Announcing a new shit: Horseshit.

Horseshit is the perverse common ground of horrible extremists of the hard left and the hard right — the festering crotchrot between the ends of the horseshoe.

It is what “both sides” at their extremes agree is true and right, usually involving coercive collective purpose, centralized control of everything by people with special gnostic insights about an idealized world that can only come into being if the current order is burned to the ground.

And for whatever reason, they invariably hate “the Jews”. It is possible that the active ingredient of the kaleidoscopically shifty forms of hatred of the Jewish people, whether anti-Judaism, anti-semitism or this new anti-zionism is none other than horseshit. In fact, if I were a propagandist seeking sources of raw horseshit to refine into hate rhetoric juice, I’d suggest mining it out from the cursed ground where Jew-haters — especially self-loathing Jews — gather. There you will find the richest vericose veins of horseshit.

I just realized that I have never written down the august lineage of Bullshit-Chickenshit. First some background:

I call meaningless formalities and procedures that seem like they ought to add up to something important but never do “chickenshit”.

And call “bullshit” notions that seem overflowing with meaning, promise and high-flying intentions that can never be achieved, or even put into practice.

And I am overfond of accusing corporations of failure to integrate meaning and practice. This kind of integration involves commitment to a difficult and nonlinear process called “design”.

Design does not suit the kind of technocratic administrator who thrives in the upper halves of glass towers. This type tends to be spiritually challenged, and are numb and deaf to meaning. They are preoccupied with efficiency and productivity. Their workaround is to force hapless human resources to do meaninglessly and tediously piecemeal construct complicated and uninspiring systems. Then they patch the pieces together and send it off to creatives who add a shiny coat of stylization. Then marketing puts phony meaning onto it, and sends it out for foisting.

Corporations fabricate bullshit-coated chickenshit.

My use of bullshit was inspired by Frankfurt’s famous essay:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

I got the term chickenshit from Paul Fussell.

What does that rude term signify? It does not imply complaint about the inevitable inconveniences of military life: overcrowding and lack of privacy, tedious institutional cookery, deprivation of personality, general boredom. Nothing much can be done about those things. Chickenshit refers rather to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige; sadism thinly disguised as necessary discipline; a constant “paying off of old scores”; and insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called—instead of horse-or bull- or elephant shit—because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.