What’s Tucker Carlson’s complaint?
In a March interview with The Washington Post, Dunn said he was called the n-word more than a dozen times that day in January. Black police officers, he said, “were fighting a different fight” as a throng of Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol grounds and building — some violently attacking police officers standing in their way.
Dunn will be one of the first witnesses to testify next week before a special committee tasked with investigating the insurrection. But Fox News host Tucker Carlson, during his Wednesday night broadcast, cast doubt on the officer’s ability to testify objectively.
Ah yes, and by the same token an assault victim can’t testify objectively, a victim of rape can’t testify objectively, a victim of burglary can’t testify objectively, and so on.
“Dunn will pretend to speak for the country’s law enforcement community, but it turns out Dunn has very little in common with your average cop,” Carlson said. “Dunn is an angry left-wing political activist.”
So what Tucker Carlson is saying here is that your average cop, your normal cop, is a racist. Your average cop apparently has no objection to violent armed insurrectionists shouting “nigger” as they try to overturn an election. I’m not sure your average cop is going to be as thrilled with that picture of them as Carlson thinks.
Comments
9 responses to “Very little in common with your average cop”
” a victim of rape can’t testify objectively,”
I’m reminded of how a veteran Washington Post reporter was told she couldn’t cover sexual assault stories because she had been assaulted herself in the past.
But some will, surely. How many? No way to know.
There were many who suggested that there should be no black people on the Chauvin jury because they would be biased against Chauvin.
#3, it was probably the same people who thought there shouldn’t be any black people on the OJ jury because they would be biased for him.
What they really mean is there shouldn’t be black people allowed anywhere except cleaning and cooking for white people.
If they truly want someone objective, maybe they should get only witnesses who weren’t there, who didn’t watch it on TV or hear it on the radio, and who don’t know what the hell the violent insurrection on January 6 was. That would be useful…
When they say “he isn’t objective”, they usually mean “he doesn’t agree with me”. Single, simple decoder ring we can use with the alt-right, the trans lobby, and Christians.
Amazing, Tucker Carlson and the ACAB crowd actually agree on something for once…
As far as objectivity goes, the video by NBC in the previous post shows Dunn’s point of view clearly. He looks very objective to me, very credible, and very serious about his job. Carlson is a propagandist clown in an air conditioned studio with makeup, hair artists, and a cushy paycheck from spouting his partisan bullshit. Vilifying Dunn as a left wing extremist is as absurd as saying the capitol mob was a left wing antifa group, which they also claimed.
T. Greg Doucette* has a second, much less used twitter account and associated podcast – @fsckemall. It focuses on the intersection between policing and politics. The pinned tweet is relevant here, specifically Rule 5.
I include the ‘T.’ because there is a really well know (apparently) Canadian body builder called Greg Doucette – T. Greg is constantly getting twitter DM’s and email intended for ‘Coach Greg’.
@iknklast
I think the thinking (as far as it goes) is slightly different here: The default person is a white, affluent male.
Since this is the default, a white affluent male is like a tabula rasa, he has no biases, interests or agenda per se. He will of course have defining characteristics (like his occupation, his political interest etc), but none of these are inherent to him being a white affluent male.
Any other person has as their first defining characteristic whatever it is they deviate from the default. So a woman is first and foremost a woman (and then may have *secondary* characteristics beyond that); a black person is black etc. Since these are now their defining characteristics, they will obviously directly affect the way these people think and behave and make them inherently biased in a way the default person is not.
Here is a trivial example (in German) I once stumbled upon: The Wikipedia description of the four main characters in the child novel series “TKKG” (the English version is better in that regard).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TKKG#Handlung_und_Figuren
Each character description starts with the main defining characteristic. The three boys are described with a main characteristic first – “the leader”, “the computer”, “the overweight one”. The one girl is described as “…is the only girl in the group”.
Humans have a way to characterize characters by a main defining characteristic and a minor addition/modification. (I once attended a talk by a scientist who researched the commonality of this structure in popular psychotests like you might find in glamour magazines and in fantasy role-playing games.) So a male, white, affluent person can be “the smart tailor” or “the compassionate politician” etc., but if you belong to a non-default group, you will not even be “the black tailor”, “the female politician”, but “The black, who is a tailor”, “The woman, who is a politician” etc.
The deviation from the default always is the first and most defining characteristic, and that (probably often even unconscious, but still sexist and racist) belief is why people tend to see women, PoC, the poor etc as inherently biased in a way that the default person is not.
Yessssssss. This is one reason I’m so prickly about default male.