I was tempted to post this review of a book about truth, lies and "bull----", entitled "On Bull----", in Maverick's Tanka thread [Tanka Tango to Go] which is dipping into the truth, but I thought this post would interrupt the flow of the Tanka* -- so I'm posting it here.

BTW the Tanka-in-progress includes this beautiful connecting link which Zed has just posted:

Truth's diamond never corrodes
But refracts to each their hue

Between Truth and Lies, An Unprintable Ubiquity
New York Times, February 14, 2005

"The bull artist, on the other hand, cares nothing for truth or falsehood. The only thing that matters to him is "getting away with what he says," Mr. Frankfurt writes. An advertiser or a politician or talk show host given to [bull] "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it," he writes. "He pays no attention to it at all."

And this makes him, Mr. Frankfurt says, potentially more harmful than any liar, because any culture and he means this culture rife with [bull] is one in danger of rejecting "the possibility of knowing how things truly are." It follows that any form of political argument or intellectual analysis or commercial appeal is only as legitimate, and true, as it is persuasive. There is no other court of appeal.

The reader is left to imagine a culture in which institutions, leaders, events, ethics feel improvised and lacking in substance. "All that is solid," as Marx once wrote, "melts into air."

Mr. Frankfurt is an unlikely slinger of barnyard expletives."

http://snipurl.com/ctmi

* I didn't want to tinka with the Tanka. :)