Bullshit

John Maier has an amusing post on UnHerd. He opens with this:

Twenty years ago this year, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt published his influential book On Bullshit. According to Frankfurt, the bullshitter, a well-known social menace, is an individual who, unlike the liar, holds forth with complete indifference as to whether he is speaking truly or falsely. He just speaks: in a manner recklessly detached from the facts. As other philosophers quickly noticed, however, bullshit is a diverse category, one with many prototypes. In his own contribution to the blossoming field of bullshit studies, the Oxford philosopher G.A. Cohen suggested that much 20th-century French critical theory should be thought of as a different species of bullshit in virtue of its “unclarifiable unclarity”. David Graeber famously speculated that, within the modern economy, entire professions and activities constituted a kind of “bullshit”. If these manifestations of bullshit have anything in common it is perhaps that in each some clearly functional ideal — truthful communication, clear writing, meaningful employment — is flagrantly undermined, while the appearance that it isn’t is deceptively sustained.

He goes on at some length. I didn't read it all. This paragraph was enough for me.