I liked the Bullshit series as well, it’s great when it can be both educational and entertaining. Penn featured on “Wretched” with this little clip wasn’t something I was expecting. Surprised how well he gets along with fundamentalists, especially after how vocal he was about his atheism on the BS series and in his real life outside of that show too.
Just seen Penn on celebrity wife swap, it’s interesting how his kids reacted to a religious person in their house, it all seemed so foreign to them and it was. The little girl especially amused me when she innocently asked the woman about her little prayer ritual at eating time, “why do you have a napkin on top of your head?”
The Kimmel hoax was only possible because of news media not properly vetting tweets and trusting them as a valid sources.
Captain Jenks from the Howard Stern show duped countless networks with his calls to them during breaking news events. Had they done due diligence and tried to verify who they had on the phone, they could have easily avoided being fooled.
Penn Jillette is a sound and logical voice of Libertarianism, even in the instances when I am in disagreement with him, I still respect how he makes his points.
Justification of the destrictive tendancies of ‘hoaxes’ (what some people cough up as humor) isn’t something that I agree with. Its the opposite of wonderful… its an exercise of mental illness that desensitizes the public to the illness, and reinforces that the illness is somehow acceptable.
It tears something of value built with hard work down, and it leaves nothing of value in place of what it destroys. Its barely a half-step removed from the knock-out game, where the accessory hides in the bushes with a camcorder to try to shill for Youtube hits later.
Well, to be sure, there is such a thing as taking it too far. The telephone hoaxes perpetrated by morning radio show hosts have often crossed that line.
But a more abstract and scholastic hoax, especially the kind that involve some real elegance in composition, are (in my opinion) sometimes really good stuff.
Rolfe Humphries’ submission to Poetry Magazine in June of 1939 is held by many to be the best ever literary hoax. One might say that it crosses the line in its very direct rude name-calling, but the target was a college president and nobel prize winner, so I think he can take a bit of ribbing, and the actual poem is – well, it’s a GRAND example of the turgid, gasping, classical invocations of extremely bad university poetry-class poetry.
(If I ever get published – ha! – you may be sure there will be hidden messages in my text!)
Not quite; he didn’t compare the opposing view to Nazism, only noted (truly) that the Nazis are such really bad people that lesser wrongs, to thwart them, become right again.
Godwin’s Law applies when someone says, “Well, the Nazis said the same thing you just said.”
