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This is a month old, but Tucker Carlson had a bizarre interview with a Jeff Elofson.
TW if you're an elderly teacher with a sensitive constitution.
In it, Tuckers asks 'Why does algebra put letters into numbers?'
His interviewee concludes that those who use 'fake math with letters' are 'good little goyslaves'.
The clip is both baffling and hilarious, it reminds me of these memes I've seen, and it's almost surprising that it did not come with an Onion logo in the corner.
This clip looks so bad that I had a hard time making sense of it. Carlson is clearly an educated guy, but now that I look at his wikipedia page, he barely graduated. So it is perhaps possible that basic math has somehow escaped his understanding.
On the other hand, this may be part of a strategy to connect with the lower classes 'we love the poorly educated'.
Another possibility I could see is associating some basic ignorance with the kind of people who unironically use the prefix 'goy' as in 'goyslop'. Not a good look.
My preferred explanation is that Tucker is tired of all his success after getting fired from Fox News, which if I recall correctly had to do with the release of his text messages critical of Trump's low-brow appeal. So he's trying to tank himself, somehow.
Maybe I'm extrapolating too much, but this kind of public attitude is worrying for the future of America.
On one hand we have the math-computer wizards and their AI(SI?) transhumanist revolution and on the other hand we have this.
I was scraping the bottom of the youtube barrel about 6 months ago and started watching some Tucker Carlson videos. He is somewhat fine/normal most of the time but occasionally drops mind numbingly stupid thoughts or ideas that make me recoil with disbelief. My impression is that he is just not very smart and seems to revel in his kind of aw-shucks naivety that I imagine some part of his audience relates to or finds charming.
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I doubt any genuinely poorly-educated working-class person even knows the word 'goy', much less the language of the meme-ified online far-right.
That doesn't mean it's not a strategy to connect with the lower classes - just that, if it is one, it's an incompetent one.
No, it's broken containment. I've heard my son's friends call things "goyslop". They have absolutely no idea where the term comes from or what it was supposed to mean.
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The guy he's interviewing is clearly an idiot. I can't find much information other than that his name is Jess, not Jeff, and he's some kind of ceramic artist from South Dakota who claims to live on a farm but apparently lives in the suburbs. Anyway, the other thing Tucker clipped from this interview is the guy claiming that the CIA paid Jackson Pollock large amounts of money to make "art" that was terrible for the express purpose of fucking with the Soviets, who wouldn't understand it. There seems to be some kind of agreement on Tucker's part that the abandonment of all the aspects of traditional painting that the Russians supposedly valued is indicative of American decadence blah blah blah, complete with pro-Russian undertones and blaming drug overdoses on bad art.
Aside from the entire premise being ridiculous, it evidences a complete lack of understanding of art history, which probably makes the opposite point that Tucker (and by extension his target audience) would intend. The Russians would not be shocked by something like Pollock, least of which because there was an entire Russian tradition of avant-garde art, the most notable proponent of which was Vasily Kandinsky. This mostly dates from the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was suppressed following the Bolshevik revolution for being "bourgeois". Abstract art did not appear suddenly in the late 40s, but developed for a half-century prior to that, longer when you consider that movements like Impressionism were considered abstract at the time relative to traditional court painting. The Soviets not only knew about this, but consciously rejected it. The emergence of an artist like Pollock would have proven the Communist point about the decadence of capitalism, but is this the point that a conservative like Carlson wants to make?
While conservatives and neoliberals are in coalition in most of the West, it's an uneasy coalition (and a weaker one in the USA than elsewhere). Small-town conservatives are generally quite suspicious of laissez-faire capitalism, even if they're also suspicious of the words "communism" and "socialism" (there is some real distaste for the bureaucracies of socialism, but note that the Amish and similar groups are literally communes).
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Well I really didn't look further into the context of the clip. Maybe there's a very good reason that he's interviewing this guy, like he's a good drinking buddy or something.
Otherwise he's going out of his way to find a guy saying dumb things and makes himself look bad in the process. Only context where it would make sense is if it's a charity-thing and he's providing some comfort to mentally-disabled people.
I once stumbled upon a radio segment with a very strange sounding presenter and it turned out to be a slightly mentally-challenged person talking about their literacy experience and there was a whole segment about book clubs for intellectually-disabled people. They'd sit in a circle interpreting what is happening in specially-made picture books and apparently they especially liked the ones that had to do with the kind of difficult social situations they may face. The example was a book about a man taking advantage of a woman after meeting online.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/17/unpopular-front
The point is that the truth of the claim is far, far narrower than what is suggested.
It’s like a motte and bailey where the motte is “a core foreign policy goal of the CIA was to fracture support for Stalinism in Western European communist student and bohemian art circles, so they funded abstract contemporary art that made the socialist realism promoted as state art in the USSR seem dated, illiberal and boring to this small, niche group of leftists who already hated the United States, capitalism, the wars in Korea and later Vietnam etc” and the bailey is “the CIA deliberately promoted the replacing of traditional classical American styles of art with degenerate, abstract and ugly contemporary art to fracture American society and make us all gay abortionists”.
Actually, none of the art was for ‘fucking with the Soviets’, it was all for shaping the opinion of socialist-adjacent groups, students, professors, artists, hippies, cultural commentators, literary journal contributors and so on in the American sphere who slowly turned against the Soviet Union in the decades leading up to 1990, which was a far greater priority.
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Anon, I…
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It's bad to make you click.
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It's just engagement bait. Carlson essentially says during the discussion that he himself has used algebra for the course of his work but that his is a fake job and goes along with the implication that nobody in real jobs like carpentry needs it.
Carlson made his bid to lead the right when Charlie Kirk was killed and failed. Because he went at the king and missed, there was nothing left for him but to embrace the grifter role fully.
How is that good engagement?
'Teehee I was just being retarded' is not good content. Unless he's trying to attract an audience who operates on that level.
Or an audience who would get offended by it, which means he'd have to come up with more intellectually-offensive content in the future, which does not seem sustainable, especially with the competition.
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The trades absolutely require algebra...
You know that, and I know that, and Tucker Carlson knows that, but the guy he was talking to claimed that he had done all kinds of carpentry without it.
Maybe he’s responsible for some of the viral “measure twice, cut once” what-not-to-do examples.
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