According to Beck, if you hate the American government you are a terrorist, and especially if you stir up hatred against the American government you are a terrorist. He was talking about Muslims of course, but what does that make Glenn Beck?
-
‹ Home
Info
-
Subscribe
-
Users
Links
- All Hat No Cattle
- Andy Borowitz
- Axios
- Barry Deutsch
- Bearman Cartoons
- Beau of the Fifth Column
- Capitol Steps
- Cook Political Report
- Crooks and Liars
- Daily Kos Comics
- Daily Show
- David Horsey
- Derf City
- Digby
- Eclectablog
- Electoral Vote
- Fair and Unbalanced
- Fark Politics
- Five Thirty Eight Politics
- Funny or Die
- Funny Times
- Go Comics
- Hackwhackers
- Heather Cox Richardson
- HuffPost Comedy
- John Fugelsang
- Kung Foo Monkey
- Last Week Tonight
- Margaret and Helen
- Mark Fiore
- Matt Davies
- Matt Wuerker
- McClatchy Cartoons
- News of the Weird
- O'Carl's Law
- Politicususa
- PolitiFact
- Propaganda Professor
- Raging Pencils
- Randy Rainbow
- RCP Cartoons
- Saturday Night Live
- Slowpoke
- Stonekettle Station
- Ted Rall
- The Nib
- The Onion
- Tom the Dancing Bug
- Tom Toles
- USN Political Cartoons
- What Now Toons
-
Tags
Abortion Bush Campaign Finance Cheney Climate Clinton Congress Conservatives Corporations Corruption Deficits Democrats Drugs Economy Education Election Elections Energy Environment Fox News Gays Guns Health Immigration Lies McCain Media Middle East Obama Palin Protests Racism Religion Republicans Romney Spying Supreme Court Taxes Tea Party Terrorism Terrorists Torture Trump Unemployment War
-
Archives
You are Visitor #
16 Comments
What that makes Glenn Beck is…..rich!! With this Obama “compromise” on taxes, he’ll be even richer. Is this a great country or what??
What an air head (or as my friend Peter would say “dumbhead”)!! I can no longer take him seriously as a thinking human being. He and Limbaugh have evolved into something else and I’m not sure what it is. Oh well, at least he provides a bit of comic relief now and again. 157,000,000 Muslim terrorists? Damn!
Ugh…I(and many others I’m sure) really use to like Beck, but ever since the tea party thing…he’s gone off the deep end…Palin too, she had a good point every once and awhile before, but when the tea party came alive…its just downhill
Glenn Beck’s response today on his radio show was that Mr. Zakaria was lying and taking things out of context. He went on to say that Mr. Zakaria called him out on a “technicality”, in this case the dictionary definition of “terrorist”. Unfortunately, his website doesn’t have his transcript yet. It was very humorous.
Yeah, a “technicality”. Like, technically, Beck is a lying bag of self-righteous and self-pitying crap?
I’d say that technically you hit the nail square on the head, IK.
No U…I became aware of and listened to Beck probably around the time he left CNN. I’ve never heard anything useful or meaningful leave his mouth in that time. When did you like Beck and why??
Don’t hold back now IK, let it all out!
Have you ever read Harry Frankfurt’s book “Bullshit”? He is a philosopher who wrote this tiny little book after he retired. I highly recommend it and it is a very short (the book is only 4X6 written double spaced in 12 point font) and very readable. He argues that there is an important difference between the liar and the bullshitter. The key difference is that the liar actually does care about the truth that he is attempting to deceive you about. “A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it.” The bullshitter, on the other hand, does not care about the truth at all. He only cares about the outcome of his intentional deceptions. “[The bullshitter] does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” He concludes that bullshitters are in fact more dangerous than liars because of this sociopathic (my term, not his) element to the intent behind the deception.
On this basis, I believe that Beck is a bullshitter. He does not seem to care whether there are facts or whether something is even knowable. He is just saying bullshit to give some kind of impression in the pursuit of profit and maybe ego. Maybe he was not hugged enough as a child.
PatriotSgt, note that I was not actually saying that Beck is a lying bag of self-righteous and self-pitying crap, I was just using that phrase as an example of a “technicality” in the same way that Beck was using it.
I have plausible deniability.
IK, Have you ever considered politics or working for the gov? LOL
Starluna, right on with the bullshit!
Get the boots out everyone cause its deep. What are you guys doing watching Beck. I don’t even watch Beck, he and Hannity give me a headache like Olberman and Matthews do. They’re polar twins to each other. See, thats how these idiots keep their ratings up. People who agree with them and the people who disagree all tune in and they laugh all the way to the bank. They probably play golf together and give each other high fives.
IK, you don’t get deniability, your news organization isn’t politically biased enough.
PatriotSgt, Let’s not get started with the false equivalence again. Olbermann and Matthews and Beck and Hannity may all give you headaches, but not everything that seems similar is.
There is a very significant difference between Olbermann and Hannity, and the distinction is not entirely unrelated to Frankfurter’s concept of Bullshit. Namely, Olbermann’s deeply held views are supported by evidence, while Hannity is quite happy to support his views by (equally deeply held) faith.
I wager that any sensible measure of belief based of evidence versus belief based on faith will show that Fox News has a preponderance of the latter.
PS: I can’t stand Matthews either, but even his style is not similar to Beck of Hannity…
I mostly agree with you Dan, but I believe Matthews/Olberman do some one sided rants and ignore the other half of the argument to make their point.
What I’d really enjoy is seeing the 4 of them locked in a room with 3 chairs and food for one and kept there until they could agree that none of them has any business calling themselves reporters or journalists. To get out they’d need to be able to say 5 positive things about each of their opposites. Now that would be a reality show I’d watch. 🙂
Dan – I don’t know that Olbermann’s views are entirely based on evidence. I would argue that such a thing isn’t even possible. The meaning of facts can only be made through interpretations based on values.
The problem for me is because the means by which all four men get their message out is very similar, it is difficult to determine whether their views are bullshit, elaborate intentional deception, or are based on facts and values.
Starluna, I would go one step further: the separation of “fact”, “opinion”, “value” is all non-existent. Even so-called facts are based on interpretation.
Two points:
1. It’s not so much if Olbermann gets his evidence right all the time, or if he has all the necessary evidence for every conclusion. (Very rare that anyone should fully achieve that to everyone’s satisfaction.) It’s that he cares about the evidence. (Hence the tangential reference to “On Bullshit”.) I’m sure Hannity would say he does too. I simply wager there’s significantly less. One simple measure would be to count the number of self-contradictions. I my view, self-consistency is a virtue on a similar footing to rationality and evidence-based argument.
2. PatriotSgt, I agree that Olbermann does polemicise frequently. As a scientist, I find polemic to be unhelpful and irritating. But I concede that in the greater public discourse there are occasional spaces for the polemic style, as long as it is clearly labelled.
Dan – I think this is where style and substance get mixed up. Olbermann’s polemic style does not facilitate assessment of evidence by viewers. ThoughtDancer had a post on this recently in her blog about how all of the elements of rhetoric can either help or hurt the transmission of the message. And while I would agree that a little less “neutrality” can be a welcome thing, if it is the normal style of someone who puts himself out to be a newsman, it makes me skeptical about the content of the message.
Remember that one of the characteristics of bullshit isn’t just that the bullshitter doesn’t care about facts and will make stuff up. It is also that they will cherrypick their evidence to meet their own needs. For what it’s worth, to the extent that PolitiFact’s assessments are more or less accurate, in the seven statements made by Olbermann that they have evaluated, only two (29%) have been found to be mostly true. Three (43%) were half true and 2 (29%) were false.
This contrasts to Beck’s 47% False and Pants on Fire assessments, but that only goes to show what we all know: Beck is full of shit.