Alarming News: I like Morgan Freeberg. A lot.
American Digest: And I like this from "The Blog That Nobody Reads", because it is -- mostly -- about me. What can I say? I'm on an ego trip today. It won't last.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: We were following a trackback and thinking "hmmm... this is a bloody excellent post!", and then we realized that it was just part III of, well, three...Damn. I wish I'd written those.
Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler: ...I just remembered that I found a new blog a short while ago, House of Eratosthenes, that I really like. I like his common sense approach and his curiosity when it comes to why people believe what they believe rather than just what they believe.
Brutally Honest: Morgan Freeberg is brilliant.
Dr. Melissa Clouthier: Morgan Freeberg at House of Eratosthenes (pftthats a mouthful) honors big boned women in skimpy clothing. The picture there is priceless--keep scrolling down.
Exile in Portales: Via Gerard: Morgan Freeberg, a guy with a lot to say. And he speaks The Truth...and it's fascinating stuff. Worth a read, or three. Or six.
Just Muttering: Two nice pieces at House of Eratosthenes, one about a perhaps unintended effect of the Enron mess, and one on the Gore-y environ-movie.
Mein Blogovault: Make "the Blog that No One Reads" one of your daily reads.
The Virginian: I know this post will offend some people, but the author makes some good points.
Poetic Justice: Cletus! Ah gots a laiv one fer yew...
Fek•toid (n.)
A factual statement presented during a discussion that involves disagreement; its veracity would survive a diligent and skeptical inspection, but its relevance would not.
“Saddam Hussein did not attack us.” “Jimmy Carter is America’s greatest ex-President.” “Palin quit.” “Dick Cheney ran Halliburton.” “Carbon dioxide’s effectiveness as a greenhouse gas is proven in a number of experiments.”
The fektoid is meaningfully distinguished from the factoid:
A factoid is a questionable or spurious—unverified, incorrect, or fabricated—statement presented as a fact, but with no veracity. The word can also be used to describe a particularly insignificant or novel fact, in the absence of much relevant context. The word is defined by the Compact Oxford English Dictionary as “an item of unreliable information that is repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact”.
Factoid was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe. Mailer described a factoid as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper”, and created the word by combining the word fact and the ending -oid to mean “similar but not the same”. The Washington Times described Mailer’s new word as referring to “something that looks like a fact, could be a fact, but in fact is not a fact”.
In contrast with the factoid, the fektoid is not only true, but easily proven so. It succeeds indisputably as it stands on its own; but as the foundation for an argument to be constructed on top of it, it fails glamorously.
The weaker minds may accept the argument, which they would in turn reject in the absence of the accompanying fektoid. But nobody is willing to string together in sequence the magic words that would be built around “[fektoid]…therefore…we know [what is posited] to be valid or true.”
Nevertheless, if they have failed to attain the necessary skills and talents involved in thinking like a grown-up, or have invested an abundance of emotion or passion in the discourse so that they cannot use these skills, they may behave subsequently as if that is the case. Its use may be thought of, with apologies to George Lucas, as a Jedi trick that only works on the weak-minded.
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[…] noticed this part, as well. The fektoid, or a fact whose veracity would survive a skeptical inspection while its relevance would […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 06/21/2011 @ 06:47[…] he doesn’t want anyone thinking about anyone else. Also, that D very often turns out to be a fektoid, a fact whose veracity would survive skeptical and critical inspection, but whose relevance would […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 06/28/2011 @ 07:21[…] read up on their little factoids and fektoids, then they log on to blogs and paste their snippets into the comments sections. The ones who […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 02/21/2014 @ 06:58