We are on a Holy Crusade here. This is the first war of the 21st century. We are going to hunt this stuff down and destroy it, wherever it hides.   OFFICIAL Fog Of War Rumor and BS Exchange   bullshit | horseshit | apeshit | how to spot bs neo-con jargon | send in your bs

The News Is Horse Shit!

Bullshit

Bullshit is defined as, "Lies, damnable lies and statistics."
Inherent to BS is creation with a deliberate intent to deceive.

Synonyms: Whopper, Big One, Stinker, Load, Shit, Crock, Pile, Crap,
Kakapoo, Doo-doo, Stuff, Guano, Manure, Disinformation,
Viral Marketing, Bogosity, Bogon Flux, Quantum Bogodynamics.

Bogometer > 80

The 9/11 BS list lives here

Horseshit

Horseshit does not require an attempt to deceive.
The originator may even believe the stuff.
There may be a core of truth, where with BS there is none.
Most politicians' statements are Horseshit.

Synonyms: Spin, Fish Story, Propaganda, Agitprop, Little White One,
Distortion, Hype, Half-truth, Slant, Bushism.

Bogometer > 60 < 80

Apeshit

Apeshit is also known as, "Rumor, fear, and the madness of crowds."
It's a bad idea that's found its time.
Even if it has a core of truth, the consequences are delusional.
If you come to wonder how you ever believed something, it was Apeshit.

Synonyms: True-believing, Dogma, Mass Hysteria, Fog Of War,
Demagoguery, Opportunism, Rabble-rousing, Mob Psychology,
Xenophobia, Fanaticism, Indoctrination, Us-Versus-Them,
Demonization, Inquisition, Fundamentalism, McCarthyism,
Witch Hunting, and so many more.

peace
war

Bogometer > 30, may exceed 99 in wartime

21 Ways To Spot BS
(and HS)

BS is not always as easy to spot as one would think. Fortunately, the stuff and nonsense have been long since analyzed into their constituent techniques. If someone's doing one or more of these, you know they've brought out the shovel.

Basic BS Techniques:

The definitive reference for these comes from 1939, a war year, when a lot of the taurine article was flying about. This book is by the short-lived Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), titled The Fine Art of Propaganda (Harcourt, Brace; NY).

1. Name-Calling

 

Name-calling is learned very early in life, and never loses its effectiveness. Little kids shout, "You're a stinky pooper!" Big kids shout, "You're a secular humanist!"

 

Name calling is effective because it links potent negative symbols to ideas or people (see stereotyping and The Hot Button below). If the symbol is scary enough, and the idea or person ambiguous enough, such labels can prove hard or impossible to fight via rational discussion. They can persist for life or beyond, ruining careers, swinging elections, and causing the occasional huge lawsuit.

 

 

2. Glittering Generality

 

The glittering generality is name calling in reverse. Instead of fooling us into making a negative judgment in the absence of evidence, it is an attempt to make us accept a positive one, approving a person or concept without thought.

 

Election rhetoric would be lost without the glittering generality. "A vote for me is a vote for Progress, Good Government, Freedom, and Prosperity." (Is anyone actually against any of those?) Advertising would be even worse off. If the average TV viewer were to wonder why Great Abs were necessary in the first place, sales of machines promising these in 8 easy minutes a day would plummet.

 

Glittering Generality helped lead to the "Neo-Conservative Jargon," through its technique of appropriating good stuff to mean very different stuff. We see this kind of thing in the news every day, as when "patriots" blow up buildings full of women and children.

 

 

3. Transfer

 

Transfer is a fancy word for the behavior also known as "wrapping yourself in the flag." This slimy appeal to false association is hardly limited to politics, however. In fact, transfer is any attempt to apply the authority, sanction, and prestige of something we respect and revere to something the bullshitter would have us accept without further examination.

 

Television is the best thing ever invented for spreading these bogus associations. The flags, bands, and bunting at US party nominating conventions hide the fact that the nominations are already agreed upon, the speeches are campaign PR, and the whole show is essentially an expensive telethon bought with our money. Switch the channel, though, and some televangelist is praising the Lord and passing the collection bowl. Not much difference any more.

 

We see a similar use of the transfer device in the "blinding with science" that we will discuss later. A hired actor in a rented lab coat holds up an Erlenmeyer flask full of snake oil, which is thus magically transformed into a research miracle.

 

 

4. Euphemism

 

Euphemism is quiet bullshit. While name-calling, glittering generality, and transfer seek a strong reaction where none is appropriate, euphemism is the fine art of preventing or pacifying any reaction to situations where strong feelings would be appropriate.

 

It's hard to imagine there'd be much support for wars any more, were it not for the inspired waves of euphemism we've come to expect from the military and their parrots in the news media. In their perfect world, war is no longer a messy business. It's just business, period. It's commerce with bullets.

 

If we kill civilians, that's bad. If we experience a completely nominal level of collateral damage, that's good. When we screw up and shoot our own soldiers, why, that was just a little ol' friendly fire. When we catch up with a bunch of the other side's soldiers, and make them all die horribly, that's just long term denial of assets. Today, war is a hostile takeover with more smoke. The US military even publishes papers with such titles as "Winning CNN Wars," and "The Art Of Naming Operations."

 

This dishonest attitude has also permeated just about every other area of life. There's a neutral, businesslike-sounding, and largely bogus name for everything. We're not supposed to smell the taurine-processed grass and water material, as it piles up over our heads.

 

 

5. Card stacking/Fact Omission

 

Just as a poker cheat can stack the deck against a sucker, a skilled bullshitter can make the facts do some truly awesome dances.

 

Simplest is merely to leave something out. Nobody these days has much time anyway, and who'll miss a key fact or two? Some new toothpaste gets your teeth 40% fresher. 40% fresher than what? Brown paint? Sewage? Bull manure? Lousy, 1929 toothpaste from before the entire industry added the same "miracle" ingredient you're pushing?

 

This device can also be used to rewrite history, and/or to lead the unsuspecting down some pretty amazing ideological tunnels. Great piles of crap from little citations grow.

 

 

6. Testimonial

 

It's hard to imagine today's commerce and society functioning at all without this device, which uses someone's demonstrated expertise at one thing to lend a false legitimacy to something altogether different. We see actors who play doctors on TV invited to help out with real surgeries. We watch basketball players make more money selling shoes than playing basketball.

 

TV news often degenerates into endless hours of testimonials, when there is air time to fill and no hard facts to fill it with. The golden-throated idiots on camera haven't a clue what they're talking about, so they legitimize their worthless speculation by calling on people who look as if they do. One marvels at the awesome parades of "experts," who are usually just regular folks who've written books about something that may or may not relate to the story. When the "experts" are wrong, well, news means never having to say you're sorry.

 

The most dishonest testimonials are also often the most effective. These are the celebrity endorsements, where fame and expertise get confused, out there in the post-modern void somewhere. If the celebrity is also a major fashion-setter, this can carry over into the bandwagon device.

 

 

7. Bandwagon

 

Bandwagon is the skilled exploitation of human insecurity, peer pressure, and the desire to fit in or run with the crowd. Its purpose is to generate real or imaginary excitement over something, to make it look like the Next Big Thing, and to fool people into rallying to it. "Big Mo," the "momentum" so highly sought by political campaigns, is pure bandwagon, and thus about 65% horse shit. So are teenage fads. So is war.

 

Fashion magazines and the "lifestyle" sections in newspapers would die without the bandwagon. "Everyone" is wearing a fireplace poker in their nose. "Everyone" is hang-gliding from low-earth-orbiting satellites. When I hear about this unseen Mr./ Ms. Everyone, I hold tightly onto my wallet. "Someone" is about to want its contents.

 

 

8. Plain Old Folks

 

Like bandwagon, this BS technique exploits conformity and peer pressure, but in a different way. It's almost a reverse endorsement. Far from exploiting glamor, fame, or expertise, the aim here is to produce a false appearance of honesty by appealing to old values, tradition, and the inherent appeal of common ordinary folks going about common ordinary lives. "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee."

 

Sales people learn this one pretty early on. You've surely met one of these folksy, chatty types, who makes you feel right at home, who becomes one of the family, and who then sells you land at the bottom of a nuclear reactor cooling pond.

 

Presidents are pretty good at this as well. Billionaire preppie lawyers press the flesh in Kentucky, kiss babies in Iowa, and give speeches at McDonald's. Why, they're just like us. Not.

 

 

9. Fear Appeal

 

This one is simple. If you can't hook people any other way, then SCARE THE HELL OUT OF THEM!!

 

The fear appeal is a grown-up version of Mommy telling you to eat your carrots because if you don't you will go blind, or worse. Something bad is guaranteed to happen unless a certain behavior is done at the store, the channel selector, or the voting booth.

 

TV news lives on this nonsense. Ever notice how much more dangerous the world gets every November, February, and May, when they run sweeps to set ad rates? Suddenly, it's Halloween. Are YOUR children going to DIE? Are YOU going to DIE? Does a SECRET MENACE lurk in YOUR bathroom sink? Find out all this week on Eye Witless Nooz!!!!!!

 

Trick or treat.

 

The best fear appeals use the other eight techniques described above to really get people where they live. For example, beware of politicians bearing scary comparisons which resonate intuitively until consciously analyzed (card stacking/fact omission). The elder Bush assured us that Saddam Hussein was "In some ways worse than Hitler." I'm sure he was. Hitler certainly looked better in a uniform, and he had much better taste in music.

 

 

 

More Advanced (and Subtle) BS Techniques:

Here's where it gets sneaky. Watch out for flying shovels and falling crocks!

 

10. Oversimplification

 

Oversimplification is a form of glittering generality and fact omission which appeals to everyone's common sense, and in particular the notion that the shortest and clearest explanations must be the most valid. You know the shovel's coming out when a speaker uses such phrases as, "It's either them or us," "You know what the problem is," and the time-honored "That's all there is to it."

 

Fundamentalists of any religion, including atheism, would be out of business without oversimplification on their side. "God said it, I believe it, and that's all there is to it." Sometimes this is honest faith, and thus harmless. More often, this is deluded thinking, rabble rousing, or outright deception, and thus the most vile kind of BS.

 

Sometimes, it even causes buildings to explode and collapse onto thousands of people.....

 

 

11. Stereotype

 

"Stereotyping" originally described a nineteenth-century printing process. A person was stereotyped when multiple copies of their image were made. Today, the picture is more a mental one, but the same process is at work.

 

Stereotyping involves name-calling, glittering generality and oversimplification. Multiple character attributes, usually negative ones taken from a single person, are projected onto many diverse individuals who happen to share some superficiality such as skin color, ethnicity, class, or ancestry. It's damning by association. "You [label]s are ALL THE SAME!"

 

On one level, stereotyping is a natural human process, and probably a survival device. Men in cars offering candy to little kids can usually be counted on to be rather nasty people. But it changes when we grow up. Excessive stereotyping makes life dull, paranoid, and ultimately lonely.

 

Systematic stereotyping is the absolute foundation of the Neo-Conservative Jargon. The aim here is to break down the entire human race into groups, then marginalize every one of them except those few that neo-conservatives agree with.

 

In times of crisis, stereotypes can kill. Propagandists use and encourage them to demonize entire nations, making war possible. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." "I'd fly 1000 miles to smoke a camel." In fact, much of terrorism's effectiveness comes from its tendency to reinforce popular stereotypes and divide target societies against themselves. This is nasty stuff.

 

 

12. The Straw Man

 

Straw men are stationary or slowly moving practice targets used instead of real ones. They're not people, but the shape is close enough, and they're sure easier to hit.

 

Bullshitters construct forensic straw men out of stereotypes, oversimplifications, and fact omissions. These are "lite" versions of a competing argument, product, or ideology, deliberately left so incomplete, inconsistent, and generally flawed that they do not stand up to even intuitive logic. This makes them far easier to attack in news commentaries, commercials, and magazine essays than the real thing would ever be. It's like bombing the same empty field over and over, and sending the footage out as proof that you're hard at work winning the war.

 

It's hard to find anyone these days who isn't making strawmen, especially in the electronic media. Sound bites, quick-cut "journalism," flash-bang comedy routines, and 24-minute sitcoms rarely allow anyone the time to tell strawmen from the real thing. The attacks, however, register as the real thing every time. All this jousting at straw men raises emotions on all sides, and is probably one cause of the oft-decried "incivility" in society as a whole.

 

 

13. The Hot Button

 

California governors would be in serious trouble without this one. It's an especially virulent hybrid of name calling, fear appeal, and glittering generality. There's always some scary new thing that has to be stopped, right now, or else. It doesn't matter what. That changes every 2-3 years.

 

A hot button, then, is a scapegoat, but not necessarily a person. It's an evil we didn't know about until the politicians or other BS slingers did us a service by telling us to be afraid of it. It's a threat du jour. It's the pool hall in River City. When unemployment is high, it's because immigrants are taking YOUR jobs, and what are YOU going to do about it? When times are good, well, it's not those immigrants at all, it's drugs, or at least poor people's drugs, and what are YOU going to do about it?

 

Hot buttons can get any number of hidden agendas through, since they are scary and make superficial sense. They are standard procedure for groups pushing ballot initiatives they don't want you to understand. Notice that the ominous ads for these are nearly always paid for by someone like Americans for a Better America, as opposed to people you ever heard of. Your button's being pushed. The screwing comes later.

 

 

14. Hyperbole

 

This is what "hype" is short for. There's also a vague connotation of a needle injecting old, tired facts to make them feel like young, vigorous facts again.

 

Hype is a more insidious form of glittering generality, and one so pervasive as to largely pass for reality in mass culture. It's designed to make the unimportant important. It's the classic fish story, except today everything's a fish story. Much post-modern philosophy explains society as the interaction of different sources of hype.

 

The post-modern news industry has come to rely on the post-modern publicity industry for most of its content. This means that, on a normal day when someone hasn't blown something up, most of the news is manufactured hype, press conferences, statements, and arranged interviews, often with a good dose of the old-fashioned horse manure.

 

You may have noticed how quickly real events become cynical "news hooks." The spontaneous display of American flags is news. It's patriotic. It makes people proud. Before long, though, some city flak has the entire population of their town standing in a field, wearing America's colors, and making a mile-long flag only news choppers can see. THAT is hype. It makes publicists rich.

 

 

15. Star Power

 

I am truly amazed that this creaky old sales device retains its incredible power over the minds of people who usually know better. It's just a hyped-up, more expensive, type of testimonial or endorsement. The goal, of course, is to produce a one-person bandwagon. It also relies on cowboy-hero-style transfer, plus the glittering generality and usually the fact omission. In other words, unsuspecting consumers are getting the whole textbook thrown right at them.

 

The results can border on sympathetic magic. People really know, in their rational minds, that $200 shoes cannot make them as talented as their celebrity basketball idols. Still, something rubs off. Or maybe a popular actor holds up a Pepsi in a movie, and Pepsi sales go up. Companies actually give away millions of dollars worth of merchandise to encourage such "placements." It's an industry in itself.

 

What's even weirder is how well endorsements sell things that have no bearing on the celebrity's claim to fame. A movie star praises the Rich Corinthian Leather, gives money to a campaign, or lobbies Congress. People buy the car, the candidate, or the bad idea. They also buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

 

 

16. Blinding With Science

 

"Science," or at least its external trappings, can make BS look real every time. It's an especially potent variety of the transfer.

 

News writers, for example, love statistics. While words are known to be imprecise and open to alternate meanings, numbers never lie. Or do they?

 

Well, this depends on their use. Statistical data can tell how many people in a sample answered a certain question a certain way. They cannot, however, allow such generalizations as "What America Wants," or "What Teenagers Think." Does this law of mathematics deter a single headline writer, advertiser, consultant, or professional number-massager from doing just that? Naah.

 

Numbers also provide the scoundrel with a perfect cover for the same BS techniques that work so well in plain speech. We see rigged experiments (fact omission), hot-button question phrasing (name calling), intentionally vague results (glittering generality), and charts with doctored or missing numeric scales (hyperbole, euphemism, plain old BS). This bogus data is then given the look of True Science, as most impressively presented with countless art-director doodads, lines, curves, arrows, icons, pointers, and thingies, until everyone's forgotten that it's bogus data.

 

And so there's a bridge for sale here. It's a pretty bridge, but then it always was. All this is really only the 21st-century version of those grainy, funky, fifties commercials where Whit Bissell in a white lab coat held up a chemical flask filled with The New Washday Miracle. Nice looking BS, yes, but it smells the same.

 

 

17. Rumor Mongering

 

A rumor is an unsubstantiated fact, and especially one so provocative and/or common-sensical that people really want to believe it. There's a big bandwagon effect here. Our Mr./ Ms. Everyone is at it again. "Everyone" is saying something (and it's what we wanted to hear anyway), so it has to be true.

 

Rumors are about half the opacity in The Fog Of War. People have already put analytical thinking on hold, so they'll believe anything, especially if Mr. Everyone says it on TV. Those nice TV news directors wouldn't show people passing unsubstantiated information... would they? (And the sun rises in the west, details at 11 after these important messages.)

 

Rumors are horseshit unless someone's starting them for malicious deceptive purposes, which happens a lot. Then they're the genuine article from the posterior of the bull. A lot of what Internet hucksters have dignified (see euphemism) as "viral marketing" is basically the creation of malicious rumors to start a buzz for or against someone's product.

 

 

18. Bogus Logic

 

Syllogisms are wonderful things, especially when combined with fact omission, card stacking, glittering generality, or stereotype. Anyone can prove anything, and they usually do just that.

 

 

Premise 1:	Anti-corporate protesters have, on occasion, damaged private property.
Premise 2:	Terrorist bombs kill and damage property, usually without warning.
Conclusion:	All anti-corporate protesters are terrorists.

 

Quid Est Demonstratum!

 

In fact, this very whopper has turned up in more than one newspaper column.

 

The way to spot this stuff is to deconstruct it. Find the reasoning scheme (in this case that group #1 and group #2 have one thing in common, therefore group #1 is part of group #2). Plug in something really stupid. (Hey, it worked for Derrida...)

 

 

Premise 1:	Newspaper columnists use computers.
Premise 2:	Internet perverts use computers.
Conclusion:	All newspaper columnists want to lure your 9-year-old daughter to a sleazy motel, get her drunk, and have their way with her.

 

Quid Est Deconstructum!

 

It is absolutely amazing how much neo-conservative hate mail uses this identical syllogism, usually combined with name-calling and stereotyping. Next time you get one of these by-the-numbers attacks, check it out, and see how easy this is.

 

Now that you know this trick of the trade, you can crank out as many hate letters per hour as any Dittohead out there. Aren't you glad you saw this?

 

 

19. Bogus Extrapolation

 

It's kind of an adage of media studies that "linear probes" are usually bogus. A linear probe is the use of a well-documented fact from the present to make an unwarranted prediction about the future. Linear probes comprise most of the speculation seen in the news.

 

This is why the "pundits" are always wrong. While blinding with science, or endorsing themselves, all they're really doing is pushing some current trend into the future forever. They'd be right if nothing else ever changed, but of course it always does. They know this, but they like being pundits. It beats working for a living. You get to be on TV, and you sell a lot of books, usually scary-sounding screeds crammed full of bogus extrapolations.

 

The road to ruin is strewn with this stuff. Generals fight the last war, not because they're stupid, but because that's the one they can get money for. Social policy gets farther and farther behind the times, and ever more clueless. It's almost comical.

 

Someday, perhaps, crime will rise for a few years straight. Now it will be time for the pundits to convince everyone, including Congress, that many thousands of new prisons are needed. Checks will be written, jobs will be created, and an asteroid will hit the Earth. Crime will drop 93 per cent. Unfortunately, the human race will die out because all the money went for empty prisons instead of civil defense and public health.

 

C'est la vie.

 

 

20. Bogus Divisions/Lines In The Sand

 

This technique, a variation on oversimplification and fact omission, is another one learned young. Little boys dare others to cross a street, promising a good licking if they do and lifelong humiliation as "chicken" if they don't. Some choice.

 

Big kids do something similar. It is called geopolitics. Big boys dare armies to cross a border, offering about the same unsatisfactory choices as the little boys do, but usually ending up with far more dead bodies at the end of their disputes.

 

Real life is obviously far too complicated for such black-and-white dichotomies to mean much, and these are therefore bogus logic all the way. However, this intuitive fact has never stopped anyone from setting one up yet. No matter how complex the situation, someone will somehow be able to turn it into a line in the sand: Us versus Them, Good versus Bad, God versus Satan, Freedom versus Slavery. "You're either part of the problem or part of the solution (60s New Left)." "Anyone not with us is with the evil forces of terror (President Dubbya Bush)."

 

Basically, get your head down any time someone insists you're either with them or against them. The manure is already flying, and soon the bullets will be too.

 

 

21. Lying

 

I put this one last because most of the time people don't come right out and lie. Most of the time.

 

This may change. Modern communications greatly facilitate lying. On the World Wide Web, a fake religion can look every bit as impressive as the Vatican. (There's that transfer again.) On the radio, a bogus call to revolution (black propaganda) can send people into the streets, where they learn at gunpoint that the government made the broadcast. Gotcha! Then there's The Big Lie, a time-proven technique of telling people a real whopper over and over, until at least a majority believe it. "Saturation" advertising is great for this. So is CNN.

 

And then there's disinformation, which is a form of lying that seeks to cause confusion, and to cloak the truth behind an impenetrable, memetic fog. This becomes standard operating procedure in wartime. Combine real security and tactical deception needs with perceived threats and fears, and analytical thinking is over for the duration. Some awesome crocks of processed grass and water get slipped through at such times. Later on, these are called history.

 

 

 

 

 

back to The Resistance