House of Eratosthenes

Let us say you have invented a software networking tool. It is a peer-to-peer networking tool that works kind of like those old programs that connected to bulletin boards. It is a Layer 5 tool you’ve invented, which means it is a session-layer tool. You remember that — Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away, 5th word begins with S, S stands for Session. Now let us say you have a customer that is running into problems with your tool, and whether you know it or not, the customer is having these problems because of the networking software on his desktop computer.

He has a serious bug in his datagram layer software, which is Layer 2.

You address this by changing your software. You are addressing a layer-2 problem with layer-5 fixes. What happens.

We-ell…

You burn a lot of midnight oil. You have very little to show for it. Your software modules take on thousands of lines of nonsense code that doesn’t really do anything. Your test cases turn to manure. You revert a lot of changes, and of those, you revert a lot of them right back again.

See where I’m going with this? In engineering, you address bugs at the layer in which they occur. Because addressing them somewhere else is always possible. But it’s a one-step-forward, three-steps-back proposition.

I’ve come to view blogging as the opposite.

People vote for Barack Obama, which is a problem. The problem is due to something else far more deeply-rooted…our continuing apathy toward truth, toward cause-and-effect thinking, toward reckoning with consequences as our parents and grandparents told us we should learn to do. But if you speak to that, you might very well lose your audience. So instead, maybe it’s better for bloggers to think like bloggers, and not as software engineers. Maybe bloggers should address symptoms instead of causes.

That’s been my rule. But I broke it.

This dipstick of a news anchor said, without a piece of evidence to back it up (so far as I know), that pro-Proposition-8 people were just as hateful and visceral as anti-Proposition-8 people. I could have acted as a good blogger and just addressed that.

But I went deeper. I broke form, and acted as a software engineer, analyzing the root cause.

I explored bullshit narratives; how popular they’ve become; what role they played in electing our Messiah of a President-Elect.

I was certain this would lose my audience. But this is The Blog That Nobody Reads. The nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads when they don’t have the time, reacted favorably to it and it sparked a fascinating discussion, both online and off. And then more than a few of my friends around the web picked it up. Apparently, this has really hit a nerve.

Good. I hope the folks who’ve taken the time to comment on what this means to them, represent millions. And I think that they do.

So I made a new word, again. It’s a little bit more than one word…

Overly-Convenient Narrative (OCN), or Bullshit Narrative, Socially Expedient Narrative, Howdy Narrative:
A construct of words, sentences, expressions and focus-group-tested phrases to describe a sequence of events with only a casual relation to the truth. Recall that Bullshit has an interesting non-correlational relationship with truth: “One cannot bullshit unless one absolves onesself of any concern at all about personal costs involved in disregarding truth — costs absorbed by other parties, are quite alright.” Liars are not bullshitters because liars have to concern themselves with what’s true, and assert something that differs from it.

A bullshit narrative tends to be more believable than regular bullshit, because whereas regular bullshit meanders randomly toward and away-from what’s true, the OCN narrative is formed around a kernel of truth. It is overly-convenient because it is assembled according to what is likely to be proliferated the most rapidly among diverse audiences, and to survive the longest. People use it to introduce themselves to each other, and ingratiate themselves with others who have bought into the same bullshit narrative, thus striking up a chord of instant (if not somewhat phony) friendship.

I went on to compile a list. A list that I could, if I dare say so, add to all day long if I so chose:

Some notable overly-convenient, bullshit narratives:

1. Sarah Palin is a dumbass.
2. So is George W. Bush.
3. So is J. Danforth Quayle.
4. We’ve poisoned the environment, causing global warming, and now we’re all gonna die.
5. The rich don’t pay taxes because they can hire accountants who know all the tricks of the trade.
6. Joe McCarthy ruined the lives of hundreds of people over made up, trumped-up charges.
7. Religious people are bigoted and intolerant.
8. (DEBUNKED) America is such a racist country it will never elect a black President.
9. No one is truly free unless… (fill in the blank)
10. Saddam Hussein was not dangerous because he had no weapons.
11. Clinton kept us safe. The 9/11 attacks occurred on George Bush’s watch.
12. Whenever a Republican is President, the public debt explodes.
13. You can’t raise a family on minimum wage the way it is now.
14. Nobody has any business owning assault weapons.
15. Barack Obama… (fill in the blank)
16. Republicans are opposed to civil rights.
17. We shouldn’t care what the Founding Fathers thought of things, because those guys owned slaves.
18. America is all about separation of church and state.
19. Our strength lies in our diversity.
20. Republicans and democrats have the same goals in mind, just different ideas about how to get them done.

Thinking takes work.

A lot of people don’t want to do it.

They want to do a lot of talking anyway. So they recycle tropes. Tropes they “know” are true, because they’ve heard ’em so many times before.

A coworker tried to convince me he’d seen youtube video of Sarah mistaking Africa for a nation. The closest I could get (before finding the whole thing was a hoax) was Sarah refusing to address the Africa is a nation/Africa is a continent issue until the source came forth.

I had to tell a friendly acquaintance that he only believed the story because it fit his political beliefs and he would immediately question it if the same were said of Barack Obama. He got very angry and defensive and I sort of hope he’s still a friendly acquaintance.
- Tom The Impaler | 11/13/2008 @ 09:30
Oh my, they do have thin skins about their grotesquely underqualified candidate, and their poorly thought out biases toward Him.

Gonna be tough for everyone trying to stay friends over the next four years. But hey. We got through the last ~~eight~~ sixteen just fine. Kinda.

Marlin Perkins had something interesting to say about when he was bit on the finger by a rattlesnake…an incident that was NEVER televised. His comments suggest your friend should be cut some slack, even though it may look like an intent to deceive was present and practiced:

An interesting after-reaction to this episode is the fact that even today I meet people who in all seriousness tell me that they sat there in front of their television receivers and watched that rattlesnake sink his fangs into my finger. At first, I used to correct them and explain I wasn’t on the show that day, that the bite occurred before we were on the air. But these people are so sure in their own minds that they have seen this thing happen that I now just let it pass and don’t try to correct them. Perhaps this shows the power of suggestion. [emphasis mine]
- mkfreeberg | 11/13/2008 @ 09:53
You say OCN, I say BSN … potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto ….

Speaking of BullShit Narratives … there’s this one:

Conservatives are intelectually shallow, not well read, mean, evil people who “lie”, even make stuff up, to advance their agenda.

Project much? Ya think?

If you’re not familiar with the Mark Steyn/McClean’s Canadian-Muslim flap, this might not mean as much to you, so I’ll summarize. Mark Steyn and McCleans were basically tried for “hate speech” over things Mark Steyn wrote in a book review of a book by the late Oriana Fallaci. And the “hateful” things he wrote were from the book he was reviewing.

At any rate, some Journalism Professor has been publicly taking Mark to task over this (fortunately Steyn/McCleans won the court battle, but the battle of the narrative rages on). “Mark Steyn is a conservative writer who makes us look bad. Therefore, he is petty, mean, hateful, stupid, intellectually lazy, and dishonest.

Mmm-hmmm. Well, Mark ripped him a new one over this professor’s latest idiocy. And, of course, since it’s Mark Steyn, it’s a fun read as well.

I mentioned “Projection”. See any in Professor John Miller?
- philmon | 11/13/2008 @ 09:58
19. Our strength lies in our diversity.

Haaaaahhhhhahahahahhhahahahahahahhhahahahaaaahahahaha!!!!!

Our diversity is why you aren’t getting along with anybody, you moron. So if our strength lies in us not having anything in common, then yeah, in whatever backwards world that you can succeed like that, you are absolutely right. The strength of diversity must be why it’s always the point of contention when you are slinging urine-filled containers at the police, in a riot of your making.

I love this topic, Morgan. Love it. The narratives of the left are a teeth-gnashing bunch of confrontational witlessness, every one of which might as well be followed by the spewer spewing “end of discussion.” It’s what they intend when they say them.

I think it is taken to the limit with statements like “I don’t believe in _______.” Usually it’s war, but other things creep in, too. It reflects how comfortable people have become saying things that actually DO NOT MAKE SENSE. You have to believe in war, jackass – it really happens. In their world, a real “zinger” consists of a statement of unassailable lunacy, based literally and directly on an absence of truth.
- Andy | 11/13/2008 @ 11:25
“our strength lies in our diversity”

Yeeeeaaaahhhh. One of those fluffily meaningless statements designed to make the speaker feel good as those around him nod and murmur in approval. It should be put in BarackQuotes.

Our diversity is a testament to our strength. I’d buy that. But our strength lies in what we have in common — what we are willing to defend.

The saying goes “United we stand. Divided we fall.”

If we’re all navel-gazingly fixated on our differences and trying our best to preserve them, because “it’s the source of our strength”, we only promote “divided”. And you know what that means.
- philmon | 11/13/2008 @ 11:44

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Twenty Bullshit NarrativesThursday, November 13th, 2008

Twenty Bullshit Narratives
Thursday, November 13th, 2008