Reflexive control is defined as:
Reflexive control is a “uniquely Russian” concept based on maskirovka, an old Soviet notion in which one “conveys to an opponent specifically prepared information to incline him/her to voluntarily make the predetermined decision desired by the initiator of the action”.[ii] That is, reflexive control is a sustained campaign that feeds an opponent select information so that the opponent makes the decisions that one wants him/her to. Methods of reflexive control include spreading false information, leaking partial information at opportune moments, and projecting a different posture of oneself than what may actually be the case.[iii] The goal of reflexive control is to ‘control’ the ‘reflex’ of the opponent by creating a certain model of behavior in the system it seeks to control.[iv] The most fundamental way to do this is to locate the weak link in the system and exploit it through moral arguments, psychological tactics, or appeals to specific leaders’ character.[v]
Tucker Carlson is now telling his audience to harass people who wear face masks outside.
If they see children wearing masks, Tucker says the response should be no different than when you see a kid being abused — "call the police immediately, contact child protective services" pic.twitter.com/4svVH0JY3s
— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 27, 2021
Unlike the Russians, Carlson isn’t trying to control his opponents. Rather, he’s trying to control his viewers. To see if he can actually get them to do what he’s telling them to do.
This is really, really dangerous. Listen to his tone of voice, and what he’s instructing. He’s moving from his viewers passively consuming his propaganda to having them act on it — against their neighbors. He’s testing his audience’s compliance. https://t.co/ZxqFMsboAW
— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) April 27, 2021
This is how authoritarian demagogues with political ambitions leverage platforms that disseminate information set the conditions for mass atrocities. The most recent examples are, of course, Radio Rwanda and the Myanmar ethnocide against the Rohingya.
This is incredibly dangerous. It is incredibly reckless. And it is likely to produce very, very, very bad results.
Open thread!
Ajabu
I’ve been trying this with my wife for three decades. It doesn’t work here. But of course, my wife isn’t a brain dead Republican. And, as Black folks we are considerably more concerned about the police than Cletus complaining about facemasks.
Moja??
laura
On who’s behalf does Tucker Carlson work? He’s stupid and yet he delivers a powerfully dangerous skull shit on the daily. Who is behind this wildly popular shite bag?
dmsilev
Is Carlson putting himself at any legal risk here? Most jurisdictions take a dim view of people deliberately making false 911 calls, and here he is telling his viewers to do so on a national broadcast.
Chris Johnson
“Unlike the Russians, Carlson”
Don’t be too quick to jump to conclusions, there. That guy is on my short list of ‘smart enough and connected enough to be a literal Russian agent’. Remember how Trump would always watch him for instructions.
Spanky
Any legal recourse against Tucker the Fucker?
Eta I see dms got there frist.
Mary G
Every time I think they can’t go any lower they prove me wrong. There will be cops called who believe this bullshit and will be only too glad to shoot down the parents if they are BIPOC.
PsiFighter37
I wonder if any of Tucker’s weird-ass turn to the extreme right is in response to Jon Stewart pantsing his bow-tied ass on live TV 17 years ago.
dfh
I spent years laughing at this stuff on Fox but now…not so funny. We’ve seen just how gullible that audience is, and how well-armed. Mix those characteristics with an overall lack of boundaries, and yes, it could spark very bad results.
Spanky
@Mary G: Wait until republican state legislatures make mask wearing illegal. Then watch the cops go to work.
Salty Sam
I look forward to a Fox viewer telling me my mask-wearing makes them uncomfortable. I have the perfect response ready:
FUCK YOUR FEELINGS!
Suzanne
Is there anywhere in the country I can go where there aren’t any Republicans? That sounds awesome.
Villago Delenda Est
Should Fucker Swanson be crushed by a 16 ton weight, I won’t be upset.
craigie
Can we assume that Tucker and Fox, if not the whole GQP, are now one giant Russian operation?
cain
@Suzanne:
it doesn’t seem that we can ever have a liberal paradise.
On the other hand, liberals are assholes too. :-)
Ajabu
@Suzanne:
USVI. If we have any Republicans there – I’m sure there’s a few – they know better than to tell anyone.
that reminds me. We need to go home!
Another Scott
@laura: I have the same questions. TVRev.com:
It’s hard to believe that they’re making money with him being there, but apparently they still are…
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
Can we give something to Tucker so he needs to do some reflexive bladder and colon control instead?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
“Masks strip people of their individual identities”
So when I had to go into an isolation room during a clinical with a face mask on was I “stripped of my individual identity”? Or when a patient in isolation had to go for tests outside of their room and had to wear a face mask, were they “stripped of their individual identity”?
This is so stupid on it’s face. Nobody in healthcare has any fucking problem wearing masks. It’s to prevent transmission of disease on both ends. Wearing masks in the community is no different
?BillinGlendaleCA
@PsiFighter37: No, this is the start of his 2024 Presidential run.
Cheryl Rofer
Brownshirt
guachi
One positive on not having cable – I don’t pay carriage fees to Fox News.
Ksmiami
Can’t we just get rid of the fox viewers in self defense? I mean if they’re going to try to break up families over mask wearing, isn’t the only recourse to fight back?
Nicole
@Another Scott:
FOX News doesn’t need advertisers. They get much, much more per subscriber from cable service providers than any other channel. They could lose like 90% of their advertisers and still be profitable.
NotMax
Tuck Evernasting.
craigie
@Another Scott:
They don’t make money from advertising. They make money – a lot of money – from cable fees.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m skeptical Tucker Carlson is ever going to run for president. And even if he did, he doesn’t have the charisma imo
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@craigie:
@Nicole:
The ongoing cord cutting has to be eating into that though
bluehill
Slippery slope is getting slipperier
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Lachlan Murdoch is a more dangerous man than his father
debbie
Don’t we deserve better demagogues?
Steve in the ATL
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: deets?
craigie
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Maybe this has already been posted here: https://unfoxmycablebox.com/
jl
He’d like how much of his audience to get charged for assault, stalking, harassment, and/or disturbing the peace?
Bobby Thomson
I guess I should carry bail money.
Gvg
Family Service agencies are all on short budgets and overworked. They don’t need this crap. They have real serious stuff to investigate and counseling and training and mediations to run, not to mention infinite court appearances etc. Tucker just has no idea. He is very very privileged and just a shitty human being. When I was a foster mom, I got a few calls for example of a kid who was burned by parents, another raised in a closet when no words because nobody talked to him, and others that I just wasn’t qualified or able to deal with. However I certainly remember and I feel rage at smug Tucker who doesn’t care. Masks aren’t child abuse.
Adam L Silverman
@laura: Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. Apparently, from the reporting, Lachlan is even more reactionary than Rupert.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Steve in the ATL: I’m assuming the growing nuttiness at Fox is at least in part due to his influence. I’ve read that he’s meaner and more racist than the old man
dopey-o
I will start wearing a mask with a little pocket for pepper spray. Quick and easy access. Perhaps a warning.
ETA: and another little pocket for bail money. Thanks, Bobby Thomson!
Redshift
@craigie: I signed up with that, and I’ve never heard anything. I don’t know if they only contact you when Fox is negotiating a renewal with your local cable or something, but it seems odd.
Kay
All of conservatism is a racket.
RaflW
Next, Tucker will suggest that while out ‘patrolling’ for mask-wearing, young people should wear distinctive clothing. Maybe brown shirts? Yeah, that’s the look.
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
Being a literal shit spreader will do that to a shirt
Also that may be why they wear brownshirts in the first place, so you won’t notice the shit as fast. They hope they can stun you with their stupidity before you notice the smell.
sdhays
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I wonder how much cord-cutting we need before Fox Noose starts to feel the squeeze. I expect they’d be letting up on the gas pedal if they were concerned about it, so I fear we have quite a ways to go before that’s a serious threat.
Kay
Fox news had to retract the lie about Biden’s beef ban today. Well, “had to”. Did. Decided to retract this one lie. Like they have any credibility to protect. You wonder why they bothered.
Ruckus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
The last guy had charisma?
Another Scott
@Nicole: I’ve seen that reported, but it doesn’t look like that’s true. E.g. it looks like Giant Evil Corp gets a lot more money for ESPN than FoxNews does.
Bundled channels are evil. But it looks like Comcast and Fox signed a long-term carriage agreement for all of Fox’s channels in April 2020, so it’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
sdhays
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I very much doubt that’s true. He just has less class about it, much like the difference between Donald and Fred Trump (Sr.).
Adam L Silverman
@craigie: No. Unfortunately as conservatism moves farther and farther towards the farthest right and into full on white, Christian herrenvolk extremism and drags the Republican Party along with it, both the movement and the party overlap more and more with where Putin has been dragging Russia, Orban has been dragging Hungary, and where a whole bunch of other extreme right authoritarians are trying to drag their states and societies.
Roger Moore
@Another Scott:
A critical thing to understand about Fox News, and right wing media more generally, is that it serves two functions. The more obvious one is as a propaganda machine. The less obvious one is as a kind of gullibility filter. Anyone who seriously listens to right wing media and believes it will also believe any other bullshit you throw at them, including ads for transparently fraudulent products. That makes it an incredibly valuable advertising medium, especially for the kinds of hucksters and con artists whose ads would never be acceptable to conventional media. This also limits the power of boycotts to force people like Tucker Carlson off the air. You may be able to convince regular companies to stop advertising on his show, but you’ll never stop the assorted scammers, both because you were never going to buy from them and because they can’t survive without their target audience of suckers.
sdhays
@Another Scott: I wonder what the definition of “long term” is. 10 years? 20? 5?
jl
@Bobby Thomson: “I guess I should carry bail money.”
Nah, just practice getting your phone cam out and recording quickly. Your lawyer can take a look before you decide what charges to press.
craigie
@Adam L Silverman:
So terrible minds think alike.
LeftCoastYankee
We interpret the second amendment as being every asshole should have gun, and the first amendment as every Australian gnome should own a fascism amplifier.
Good plan.
sdhays
@Roger Moore: But there’s a limited amount of competition for ad slots that no reputable company wants. Fox’s resilience in the face of boycotts is due to Crapcast and friends propping them up.
Ruckus
@Kay:
They got seriously caught being extremely stupid so they admitted to it, showing that they can admit when they are wrong. I’d bet it was a test to see how far they can go and if necessary, they walk it back, which gives them even more power over their target audience who now think the rest of their crap is real.
We don’t buy/believe anything from faux news so it wasn’t intended for this audience.
RaflW
On a more personal level, I think about when, decades ago, my mom had terminal cancer. She’d get chemo, then a week later get some biotech shot that boosted her white blood cell count. She was still feeling okay, and felt like she had a year or two left to see family, friends, and a few more ‘bucket list’ things (man does that term have an impact thinking of, say, her Alaska cruise. The balcony suite was critical to her having a successful, low-interaction trip).
She and dad would fly to visit people & places. And, she wore a mask on planes and in crowded public places. A cold that you or I just shrug off could have really fkd with her plans.
Evil, soulless maniacs like Carlson will make at least an incremental worsening for people who need masks beyond Covid protocol. What an inexcusable bastard.
And at this point, I don’t care if one is a lighting tech or a cafeteria worker. If your paycheck says Fox News on it, you’re stained with T Swanson’s vile essence.
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Jesus fucking Christ. That’s all I have.
Rob Lll
@Roger Moore: This is a brilliantly astute comment and fits my Fox-watching uncle to a T. So incredibly gullible it’s surprising he still has his wallet or any other valuables on him when he comes back from a walk outside. Anyone could fleece him like a lamb.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Adam L Silverman:
Most Americans aren’t on board with this stuff. The GOP is increasingly out of step with everyday Americans. I have to believe there’s going to be a massive backlash against them
How can this be stopped?
Redshift
@Kay:
Because their audience is already sold on it, so it costs them nothing to pretend to be journalists for once.
Barbara
@craigie: Does that mean that as cable declines Fox will too? Or are the alternatives just as likely to pay carriage fees, even if they call them something else?
Kent
I’m related to a bunch of these fundie freaks. Although in my family it is more conservative Mennonite fundamentalist rather than evangelical.
I’ve noticed that the ones who are the most outraged about losing their “freedom” by wearing masks are the ones most likely to sign off all their actual freedom to their fundamentalist churches which do, in fact, regulate every fucking aspect of their lives from dress codes to what they eat and drink to who they marry.
They have zero self-awareness.
cckids
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
You’re quoting me from 2014, re: D. Trump. Never underestimate the appeal of pure hate to the rightwing.
Uncle Jeffy
Yep, that’s Tucker the F*cker.
Mart
This asshole’s acolytes following his orders will be 80% of the news for the next month. His excuse will be he is working with a bit of science, outdoor transmission is rare. Some of that is likely due to masks and separation. As for me, double Moderna jabs + 2 weeks; I will continue to double mask outside for more viral variants that we don’t fully understand, and to model good behavior. Compared to being masked up in horrid factory conditions, this is a picnic.
LongHairedWeirdo
The incessant *whining* of Republicans over masks really bugs me. My favorite was “OMG my kids have allergies with masks on they can’t breathe!” Masks would likely help allergies, by preventing allergens from getting into the nose and mouth. “OMG I can’t breathe!” You seriously can’t be arsed to cut a strip out of an undershirt, to make a totally useless, yet technically compliant mask? “OMG MAH FREEDUMB!” States have the right to protect their citizenry from threats, like morons too stupid to realize they could be infectious, and that anyone *they* infect could infect a boatload of others, leading to deaths.
I was once pondering the nature of the power of the state, and one inescapable conclusion I reached was *precisely* the right to quarantine. Yes, public health measures mean less than perfect freedom; but there once was a disease as contagious as Covid-19, and killed something like 30% of those infected. It was called smallpox, and people would do a hell of a lot worse than say “you can’t come in here without a thin cloth covering over your mouth and nose” to try to contain an outbreak, and while much was wrongheaded, only the basest of fools questioned that it was necessary to curtail freedom to save lives.
You could argue that a modern, “free,” state, would demand the government cover living expenses, and otherwise try to provide benefits to offset the loss of freedom – but if the government can’t insist on reasonable restrictions, supported by science, to protect its citizenry, you don’t really have a government. (You might have the Confederacy – look how *that* turned out! The Confederacy was killed by its own creed, in many ways.)
Heck, I saw some people scorning California for forbidding outdoor activity, later in the pandemic, when it was known that being outdoors was (to modify an old expression) safer than houses. I can’t say it was a *good* idea; but it might have been necessary. Though science didn’t support it, as a practical matter, the police might well need to know that everyone they see out can be questioned and ticketed if they can’t provide a reason to be out. (Yes, I know, it generally shouldn’t be the regular cops, but they would be “police” – people enforcing policy (which is the root of “police” in this context). (And yes, this means Terry Pratchett was incorrect – but god damn, on Discworld, *he* gets to decide on etymology if he wants, whether because its his world, or the rule of cool, etc..))
Anyway: long and short of it is, yes, a collection of people who want what’s best, and have some wisdom, and form a government, will (almost certainly) agree that there might be situations in which anything less than the ability to enforce certain behaviors will result in far worse outcomes.
(Like over half a million dead. I was chilled by a nurse saying she always hoped that the people who reached the state where they *can’t* get enough oxygen had already lost consciousness, because of the panicked horror a person in that state will feel. The *lucky* ones who die might pass out before being able to consider final goodbyes.)
This rant brought to you, in part with support provided by the person who gave me my first Pfizer shot.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@cckids:
Trump was a unique phenomenon that was boosted by the Russians along with an assist from the media combined with 20 years of Hillary Hate. Tucker is a dweeb
kindness
Crazy right wingers somehow think none of the bad things they whip up will ever come back to them. One of the many reasons I call them crazy.
Karma can be ugly. My only complaint is it sometimes takes so long.
Another Scott
@Roger Moore: Good points, but I’m not sure that business model works any more. I assume the SEC and Postal Inspectors and so forth will be busier now than they were under TFG.
I was surprised to read that the Pillow guy had around $235M in sales in 2020. But that seems to be small potatoes these days – the Property Brother’s “Scott Living” company has $500M in sales.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
SiubhanDuinne
@Roger Moore:
Excellent point.
Nelle
When my husband was writing his resignation letter for a company that he realized was quite comfortable with lying, he called in sick for one of the few times he didn’t work. He told the secretary that he didn’t want her to catch what he had. He hot off the phone and said, “A very bad attitude.”
If confronted about mask wearing, I intend to say that I know that I have something quite contagious. And I’ll be thinking, a bad attitude. And possibly a foul mouth.
StringOnAStick
@Another Scott: Costco and Bed, Bath and Beyond stopped carrying MyPillow when the owner started pushing his movie to support the Big Lie. I sincerely hope sales are way, way down.
HumboldtBlue
The Daily Show has some Tucker cackles
rikyrah
???
Every resident in a zip code in The Loop vaccinated as Englewood struggles at 21 percent
https://chicagocrusader.com/every-resident-in-a-zip-code-in-the-loop-vaccinated-as-englewood-struggles-at-21-percent/ via @The Crusader Newspaper Group
RaflW
I hope Ms Shenker-Osorio is right. And by hope, I mean that we all have to do what we can to make the end of her first tweet the salient point: We, a preponderance of the nation, are onto their game and won’t play.
Craig
@Suzanne: come to West Oakland.
bluehill
Doesn’t look like MAGA adherents are going to come to their senses any time soon. This and other observations about cynics like Tucker and his blind followers.
Mary G
Recall this, motherfuckers:
Not even a Gav fan, and he hasn’t been the best at keeping businesses in line, but if someone comes up to me in my four layers of mask that I plan to wear for the foreseeable future, they will receive the rare angry MEAN MARY G treatment. The teen still speaks of it in hushed tones over Halloween 2017.
NotMax
@Mary G
Ah, that explains those seismometer blips across the western third of the country.
;)
HumboldtBlue
@Mary G:
Which is why you see me sittin’ my ass down.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Tucker is the only one who only has what TFG had…he’s not a politician, he’s wealthy, he’s on the TV machine, and is happy to say the quiet parts out loud(though he’s only asking questions, ya know).
cckids
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
To you and me, yes, he’s an unredeemable asshat and loser to boot. But you’re talking about people who are, apparently, turned on and awestruck by Donald Trump. I will never understand it, nor again believe I can predict what those people will find votable.
cckids
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Yes! And he’s the main candidate the Pod Save America guys are concerned about for 2024. I believe they know their stuff.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@cckids: Yup, most of the rest of the field as it stands now are all career politicians, TFG’s voters don’t like em.
Jay
Ruckus
@Kent:
The key is that they don’t want self awareness.
They want the awareness of a deity. Their chosen deity sure, but they want that because it means to them that they made a proper choice. No matter what they’ve done or thought or said in the past, or future their chosen deity will be aware of them. Maybe they are right. I don’t see it and really I’d bet that neither do most people but it’s not us that is making that choice.
They chose subservience over self awareness.
Ruckus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Tucker is a dweeb
Yes, so?
THEY FOLLOWED SHITFORBRAINS. Voted for him. Worshiped him.
They don’t make reasonable, rational choices. They liked their racist in chief. Who was and is incapable of really anything. fucker carlson is as bad and quite possibly a worse human being. Hard to believe but he may actually be a bigger racist fuck than shitforbrains, and they like that. Never count out a person who checks someone’s big box, as well as a couple smaller if not less significant boxes.
LongHairedWeirdo
@cckids: I know it seems crazy, but I saw how Fox fluffed him. Like, I saw Fox playing a clip of him ducking down behind a podium because he’s talking about Bloomberg, and OMG he’s short!
They were laughing and one said “this is the President at his best” which, hey, out of the mouths of babes. (Um, I mean people with infantile intellect, *not* “hot” women. I don’t know if the blonde Foxite was the one who said it or not.) It was like I could hear the narrator: “as you can see, they’ve given the mean-spirited permission to laugh, and suggested, those who find mockery of physical features distasteful, should maybe lighten up, it’s all in good fun!”
Sometimes the most terrifying propaganda is the kind that says the unacceptable is, in fact, perfectly acceptable, “except for all our enemies, who continuously lie about us! We’re your *friends*, and we would never cover for wrongdoing, because we’re not like those liberals who hate you so much.”
Flood the zone with enough crap that there’s reasonable doubt, and insist the accusations are always lies, and you can convince a lot of people to overlook a lot of warnings.
James E Powell
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I feel like most white Americans are on board with this stuff or, at least, it isn’t something that they believe is wrong. We have no evidence that Republican voters are calling their elected officials to tell them to stop.
Darkrose
@Ajabu: I haven’t been to the USVI since my aunt’s memorial service in 1997. Such a beautiful place and people; I miss it.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Ruckus:
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
@cckids:
I don’t think it’s that simple. People liked Trump because he was an ignorant know-nothing moron who was also a business man who was a hell of a lot more crude than Carlson is. Carlson likes to pretend to be an intellectual when he’s not. Not the same thing. It was Trump himself they liked. I truly think you all are overestimating Carlson and being alarmist.
West of the Rockies
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I think Trump could sell the tough guy shtick against Rubio and Jeb! and Jindal (remember him?).
But Tucker comes across as a spoiled pissant. I don’t think he’s a serious threat.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
On top of what I said already, Trump had been famous for decades prior and had a much wider audience than Carlson has on Fox
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
pretty clever of Sacha Baron Cohen to wear a Tucker Carlson mask
Jay
@Ruckus:
they are unaware of how the world has changed.
I am a kind and gentle man, who intervened on a racist assault on one of my female coworkers. I restrained the perp, walked him to the front, where Security was waiting, and he accidentally slammed his head into every pallet racking upright on the way there. Our store is 2 isles long, it took 6 to get him there.
The shitshow of the past 4 years and Covid, has made many of “us” polite, “Liberals”, a lot less tolerant.
Ditto for antimaskers. I chase them out of the store, making it clear that I will curb them if they don’t gtfo.
I will tolerate a small amount of BS performative shit but the line between “you are a moron” and “I will kill you”, has gotten a lot tighter.
I was taking the Skytrain home a week ago, and some asshole coming the other way, leaned down to a young BIPOC girl, holding her Mom’s hand while walking, (2 metres, Asshole!!!), and said to the little girl, the N word. Stood up and kept walking with a smirk on his face.
I was bag assed tired, 10 hours on my feet, so as he passed I throat punched him, kicked him in the head as he fell, kept walking, and as I passed the Mom and her daughter, who were standing there in shock, I gave a “good evening” to the Mom, and an “I love your hair” to the daughter, and just kept going.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@West of the Rockies:
Agreed. The one dangerous thing about Carlson I’ll admit is his ability to come across as “reasonable” and “smart” to people who haven’t given a lot of thought to any given topic by just “asking questions”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): A wider audience is irrelevant for Republican primaries.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
But not a general election. Carlson also doesn’t have the machismo factor Trump had
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
TFG had machismo???????????
I always thought he was a fat fuck filled with hot air.
Jesus, the guy was afraid of stairs,
Chris T.
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Actually, being low on oxygen just makes you tired / fall asleep. The “can’t catch your breath” feeling is mainly driven by CO2 levels, though mechanical airway issues are terrifying. The low O2 sats people get with Covid don’t come with can’t-breathe feelings, but it’s true that if you get to the point where your lungs fill with fluid, that both is bad and feels bad.
Meanwhile, if you get someone who insists that you take your mask off, just tell them that you have a deadly, airborne disease. Preferably right after taking your mask off and breathing on them: “Now you have it too! Pray that you’re a carrier too, otherwise you have three weeks to live.”
lowtechcyclist
@cain:
Well, we certainly can be assholes (myself definitely included), but unlike the GQP, assholery isn’t our entire freakin’ platform.
Frankensteinbeck
@Jay:
One of the few things that surprised me, but afterwards it made sense. Trump is angrily insecure in his masculinity. To other men angrily insecure in their masculinity – the ones who give a damn about macho – it reads as being extremely macho. It peeled off a small but significant few percent of minority men, apparently, and of course created huge enthusiasm in right wing assholes. Limbaugh also had that ‘women are bitches or whores’ swagger. Tucker does not. I’m sure he hates women, but he acts like a dweeb rather than paying porn stars for sex, bragging about sexual assault, and obsessively discussing women based on their atteactiveness.
Chris Johnson
Remember it’s terrorism. It’s warfare. The point isn’t to become a mirror of it, the point is to fight it and suppress it and stop it and lead decent lives.
wenchacha
Next, how about calling cops if you see parents forcing kids to use sunblock. Do we really know what chemicals are in it? It’s just Big Sunscreen trying to keep us from enjoying Vitamin D!
Nicole
@LongHairedWeirdo:
FOX News, the favorite refuge of bullies.
Insulting men based on their height is such a classic example of toxic masculinity. Like, what are you so insecure about, Tucker, that someone else’s size matters to you? Hmm? HMMMM??
Nicole
@Frankensteinbeck:
True; and therein lies the trap of the cult of masculinity; when a man (or boy) buys into it, he discovers that one is never masculine enough. And that makes for some very insecure and frightened males in the world, and, as anyone who has ever had an insecure dog can attest, the insecure and frightened lash out in an attempt to demonstrate that they are not, in fact, insecure and frightened. For the rest of us, who are not insecure and frightened, it makes them both dangerous and exhausting to be around.
Tucker is both insecure and frightened, 24/7.
J R in WV
I see I’m not the first person to raise this issue… but shouldn’t Fucker Carlson be reported to Child Protective services for this criminal advice? Along with most of his other social and political advice to act in illegal ways out in public?
So glad we don’t support Faux Broadcasting with a single cent of our own monies. No cable bill, no sat TV service available due to trees and terrain, both of which we prefer to criminal fraud being broadcast. How does this phoney fraud have any friends? Oh, right, he probably doesn’t. Just cronies, hangers on and people like that. Sad for him, but glad for the rest of the world’s population.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Chris T.: The desperate fighting for breath was what the nurse was referring to – you’re right, when O2 drops too low, you pass out, but if there’s a mechanical failure, panic sets in. (That is, in fact, the point of crucifixion – in that position, it takes real effort to breathe, and your body will spend *all* that effort, over *all* that time, until it finally can’t.)
One of the witnesses in the Floyd murder trial mentioned the same sort of thing – describing how the video shows the whole body effort desperately trying to get some air in.