Everyone seems to want to sell me a narrative lately, even those I might agree with in principle if the narrative itself weren’t padded with bullshit. The alignment is often there. The framing is not.

What bothers me isn’t disagreement. It’s precision masquerading as truth.

In The Theory of Error, Yardley Beers pointed out that wherever there is precision, there is also error. Measurement does not eliminate uncertainty; it redistributes it. Treating precision as truth, and error as noise to be ignored, is how systems convince themselves they are congruent when they are not. And when a system is not congruent, it cannot be coherent.

Translated into everyday language, the problem becomes easier to see.

What we call “bullshit” is rarely pure falsehood. More often, it is error treated as signal. Or, just as often, it is signal buried under narrative noise until intent becomes indistinguishable from distortion.

From that perspective, the ratio matters more than the claim itself. How much signal is present, and how much noise is being smuggled in to stabilize the story?

I don’t want to buy a story wholesale, bullshit and all. I don’t buy stories when the stakes are real. I don’t trade parts of who I am for membership in a group.

Believing that someone should not have been shot does not require me to deny that their actions may have worsened the situation rather than improved it. Holding both truths at once is not inconsistency. It is a refusal to collapse reality into something easier to sell. The obvious question, then, is: who is that sale meant for?

Once you start asking that question, the pattern becomes difficult to ignore.

Being told that Venezuela was shipping fentanyl into the United States was a stretch at best; the numbers cited did not withstand even minimal scrutiny. Being told that a de facto military action and blockade would somehow improve the lives of Venezuelans also fails scrutiny. Being told that oil companies would eagerly invest in a country whose stability visibly decreased after that action has collided with reality, as oil executives behaved pragmatically. Why would they invest in a nation that has suffered under sanctions to the point where migration became the most rational path out for many?

Being told that a sitting senator should be punished for reinforcing what every veteran is supposed to understand about unlawful orders was already questionable. Doubling down by re-activating military service as a petty punitive gesture crosses from incoherence into something closer to spite.

And this style of communication has become so pervasive that “bullshit” itself has entered political speech. We now have politicians and governors using profanity as emphasis, as though intensity could substitute for alignment.

Incongruent narratives written for audiences with attention spans measured in seconds inevitably collapse into sound bites, micro-frames that may hold briefly on their own, but contradict the larger frame they are meant to support.

That is not persuasion.
It is noise management.
It is the normalization of bullshit.

Bullshit should not be normalized.

The blockade has become normalized.
The deluges of ICE agents sent to boost a dubious metric of deportations are dangerous, and that danger is in the process of being normalized. The use of implicit and explicit threats against other nations, even long-standing allies, is also being treated as acceptable.

I sincerely hope you, gentle reader, do not allow such normalization to continue in your mind.