Tuesday, May 13, 2014

A Marathon of Bullshit!

I ended up doing a Penn & Teller: Bullshit! marathon (all of season 1, half of season 2, plus a few other episodes).  Overall I like it and I plan on watching the rest of the episodes.  I may even do a number of posts based on certain episodes.

Before I start getting into specific subjects, I want to first mention something that kind of bugs me about the tone the show takes at times.  There's a definite Libertarian bend to it (especially when mentioning taxes).  It's somewhat common how they will berate someone from or something in the government for screwing something up or perpetuating some false/misleading information.  This often seems to set off implications about the inherent ineptitude of government and how government is not to be trusted, and so on in usual Libertarian style philosophy.  This bothers me a little as I do not quite bend in that direction, but I can understand it.  However, what gets me is that fairly often there will be an argument in the same segment about how there is regulation by a government agency and they will use that as a good thing to support their claims or to debunk what they are going up against.  I can't help feeling there is some hypocrisy there.

Of course, I think I still like the show because of the fact that they tend to admit to their own hypocrisy (albeit in some subtle ways); actually don't mind people believing or living in debunked ways as long as those people aren't hurting, manipulating, scamming, etc. others; and even occasionally call bullshit on some things they have believed in their own lives. As one philosopher friend of mine says, "You cannot go through life without being hypocritical.  Just don't be hypocritical about your hypocrisy."

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, I have to say that show was really hit or miss. Penn Jillette even said later on that in every season there were episodes that he didn't feel like he did a good job on or where he didn't feel like he made his point very well.

    Sidebar: where have you been? I'm back on blogger after nearly six years, so come on back. The world needs us!

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