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...
Something has to be said about it, and Jon Stewart says it very well.
At 2:58 Stewart uses the word “narrative.” Let me go down a bunny trail here, I think it’s worth it.
This is an absolutely correct use of the word, but we probably need a new word because this one doesn’t describe enough:
a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious. [ital. emphasis mine]
We have a whole lot of these “narratives” going around right now; it’s an election year. We need a new word that offers greater precision, drawing a periphery around those situations which together constitute a subset of situations for which the actual “narrative” word would apply. That is to say, all of the situations I have in mind, would be described accurately by the word “narrative,” but all of the situations described by the word “narrative” would not necessarily fit into the definition of this new word.
I recall the H. G. Frankfurt book On Bullshit…
What bullshit essentially misrepresents is neither the state of affairs to which it refers nor the beliefs of the speaker concerning that state of affairs. Those are what lies misrepresent, by virtue of being false. Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.
This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar…A [liar is] responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it…For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
This is really good for our purposes, because it’s a great point. A liar has to show some interest in what is true, and the bullshitter is distinguished from the liar because he maintains little to none. From all I can see here, that’s the Brian Ross story in a nutshell.
Still more definitional work remains to be done, however, after these two concepts of “narrative” and “bullshit” are melded together, for a bullshit narrative does not precisely describe what we are targeting. Which, in turn, has to do with a great deal of passion aroused toward the objective of reciting something, late in the narrative, which provides fuel for the fire that is the bullshitter reciting the earlier items of the narrative. A true “bullshit narrative” may lack this passion. Example: I work for a newspaper, boss wants a story all set to go for the evening edition, so I threw together some bullshit narrative. Such a situation would be excluded from what we are trying to define here, although it would make effective and accurate use of such words, in the way we have defined them here. Since — again, I’m speculating this about Mr. Ross, but it certainly is not going out on a limb by any means — there was a desire here to connect such senseless violence with the Tea Party. The lazybones trying to make a deadline would lack such a desire.
Granted, so does Brian Ross, from the way things have been presented by Jon Stewart. But that’s the point. I don’t think Stewart nailed everything here. Great job, but he missed a spot. I don’t think Brian Ross…or, whoever put this bit of information in his hands…was lazy. I think he was the opposite of lazy. He was anxious.
Not so much hyper or sweaty. But…and this is key to this new word I’m trying to define…already many steps into this narrative. You get halfway through a book that’s good, you want to finish it. Eat half a candy bar, you wanna eat the other half. That’s the way a lot of people do their “thinking.” They pursue narratives. Some bit of inconvenient evidence from reality, comes knocking to throw things off track, and they’re just not ready to accept it. The bits of fact that do make it into the pleasure dome, all have it in common that they elicit this response of “Ah ha!! The narrative continues!!”
Maybe what we need to be naming, are these bits of evidence that throw the narrative off track. This other thing we used to call “science,” is made up of such things. These two stars are so many degrees, seconds and minutes apart in September…the angle is discretely different in March…and so, we discover parallax. Like that; that is how science works, that is how all disciplined thinking is supposed to work. Discard the overly simplistic theories by way of inductive reasoning, and exclude the inapplicable possibilities by way of deductive reasoning.
Of course, you could say a reporter’s job is not to reason, but to bring the facts — and you could further say, in fact, Brian Ross did exactly that. Problem was, the fact Ross reported was unhelpful in the extreme. He got himself into a spot of trouble…or rather, should have, and we’re still trying to find out if that’s the case…because he went chasing off after these facts in order to help flush out one of these bullshit narratives.
That is not research, that is telling a story. We’ve got a lot of people doing that lately.
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