Jump to content
Objectivism Online Forum

Reblogged:Fox Discovers 'Addition by Subtraction'

Rate this topic


Recommended Posts

I have little use for cable news and less for Tucker Carlson. I never paid him much attention and am no fan, to say the least: Carlson typifies the loud-mouthed, brain-dead populism that has taken over the right -- and at a time that would otherwise be ripe for a better alternative to the left.

(Lots of people these days seem to think being a jerk and taking a stand mean the same thing. That is one of many symptoms of a general loss of the ability to think in terms of principles in our culture, combined with our society's fading memories of its origins in a group of principled men standing up to a tyrant and defeating him. Yes: America needs leaders with backbones -- but unless those leaders are thinking men, what would be the point?)

News of Carlson's sudden firing from Fox is all over the place, but nobody seems to know exactly why the popular (!) commentator was fired. Sexual harassment and other legally problematic behavior? Too much "prayer-talk" for Rupert Murdoch's tastes? Given that very public displays of religious piety are common covers for moral depravity, I would be far from shocked if both were true, and neither were why he was fired.

Who knows? And, given that the firing wasn't for spinning conspiracy theories or such dross as praising the central planning of Elizabeth Warren as an improved version of Donald Trump's, I don't much care why Fox chose to fire him now.

As Yaron Brook puts it in the clip embedded below, good riddance -- at least for now.

Carlson will return, one way or another, but I hope this proves to be a substantial setback for his career and influence.

So, yes. My tiltle is a joke. If Fox were an institution with any integrity, it wouldn't have needed to fire Tucker Carlson so dramaiically and expensively: He would have been gone long ago.

-- CAV

Link to Original

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 hours ago, Gus Van Horn blog said:

spinning conspiracy theories

People everywhere are coming to see that smear as nothing more than an evasion aid for information that upsets one's worldview, information the implications of which one is not comfortable facing.

For example, "covid hospitalizations" and "covid deaths" overcounting has been an easily confirmable fact since the beginning of the Scamdemic. But normie simpletons refused to look at the information and relied instead on their favorite smear.

The truth is that very few people, including self-identifying Objectivists, are willing to think for themselves. Too often people will reject objective evidence they don't like with smears of the messenger and wait until "respectable outlets" (or Mr. Brook) tell them what to think.

 

Edited by Jon Letendre
Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 minutes ago, Jon Letendre said:

The truth is that very few people, including self-identifying Objectivists, are willing to think for themselves.

This bears repeating.

22 minutes ago, Jon Letendre said:

The truth is that very few people, including self-identifying Objectivists, are willing to think for themselves.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

RFK Jr:
Fox fires @TuckerCarlson five days after he crosses the red line by acknowledging that the TV networks pushed a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their Pharma advertisers. Carlson’s breathtakingly courageous April 19 monologue broke TV’s two biggest rules: Tucker told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content and he lambasted obsequious newscasters for promoting jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless. For many years, Tucker has had the nation's biggest audience averaging 3.5 million — 10 times the size of CNN. Fox just demonstrated the terrifying power of Big Pharma.
 
 
Edited by Jon Letendre
Link to comment
Share on other sites

It’s not about Left versus Right anymore.  The remnants of a Principled Democracy leaning to and fro are on the brink and all people who on either principled sides of the isle are threatened.

We now have principles as such versus corruption, Republican Democracy versus Tyrannical Oligarchy.

I dare say Trump should choose a Democrat as his running mate… but one who is principled and still fights for humanity and the ideals of the west.

But perhaps this task is not for Trump and maybe it is decades away… all those principled dems and reps need to abandon the legacy parties …. there is a vast common middle ground and common values most Americans would rally behind… the new principled peoples party would directly reclaim freedom from those powers who aspire to reincarnate themselves as King George…. we need a new set of founding fathers and yes mothers…

and one day perhaps we’ll see America slowly becoming more free rather than less.

Edited by StrictlyLogical
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

all those principled dems and reps need to abandon the legacy parties …. there is a vast common middle ground and common values most Americans would rally behind

Most of these people still buy the altruist morality.  Most of them do not understand what government is.  

This makes them ineffective as defenders of rights or of freedom.

6 hours ago, StrictlyLogical said:

and one day perhaps we’ll see America slowly becoming more free rather than less

Only when enough people learn what Ayn Rand has to teach.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

"covid hospitalizations" and "covid deaths" overcounting has been an easily confirmable fact since the beginning

My understanding is that health care workers are trying to distinguish between deaths from covid-19 and deaths with covid-19, but that this is a complicated task.

The Washington Post article you link says there is no conspiracy.

14 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless

If this is true, why are the unvaccinated more likely to die than the vaccinated?

23 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Scamdemic

The pandemic has killed a lot of people.  It is no more a scam than the idea that Naziism was a threat in World War II.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Doug you seem unwilling to contemplate that our overlords intentionally overstated covid deaths as has been obvious to many of us from the start. I can't help you with that.

Lethal and worthless are RFK Jr's words, not mine. Suffice to say I understand that you still trust the establishment media (who rely upon big pharma advertising and are controlling-interest owned by the same very small group of Wall Street elites who control big pharma*.) You still blindly trust them about this and about so much more and you can cite their many insistences that the unvacc'ed are dying more and I can cite others saying it's not so ( https://brownstone.org is doing a good job.)

Forgive me if I don't engage you further in "debate." I've seen how you operate over many years. You play games and make no attempt at genuine engagement with what the other side presents. Arguing with normie simpletons is like trying to play chess with a pigeon, it won't work because he's just going to knock over all the pieces and strut around like he won.

 

*Both Fox and Pfizer are well over 50% owned by a small clique of Wall Street institutions.

Just Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street together own at least a third of FOX and a quarter of PFE.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/FOXA/holders

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PFE/holders

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

39 minutes ago, Jon Letendre said:

you can cite their many insistences that the unvacc'ed are dying more and I can cite others saying it's not so

The source you link claims it's not so but offers no grounds for that claim.

There were mistakes made early on because it was a new virus and very little was known about it.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Doug Morris said:

The source you link claims it's not so but offers no grounds for that claim.

There were mistakes made early on because it was a new virus and very little was known about it.

 

And yet they were able to create a vaccine for it , little wonky if it’s new and not well known. Miscounting is easily explained by that logic, but how is that consistent with being able to reproduce genetic sequences of the virus and engineer a delivery system that was proven before use to be safe and effective, with such low levels of understanding of a new phenomenon?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

And yet they were able to create a vaccine for it , little wonky if it’s new and not well known. Miscounting is easily explained by that logic, but how is that consistent with being able to reproduce genetic sequences of the virus and engineer a delivery system that was proven before use to be safe and effective, with such low levels of understanding of a new phenomenon?

The vaccine and the genetic sequences came later when they'd had more time to study the virus.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, Doug Morris said:

The source you link claims it's not so but offers no grounds for that claim.

There were mistakes made early on because it was a new virus and very little was known about it.

 

QAnoners enjoy grand narratives. 

But the fact is, Tucker being fired is most easily explained by how Murdoch and his son really didn't like Tucker, and wasn't worth dealing with due to the recent lawsuit against Fox. "5 days later" doesn't ring any alarm bells, you could grab anything he's spoken about in the past 6 months and attribute it to that. 

If there was a Big Pharma conspiracy here, I don't think it would be 5 days later, it would be the next day or 2. And it would have been done months ago based on so many other things he has said.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

How do we know as fact that the Murdochs didn’t ‘like’ Tucker? Are there statements about his personality they made that point to their displeasure with dealing with him? 
Or statements that show their displeasure with him as an employee? Tucker had at least in the recent past the most viewed product in their ‘lineup’, though it seems they couldn’t garner the ad revenue based on size of ratings they would probably have preferred. Ie, though relatively larger audiences consumed the content advertisers were pressured to not buy commercials during Tucker’s show because they would then be seen as endorsing Tucker’s content, AOC made public statements to the effect that there is/was coordinated ‘behind’ the scenes campaigns to discourage advertisers and that ‘they work’.

I think the Murdochs etal., loves them some grand narratives and don’t ‘like’ those that oppose themthar narratives, less Q and less Anon.

In the US pharma uses direct to consumer advertising for sales promotion, their ad revenue is one of the largest segments of cable broadcasting schema. Companies that rely on that segment of revenue would be foolish to bite the hand that feeds them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

How do we know as fact that the Murdochs didn’t ‘like’ Tucker? Are there statements about his personality they made that point to their displeasure with dealing with him? 

I mean, I've read different articles that talk about how it was reported that the Murdochs in particular didn't like him as a person and didn't like him as an employee. I'm saying there is at least some evidence to think that they no longer believed Tucker to be an asset. 

2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

AOC made public statements to the effect that there is/was coordinated ‘behind’ the scenes campaigns to discourage advertisers and that ‘they work’.

You are good at making vague sentences like this that leaves the room open for conspiratorial ideas. ("The System is actively trying to squash me"). Yeah, in market systems, companies and individuals coordinate to impact the market, including discouraging advertisers. Nothing nefarious. 

2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Companies that rely on that segment of revenue would be foolish to bite the hand that feeds them.

Then Fox would have fired him a long time ago. The only really new thing added to the mix was the lawsuit settlement.  

2 hours ago, tadmjones said:

I think the Murdochs etal., loves them some grand narratives and don’t ‘like’ those that oppose themthar narratives, less Q and less Anon.

Sure, I agree, I should say that the QAnon narratives are far grander than any of the narratives I've seen on Fox.

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

 

5 hours ago, tadmjones said:

In the US pharma uses direct to consumer advertising for sales promotion, their ad revenue is one of the largest segments of cable broadcasting schema. Companies that rely on that segment of revenue would be foolish to bite the hand that feeds them.

You and your grand narratives.

Nevermind the Wall Street institutions that own 80% of Fox and similar of big pharma.

The family that owns under 20% of the company just didn't like Tucker anymore. The "fact is" that's the "easiest explanation."

lol 

Edited by Jon Letendre
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Companies that rely on that segment of revenue would be foolish to bite the hand that feeds them.

Note also that Fox is only worth about $17 billion, market capitalization.

Pfizer alone is worth about $220 billion.

The small clique of Wall Street institutions that own 80% and 70% of those two companies would view even the total destruction of Fox as a very net positive business decision if it ended mainstream media criticism of their pharma companies which together are worth orders of magnitude more than Fox is worth.

We are expected to believe in the classical economic paradigm that companies always promote their own interests and behave according to market principles. But that paradigm obviously breaks down when all of them are vast-majority owned by the same institutional owners. Under this condition rational self interest will lead those owners to see past the atomic interests of individual companies and to press for those outcomes which promote their best net interest.

I am not prepared to say that RFK Jr's thesis is the only or even best explanation for Tucker's firing, just that its plausibility is well grounded in facts, no matter what the clingers to braindead mainstream narratives say.

 

RFK Jr, April 24, 2023:
Fox fires @TuckerCarlson five days after he crosses the red line by acknowledging that the TV networks pushed a deadly and ineffective vaccine to please their Pharma advertisers. Carlson’s breathtakingly courageous April 19 monologue broke TV’s two biggest rules: Tucker told the truth about how greedy Pharma advertisers controlled TV news content and he lambasted obsequious newscasters for promoting jabs they knew to be lethal and worthless. For many years, Tucker has had the nation's biggest audience averaging 3.5 million — 10 times the size of CNN. Fox just demonstrated the terrifying power of Big Pharma.
Edited by Jon Letendre
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

The family that owns under 20% of the company just didn't like Tucker anymore. The "fact is" that's the "easiest explanation."

That's not the singular reason I gave. It was part of the reason. There were already other issues about Tucker, legal issues, and all that works pretty well for explaining things. By the way, the Murdochs own more of the company than anyone else. You can't lump everything else together as if they are a single entity with specific values. And big pharma doesn't own anything. 

3 hours ago, tadmjones said:

AOC said pressuring advertisers will suppress political opinions she does not agree with, “it works”.

Yeah, very vague statement here, nothing to agree or disagree with. People pressure other people to do different things. That's how markets work. 

2 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

I am not prepared to say that RFK Jr's thesis is the only or even best explanation for Tucker's firing, just that its plausibility is well grounded in facts, no matter what the clingers to braindead mainstream narratives say.

I'm saying it's a terrible explanation, the timing is wrong. 

Edited by Eiuol
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...