[scatterhead]

> if Obama and Pinker are bullshitters, I'm not sure the label has much meaning

They aren't. Nathan J. Robinson (author of this article) is. Here's the full quote from the Obama speech.

> I face this challenge with profound humility and knowledge of my own limitations, but I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

You can read this charitably (a passionate person who's excited about the collective project being embarked upon) or uncharitably (not very humble to connect your own presidency to the salvation of humanity). But it's total bullshit to read that as:

> a man who manipulated people’s emotions with stirring messianic rhetoric about how his election would mean the oceans would stop rising and change would come to the land, then delivered eight years of milquetoast centrism

If this is manipulating people, then literally every politician (not to mention every football coach) to ever have existed has manipulated people, and the core argument of the article shrinks to nothingness.

Also, it's a plain lie. Obama never said he would solve these problems -- much the opposite, he conditioned the solutions on the people being willing to work for it.

Funnily enough, if anything this irony bolsters the author's point that bullshit can be found anywhere. Even articles about bullshitters are themselves full of bullshit.

This article is almost The Onion worthy.

[acdha]

> Obama never said he would solve these problems -- much the opposite, he conditioned the solutions on the people being willing to work for it.

That really soured me on the author’s credibility — there’s no mention of opposition, and no matter what party you’re in you should agree that 6 of the 8 years he was in office were intensely adversarial.

[wanderingstan]

Thanks for that deep dive. I too thought the article fell apart at that point.

For a minute I wondered if the piece was about to become self-referential; gradually slipping into complete bullshit in order to illustrate how it’s done. (Much like the film “Adaptation” changed toward the end as the protagonist changed his writing.)

Alas, it was just sloppy thinking and poor writing.