Sorry to nitpick your post but I don't think any of O'Reilly's fans are capable of wondering. If they were, they wouldn't be O'Reilly fans. They "know" why things are bad. Because the Kenyan Muslim wants to destroy America. Like, how many of them blame Obama for hurricane Katrina?

It's worse for the younger people. BillO's fans can take solace that they'll be dead soon. But the youngs have to live through a Trump administration and the aftermath.

My point is: just like liberals believe in ultimately fictitious social norms and standards like "we don't tolerate racism" and "sexual harassment is bad" only to have those ultimately undermined by the incentives created by market transactions, so to do conservatives and white populist types who watch O'Reilly harbor the same sorts of fictions (things like our business overlords will ultimately put American workers first, the American white working and middle class are super competitive globally and laissez faire capitalism rolling back of protectionist schemes and organized labor will ultimately serve their interests, even simple prosaic notions of patriotism informing and motivating their politicians). Those fictions are being undermined by the same forces of global capital.

Obviously O'Reilly fans will get the causes hilariously wrong and blame a whole host of scapegoats or develop a set of related cultural grievances. I'm not praising their innate wisdom, only that their feelings are real.

So my little quip there is just to say O'Reilly sits in the middle of a highly transient, fast moving world buttressed by modern market capitalism. The whole incident is incredibly instructive. In Bill O'Reilly alone, we see the proof of the glacial pace at which social norms have truly evolved and the very, very limited ways consumers can really control negative externalities through their collective behavior (e.g., it's actually quite OK to be a racist hater on TV and sexually harass your staff; so long as it fits a market demand, collective moral standards will be degraded, and the market will have to really lean on third-party business partners to effect change).

But his very existence , the core of his appeal is only explainable through the way a separate set of norms and fictions have been quickly set aside, over a few decades, entirely visible during the lifetimes of much of the O'Reilly audience. And much of the causation lays at the feet of capitalism, or minimally how we trade and how we produce: migration patterns that see lots of brown people arriving in the US to chase capital and wealth unavailable to them where they came from, global firms and corporations who pulled up shop from one-industry towns and left them deprived of wealth and economic activity that gave their lives meaning and replaced it with nothing, that swapped out demands in American labor from manufacturing to technology and knowledge and services, and left a lot of these people as functionally useless.

This is of course a critique of capitalism but I think even if you disagree with my framing about the benefits and harms, I maintain the ultimate story is factual and almost is not debatable: that is, here we have something highly non-intuitive that merits an explanation -- the meteoric rise of a buffoon who yells garbage at a camera into a famous multi-millionaire who knowingly more or less abused the people around him for a very long time before he was ultimately undone by seemingly arbitrarily-timed pressure from advertisers. All I'm saying is that the explanation is fundamentally a story about the nature of modern capitalism and all of the 'surprises' or unexpected parts of the story ("wait, what is this guy's appeal? why is he a rich entertainer? why did he get so much institutional backing for so long despite the fact he was a known sexual predator? why his downfall, now?") have their causes there, about how incentives are structured and what really informs human behavior in this context.

Really good post DVaut.

To be clear, I'm not surprised by much these days. I know why BillO and Rush make their millions for being crazy. It's definitely capitalism.

But why do we still have capitalism then? I think it's because of liberal complacency. We just sat back and laughed at Hannity for pushing birtherism every night because we were too busy enjoying our first black president and a supermajority and sippin on our lattes while we debated how quickly we'd push through single payer. Maybe we should've called Hannity a traitor to the country for increasing the chances of an Obama assassination or something. Maybe that would've gotten the attention of the advertisers.

Like how many ****ing decades are we gonna debate trickle down economics? When someone tells a liberal that they think a flat tax is fair, the liberal always says, "I can see why you'd think that, but blah blah blah 40 minute explanation". Why not just call them a ****ing moron for believing in fairy tales?

I like to think that we're moving away from complacency, and that's ultimately why O'Reilly got canned for doing what we've all known for a long time. We're all so pissed off about Trump that we needed to punch something, and O'Reilly was just standing right there asking for it.

Maybe FOX should have put out a memo. Or something.



https://twitter.com/bi_politics/stat...52658550079488

The context though:

This has been pointed out ad nauseum, just so many times. But you have to appreciate just the blatant concern trolling idiocy that is basically the go-to tool. "OH lol the left says they respect women but they boo them! P.S. this dame looks like she's fellating a microphone, me like that, yeah baby." But most notably is how poor the effort is, like this is just so lazy.

As always there's so much to unpack here but I think most notable is how Jesse Wtters et al often give you a totally unfiltered view into their mind. On national TV. The first sentence is basically on script and what he's paid to do, which is just be an idiot concern troll. That's the show. It's dumb but whatever, it's folk art, I get it. It's the second sentence where the illusion goes away and the circus master decides having a lion balance on a ball is boring and he's just gonna have a cigarette and admit the animal is just conditioned to do this and his whip doesn't do anything anyway, it's just a prop, lol these animals are stupid.

I mean, he has like three thoughts here as you transition from showman to guy just thinking out loud about things:

1. "the left are hypocrites because they booed a woman, which is NOT respectful"
2. "come to think of it, I don't really know anything"
3. "what I really like is blowjobs lol mmmm"

Like I've remarked how what is REALLY remarkable about the right-wing media entertainment complex is the erosion of kayfabe in the show -- kayfabe being the sort of staged events or scripts portended to be real (e.g., Watters prattling on about the HYPOCRITE LEFT who pretend to champion women while BOOING THEM, as if Watters is really the champion of respecting women or is really aghast poor Ivanka would be booed). He literally gives up and just starts openly fantasizing about Ivanka giving oral to a microphone. HE IS NOT EVEN TRYING.

Not the first time he has done something dumb either. Hell, he had an entire segment full of dumb **** on The O'Reilly Factor.



I honestly can't believe that video is still on FNC's YT page.

What's irritating is the way CNN and the center-left MSM have painted Ivanka as the poster child for Successful Empowered Millenial Businesswomen or whatever. Like there was this liberal fantasy that she's whispering to Donald behind the scenes and telling him to not hate the gays so much. I mean, just look at that Chris Cilizza thinkpiece the other day.

Ivanka is just another Donald Trump Jr. except she designs handbags instead of shooting animals on Safari. The Euros have the appropriate response, which is to just heckle her when she's defending Trump's bull****.

Hahaha it's funny cuz the microphone is shaped like a dick! Whooo hooo Knee slapper.

Wonder where Tiffany has been in all of this.

Maybe she's the only smart one and is distancing herself from the family trainwreck.

Billy O'Blue Balls will find another outlet for sexual harassment. He has too much of a fanbase to go into seclusion. Plus he has nobody to sexually harass if he retires.

Thing is, the first sentence on its own is pretty much in line with how the media are reporting this. At least when Jared was picked to solve the Middle East crisis there was some discussion about whether some Trump in-law was remotely qualified for the job. Here we've got this embarrassing spectacle of a trust fund kid on a stage Trumpsplaining to Angela Freaking Merkel and other highly successful women about women's empowerment and how her daddy groping women is really nbd. The response from the media ranges from CNN's "Why won't those mean Germans leave Ivanka alone!!!" to blowjob jokes from the Fox News crowd.

Man, WAAF if this kind of absurdity has become normalized. It's had to really blame Waters for not perfecting his heel act when the MSM is building his kayfabe for him. Why not just tell a few dick jokes and see if he can poke through the fourth wall a little.

I really don't blame Ivanka for that. She's just hitching her ride to the already there corporate feminist movement. The media never really asked Sheryl Sandburg why her version of feminism was to advocate for women's empowerment so long as it doesn't interfere with Facebook corporate interests along with a whole host of other ostensibly liberal women who advocate for a feminism but one that doesn't rock the boat too much. Over time even more corportized women like Ivanka found out they can just hop on and start feminist charities, advocate right wing policies that will favor upper class women disguised as aggressive advocacy for women and children, etc while never advocating so stronger feminist policies that might not be so conducive to upper class and corporate interests and get the halo effect of being called feminists. Ivanka is just the latest on the already moving train.

Sheryl Sandburg at least has some legit business credentials beyond using her daddy's name brand to sell jewelry at her daddy's hotels. A functioning press would ask why we're sending the president's daughter to a women's empowerment summit instead of a woman with actual business/political accomplishments.

My guess is Tiffany was either molested by Daddy or is so repulsed by him she can't be in the same room unless absolutely necessary. Maybe she walked in when the pee pee tape was being shot.

Tiffany Trump? But Ivanka as #1 sex object tho.

She's more in league with Melania then, right?

nice, that's nice

LOL.

You'd think Ivanka would be more repulsed given that Donald has not been subtle about wanting to **** her.

Repulsed? Have you seen her lap dances?

Ivanka probably loves the attention.

So she's a younger female version of her father.

No wonder why he wants to **** her.

Haha oh man, this is so true. He really is a f'ing psycho.

Former FOX woman who now works CNN saying Watters was just talking the locker room talk, like she imagines all guys do. He's actually a nice guy.

ETA given the last few posts maybe she has a point.



https://twitter.com/GeorgeTakei/stat...65161934626817

Daddy liked Tiffany when she was a baby.
She probably didn't fill enough for his taste.