From Unz Review, Tucker Carlson’s Virtue-Signal with Kanye West Backfired—But Exposed Regime’s Rampant Social Credit Canceling.
I think Derb is off the mark here.
Conservatives who are respectable enough to have their own TV shows—a category that obviously includes Tucker—live in terror of being thought hostile to blacks. They want thirteen percent of their guests to be black, for equity. For the Tuckers of the world, black conservatives are gold—even airhead celebrity blacks who are no more able to articulate consistent conservative opinions than they are to solve cubic equations.
So there’s your answer: Tucker was Virtue Signaling.
Tucker interviewed Kanye because they probably agree on some issues, and he’s good for ratings, not because of diversity.
Derb still seems to put too much stock in credentialed experts despite their terrible track records at almost everything. I’m inclined to trust Kanye’s opinions more than the experts, unless it’s something highly objective like math or physics. That’s not to say Kanye is right or his opinions are good, but it’s probably still better than the mainstream media, which is a very low bar.
The correlation between credentials and competence or accuracy is mixed at best. When it comes to forecasting, the experts are no better than a coin toss, maybe worse. Experts in 2014 hyped a non-existent campus rape epidemic, alleging that 1 in 5 college women had been raped, a gross misinterpretation of the data. They promised that ‘flatten the curve’ would work. They way oversold the efficacy of vaccines at preventing the spread of Covid. They predicted rapidly rising sea levels and coastal flooding for the past 50 years, and yet sea levels are mostly unchanged. In 2007 at least 50% of economists said there would be no recession.
After the interview, over the weekend, Kanye made a tweet which was interpreted as antisemitic and deleted by Twitter. Somehow this makes Tucker look bad.
If there is one thing a cable-TV prime-time host dreads more than being thought racist, it’s being thought antisemitic, or even just being accused of hosting an antisemite on his show. They really, really hate when that happens.
Twitter deleted the tweet and suspended West’s account. Poor Tucker was left with egg all over his face.
Except Tucker bears zero responsibility for this, not even in some abstract moral sense. Everyone is blaming Kanye, no one is even talking about Tucker.
Twitter didn’t suspend Kanye’s account, but similar to Jordan Peterson, gave Kanye an ultimatum, which Kanye has not yet agreed to in order to have his account posting privileges restored. Loss of posting privileges is not the same as the account being suspended, but it accomplishes the same sort of goal of silencing the affected individual.
Most celebrities are low-IQ. Sure: entrepreneurial success like West’s needs some people skills and planning ability, but not much abstract thinking.
Not sure about this. Perhaps low-IQ relative to a theoretical physicist, but still higher than the general population. Matt Damon went to Harvard and collaborated with Ben Affleck for the script of Good Will Hunting (writing a screenplay, and such a successful one, is no easy feat). If you look at those high-IQ lists, you will see a lot of familiar names. Maybe those scores are wrong or exaggerated, but it seems reasonable to assume that they are smarter than the average population. Sharon Stone for example was “admitted to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania on a creative writing scholarship at age 15,” which does seem to corroborate with her listed IQ of 154. Or to put it another way, Derb has not supplied any evidence that most celebrities are low IQ, and the evidence I showed would seem to suggest the opposite. Maybe rappers have a lower IQ than actors or screenwriters, which would not surprise me.
He ends with:
We can dare to hope that if the GOP gets control of Congress—or even just of the House—in the upcoming midterms, they might take some legislative action against these big software monopolies fronting for the Democratic Party.
Republicans are generally not keen on breaking-up monopolies. Even with Trump in power, nothing happened even as conservatives were being de-platformed and censored everywhere, although maybe there is reason for hope.
But at the rate things are going, I see China’s social credit system as being the future of America, except enforced by ever-growing private companies, all while the federal government allows it to happen or creates conditions conducive to it. Social media companies, banks, and payment processors, ISPs, and email providers have become the new gatekeeps. Say something bad about Biden on social media or criticize the outcome of an election? You may lose your Gmail account, or have your PayPal account debited $2,500, or have your bank account closed. Even if this is uncommon, the threat is always present, so that factors into one’s decision making processes.