to think that the screwdriver is a relatively new tool

in the supplementary volumes, and it also has entries for various pertinent uses of the word bull and for some related terms. I shall

i have a book here called 'on the psychology of military incompetence' (1976), a splendid book so far as it deals with history and the examples therein, but rather shitty when it attempts to take on the actual psychology ('ch. 17: socialization and the anal character' etc). in any case, chapter 16 deals with 'bullshit':

"according to eric partridge, the word [=bs] was coined by australian soldiers in 1916. coming from a country whose armed forces have always been relatively free from this element of militarism, they were evidently so struck by the excessive spit and polish of the british army that they felt moved to give it a label. going further back, it is possible that the expression has its origins in 'a bull', the false hairpiece
worn by women between 1690 and 1770. this would be consistent with the fact that modern dictionaries define 'bull' as a 'ludicrous jest, a self-contradictory statement, to cheat, empty talk, absurd fussiness over dress'. whatever its
etymological significance, such definitions certainly capture the nature of military 'bull' - one of the most astonishing, apparently irrational and yet significant aspects of militarism, one which connotes an attitude of
mind, a pattern of behaviour and an end-product." (pp.176-177)

appears to be unproblematically confirmed. Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about “our great and blessed country, whose Founding-Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.” This is surely humbug. As Black’s account suggests, the orator is not lying. He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring
about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false, concerning such matters as whether our country is great, whether it is
blessed, whether the Founders had divine guidance, and whether what they did was in fact to create a new beginning for mankind. But the orator does not really care what his audience thinks about the Founding Fathers, or about the role of the deity in our country’s history, or the like. At least, it is not an interest in what anyone thinks about these matters that motivates his speech. It is clear that what makes Fourth of
July oration humbug is not fundamentally that the speaker regards his statements as false. Rather, just as Black’s account suggests, the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. He is not trying to deceive anyone concerning American history.
What he cares about is what people think of him.

in a way this is a good passage, though it doesn't express anything in any such way as to make me enthusiastic about it.. "intends to convey a certain impression of himself".. "cares what people think of him". no doubt, but something essential is missing

Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped.

what a jewel - "merely emitted"..!

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.

i think the whole point of the thing is here (or half of it). which would have been just as clear without all the "introduction" preceding it

Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There
is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the

yeah i guess this is connected to the same thing as why in more closed circles beliefs about moralities are much more stiff and a bigger issue than e.g. in today's city life where "ihmiset ei tunne edes naapuriaan". (i cannot refer to any source, but this is one of those rather strong impressions i have)

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled - whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related

ok, this passage touches on something. there's nothing surprising per se in it, but it's well put IMO, which is already good enough

i think it's further connected to the stuff above, so that the strictness of morals correlates with other shared beliefs - and
to a great extent amounts to the same thing! - and in a more loose society it is more tolerable to disagree.. i mean, if everybody has a stake in having some belief around (the stake being e.g. the cohesion of the group which manifests itself in the shared belief), no-one will say anything, even if every single one of them was doubting the stuff in private, if there is uncertainty as to what the others are thinking.. thus there is
not so much bullshit (though no doubt there will be lots of it anyway) if it is clear what is the meininki. or something

The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These “anti-realist” doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of
sincerity. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the
facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.

i think this was ok as well, though i don't know if the forms of skepticism are any "deeper" than the stuff put forward in the preceding quote

dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial — notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.

you bet yours arse that this closing sentence was polished ages before the guy even considered starting to write this text

--

oh well. the whole shit was, as you said, much too long, and if the writer was serious all the way through, well, holy jesus. if there was some academic tongue-in-cheekiness there, i think
it was pretty trite. the closest thing coming to mind is a teenager who thinks fucking around with words (="philosophy") is cool

i'm not sure what you meant when you said that bluff, bullshit etc. interest you at the moment. maybe you have more to say about it than i do, offhand. my own perspective was made clear (i hope) in the aggressive crescendo of the taideastia discussion in muoviromu, i.e. i take it rather pragmatically, and aim to my activity becoming not so much restrained by personal
uncertainties and such things as i think it still is at the moment

in hesari there was a sunday story some time ago on the vasemmistoliitto MP jaakko laakso, who belongs to the bunch of the so-called änkyräcommunists in the parliamentary group of the party. as a young man laakso was a fierce
agitator, and during one speech he was giving he was asked, bona fide, about some economical aspect of the USSR. laakso whipped out a notebook
from his pocket and gave the requested fact. later he revealed to his comrades that the "notebook" has been just a random blank page
in his calendar

another event was during a tv interview, where laakso was criticising university administration, or some such thing. the interviewer had asked,
what about the HYL (or something, i don't remember the correct acronym)? laakso had said that they're part of the same elitist clique too. after the interview he had to check what the fuck was the HYL

in short, as far as the attitude is concerned: fuckin aye!

my general perspective on this is, that it is no use to spend time arguing with people you disagree with, EXCEPT in the case there is
such people present who have not made up their minds on the question at hand. in that case the conversation (or argument) - which is worth having even though in terms of content nothing could be more futile - is had only formally with the adversary, and in reality you're addressing the undecided, making your points from the viewpoint that they could be won to your side

(ok here begins the actual case study, sorry if it is too self-centered. but i think this at least verges on what bullshit and bluff are about. at least from one viewpoint, maybe you would prefer some other)

if someone thinks your act is convincing, good. convincingness is given weight by the impression of expertise. precisely for this reason it is essential to memorise standard answers and critiques to a variety of questions. e.g. within marxist discourse they can be:

- accusing the adversary of infantile leftism, i.e. idealism that makes one see unrealistics ways of how to solve things, ones that do not correspond to the existing realities

- an accusation of clinging to the past; "after all, marxism is a living science", so you must not make the october revolution and the forms of its revolutionary organisation into a fetish

- on the other hand it's always good to throw a quote from marx or lenin here and there occasionally. and it's always the better
if you can add a historical reference to whatever case you're making, e.g. the october revolution, or - occasionally - even better, something more fuzzy but that still clearly is part of the
narrative of the tradition in question, like the spanish civil war; "wow that guy really is up to it!" etc

- accusation of having been influenced by the surrounding bourgeois prejudices

as far as the talk here is about how i relate to these things, it is all founded on that which i personally see that the revolution can be advanced with, AND how to persuade others to
join, of course (yeah, i don't like to talk about "revolution" as i know it sounds silly, sorry). at present that is the instrumental reason why i have interest in there matters.. i see the marxist (and more generally, socialist) discourse
as the surroundings that is the most meaningful to work in, even though they of course have a lot in them that i don't agree with. but when we're talking COOPERATION, it is a cardinal blunder to underline DIFFERENCE; instead you have to give up parts of yourself when the situation so demands,
to the extent that you think it is still possible to mount the saddle again at some point

(recently i bought, again, after having sold it some years ago, tuomari nurmio's LP 'lasten mehuhetki'. it includes several pieces that i especially like. one of them goes like: "sun pitää liata kätes vereen ja pitää sydämes puhtaana.". another one: "sä et voi olla valloittaja josset sä usko kohtaloon". and a
third one: "mä kaipaan lohdutusta, mä en voi elää ilman syytä, mä kaipaan johdatusta, ilman sitä mä en ole mitään.. sä isket salamaa mun kitaraani pitkin ja sä kuljetat mun kynääni.. mä lankeen sun eteen, tuleen tai veteen, tuuli vie mua niinkuin roskaa, sä et horju koskaan, mahtava totemi.") continuity is bloody important. if there is some really radical change in tactics or something, it is always good to explain it with
and through lenin and marx, or otherwise a familiar discourse

i don't know how you perceived that part of the taideastia discussion which made me flip my lid, but my point is that if you work in a tightly-knit group to consciously reach some
shared, together-set goals, by means that cannot be known in their details beforehand (which means you have to have discussions and negotiations in many situations), and where letting it be and
quitting is among the last options, you have to learn to relinquish a big part of yourself constantly (unless you're the hegemon. but
that's another story.)

but the stamp is not to be used carelessly, of course. it does no good to the atmosphere of the group if others are ridiculed or crushed; it is together that you have to accomplish what you
strive for, and everybody's input is needed. but you can try holding the strings in a "civil" way, e.g. with the references to history and tradition in general, which BUILDS instead of wrecking. that's what authority as a positive form of power
is made of

The guy is an old unreconstructed NAS conservative. He hates poststructuralist/-modernist/-colonialist thought. He's a fucking ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY for Christ's sake. His intellectual growth stopped back when Austin first tackled the whole notion of the truth-proposition, what Austin called the constative utterance, which lies at the core of analytical philosophy. Everything after that--what Derrida and Shoshana Felman did with Austin, what Judith Butler did with Austin and Derrida and Felman (and Foucault and the rest), all the very cool stuff on performativity that has been coming out for the last 10-15 years and, more broadly, all the Nietzschean stuff on the power-situatedness of the subject--is just flatout heresy to him. He's calling bullshit on a revolution in philosophy, which just goes on generating cool heretical stuff all around him, despite his best efforts to exercise some kind of analytical damage control (from retirement!).

I watched the first interview clip, and couldn't get any further. Not only is Mr. Hot Dog a wiener; the interviewer is even worse. Did you note how he held up the thin bullshit book, maybe 150 pages at most, and said "I must admit I haven't read the whole thing yet, it's a bit on the lengthy side"? I thought for sure he meant it ironically, as a witty self-undermining EXAMPLE of bullshit, but he fucking meant it. What a tool.