BS

 A friend sent me a link to a Substack article (URL below) about BS. Herewith was my email reply:

Interesting. Thanks for sharing. We got Newsweek at our house when I was growing up, and after I got married, we subscribed for a decade or two. Eventually, we stopped the subscription, as we later did the dead tree newspaper, because I could get faster news and better analysis on the intertubes. Time and Newsweek are zombies.

Humanity has always been awash in BS. Hundreds of millions died because of the BS of the popes, the various European empires and their colonies, the Confederacy, Stalinism, Maoism, Naziism and other manifestations of tribal BS. In my time, Wm F Buckley Jr was one of the more erudite American BS purveyors, both through the National Review and on TV. But there was the John Birch Society, Fr. Coughlin, and eventually, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich. Fox News has taken BS to a whole new level. I used to have hope for the internet as the sterilizing sunlight to exterminate BS, but BS has bloomed in profusion with the web alongslide real information, and most folks lack the critical thinking skills to tell the difference.

At its core, the problem with BS is that it appeals to those who seek arguments from authority. That certainly explains the appeal of the BS of organized religions. And only when I embarked on a career in research did I really abandon arguments from authority for arguments from evidence. Now, I find it relatively easy to dodge the miasma of BS and research the evidence. Over time, I've found sources that have repaid my trust, but as St. Ronnie was fond of bleating: "Trust, but verify."

I just finished reading "Spin Dictators: The changing face of tyranny in the 21^st century." While the writing can be tedious, the central point--buttressed by plenty of citations--is that the trend overall is away from fear dictators and towards spin (i.e., BS) dictators.