Finding examples of bullshit

Posted on July 28, 2009 by Tom Crippen

Because it was my love. She couldn’t decide that. It was my love.

That’s how I remember a key line from Adaptation, the movie by Charlie Kaufman. The movie’s second half is a point-by-point parody of a typical modern-day Hollywood popcorn film, with beats and pivots and so on. There’s the fake plot breakthru (the villainess says she’d like to have dinner with Jesus or John Lennon, so now the heroes know she’s a big liar and that she’s up to something), the race against time, the quiet heartfelt moment before the big action climax. During the quiet heartfelt moment, the dopey brother tells the smart brother (the arc is about two brothers who must be reconciled) that in high school, sure, he had a crush on that hot girl even though she made fun of him, that he kept loving her even after he caught her and her friends laughing about him and what an idiot he was. Why? And then the line given above, a really fine pastiche of a dopey Hollywood pseudo-profound gnomic utterance.

I would have thought that was a perfect example of bullshit, as the word is used in H. G. Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit.” I mean a supposed statement that actually says nothing. This kind of bullshit is to statement what a slug (by which I mean a round, blank disc, not a garden slug) is to a coin. The slug does nothing that a coin is supposed to do except feel like a coin. Someone who isn’t paying attention will put it in his pocket and believe he has a coin there. But it’s all a fraud. The same with a sentence of bullshit: You hear it, and it feels just like something has been said. A lie, on the other hand, does say something, but something untrue.

I’ve been looking for examples of bullshit, finding them, and then having them squirt away from me. When you go down a few layers, there’s always some specific lie hidden away. It’s just that the lies have to do with heady matters that don’t get looked at directly most of the time.

For example, “Because it was my love. She couldn’t decide that. It was my love.” Compare that with the following:

So, this momentary ego approval was not as great as the feeling of loving her! As long as I was loving her, I felt so happy. But when she loved me, there were only moments of happiness when she gave me approval. … Her loving me was a momentary pleasure that needed constant showing and proving on her part, while my loving her was a constant happiness, as long as I was loving her

I concluded that my happiness equated to my loving! If I could increase my loving, then I could increase my happiness! *

The speaker is a man discussing the great change in outlook he underwent during his 40s. I think a lot of people would agree with what he said. I haven’t read the book in question, just glanced at a couple of pages, but I gather that the speaker goes on to draw many sweeping, straight-line conclusions from this discovery. They may be right or wrong, I have no idea. But his starting point would strike many people as correct: not just that it’s better to love than to be loved, better as in morally desirable, but that you get more out of loving than being loved. There’s more return.

With that point established, the Charlie Kaufman line looks a bit different. All of a sudden I can see how it might actually mean something — something highly debatable, not to say false (that the benefits accrued from loving have nothing to do with the person being loved, with whether they return the love or treat you decently, and so on), but something that can be turned into a statement.

Thinking about it, there’s another heady claim that the line could be based on: the idea that everything about you is somehow your property and that the key thing is to make sure no one else ever has a say in its disposition. That sounds a bit Ayn Rand-ish, but Hollywood goes in for a debased form of self-actualization that could also give rise to a claim like that, at least if a screenwriter was desperate enough.

* From Happiness Is Free and It’s Easier than You Think by Hale Dwoskin and Lester Levenson. Achmed, a cafe rat I know, pressed the book on me, he said sheepishly.

Good example

Posted on July 27, 2009 by Tom Crippen

Lawrence, a very well-read cafe rat I sometimes bump into, was pouring scorn on the way Republicans pretend that Joe Biden’s run-off-at-the-mouth tendencies are proof that Sarah Palin isn’t stupid. Lawrence said Biden could talk for an hour on any given political/policy topic and make sense, whereas Palin would fall apart 10 seconds after her sound bites ran out. Good point!

The problem with Biden isn’t that he’s ignorant or muddleheaded, it’s that his mouth goes way too fast. Occasionally he’ll get some matters of fact garbled, like someone committing a spoonerism even though he knows where the syllables are supposed to go. More often he says something that’s simply impolitic. Michael Kinsley likes to say most “gaffes” are statements that are true but politically inconvenient. If someone asks you what magazines you read and you reply, in effect, “Uh, all of them?” that is not a gaffe. But if someone asks you what you, as vice president of the United States, think of the situation with Russia and you say:

The reality is the Russians are where they are. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

… that would be a gaffe. But as a lucid, straight-from-the-shoulder overview of an economic-political situation it’s not bad. At least he knows about population bases and banking structures and stuff. I like that in a political leader.

(Via Sullivan, with Biden interview here.)

Do people still care about decades?

Posted on July 26, 2009 by Tom Crippen

When I was younger, newsmagazines and regular people spent a lot of time on deciding what mood the world was in during a given decade. The practice goes back a while (the Mauve Decade, the Gay ’90s, others), but it mainstreamed hard during the ’60s, and then the ’70s were a reaction to the ’60s so they needed an assessment too, and then the ’80s were a reaction to the ’70s, and the ’90s were a reaction to the ’80s, so the chain kept going for a while.

The assessments had something to do with big-league events in the world, such as assassinations and wars, but their heart always seemed to be this: for the past few years “we” have been behaving and thinking differently than we were a few years before that, and these changes in thought and behavior amount to a whole new climate for life. How shall the climate change next?

The official sequence of decades went like this: ’60s (idealism! upheaval! violence! challenges to established norms! liberated lifestyles!), ’70s (cynicism! self-absorption! stagnation! liberated lifestyles!), ’80s (money! traditional norms! consumption!), ’90s (austerity! youthful ennui! spirituali — wait, the economy’s back up — dotcom!).

I make that sound pretty stupid, but the changes in behavior and attitude that happened just before, during, and just after the 1960s really were a sea change. If you want to refer to them all, “the ’60s” is the neatest way to do it. During the 1970s and ’80s, people really were working out what to make of the changes, how far to take them and how far to retreat from them. The silly aspect of the decades business, never a small thing, got larger as the post-’60s consensus worked itself out.

By the ’90s we had a new generational shift, so chances looked good for a new, highly distinct zeitgeist unit. But Gen X didn’t really have much of a new set of attitudes. People thought they were pretty mopey, but that turned around when they started finding jobs. Therefore, the newsmagazine aspect of the ’90s changed almost in mid-year. One month you were hearing about how “the ’90s” were a time of hardship, disaffection, creepy enthusiasm for serial killers, and so on. Then, all of a sudden, “the ’90s” was a period of crazy amounts of money and consumption — “excess,” as journalists like to put it.

With its raison d’etre running out, the decades business also encountered two important technical obstacles. First, there was a new millennium. That looked like a fat invitation for more zeitgeist assigning, but guessing at a spirit for a whole millennium makes one feel pretty stupid. At the same time, figuring out a decade looks too trivial to bother with. Second, it’s tough to talk about a period of time when there’s no number to go with it. What do you call a decade whose years are marked out by 0, as in ’01, ’02, etc? Somebody in Slate suggested “the Oughts,” which was enough to show the decades business was in trouble.

Finally, 9-11 happened, and then the Iraq invasion, and then Barack Obama’s election. I’m tempted to think that these events have provided us with such immense milestones that the this-decade-vs.-that-decade parlor game has slipped people’s minds. On the other hand, the 1960s and 1970s had their own jumbo events, and what happened was that people assigned the events to serve as markers for the start and end of the decade-as-zeitgeist units — I mean the assertion one used to hear that “the ’60s began in 1963 and ended in 1974,” which is keyed to the Kennedy assassination and the end of the Watergate scandal.

With the 1980s we had a pair of big, zeitgeist-defining events to get the decade started: Lennon shot, Reagan elected, and (as newsmagazines reminded us at the time) the ’80s are underway.

But no one talks about how our current decade really began on Sept. 11, 2001, or how it ended on Nov. 5, 2008. Back when the market crashed in ’87, Newsweek got out in front with a cover story saying, in so many words, “The ’80s Are Over.” Nothing like that now.

Maybe people are getting smarter, though that’s never a good bet. My own theory is that all this goes back to the baby boomers. The ’60s-’70s-’80s chain of zeitgeist assessments was a means of arguing about where those crazy kids would take the culture. The two choices being discussed always seemed to be idealism/libertinism vs. traditional values/greed. Conservatives would say the choice was between libertinism and traditional values, liberals would say it was idealism versus greed. What it came down to was arguing about whether the country would continue to change in line with the changes kicked off during the 1960s or whether it would swing back to the pre-’60s status quo.

Now the baby boomers are all going to have urinary problems and then die, and it looks like nobody else is planning any big departures from present modes of operation. Which probably means that steam is gathering for a direction that’s so new nobody will figure it out until we’re 10 years into it. At which point we’ll hear about “the Teens” or “the Age of Palin” or some damn thing.

Tough guy dialogue

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Tom Crippen

Yeah? I’m going to lay it on the line. Smoke this down, pal. Smoke it cool.

Overheard at Troublemakers Studio during a story conference that involved Brian Michael Bendis. (Not really.)

She’s a big jerk

Posted on July 25, 2009 by Tom Crippen

“It violated all common decency, all protocol,” says Ramras. “It just showed such disrespect.”

That’s Jay Ramras, a member of Alaska’s House of Representatives, talking about Palin’s tongue-lashing of an aide to the House speaker. The aide had told Palin it wasn’t the done thing for governors to leave the state when the legislative session still had a few days to go. Apparently Palin overreacted.

Mr. Ramras also has this thought, on Palin’s misfired nomination of a loudmouthed attorney general:

“He was voted down, and she blamed all of us,” says Ramras. “She’s perfected victim psychology.”

The quotes are from a piece in the New Republic by Suzy Khimm about Palin’s activities as governor since ’08. These activities appear to have been few but frenzied:

… upon returning to Juneau last fall, “she managed to alienate most of the 60 members of [the Alaska] House and Senate,” says Larry Persily, an aide to state Republican Representative Mike Hawker. “It wasn’t a matter of burning bridges–she blew them up.”

Mr. Persily “spent two years working in the Alaska governor’s Washington office,” the article says. I guess that mean he was working for Sarah Palin, though the wording’s bit unclear; if he was, he must have come back to Alaska at the start of ’09. At any rate, he’s Republican and so is every politician and aide mentioned in this post. Judging by Ms. Khimm’s article, I’d say Republicans who take part in the Alaskan legislative process really enjoy talking about Sarah Palin.

Understanding modern America

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Tom Crippen

Being racist against blacks is such a bad thing that actually it can never exist. Nobody could really be that bad. My hatred for white racism is shown by my resolute understanding that it never occurs.

[ Notes for the dumb: Yes, the above is irony. ]

White evangelicals, you disappoint me

Posted on July 24, 2009 by Tom Crippen

The Washington Post reports on its new poll. You know who “she” is:

While she is still widely popular among those in her party, she has lost ground among Republicans generally and among the white evangelicals who are so critical in the early presidential primaries.

…

Among white evangelicals, Huckabee outpaces Palin and the others by better than 2 to 1.

Actually I like Huck, so I shouldn’t say I’m disappointed. He’s a weathervane, and on various key issues of modern life I think he’s a nutter. But he’s smart and he ran a full-size state for quite a while in a way that is generally accounted competent. Also, he’s got charm and he really can come out with a good speech, whereas Palin gets graded on an outrageous curve. God, I hate her voice!

On the other hand, as a product of secular America I’m used to thinking of evangelicals as people who will believe anything. It turns out some of them have their limits. Maybe I knew that intellectually, but factoring in actual evidence still makes my ideas twitch.

57 percent of Americans say she does not understand complex issues, while 37 percent think she does, a nine-percentage-point drop from a poll conducted in September just before her debate with now-Vice President Biden.

I wonder what the figure was for right after the debate? Biden certainly did well in the “who won” results, but people were talking about how much better Palin did than anyone had expected (since expectations had been set by her Gibson/Couric interviews).

Like most people, I think, I believe that her relatively good reviews for the debate were all about her demeanor — viewers were relieved and surprised when she got thru complete sentences and didn’t try to hide under the podium. But a post-debate “understands complex issues” number would be helpful for verifying that impression.

GOP women are more apt than GOP men to see Palin as a strong leader

Yeah, those GOP men. How do you make it possible for them to see thru an ignorant, posturing jackass? Give the jackass breasts instead of a penis.

The Hooded Utilitarian

a pundit in every panopticon

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