Fox News revelations in election fraud lawsuit

[CivilDiscourse]

What I was kinda thinking was that if you got progressives together and got a wishlist they agreed upon between them as a sort of consensus, you'd get something like New Zealand. That doesn't mean any given one of them would get everything they happened to personally want or personally think was optimal.

Wow... that's quite a novel view.

I don't think in my entire life, doing a philosophy degree and reading ethical philosophers throughout history, studying theology in my spare time, debating people about morality on the internet (including a couple of dozen, 100-page threads with seer), watching US progressive commentators daily for more than a decade... have I ever heard anyone suggest morality worked that way. It seems an order of magnitude more cynical than even the guy in Plato's Republic that argues that might makes right.

Is that how conservative morality works in the US? I had wondered, cos I've never really been able to figure it out, it always just seems immoral. But, now I think about it, the 'morality' you describe could explain a lot of Tucker Carlson content.

Not all morality. Just like not every car is a positional good. Another way to put it is that Political Correctness is more about VIRTUE SIGNALING than it is about actual virtue.

Source: https://iea.org.uk/blog/the-economics-of-political-correctness

Over the past few years, spiked online magazine has consistently and robustly defended the principle of free speech against the censorship demands of the politically correct, whatever quarter they may come from. It is great, of course, that there is at least one magazine in which the phrase ‘I believe in free speech’ is unlikely to be followed by a ‘but…’, and more likely to be followed by an ‘even for…’. But while I fully support the spiked line, I also think the spiked authors sometimes misinterpret the intentions of the ‘PC brigade’, and would like to offer an alternative interpretation rooted in boring, old-fashioned textbook economics.

Spiked authors believe that PC is driven by a loathing for ordinary people. According to spiked, PC brigadiers view ordinary folks as extremely impressionable, easily excitable, and full of latent resentment. Exposure to the wrong opinions, even isolated words, could immediately awaken the lynch mob. PC, then, is about protecting ‘the vulnerable’ from the nasty tendencies of the majority population.

But if PC was not really about protecting anyone, and really all about expressing one’s own moral superiority, PC credentials would be akin to what economists call a ‘positional good’.

A positional good is a good that people acquire to signalise where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them.

Positionality is not a property of the good itself, it is a matter of the consumer’s motivations. I may buy an exquisite variety of wine because I genuinely enjoy the taste, or acquire a degree from a reputable university because I genuinely appreciate what that university has to offer. But my motivation could also be to set myself apart from others, to present myself as more sophisticated or smarter. From merely observing that I consume the product, you could not tell my motivation. But you could tell it by observing how I respond once other people start drinking the same wine, or attending the same university.

If I value those goods for their intrinsic qualities, their increasing popularity will not trouble me at all. After all, the enjoyment derived from wine or learning is not fixed, so your enjoyment does not subtract from my enjoyment. I may even invite others to join me – we can all have more of it.

But if you see me moaning that the winemakers/the university have ‘sold out’, if you see me whinging about those ignoramuses who do not deserve the product because they (unlike me, of course) do not really appreciate it, you can safely conclude that for me, this good is a positional good. (Or was, before everybody else discovered it.) We can all become more sophisticated wine consumers, and we can all become better educated. But we can never all be above the national average, or in the top group, in terms of wine-connoisseurship, education, income, or anything else. We can all improve in absolute terms, but we cannot all simultaneously improve in relative terms. And that is what positional goods are all about – signalising a high position in a ranking, that is, a relation to others. This leads to a problem. Positional goods are used to signalise something that is by definition scarce, and yet the product which does the signalling is not scarce, or at least not inherently. You can increase the number of goods which signal a position in the Top 20 (of whatever), but the number of places in that Top 20 will only ever be, er, twenty. Increasing the number of signalling products will simply destroy their signalling function. Which is why the early owners of such a signalling product can get really mad at you if you acquire one too.

We have all seen this phenomenon. Those of my age (1980 vintage) have probably witnessed it for the first time in their early teens, when an increasing number of their schoolmates tried to look like Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, and being a fan of that band lost its ‘edginess’. ‘Being alternative’ is a positional good. We cannot all be alternative [1]. Literally not.

Now remember how the ‘early adopters’ responded when Nirvana fandom went mainstream, and their social status was threatened, because there are clear parallels with PC: some of them went on to more extreme styles; others tried to repair the broken signal by giving endless sermons about the differences between ‘those who are in the know’ and ‘the poseurs’.

PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.

You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs (here’s a nice example). You can also hugely inflate the definition of an existing offense (plenty of nice examples here.) Or you can move on to discover new things to label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and oppression.

If I am right, then Political Correctness is really just a special form of conspicuous consumption, leading to a zero-sum status race. The fact that PC fans are still constantly outraged, despite the fact that PC has never been so pervasive, would then just be a special form of the Easterlin Paradox.

Keep up the good work, spiked team. But bear in mind that you are up against a powerful economic force.

© Copyright Original Source

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

The Satanic stuff comes from the Finders who had pictures of child playing with disemboweled pregnant goats and playing with the goat foetus (fact).

Goodness me! The cuckoos are calling early this year!

[Starlight]

Another way to put it is that Political Correctness is more about VIRTUE SIGNALING than it is about actual virtue.

I would agree for a small subset of 'political correctness' but that term can cover a lot of things.

Perhaps an example that fits, is after the Biden administration noted that the science says gas stoves can be harmful but decided not to do anything about it, and in Florida, the state with the least current gas stoves, DeSantis decided to actively promote the use of gas stoves in response. Bringing harm via higher gas stove usage is clearly not about actual virtue, so clearly what the policy signals is DeSantis' will to oppose libs and hence solidifies his conservative bona fides. More properly perhaps, it's vice signaling, as he's actively propagating something he knows is harmful in order to signal group membership. A similar case could be made with his book bans, where content is being banned on political grounds rather than it actually being harmful, and the act of banning it thus serves to signal conservative bona fides not actually achieve anything of value.

Historically, most liberal political correctness was about not being rude to minorities. I do think that's generally won out and that we don't even tend to talk about political correctness in this sense anymore. It's just seen as socially beyond unacceptable to go around regularly calling black people the n-word, or jewish people the k-word, etc etc. So the political correctness battles of the 80s and 90s have dropped away as everyone accepted the liberals view that it was indeed rude to constantly insult minorities.

In terms of the segment you quote, I don't really see any reason to agree with the writer. They don't give any specific examples I could look at and analyze, and they don't give any evidence for their generalizations. Their opinion seems wrong to me at face value.

[Starlight]

CD, I had a think about that a bit more.

In economics, a positional good (e.g. a flash expensive car) indicates status because it's something that people of a different status can't attain (e.g. they are too poor). There are thus inherent limits on things that can and can't ever be positional goods (something everyone has, or can easily have, can never be a positional good).

But in philosophy, views are free. Anyone can have any view. No view therefore can ever be a positional good. Were there to ever be some view that was commonly held by some elite segment (e.g. rich people), and became used to signal membership of that elite group, anyone not in that group could simply say they held that position, completely undermining such usage. For this reason, no philosophical view can ever be a positional good.

[CivilDiscourse]

CD, I had a think about that a bit more.

In economics, a positional good (e.g. a flash expensive car) indicates status because it's something that people of a different status can't attain (e.g. they are too poor). There are thus inherent limits on things that can and can't ever be positional goods (something everyone has, or can easily have, can never be a positional good).

But in philosophy, views are free. Anyone can have any view. No view therefore can ever be a positional good. Were there to ever be some view that was commonly held by some elite segment (e.g. rich people), and became used to signal membership of that elite group, anyone not in that group could simply say they held that position, completely undermining such usage. For this reason, no philosophical view can ever be a positional good.

In a narrow sense. Though, you could just as easily pedantically argue that "morals are not a good that can be bought or sold, so by definition, they cannot be a positional good" At the same time, the point of a positional good is to use it to set yourself apart from the masses. I.E. You are "Better" because you <X> and the rest of the world does not. It becomes positional when the rest of the world appreciates "<X>", and you are now disgusted by that instead of when you were one of the select few that did.

What was done and is talked about is applying the economic theory outside of economics to explain certain behaviors. In other words....It falls into the study of economic psychology. It's the reason why FOMO (fear of missing out) applies to a sale, as well as deciding to go to a particular party, or watch specific "event" television.

[Starlight]

This idea also seems to have no predictive power about what views such people would hold. Let us say someone desires to see themselves as 'better' than the general masses. What are they going to choose to believe to differentiate themselves? It would seem they could pick literally anything at random that is commonly believed. e.g. the masses believe the sky is blue, so they are then going to believe the sky is green. Or the masses believe handshakes are a positive way of greeting others, therefore they choose to believe handshakes are evil. etc there are infinite possibilities, and this idea of wanting to be different for the sake of it has zero predictive power about which beliefs such people would come to hold.

Contrast that to the view where PC concerns are focused on protecting vulnerable minority populations and not inflaming majorities against them. That actually makes predictions about what views PC-concerned people would come to hold.

Making no predictions, combined with the earlier-post-mentioned problem that this theory is inherently flawed because anyone can hold any view and so there's no barrier to entry for moral views unlike actual economic goods, means this view appears to me to have absolutely nothing to commend it.

[oxmixmudd]

...

The issue is, honestly, positional good morality/ethics. So much of it isn't about being in a specific state, it's about being morally superior. If everyone were as moral as you, you are no longer superior, so now you have to come up with NEW outrages in order to show that you are superior to the rest of the people.

That strikes me as being a very cynical and derogatory characterization of what more likely is just people with high moral ideals trying to make a difference in the world.

[Starlight]

The ongoing Fox news lawsuit has revealed this private text from Tucker Carlson about Donald Trump:

"I hate him passionately"

Hillary Clinton was lambasted for having 'public positions' and 'private positions'. It seems Tucker Carlson, who in private hates Trump passionately and described him elsewhere as "demonic", has quite different public and private positions on Trump.

[Ronson]

The ongoing Fox news lawsuit has revealed this private text from Tucker Carlson about Donald Trump:

"I hate him passionately"

Hillary Clinton was lambasted for having 'public positions' and 'private positions'. It seems Tucker Carlson, who in private hates Trump passionately and described him elsewhere as "demonic", has quite different public and private positions on Trump.

What was the full context of that Carlson quote?

[Ronson]

What was the full context of that Carlson quote?

Never mind, I found it. It sounded more like he was sick of having to report on Trump all the time. But in other texts, he basically says he didn't think much of him and he wasn't a great president, although he said otherwise on Fox.

Lies? Yes, That's the state of news today. And especially TV news.

[NorrinRadd]

Honestly, I don't know that I've ever heard Tucker directly express an opinion about Trump on air. He has certainly defended him against lies and persecution, and has featured many guests who are very pro-Trump, but I never noticed him directly praising Trump -- certainly not as overtly as Hannity, Ingraham, or Judge Jeannine.

The closest thing to an exception that comes quickly to mind are the pictures of Tucker obviously cackling uproariously while hanging out with the Hated Destroyer.

[Starlight]

Just consolidating this here from another thread.

Note the last line:

In another text, Carlson said of “the last four years” under Trump, “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

Holy guacamole batman!

Did you pick up this?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/20...apitol-footage

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson told an associate he “hated” Donald Trump “passionately”, new filings in a $1.6bn defamation suit against Fox News by Dominion Voter Systems revealed.

Even as the filings were reported on Tuesday, Carlson continued to broadcast January 6 security footage in his attempt to cast the deadly attack on Congress as “peaceful chaos” arising from a protest of Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson said in a text on 4 January 2021, two days before the riot. “I truly can’t wait.”

He also wrote: “I hate him passionately … What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong.”

Many observers think the Dominion suit, over the broadcast of lies about electoral fraud by Trump and his allies, could prove seriously costly to Fox News.

Hosts and executives up to and including Rupert Murdoch have been shown to have said Trump was lying, and to have ridiculed surrogates including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell but to have broadcast their claims regardless.

In one message newly revealed on Tuesday, the host Laura Ingraham called Powell a “complete nut” and said “no one will work with her. Ditto with Rudy.”

In a statement, Fox News said Dominion was “using further distortion and misinformation in its PR campaign to smear Fox News and trample on freedom of speech and freedom of the press”.

Carlson is Fox News’ premier primetime host. Last month, over protests from Democrats and Fox News’ rivals, the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, chose to give Carlson more than 40,000 hours of security footage from the Capitol on January 6.

After Carlson’s first broadcast on Monday, Democrats, Senate Republicans, the chief of Capitol police and the family of an officer who died the day after the riot were among those to condemn him.

The police chief, Tom Manger, said in an internal memo Carlson’s broadcast was “filled with offensive and misleading conclusions”, “conveniently cherry-picked from the calmer moments of our 41,000 hours of video” and “fail[ed] to provide context about the chaos and violence … before or during these less tense moments”.

Manger also said Carlson’s staff did not reach out to “provide accurate context”.

The family of Brian Sicknick, who was 42 when he suffered two strokes and died a day after battling rioters and being sprayed with chemicals, decried “the ongoing attack on our family by the unscrupulous and outright sleazy so-called news network”.

Nine deaths have been linked to the Capitol attack, including law enforcement suicides. More than 1,000 people have been charged and hundreds convicted of offences including seditious conspiracy.

Trump escaped conviction in an impeachment trial and has not been criminally charged. A House committee made four referrals to the Department of Justice.

On air on Tuesday, Carlson claimed Democrats had shown “hysteria, overstatement, crazed hyperbole, red-in-the-face anger” over his use of the January 6 footage. It was “not outrage”, he said, but “fear. It’s panic.”

He then focused on Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker of the House, saying footage would show the January 6 security failure was her fault.

The media continued to pore over the filings in the Dominion suit.

In another text, Carlson said of “the last four years” under Trump, “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”

[Starlight]

Lies? Yes, That's the state of news today. And especially TV news.

The real country club rich-man Tucker who goes to cocktail parties with the elites, is just not the same as the character he plays on his TV show where he pretends to be an every-man conspiracy-theorist to trick his audience.

[Starlight]

The real country club rich-man Tucker who goes to cocktail parties with the elites, is just not the same as the character he plays on his TV show where he pretends to be an every-man conspiracy-theorist to trick his audience.

Here's an old clip of Tucker talking about how Bill O'Reilly plays a character on TV but isn't really that person..

Interviewer: Another quote from your book, "Bill O'Reilly's success is built on the perception that he really is who he claims to be. If he ever gets caught out of character, it's over."

Tucker: That's right. I say before that, that Bill O'Reilly's really talented, he's more talented than I am. He's got a lot more viewers than I do. He's a better communicator than I am.

But I think there's kind of a deep phoniness at the center of his shtick.

And, again, as I say, the shtick is sort of built on this perception that he is the character he plays: He is "everyman"; he's not "right-wing", he's a "populist", this kind of "Irish-Catholic populist"; fighting for "you" against the powers that be. And that's great as a shtick.

But I'm just saying, the moment it's revealed not to be true, it's over. Y'know, the moment he gets caught y'know slapping a flight attendant on the concord for not bringing his champagne fast enough, or barking at one of his subordinates to "take the brown M&Ms out of my bowl, and get me a bottle of Evion!" or something like that, the second that makes page 6: It's over. Right?

Because the whole thing is predicated on the fact that he is who he says he is. Nobody is that person. Especially someone who makes many millions a year.

The progressive host in the clip above goes on to plausibly speculate that Tucker's opinion was subsequently changed when Bill O'Reilly had a two decade career without being exposed as a phony, and Rush Limbaugh retained his audience despite his oxycontin addition being revealed when he had railed against people who took drugs. Today Tucker Carlson has Bill O'Reilly's old spot, and is doing the same "everyman" shtick.

[Starlight]

But in other texts, he basically says he didn't think much of him and he wasn't a great president, although he said otherwise on Fox.

Maybe it should be a new game-show category: "Who said these nasty things about Trump? (a) Tucker Carlson, (b) Rachael Maddow". Might be quite hard to guess the correct answer!