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Bullshit
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  1. The biggest threat to a free society is freedom of speech, says Canada’s Public Safety Minister
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    Canada's "Public Safety" Minister Steven Blaney says that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only Germany hadn't suffered from an excess of freedom of speech.
  2. The Business of Bullshit
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2018
    Bullshit business is about the meaningless language conjured up in schools, in banks, in consultancy firms, in politics, in the media and, of course, in thousands of business schools releasing MBA-certificated managers who are then spreading the meaningless managerial buzz-word language of bullshit business around the world. Bullshit business can indeed take over organizations crowding out their core purpose – profit-maximization.
  3. A comment on John Holloway's 'Read Capital: The First Sentence, Or, Capital starts with Wealth, not with the Commodity'
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    John Holloway has written an article entirely devoted to the first sentence of Marx's Capital, a sentence which he claims is key to the whole book. Ulli Diemer thinks Holloway is misguided.
  4. The cost of software piracy
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2005
    The enormous dollar amounts the software industry throws around in its PR campaigns about software 'piracy' are purely imaginary.
  5. The Crusade in Favor of GMO: Falsehoods and Vilification Will Not Fool the Public
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    Pro-GMO campaigners often attack critics of the technology by claiming their negative views of it emanate from well-funded environmentalist groups or commercial interests in the organic food sector. The assertion is that such bodies promote falsehoods and scaremongering about GM to protect their own interests and that the GMO agritech sector has fallen victim to this.
  6. "Fake News"
    Introduction to the December 20, 2016 issue of Other Voices

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    "Fake news" is the latest mania to convulse the mainstream media. All at once, we're being subjected to an outbreak of hand-wringing articles and commentaries about obscure websites which are supposedly poisoning public opinion and undermining democracy by spreading "fake news."
  7. Fakethrough! GMOs and the Capitulation of Science Journalism
    Total Information Control

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
    Good journalism examines its sources critically, it takes nothing at face value, places its topics in a historical context, and it values above all the public interest. Such journalism is, most people agree, essential to any equitable and open system of government. The science media has somehow escaped serious attention. This is unfortunate because no country in the world has a healthy science media.
  8. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1998
    The authors criticize postmodernism in academia for its misuses of scientific and mathematical concepts in postmodern writing. Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics: (1) The incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals; (2) the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others". The stated goal of the book is not to attack "philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general...[but] to warn those who work in them (especially students) against some manifest cases of charlatanism," and in particular to "deconstruct" the notion that some books and writers are difficult because they deal with profound and difficult ideas. "If the texts seem incomprehensible, it is for the excellent reason that they mean precisely nothing." The book includes long extracts from the works of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard who are considered by some to be leading academics of Continental philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis or social sciences. Sokal and Bricmont set out to show how those intellectuals have used concepts from the physical sciences and mathematics incorrectly. The extracts are intentionally rather long to avoid accusations of taking sentences out of context.
    Published in French as Impostures Intellectuelles and in the United Kingdom as Intellectual Impostures.
  9. Flatly Outrageous
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2005
    The flat earth society is not the equivalent of the Fraser Institute.
  10. Fossil Fuel Industry's Global Climate Science Communications Plan in Action: Polluting the Classroom
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    The Fossil Fuel Industry promotes a plan in U.S. schools to address global climate change. Their plan includes denial, doubt and promoting the merits of fossil fuel.
  11. Fracking company teams up with Susan G. Komen, introduces pink drill bits "for the cure"
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2014
  12. 'Free speech' - as long as it doesn't offend anyone
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2009
    On the issue of free speech most of the right and much of the left are in agreement, and so too are many liberals, activists, and human rights apparatchiks. They hold essentially the same position on freedom of expression - they are for it -in principle-, but only so long as it isn't used to express views that they find unacceptable or offensive. What they disagree about is merely who gets to decide what ideas are unacceptable, i.e., who gets to censor who.
  13. From the people who rescued the victims of Hurricane Katrina...
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2008
    The United States – so the media report – has accused the Burmese government of “criminal neglect” in its response to the recent cyclone. The accusation is undoubtedly true, and the U.S. government is certainly splendidly qualified when it comes to recognizing criminal neglect. Still, the chutzpah is enough to turn one’s stomach.
  14. Grand narratives
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2011
    Those who reject 'grand narratives' have simply bought into the hoariest grand narrative of all, the one which says that capitalism is all-powerful and eternal.
  15. Have you heard the one about the negligent official and the obtuse columnist?
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2008
    When people die as a consequence of your failures, joking about it just isn't on.
  16. Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 1994
    Describes attacks on science, and on concepts of truth and rationality, in areas of the humanities.
  17. Kill for the Cure: The U.S. and Israel Aim to Cure Breast Cancer With Tasteful Pink Fighter Jets
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
  18. Kyrgyzstan's dubious success
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1995
    In Kyrgyzstan, everyone is better off - except for the vast majority of the population.
  19. Let Them Eat Climate Change
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    The winds are changing for the energy giants. And so the black plumes of smoke emitted by the climate deniers in an attempt to provide cover for the coal, oil and gas industry have already been refined.
  20. Neocon con game: First deprive public institutions of their ability to act, then blame them for not acting
    Margaret Wente's Chutzpah

    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2005
    The neocon con game: first deprive public institutions of their ability to act, then blame them for not acting
  21. On Bullshit
    Resource Type: Book
    Published: 2005
  22. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 23, 2016
    Science and its enemies

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2016
    Our society and its institutions, public and private, regularly tell us that science, and education in the sciences, are crucial to our future. These public declarations are strangely reminiscent of the equally sincere lip service they pay to the ideals of democracy. And, in the same way that governments and private corporations devote considerable efforts to undermining the reality of democracy, so too they are frequently found trying to block and subvert science when the evidence it produces runs counter to their interests. Real live scientists doing real live science, it seems, are not nearly as loveable as Science in the abstract.
  23. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - December 20, 2016
    Fake News

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2016
    "Fake news" is the latest mania to convulse the mainstream media. All at once, we're being subjected to an outbreak of hand-wringing articles and commentary about obscure websites which are supposedly poisoning public opinion and undermining democracy by spreading "fake news." Since we don't like to be left out when a new fad comes on the scene, Other Voices is jumping on the bandwagon too, with this, our last issue of 2016, devoted to "fake news." Our focus, however, is not so much on the crackpots and trolls making mischief on the fringes, but on the dominant actors in the fake news business: governments and the corporate and state media.
  24. Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - April 1, 2017
    April 1 issue

    Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
    Published: 2017
    Other Voices always strives to present you with alternative views on important topics. This issue offers some really alternative perspectives and even some "alternative facts." As always, read critically - and enjoy.
  25. TIFFs corporate mentality
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2015
    The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) tries to prevent anyone from handing out flyers to people standing on the sidewalk waiting for a film.
  26. Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 1996
    Alan Sokal submitted this parody of postmodernism, poststructuralist theory, deconstruction, and political moralism to the journal Social Text. The editors failed to spot the hoax and published it as a serious article. The hoax caused a fierce debate between the postmodernists and those who consider postmodernism reactionary nonsense.
  27. The U.S. and Israel Are Trying to Cure Breast Cancer With Tasteful Pink Fighter Jets
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
    According to companies that manufacture pink doodads, we could totally cure breast cancer if it weren’t for all the people who are unaware of breast cancer. Since pink means women, and women mean breasts, pink things are the best way to make people aware of breast cancer, and thus cure it. Imagine all the awareness that will rise in the contrails of these two pink fighter jets, brought to you in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month by the U.S. Navy and the Israeli Air Force.
  28. "A warm reminder of humanity's less barbaric traits"
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2016
  29. Were Marx's principles only skin deep?
    Resource Type: Article
    Published: 2007
    A British dermatologist has managed to get himself worldwide publicity with an article suggesting that Karl Marx’s painful skin condition may have caused him to say all those mean things about capitalism.
  30. Your Call is Important to Us
    The Truth About Bullshit

    Resource Type: Book


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