Cutthroat Carnage, Again!

[WinstonConfluentus]

Hi Gang,

 

As some of you may know, my buddies the Cuttys are in even worse shape than we are in some ways, yet ESRD is about to allow the devastation of Star Creek by supporting an experimental logging project by the Southern Rockies Watershed Project. Cuttys are down to five percent of their native range in Alberta and have received federal protection in a few streams, but it looks like its going to take the people's voice to save them from the Alberta governments management practices. Please have a look at the Crowsnest Pass Herald's website: passherald.ca to see a letter by a fellow that cares. Please let everyone you can know about this from the Premier on down to the folks at the local fly shop. If they get away with this one, the plan seems to be to try it everywhere they can. Yikes! Again!

[beedhead]

Here is the direct link below.

 

http://passherald.ca/archives/141126/index5.htm

[albertatrout]

Are there any pure strain cutts left in Star Creek? I know its fishless above the falls but still a very pretty area. It has been logged historicaly (it did grow back), we're not talking old growth forest in there. I'm a bit surprised theres enough lumber for them to even bother with.

[WinstonConfluentus]

Thanks Beedhead; my friend who types only know a bit more than me about computers.

 

Turns out there are Cuttys above both the main falls and further up above the little falls too! Unless someone snuck a rainbow up there, they will be pure. I don't know if we ever made it up that high before the last one of us died in the Upper Crowsnest River in the 1950's, but the Cuttys have hung on! Betcha they'd be tasty.

 

There's also a story by Collette Derworiz in the Calgary Herald today about it! The fellow that spoke for the government hasn't seen what my friend down here has. I don't think he will be able to say that after he sees it for himself.

[Taco]

What? No mention of the UofA?

[WinstonConfluentus]

Thanks for having a look everyone! There's a bunch of stuff about the U of A in the letter the link takes you to. There's only a little time left to stop this and avoid the precedent it will set. We really need everyone's help this time; if things get much worse for my Cutty Buddies and their status is raised to endangered, the feds may have to place a protection order and you will all have to find a new place to fish. Hmmmmmmm, more yummy fish for me, but not so good for you.

[TMLhammy]

Thanks for posting Winston, I love that area and will continue to follow this.

[beedhead]

"Alberta Wilderness Association" wrote a good letter to Minister Campbell, Link below...

 

http://albertawilderness.ca/archive/cutthroat-trout-archive/2014-09-05-star-creek-%E2%80%9Cexperimental%E2%80%9D-logging-going-ahead

[WinstonConfluentus]

Hi Gang,

 

Well, it seems some humans are really staring to care about what happens to us; there's been some good things happening and a couple of new stories about Star Creek. One is on the Pass Herald's site (link above then hit home for this week's stuff), a story by their reporter and another at a website called Crowsnest Voice.

 

That said, the scary folks showed up last week and have started building the roads so we're not safe yet. They built one of them way too close to Girardi Creek, another one of the Cutties last good neighbourhoods just to the west of Star Creek. Their bridge over Girardi looks pretty bad too. They may just destroy both creeks with this silliness.

 

If you folks have time, please tell your government and the university that this is not ok!

 

Thanks again,

 

Winston

[Taco]

Ah! the lure of Internet anonymity or is there actually a smug lookin' Salmonidae in a Guy Fawkes mask?

[osprey]

Letter (email) sent to Kyle Fawcett. Now I just have to wait for a reply by post. By then the watershed could be logged. Does anyone know if this is a test case so that the logging companies can do more logging around prime cutthroat streams?

[Taco]

Anybody bother to contact any of these people?? http://www.forestry.ualberta.ca/ContactUs.aspx They're the ones running the project

[Jeffro]

Anybody bother to contact any of these people?? http://www.forestry.ualberta.ca/ContactUs.aspx]http://www.forestry.ualberta.ca/ContactUs.aspx[/url] They're the ones running the project

Taco,

 

Surely you know its better to burn the witch before the trial. It removes all need to worry about whether it was a witch at all.

 

Curious to see what the results are myself. Any learnin' is a good learnin', even if it stings a bit.

[Taco]

No *hit Jeffro

[WinstonConfluentus]

Well Gang,

 

The news is not good for Cutties. The Alberta government, the University of Alberta and Canfor have all ignored the science, their own regulations and will of the people and are proceeding with the experimental logging in Star Creek. There's an update on crowsnestvoice.com today.

 

"It is horrifying that we have to fight our government to save the environment" - Ansel Adams

 

My home watershed has been under assault by our government for decades now and we are almost out of time to save what's left. Cutties are down to five percent of their range and we may not be able to hold on much longer ourselves in the Oldman watershed. Hidden Creek meant the world to us before it was clear-cut with eight out of ten of us living in the Oldman above the dam spawning there. This year our numbers were way, way down. You see, the land between the parks has been considered expendable and has been industry's playground for decades. The carnage left by industry, with the G of A turning a blind eye as they are on Star Creek, has left the land susceptible to further damage by motorized user groups and overgrazing which the G of A supports as it helps blur the damage and gives them an ally. Any of you who have fished the area have seen this first hand. Ironically, the recovery plan for Cutties has a picture of Star Creek on the cover.

 

The new controlling document, the SSRP, contains all sorts of stuff about road and trail density relative to the health of the land and its charges, random camping rules and many windy platitudes about conservation; it also contains plans for a new quad staging area at Star Creek, an area that exceeded the trail thresholds before this experimental logging. The G of A is aware and has been reminded of all of this by scientists, NGO's and citizens not under their or industry's control. Seems the G of A have succumbed the "better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission or follow the rules" management practice and being judge, jury and executioner the have gotten away with it so far. This must change if we are to continue to enjoy our land in any meaningful way.

 

Again I beg you to make your voices heard. The haul road has been built and the feller-bunchers will be working shortly. Across Highway Three, SLS will soon cut the Spoon Valley - home to more of my friends and who's confluence with South Racehorse Creek is smack dab in the middle of our spawning area in SRH. Quite a few of us found a place to spawn in SRH this year as Hidden isn't good for much beyond suffocating eggs and muddying the Oldman now. There are many ugly truths down here; I've only been able to touch the surface on it here, (no pun intended). Please find the courage to help heal this land so it can help heal us.

 

Be well all,

 

WinstonConfluentus

[Taco]

Or could it be that South Racehorse has returned to being a major bull trout spawning stream it once was because the monster logjam at the mouth has finally succumbed to successive high water events ??? It was only 20'-30' high in places and 150 yds deep and in place since '96. *hit there was a small lake behind it for a few yrs.

 

 

Quit bein' a cutesy CSer and tell us the organization

[Smitty]

Have to say I'm a little sympathetic to Taco's point. When push comes to shove, when serious people get serious about their serious concerns, they ought to use less literary license and just be matter of fact about it - in my humble opinion. I would advise Mr. WC to be a little more straightforward in this chicken little scenario. We all know - whether the label is officially applied or not - that 100% pure cutts are certainly a threatened species, and their diminished range being less than 5% has been that way for quite sometime (fair to say decades here?).

 

So if there is an organization that collating and expressing our collective concerns and providing that voice, let's be a little bit more up front about it, shall we? I'm not trying to minimize a valid analysis or take away from creating a sense of urgency, but the teasing tone and anonymity rubs me the wrong way - at least a little bit anyways.

 

Care to provide some additional clarity Mr. WC? I for one would appreciate it. This is exactly the kind of issue that can easily be raised (and fits very nicely into the curriculum) in a science 9 class.

 

Smitty

 

(Mike Smith)

[WinstonConfluentus]

Thanks for the thoughts from the capital Smitty. The reference has been removed as it was a little premature and born of the passion of the moment having received some ugly news. I can see how it could be misinterpreted without knowing the breadth of the effort.

 

I, too, wish this could be dealt with in a Science 9 classroom and maybe the ultimate answer lies with the kiddos. The science is certainly clear and assessable enough; unfortunately, this appears to be more a problem of poly-sci and to my understanding, well beyond grade 9.

 

The anonymity enjoyed here can easily be abused. I assure you that is not my intention; sometimes it just doesn't matter who says something, only that it is said. I have nothing to gain from this personally. I can also assure you that I am far from anonymous in some circles and have openly stood by the courage of my convictions many, many times and have welcomed the consequences however unpleasant. We all have a role in this, good, bad or otherwise and we all have different strengths and weaknesses. Open debate of ideas is at the core of democratic process and it saddens me when important topics are obfuscated by thoughtlessness or ignorance of the issues. Most folks are pretty good at heart and really do care about things outside of themselves once they are aware. So take what you like and leave the rest; if the urge grabs you, do a little research and form your own opinions. If passion grows from that - great. I will continue to place the welfare of the land in the fore; here, and anywhere else I can lend a hand to the things I love.

 

Winston

[Taco]

Bullshit

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the expletive. For other uses, see Bullshit (disambiguation).

Look up bullshit in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Bullshit (also bullcrap) is a common English expletive which may be shortened to the euphemism bull or the initialism BS. In British English, "bollocks" is a comparable expletive, although "bullshit" is more common. It is a slang profanity term meaning "nonsense", especially in a rebuking response to communication or actions viewed as deceiving, misleading, disingenuous, or false. As with many expletives, the term can be used as an interjection or as many other parts of speech, and can carry a wide variety of meanings.

It can be used either as a noun or as a verb. While the word is generally used in a deprecating sense, it may imply a measure of respect for language skills, or frivolity, among various other benign usages. In philosophy, Harry Frankfurt, among others, analyzed the concept of bullshit as related to but distinct from lying.

Outside of the philosophical and discursive studies, the everyday phrase bullshit conveys a measure of dissatisfaction with something or someone, but often does not describe any role of truth in the matter.

Contents

• 1 Etymology
• 2 In the philosophy of truth and rhetoric
  • 2.1 Assertions of fact
    • 2.1.1 Distinguished from lying
  • 2.2 Harry Frankfurt's concept
• 3 In everyday language
• 4 See also
• 5 References
• 5.1 Notes
• 5.2 Bibliography

Etymology

"Bull", meaning nonsense, dates from the 17th century,^[1] while the term "bullshit" has been used as early as 1915 in American slang,^[2] and came into popular usage only during World War II. The word "bull" itself may have derived from the Old French boul meaning "fraud, deceit".^[2] The term "horseshit" is a near synonym. The South African English equivalent is "bull dust". Few corresponding terms exist in other languages; one prominent example, however, is German Bockmist, literally "billy-goat *hit".

The earliest attestation mentioned by the Concise Oxford English Dictionary is in fact T. S. Eliot, who between 1910 and 1916 wrote an early poem to which he gave the title "The Triumph of Bullshit", written in the form of a ballade. The word bullshit does not appear in the text of the poem, and Eliot himself never published the poem.^[3]

As to earlier etymology the Oxford English Dictionary cites bull with the meaning "trivial, insincere, untruthful talk or writing, nonsense". It describes this usage as being of unknown origin, but notes that in Old French, the word could mean "boul, boule, bole fraud, deceit, trickery; mod. Icel bull 'nonsense'; also ME bull BUL 'falsehood', and BULL verb, to befool, mock, cheat."^[4]

Although there is no confirmed etymological connection, it should be noted that these older meanings are synonymous with the modern expression "bull", generally considered and used as a contraction of "bullshit"

Another proposal, according to the lexicographer Eric Partridge, is that the term was popularised by the Australian and New Zealand troops from about 1916 arriving at the front during World War I. Partridge claims that the British commanding officers' placed emphasis on bull; that is, attention to appearances, even when it was a hindrance to waging war. The foreign Diggers allegedly ridiculed the British by calling it bull*hit.^[5]

In the philosophy of truth and rhetoric Assertions of fact

Bullshit is commonly used to describe statements made by people more concerned with the response of the audience than in truth and accuracy, such as goal-oriented statements made in the field of politics or advertising. On one prominent occasion, the word itself was part of a controversial advertisement. During the 1980 U.S. presidential campaign, the Citizens Party candidate Barry Commoner ran a radio advertisement that began with an actor exclaiming: "Bullshit! Carter, Reagan and Anderson, it's all bullshit!" NBC refused to run the advertisement because of its use of the expletive, but Commoner's campaign successfully appealed to the Federal Communications Commission to allow the advertisement to run unedited.^[6]

Distinguished from lying

"Bullshit" does not necessarily have to be a complete fabrication; with only basic knowledge about a topic, bullshit is often used to make the audience believe that one knows far more about the topic by feigning total certainty or making probable predictions. It may also merely be "filler" or nonsense that, by virtue of its style or wording, gives the impression that it actually means something.

In his essay on the subject, William G. Perry called bull[*hit] "relevancies, however relevant, without data" and gave a definition of the verb "to bull[*hit]" as follows:

To discourse upon the contexts, frames of reference and points of observation which would determine the origin, nature, and meaning of data if one had any. To present evidence of an understanding of form in the hope that the reader may be deceived into supposing a familiarity with content.

[7]

The bullshitter generally either knows the statements are likely false, exaggerated, and in other ways misleading or has no interest in their factual accuracy one way or the other. "Talking bullshit" is thus a lesser form of lying, and is likely to elicit a correspondingly weaker emotional response: whereas an obvious liar may be greeted with derision, outrage, or anger, an exponent of bullshit tends to be dismissed with an indifferent sneer.

Harry Frankfurt's concept

In his essay On Bullshit (originally written in 1986, and published as a monograph in 2005), philosopher Harry Frankfurt of Princeton University characterizes bullshit as a form of falsehood distinct from lying. The liar, Frankfurt holds, knows and cares about the truth, but deliberately sets out to mislead instead of telling the truth. The "bullshitter", on the other hand, does not care about the truth and is only seeking to impress:^[8]

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.

Frankfurt connects this analysis of bullshit with Ludwig Wittgenstein's disdain of "non-sense" talk, and with the popular concept of a "bull session" in which speakers may try out unusual views without commitment. He fixes the blame for the prevalence of "bullshit" in modern society upon anti-realism and upon the growing frequency of situations in which people are expected to speak or have opinions without appropriate knowledge of the subject matter.

Gerald Cohen, in "Deeper into Bullshit", contrasted the kind of "bullshit" Frankfurt describes with a different sort: nonsense discourse presented as sense. Cohen points out that this sort of bullshit can be produced either accidentally or deliberately. While some writers do deliberately produce bullshit, a person can also aim at sense and produce nonsense by mistake; or a person deceived by a piece of bullshit can repeat it innocently, without intent to deceive others.^[9]

Cohen gives the example of Alan Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries" as a piece of deliberate bullshit. Sokal's aim in creating it, however, was to show that the "postmodernist" editors who accepted his paper for publication could not distinguish nonsense from sense, and thereby by implication that their field was "bullshit".

In everyday language

Outside of the academic world, among natural speakers of North American English, as an interjection or adjective, bullshit conveys general displeasure, an objection to, or points to unfairness within, some state of affairs. This colloquial usage of "bullshit", which began in this 20th century, does not assign a truth score to another's discourse. It simply labels something that the speaker does not like and feels he is unable to change.

See also Wikiquote has quotations related to: Bullshit

• Confabulation
• Humbug
• Tall tale
• Not even wrong
• Waffle (speech)
• Bullshit bingo

References Notes

1. Concise Oxford English Dictionary
2. "Online Etymology Dictionary". Etymonline.com. Retrieved 2011-11-12.
3. Eliot, T. S. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (Harcourt, 1997) ISBN 0-15-100274-6
4. Mark Liberman (2005-08-17). "Bullshit: invented by T.S. Eliot in 1910?". Language Log.
5. Peter Hartcher (2012-11-06). "US looks Down Under to stop poll rot". Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2013-11-05.
6. Paul Siegel (2007). Communication Law in America. Paul Siegel. pp. 507–508. ISBN 0-7425-5387-6.
7. Perry, William G. (1967). Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts. Originally published in Harvard College: A Collection of Essays by Members of the Harvard Faculty.
8. "Harry Frankfurt on bullshit". Archived from the original on 2005-03-08. Retrieved 2013-11-05.
9. Cohen, G. A., "Deeper into Bullshit". Originally appeared in Buss and Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Themes from the Philosophy of Harry Frankfurt (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2002). Reprinted in Hardcastle and Reich, Bullshit and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), ISBN 0-8126-9611-5.

Bibliography

• Eliot, T. S. Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (Harcourt, 1997) ISBN 0-15-100274-6
• Frankfurt, Harry G. (2005). On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-12294-6. — Harry Frankfurt's detailed analysis of the concept of bullshit.
• Hardcastle, Gary L.; Reisch, George A., eds. (2006). Bullshit and Philosophy. Chicago: Open Court (Carus Publishing). ISBN 0-8126-9611-5.
• Holt, Jim, Say Anything, one of his Critic At Large essays from The New Yorker, (August 22, 2005)
• Penny, Laura (2005). Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth About Bullshit. Random House. ISBN 1-4000-8103-3. — Halifax academic Laura Penny's study of the phenomenon of bullshit and its impact on modern society.
• Weingartner, C. (1975). Public doublespeak: every little movement has a meaning all of its own. College English, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Sep., 1975), pp. 54–61.

Categories:

• Profanity
• Feces
• Interjections
• Deception

[bigbowtrout]

I still can't get over how well Bulltrout can type

[troutlover]

You are an idiot, its not really a fish its a guy pretending to be a fish. Soooo typing is done with his fingers. ya I know, I just blew your mind right?

[bigbowtrout]

Awwww man I thought we had a real typing talking trout online 😠

[Taco]

In a Guy Fawkes mask yet too.......

[Taco]

And yes I'm a prick for givin' poor old winnie a hard time but I highly dislike a doubly anonymous eco-wienie willing to hijack a worthy cause, be it native fish or grizzlies to further advance what they are really protesting against. Grow a spine and be up front about it!

[osprey]

And yes I'm a prick for givin' poor old winnie a hard time but I highly dislike a doubly anonymous eco-wienie willing to hijack a worthy cause, be it native fish or grizzlies to further advance what they are really protesting against. Grow a spine and be up front about it!

Hmmm... maybe I'm missing something here, but I feel that Winston's campaign against logging practices that screw up trout streams was pretty obvious. What is this shadowy cause that you think is really behind his protest? Does it involve the Masons?