World class bullshit.

Posted on By pukeko

There is a careful distinction to be made here. Most leaders, at least in my part of the world, are in public service with the best of motives. Many of them take a pay cut to become members of Parliament. Although there is now a political class most people in this are not actively evil. Instead they are thoughtless, and believe Lacan was speaking gospel when he said that there is nothing as practical as a good theory.


Last week Vernon Bogdanor described his astonishment that the man he called ‘my ablest pupil’ (David Cameron, PPE, Brasenose College) was drawing up a new constitution on scrap paper. You don’t rush fundamental change with barely a moment’s thought, the visibly shaken Bogdanor told the BBC. Cameron’s behaviour was ‘absurd’.

As Professor Bogdanor’s least able pupil, I hate to be the one to break it to him, but banging out ideas with barely a moment’s thought is exactly what PPE students do. They study three separate disciplines yoked into one course. In the first year, they must produce essays on John Stuart Mill one minute and parliament the next; on microeconomics, modern French history, Rousseau, Marx, formal logic, the US Congress and whether it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.

‘I always invited PPE-ists to my parties,’ said Madeline Grant, who left Oxford last year. ‘They could talk about anything. Whether they knew anything did not bother them in the slightest.’

I don’t dispute that Oxford produces world-class thinkers, but it also churns out world-class bullshitters

Lacan was cynical. Like many of the intellectuals of his time, he used rhetoric to hide his vices: in his case incredible laziness as a therapist, on others more significant evil.

And the verbally facile are not always wise. This is one of the reason techs and professionals have contempt for the managerial class. They are being told how to do their job by a person who does not understand it: they are told to make bricks without a binder, and they see their warnings of the consequences of these policies being ignored.

For the verbally facile can be hacked by the equally verbally facile. And without trial and careful analysis, one can find the policies you are advocating leading to evil.

And we have a duty to warn.


Woe to those who devise wickedness and work evil on their beds! When the morning dawns, they perform it, because it is in the power of their hand. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them away; they oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance.

Therefore thus says the LORD: behold, against this family I am devising disaster, from which you cannot remove your necks, and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be a time of disaster.

In that day they shall take up a taunt song against you and moan bitterly, and say, “We are utterly ruined; he changes the portion of my people; how he removes it from me! To an apostate he allots our fields.” Therefore you will have none to cast the line by lot in the assembly of the LORD.

“Do not preach”—thus they preach— “one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake us.” Should this be said, O house of Jacob? Has the LORD grown impatient? Are these his deeds? Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly?

But lately my people have risen up as an enemy; you strip the rich robe from those who pass by trustingly with no thought of war. The women of my people you drive out from their delightful houses; from their young children you take away my splendor forever.

Arise and go, for this is no place to rest, because of uncleanness that destroys with a grievous destruction. If a man should go about and utter wind and lies, saying, “I will preach to you of wine and strong drink,” he would be the preacher for this people!

I will surely assemble all of you, O Jacob; I will gather the remnant of Israel; I will set them together like sheep in a fold, like a flock in its pasture, a noisy multitude of men. He who opens the breach goes up before them; they break through and pass the gate, going out by it. Their king passes on before them, the LORD at their head.

(Micah 2 ESV)

We need to not sugarcoat. We have to stop censoring. We need to call bullshit when we see it. Which leads be back to one Diana Anderson. She linked to me a few days ago, redacted a comment which is her right (it is her blog) and when the commentators asked be for evidence they got a post about why divorce is associated with suicide (with numbers) when I had 20 minutes free and access to an academic library.

There is an error in that tweet. We should not be silent. And FN, a Canadian Brother has called her on this. I have added a link he put somewhere else into his discourse.


You are not a wicked Jezebel or a false teacher for having pre-marital sex. We all commit sins, which is why Christ died in the first place. Forgiveness can be had by all through repentance.

This leads to the actual reason you are a wicked Jezebel and a false teacher: you do not repent your sins. In fact you do not even state that you probably should repent but are struggling, instead you proudly proclaim no repentance for sin is necessary for you have not sinned, calling your sins holy. Not content even with this, you even go farther by declaring your sins a form of sacrament.

This is what makes you a false teacher. You lead the flock or rather, given that you have been writing these pieces for secular audiences, non-Christians into damnation. Not content to repent, or at least keep your sins private, you publicly flaunt them to draw others away from Christ and his message of salvation.

For the sake of your own soul, please repent your sins and declaim them as sins as publicly as you have previously lauded them.

The correct response to mere rhetoric, is to call it as the bullshit it is. And to call those in error to correct them. To name the institutional injustices in this life, And to confront the rabbits, for their tactics are evil.

If you blog pseudonymously, outing you will be the rabbits’ first tactic. They will start rooting through your blog, your Twitter account, your WHOIS records, anything to find out who you are, where you live, who you work for and so on. They’ll then plaster this info on Facebook, Pastebin, anywhere eyeballs can be found. The goal is to use the threat of social ostracism to shame you into falling back into line with the other bunnies.
….
If you’ve been exposed (or already write publicly), the next step for the haters is to make shit up about you. The rabbits will throw everything and the kitchen sink at you in hopes that something, anything will stick. Whether anything they say is true is irrelevant, because the goal of ganging up on someone in this fashion isn’t to be truthful, it’s to warn the other rabbits that dragons be here.
….
If they can’t pressure you into recanting, the haters’ next move will be to threaten you into recanting. They’ll dig up your Facebook profile, your address, your phone number and more and encourage each other to harass you. In pure Stalinist fashion, they will also harass your employers, your family members, your friends and more. The bunnies will defend their actions in a cowardly, Pharisaical fashion: claiming that what they’re doing is perfectly legal, as if the law is the only determiner of what behaviors are apropos.
….
When intimidating the wolf fails, the rabbits fall back to their last line of defense: getting other wolves to white knight for them. In this case, those other wolves are the police. The same liberals who call the cops “pigs” will merrily run scurrying to them if it means they can silence someone with whom they disagree. This is more of a problem in Canada, Britain and other countries that lack protections for freedom of speech.

Well, Matt Forney is correct in his description (he gives examples in the full post) and he is correct that hate speech laws cause more harm than good. The use of the SLAPP suit, the hurt at being called, and justifying theft of emails (and publishing them to document a made up consipiracy) were all part of the recent election here.

But do not be like them, and do not be them. Dream in your bed of doing good, not taking people down.

This does call for wisdom, and thought. We should call bullshit when we see it, but let your life be not confrontation, in case our love of argument turns us into that error we have just called.

One thought on “World class bullshit.”

  1. Pingback: Dark Brightness | The whore and the theologian.

Comments are closed.