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The B.S. Factor
- The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America
- Narrated by: Charles Henderson Norman
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
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The B.S. Factor
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Summary
Fakery and hypocrisy in American communications are the subjects of this outspoken and hilarious audiobook. Uncovering our thought-pollution problem for perhaps the first time, Arthur Herzog exposes Executalk (“name of the game” for “point” or “purpose,” “ball-park estimate” for “rough guess”), Quote Facts (opinions made to seem like facts by virtue of being quoted), and Complex Complex (the compulsion to make things more complicated than they need to be), to mention only a few of the current crimes against logic and language.
The perpetrators of these atrocities include Fadthinkers, Word Mincers, Sci-Speakers, Copy Cant-ers, and Anything Authorities, those who, having succeeded in one field, appear on TV talk shows as experts on everything else. Without the B.S. Factor, success in America is almost impossible, says Herzog, and he goes on to call for a new breed of “radical skeptics” to clear away the B.S. that is now engulfing our country.
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- I. A. Clark
- 25-04-15
As relevant now as the day it was written
"America has abolished lies by legislating them out of existence".
Respected author Arthur Herzog III mercilessly dissects the new language of public life, designed to replace outright lies – which can at least be contradicted – with utterances which are just too slippery to get a handle on.
The examples all come from the Nixon era, but the techniques of obfuscation which the author collects into an alphabetical list, and pins out for our inspection like so many ghastly bugs, are still very much in daily use. Forty years or so after it was first penned, his diatribe against the all-pervading corruption of democratic discourse by language suited only for the promulgation of "B.S." is just as relevant today.
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