I haven't seen any BS episodes. I looked for some reviews on this series and found this one on Amazon. Does anyone here agree with this review?
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"Penn and Teller's Bullshi*t is a much-needed voice of reason in the midst of the alarmist, emotionally charged know-nothings they spend their time debunking in this DVD series. What's included here is a 3-disc set that contains the entire first season (10 episodes) as well as some bonus features, most notably a bonus episode (about ghosts).
Initially, I caught Bullshi*t on Showtime and fell instantly in love with it. At last, here was a series dedicated to crushing the myths that draw in millions of non-thinking individuals. There was something almost vindicating about seeing them body-slam sensationalist after sensationalist with their rhetoric, even providing thinking America with some ammunition to battle our more, well...emotion-driven friends. I had only seen three or four installments on Showtime before buying the DVD and eagerly gobbling up all ten episodes.
Now that I've had some time with the series and have seen all the shows multiple times, something interesting has happened. The last episode I watched really got to me - an episode on second-hand smoke. For once, I thoroughly disagreed with Penn and Teller. The idiots that I normally found myself scoffing at - well, this time it was the hosts of the show. What I saw in that episode was Penn and Teller from the other side of the river. I saw them taking a very specific facet of an argument, thus pushing reams of data aside, and exploit it using arguments from the constitution applied to illogical extremes. Right away it started on a very shaky foot when they staged a scene of themselves in a restaurant with a noisy musician nearby, annoying them. "You're annoying us - let's legislate against you," they began, implying that second-hand smoke was on the same level of loud music, nothing more than an annoyance.
The most important thing to note about this argument is that there *is* legislation against loud music. It's called disturbing the peace. So apparently "annoying" habits are regularly legislated against, including the one they were trying to portray as absurd as an analogy.
Their main thread in this argument was that since there was no direct data that linked second-hand smoke to illness, second-hand smoke is therefore okay to have around. Their sub-point is that the EPA exaggerated some data in a report they issued in the 90s, and this exaggeration has been used to fuel the legislation against smoking in public. Therefore, they seem to imply that because of the bogus data, the legislation against second-hand smoke is also bogus.
To me, neither of these arguments hold any water. There is a very simple point to be made regarding second-hand smoke - we know smoking causes death and illness. The same chemicals that cause these illnesses are present in second-hand smoke. Therefore, whether or not we can prove that occasional second-hand smoke causes cancer, we do know that it contains very harmful compounds. The only difference between a non-smoker and smoker, then, is the amount of this smoke they are inhaling. Just because it's not proven that a smaller amount of smoke will cause me to die doesn't mean it's perfectly okay for it to be floating around in the air for me to breathe. If I sprayed arsenic and carbon monoxide into someone's face, they would arrest me. If I blow it into someone's face after inhaling it from a cigarette, it's legal in most areas. This is completely illogical to me. Speaking to their second point, just because the data may have been exaggerated, it doesn't mean that it's not fundamentally true.
Anyway, this exposed some of the techniques that Penn and Teller use, and I started looking for them in other episodes, even those episodes with which I wholeheartedly agreed (in other words, all of them). I found something pretty standard in all their arguments. For their opponent, they usually find the absolute most extreme camp they can find, a camp that probably represents 10% of the other side of the argument, and they use that as the face of the enemy. For example, in their episode on eating and feeding the world, whom did they choose as the antagonist? Greenpeace and a group of hippie-freakshows who only eat raw foods. Of course we're going to disagree with these idiots, therefore agreeing with Penn and Teller. We leave the show thinking that any and all genetically-altered foods should be dumped into the 3rd World, bar none.
What they don't show you are the extremely intelligent, forward thinking scientists who recognize the *legitimate* problems with this. Most notably, while genetic engineering may have saved a billion lives it has also done something else very obvious - drastically increased the population. Therefore, deaths related to overpopulation not associated with starvation - like aids, leprosy, and other illnesses - have drastically increased, inverse to the decrease in deaths from starvation, even exceeding it in some areas. So in trying to do good, we could, in the end, be killing more people. I'm not saying I totally agree with this point of view, just that it is a legitimate facet of the argument that isn't so easily dismissed with a wave of the hand like the ignorance of the losers that Penn and Teller put on camera. So be aware as you watch, that there are almost always more viable arguments against their points that they are not showing you. By consistently choosing only the far spectrum of their opponents, they safely avoid putting an intelligent adversary - which would probably fall somewhere in between Bullsh*t's POV and the extremist they've chosen - into the equation.
This doesn't mean I won't continue to watch regularly and cheer P&T on, or show these episodes to my more gullible friends who may be environmentalists or alternative medicine subscribers. Just understand that more often than not, there is a wide gap between what Penn and Teller are advocating and whom they choose to portray on their show, and in that gap lies a full spectrum of arguments for you to explore."
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