If you watch all 10 mins. of Tucker Carlson's first Twitter show and are like me it will be 10x longer than you've ever watched him

 

By Hal Brown

This morning I went there and watched Tucker Carlson's Twitter debut show so I could write this blog. Until now the most I'd seen of Tucker Carlson were brief segments aired on MSNBC. 

I did this after finding out about his new "show" from HUFFPOST and clicking on the link to Twitter in their article 

Tucker Carlson’s New Twitter Show, Seen By Millions, Starts With Conspiracy Theories

Click above to enlarge image

I doubt you'll do it, but you can watch the Tucker's Twitter debut by clicking here.

I am too lazy to offer a complete summary of what he said though I want to share a few impressions.

I was surprised that some of his references went so far beyond sarcasm that I wondered if they would fly like the alien UFO's he said he were in possession of the US government (along with the bodies of alien pilots) over the heads of many of his viewers. Really, he spent about two  minutes on how the "fact" that alien UFOs exist and we have been studying them and their the bodies of their pilots is the covered up story of the century.

He also explained what using tautology as a  persuasion technique was, and he accused the mainstream media of using this technique of argument incessantly when I doubt most of his viewers know what the term means. In fact, Carlson's stock in trade is tautology. Having graduated from Trinity College (ranked 39 among US liberal arts colleges) and being one of their best known alumni he certainly is familiar with the concept. Of the hundreds of notable alumni listed on Wikipedia, alas (for him) he's only number four of the 10 who are pictured as select alumni in the sidebar. He is after Christine C. Quinn, David Cage, and Dov Zakheim who aren't household names. If he ever looks at this I assume he can beat his chest over being above George Will and the creator of MyTunes.

Click above to enlarge

He managed to get in references to trans women calling them skinny dudes in dresses. 

Unanswered questions apparently trouble Carlson. For example, who organized the BLM riots, what  really happened on 911, and who killed JFK?

Although Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham got knocks, there were two primary villains in his 10 minute Twitter debut. One was the media and the other was Zelenski who he described with a string of insults saying that he was ratlike and a shifty dead-eyed man in a tracksuit.

Perhaps time limitations kept him from gushing or crushing over Putin, the dictator who likes to be photographed barechested. He didn't even mention his name.  He supports Russia in the Ukraine war. In fact, one of his segments was replayed on Russian TV:

He began his debut "show" explaining why he is sure they weren't responsible for blowing up the Kakhovka dam blaming it on Ukraine.

Describing the media toward the end of his show (I'll take the word out of quotes) he says they have stories like "here's a story about racism now go eat each other." I have no idea what he meant by now go eat each other.

How many of his regular viewers will follow him to Twitter and watch him on their Internet devices rather than on television remains to be seen. Unless Elon Musk decides to pay him I don't know how he can make much money off of this although his net worth has been estimated to be $30 million.

Of course with an ego like Tucker's maybe money isn't all that important to him.

...........................................................

Related blog from June 2nd: The unemployed TV personality who could beat Trump.

Here's a mystery. For unknown reasons all week the blog has had the largest percentage of readers logging on from Singapore. All I can think of is that this had something to do with this:

World's spy chiefs connect in secret conclave at Shangri-La Dialogue security meeting in Singapore

Click above to enlarge

IF SO:

If you don't see the Disquis comment section below it is on the bottom of the page here.

Can Twitter replace Fox News? Consider what my Twitter page looked like this morning.

By Hal Brown 

Most of you, if I have an accurate sense of my blog readers, are loathe to even click on Twitter let alone actually have an account and post their own tweets there. You probably would be one of the people depicted in the DonkeyHotey image from 2022 above. You can see how he was depicted by caricaturist DonkeyHotey (website) with an impish smile in 2012 to looking mean but oblivious in his grandiose state of smug self-delusion in 2022. 

Yet Elon Musk makes the news almost every day and now, according to a featured article in Salon this morning, wants to have Twitter replace Fox News:

I am not sure how this is possible. I doubt very many people want to turn off their televisions and use their laptops or other Internet devises to get their fix of right-wing opinion. There are ways to watch the Internet on the big screen (seeWikiHow) - but how many people are going to do this? My hunch is not very many. I tried to get my laptop to play through my smart TV with a cable I had for another purpose and after considerable trial and error I manage to get it to work. 

Then  noticed that my smart TV had an Internet setting so I was able to get Twitter there.

This may all seem like techie stuff, but in order for Musk to succeed in making Twitter an alternative to Fox News he has to have numerous people willing to take the steps to put it on their televisions. 

Given that, how many people even open Twitter first thing when they look at what's online using an Internet device? The MAGA world he lusting after, even want to follow the news, are more likely to turn on their television than go to the Internet. If he really wanted to become a media mogul like Rupert Murdoch he would be better off if he purchased NewsMax or One America News (OAN) and try to expand the number of cable stations which broadcast them. This is a bit dated being from 2021 but is relevant: Large Majorities of Newsmax and OAN News Consumers Also Go to Fox News. He'd have his work cut out for him but at least he'd have an opening to break into television.

My morning online routine is to look at my overnight email, then see what HUFFPOST has as their top story, check Raw Story for their articles which summarizes news as it breaks, I scan The New York Times and Washington Post websites, and see what Salon is publishing.

I always have MSNBC on so on weekdays "Morning Joe" is playing in the background.

Among all these sources I try to come up with an original take for my blog of the day.

For those of you who rarely if ever look at Twitter, and may see screen grabs of select tweets in various articles, below are screen grabs of my Twitter page for this morning.

Clicking images will enlarge them and not take you to Twitter.

After skimming the Salon article I thought I'd see what just going to Twitter.com looked like.

The top tweet is from Musk about DeSantis and his announcement on Twitter:

What stood out to me was the Trump-like incoherent sentence "But you what isn't noise?" I assume he meant to write "But what you hear isn't noise" ending with a period rather than a question mark. The sentence after that isn't grammatical either. What would convey what (true or not) Musk meant is that what people heard wasn't noise but rather was DeSantis setting an all-time record for fund-raising.

If you click on Find out more this is what you will see:

You will have to go to Twitter (here) to read their Community Notes Guide.

In order going down the page as it appeared on my laptop are the following mishmash of tweets. I don't know if your Twitter page would look like this. I was struck by the contrast in tweets from liberal Thom Hartmann's tweet with was second under Musk's tweet to Lauren Boebert which was the next tweet. Down the page there was a similar contrast.

While alternative platforms, one of the best known being Mastodon (below)  have tried to replace Twitter, none have lured away the well known posters on Twitter as the screen grabs show.

Today there are tweets from President Biden, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rick Scott,  George Conway, Jim Jordan, and Barack Obama for example.

 So far I haven't seen a post on Mastodon, where I have an account where I've made 952 posts since Nov. 2022 (here) copied onto a news or opinion article they way so many tweets are.

 

Update: (Ben Collins is a senior reported at NBC News)

If you don't see the Diquis comment section below click here.

As a dauntless opinion writer I was tempted to join Truth Social

 By Hal Brown

Above: Truth Social is America's "Big Tent" social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology.

Caricature by DonkeyHotey

Currently I depend on various websites to report on what Trump posts on his Truth Social platform. For example Raw Story has a story about a particularly unhinged and wack-a-toon post:

Trump obviously hoped to make money from Truth Social.

He also no doubt wanted bragging rights about how many millions of followers he had there compared to when he was on Twitter.

The failure to achieve these goals have turned out to be irrelevant because Trump now has his own megaphone. He totally controls it. While not everything he posts there is widely shared in the media he can throw random shit at the wall and see what sticks in the media.  

Trump isn't on Twitter. Elon Musk, no doubt wanting him to start tweeting again to boost Twitter's statistics, reinstated him. His most recent tweet is from January 8, 2021 when he was supposedly permanently banned.

I doubt Trump would go back to making Twitter tweets because he has an agreement with Truth Social to post there six hours before he posts anywhere else. Not only that, but he would have to admit that Truth Social failed and Elon Musk had more business acumen than he did.

Just as all major media outlets have staff assigned to watching Fox News and keeping up with other right-wing media, and finding tweets to add to articles which are relevant to the subject being covered, they have staff assigned to monitoring Truth Social. It's nice work if you can get it, and can stand watching Tucker Carlson if you're assigned to Fox News, since you can do it from home.  

I could get on Truth Social for free. I could watch Fox News. I could check out all the online right-wing websites. I probably would come up with ideas for what I hope would be an original and perhaps particularly snarky take on something for this blog.

This would mean devoting a lot of time suffering through watching and reading, to put it bluntly, a lot of crap. I am retired and nobody has decided offer to pay me to do this, plus if they did it would have to be lot of money for me to even agree to devote a few hours a day to doing this.

If I joined the platform, aside from writing about Trump's Truth Social posts, I might wile away some time screwing around with Trump by replying to his posts with over-the-top fawning replies dripping with thinly veiling sarcasm aimed at stroking his ego. I wouldn't be critical of him, what's the fun in that? He'd probably never see my posts. All that would accomplish is trying to see if I could get kicked off the platform and that would only get me a subject for one blog.

The fun of flippant fawning would be to try to get Trump to "re-Truth" (his version of a re-tweet) a reply he thinks is complementary to something he posts when in fact it comes from someone who thinks he might be gullible enough to believe I am a member of his cult.

Therefore, here's my decision: 

Sorry, MSNBC, Raw Story, HUFFPOST, Daily Beast, et. al, I'm not going to accept bundles of cash to be one of your work-from-home right-wing media monitors. Besides, I figure most of you are using interns to do this.

Tempted as I am, I won't join Truth Social, and "truth" be told, part of the reason is that I am a little afraid I might enjoy posting there so much I'd become addicted to this useless endeavor.

Addendum:

Remember this guy?

Truth Social is run by Trump Media & Technology Group, and headed by Devin Nunes. In 2022, Talking Points Memo stated Nunes' remuneration was $750,000 per year.

From Newsweek:  

Devin Nunes' Cow Celebrates Congressman's Resignation 

You can read a lot more about Truth Social on Wikipedia here.

Rep Cory Mills malicious malevolent tweet about Pelosi's husband shows why we need Twitter

  Rep. Cory Mills malicious malevolent tweet about Pelosi's husband shows why we need Twitter  

Today's blog is a twofer. I address both the malignant narcissism on the far-right and why Twitter is, like it or not, a necessary town square.

by Hal Brown, MSW

Read HUFFPOST article here.

I wish it wasn't so. I wish it was possible to dismiss the benefits of Twitter out of hand. I hate the fact that because so many newsworthy tweets are on Twitter Elon Musk is able to make money off the platform.

President Biden has 36.8 million followers there:

It isn't like it or not, I don't like it at all, but Twitter has become the national (and international) town square. We can try to live in fantasy land about Twitter just going away. Case in point, read the HUFFPOST article and see how tweets are used. Consider what this dirtbag would have gotten away with without Rep Swalwell posting on Twitter .

There's nothing to say about this despicable new member of the GOP contingent of the House that isn't in the HuffPost article except for me to add my perspective as a retired psychotherapist who has written a lot about a particular psychological personality type.

Brought into the public awareness by the founder of the Duty to Warn group Dr. John D. Gartner malignant narcissism was a conceptualization several psychopathologies described by noted social psychologist Erich Fromm in 1964.

Malignant narcissism is an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, aggression, and sadism. Fromm described it as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". He characterized the condition as "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity. Wikipedia

From Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Tucker Carlson to a witches' brew of actors on the public stage like Putin and the two Steves, Bannon and Miller, those who love democracy, not only in America but in Ukraine and elsewhere, are suffering because malignant narcissists wield power. 

Back to Twitter and the story on HUFFPOST. You can see just from this one example how Twitter functioned as a worthwhile town square. 

Cory Mills, in his malignant narcissism, was unable to resist making a tweet which sent a message to hard-core extremists and showed his true colors.  When it proved to be against his own best interests he deleted it but it was too late since like with many similar tweets it had already been noticed and copied. In this case we can thank Rep. Eric Swalwell:

His tweet generated the dozen replies which augment the HUFFPOST article. None of them are notables. They are from ordinary people with Twitter names like Jack-O'Lantern and booklady2002.

Just as the open mic*, sharp-eyed photographer, or accidental video can catch someone whose impulses outweighed their good judgement, the ease of making a tweet without considering the negative consequences can reveal one's true character and beliefs.

Consider the recent example of a CSPAN camera catching liar Rep. George Santos making what appears to be a white power symbol.

C-SPAN video of the incident shows that Santos had pre-positioned his hand along his body in an unusual way to create the gesture.

Far-right extremists, mainly white supremacists, have coopted the gesture to symbolize a “W” and “P” for white power, according to the Anti-Defamation League. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center also categorizes the gesture as a white power gesture but explains that on the right, the gesture is often used to troll liberals. YahooNews 

Click "Read more" below to continue.  

Is Elon Musk using psychedelic drugs? If not, should he?

 Is Elon Musk using psychedelic drugs? If not, should he?

By Hal Brown

Follow on Mastodon

Psychedelic artwork by the New Illuminati, CC 2.0

I looked at RawStory this morning and saw this on the subscription RawStory+ which I don't subscribe to. 

The article is by Bobby Azarian is a cognitive neuroscientist affiliated with George Mason University and a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, BBC Future, Scientific American, Slate, The Huffington Post, Quartz, and others. His research has been published in journals such as Cognition & Emotion and Human Brain Mapping.  Visit his website at www.bobbyazarian.com.

Even though to read this article from the RawStory website you need RawStory+,  you can read it without a subscription if you go the RawStory Twitter page here.

Excerpts:

• Well, as the saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. The Elon I used to know and root for is not the man I see today. I see a person who is out for revenge. I also see someone who is behaving in a way that is increasing division and political polarization.
• ... the aim of this article is to cause a shift in how Elon sees the world, such that he is inspired to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If a new perspective on life and the universe can convince him that the human progress he wants to achieve requires unification, it could motivate him to use his causal power to help bring us together under a common goal and a shared worldview — one that aligns our interests.
• The old saying, “United we stand, divided we fall,” tells us that doing so is not a choice, but a matter of survival. Overcoming our shared existential threats will ultimately require the full causal power of the collective human network.
• But for Elon to have the sort of awakening that motivates someone to adopt a radical new perspective and approach to doing things, he must be open to undergoing such a transformation. Science has shown that psychedelics — like LSD, DMT, and psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) — have the power to prime a person’s mind for exactly this type of transformation.

Azarian references this article which shows how taking LSD and similar drugs can increase empathy and political perspectives:

I think Musk has proved himself to be in a state of empathy deficiency. How he got there at some point in his psychological development is impossible to know. Perhaps his being on the autism spectrum has something to do this this. Consider:

What makes all this more than an excuse to suggest just that Musk needs an assist to enhance his empathy and taking psychedelics might be the key to increasing his moral and prosocial behavior, thus lessening or eliminating his immoral and anti-social behavior, is that Musk himself has promoted the use of psychedelics.

Click above thread

Here's another article: 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk Believes Psychedelics Are Better Than Pharmaceutical Medications

Going beyond Musk to other politicians who not only lack empathy but seem incapable of it the politician who comes to mind is Donald Trump, but clearly Ron DeSantis is also right up there. What we see in all three of these is an element of sadism and cruelty. The cruelty of Trump and DeSantis is evident in how they treated people trying to enter the United States at the Mexican border.

Trump is in my opinion and that of many other psychotherapists a malignant narcissist. I think DeSantis probably fits into this category as well. Musk is different in that while he is narcissistic he also is on the spectrum.

None of these people are about to get any kind of therapy, let alone psychedelic therapy.

Addendum: My state has just legalized the therapeutic use of psilocybin (aka Magic mushrooms).

I welcome comments to any of my blogs. Even though this page has a comment feature very few people ever use it. The best way to comment is to do so on Mastodon (but you have to join first) or on Facebook if have a page here.

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Forego social media and bring back press release

 Forgo social media and bring back the press release

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

When it came widely disseminating information before social media there was group email and before that there were newsroom wire services and before that I suppose there was the ticker-tape machine which was used for stock market transactions.

Today even The White House uses social media, especially Twitter, to communicate messages to the media. If they are going to use Twitter I think it is only fair they use other similar platforms like Mastodon and Tribel. For example this is how their latest message seems to have gotten out. I don't know how since it wasn't on their official Twitter account but this is what various media websites have a link to:

I tried to find out where original statement came from. It wasn't a direct tweet from Andrew Bates, it was on his Twitter page as the retweet you see above.  Christopher Cadelgo is a reporter for Politico. It wasn't here either: 

These are their tweets from the prior 19 hours (click to enlarge):

If there's an urgent message that President Biden or White House wants to send there is always the press conference, but there's nothing between that and using the Internet.

If you want to see what the official White House website has to say about what Trump said about suspending the Constitution and try to look at their official website and type in a dot com this is where you go:

Someone obviously figured out that many people would land on this website by mistake and registering the URL was a valuable idea.

When you realize your error and type in dot gov you go to the official website:

Then if you want to find the actual statement which was posted on Twitter you're out of luck because it isn't anywhere to be found where you'd expect it to be:

Trump uses his own version of Twitter, Truth Social, as an alternative to issuing a press release. While Truth Social is an overall failure for Trump it is a success since everything he posts there is covered by the media.

For any government official or entity, any public or private organization or institution, and any individual in the public eye there is an alternative to using the social media platform owned and controlled by Elon Musk even though it currently has the most reach. 

For those wanting to reach the media Wirth a message it would require compiling a group email list, although I would guess some of these are languishing unused in numerous computers. 

Once this is done the same people in charge of posting a tweet to get a statement out to the media could simple send it out as a press release via email.

Of course any organization or individual could still use Twitter but considering that this platform is controlled by Elon Musk I personally would hope that nobody did this. It legitimizes Twitter as a news source and subsidizes the platform which means more money in influence for Musk.

As far as alternatives for those who want to leave Twitter I prefer Mastodon. I wrote abut this here:

Here's my profile.

Individuals, including journalists, are divided over whether or not to leave Twitter. As I write this it is been discussed of Ali Velshi's MSNBC show. You can read "Why I'm Not Leaving Twitter" by Karen Attiah (left below) if you have a Washington Post subscription here.

Ali Velshi expressed mixed feeling about it but said he still uses Twitter and also uses these: 

As an aside, I am actually supportive of having Donald Trump use Truth Social, or if he wants to return to the all embracing arms of Elon Musk, to use Twitter. This is because with either platform he expresses himself without a filter and reveals what he really thinks. He doesn't have handlers urging him to stick to reading what has been prepared for him on a teleprompter. On social media he is his own worst enemy and the nightmare of any defense attorney who is trying to keep him out of jail.

I wonder whether Special Counsel Jack Smith will see this as Trump confessing to sedition:

The right-wing speechwriter Robert Strom just wrote in the highly conservative publication Hot Air that Trump has finally committed political suicide and will never recover:

"It’s like a social science experiment with 350 million participants. Researchers are asking: just how batsh!t crazy does a person have to be to lose 95% of their fans? For some reason, Trump has decided to participate as the experimental subject," Strom added, "There are several obvious things about Trump’s statement that are simply politically stupid. Like, really really stupid. Assuming there were no legal or ethical barriers to either calling a new election or suspending the Constitution (stay with me here, I know that is insane!), it is still politically stupid."

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