Yes, Trump viewed #Eclipse2017 without glasses. 'Don't look,' an aide shouted

Are you sure I can stare directly at the eclipse without protection, Melania?

Yes dear, that’s what Fox News said.
…(in the background puts finishing touches on mannequin shaped like herself)

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This sort of stupid shit is like catnip for authoritarian fuckwits.

Wow, tough guy.

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Julian Assange, too.

https://twitter.com/simonlinsley/status/899776916311257088

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Its probably better on the retina if you are short sighted and not wearing glasses, so the image of the sun is bigger and cooler.

I am guessing that the brain uses the standard NASA technique of having a camera face a TV monitor and turning the monitor upside down.

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The man was just confused, he though a total eclipse of the sun was when the sun travels between the Earth and the Moon. He’s looked out and saw that it was still the same distance away, so why not look directly into it!

We have a winner!

Please, please, please, somebody tell him in no unclear terms that he should never, ever throw a plugged radio into his bathtub while having a bath.

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Careful! Is it rat poison, or is it fuel for his laser eyes?

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Thank God Assange is an idiot, because his lies were much more subtle for a long time.

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I had to fact check this, it didn’t even seem possible.

From Huffington Post:

Carlson was likely joking, but given his history of praising Trump, the humor ― if indeed that’s what he was going for ― was a little tough to spot.

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“Your honor, there is no way President Trump could have committed this murder. It would have taken someone far stronger and smarter to pull this off.”

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This could be the answer to AGW denial.
But be sure to find someone unqualified in toxicology - like Dyson - to tell people that the “science isn’t settled” on arsenic, and someone to produce a list of people who ate arsenic and didn’t die, choosing a time period in which nobody died of arsenic poisoning.
Now wait.
Pretty soon, no AGW denier problem (except of course the ones who are just paid shills…but they will no longer have sheep to preach to.)

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Despite some of the comments below that, Assange has never been left wing. He’s a “libertarian” of the sort that think white men have special rights.

And material goods.
Republicans as a cargo cult. Perhaps those South Sea islanders weren’t so funny after all.

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Tucker Carlson is just a sycophant that says whatever he can to curry favor with whatever makes him money. He’s a racist when he needs to be, he unilaterally praises Trump to curry favor since the actual news portion of Fox News is constantly being called fake news by the GOP base, and he sucks up to staunchly anti-Democrat progressive figures when it suits. I mean five weeks ago was the gypsy story, the next week he was on the Intercepted podcast, last week he defended slavery, and this week he’s implying Trump showed all those cucks what’s what by not wearing glasses while staring at the sun. It’s all over the place.

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I think the whole issue of whether he was joking is sort of a proxy battle papering over what you are saying. If we believe there is an underlying reality where things are real and that our mental models in some way give us information about that reality, we have to believe that in that reality, the conglomeration of things (whatever that may be) that we refer to as “Tucker Carlson” is an ass-kissing idiot who could be easily replaced by a slime mold colony with a dollop of oatmeal solution placed over a sticker that says, “Trump is good.”

But clearly media outlets don’t feel they can report that fact, so instead they have to report that Tucker Carlson said something without being about to say why he said it. Tucker Carlson’s actions are created by the current media zeitgeist that says we have to pretend that underlying reality is an ultimate mystery that we can’t even form probable conclusions about; that the cat is not just dead and alive, but dead and alive with equal probability.

So while some report that it was a joke and others take it as not a joke - both ultimately concluding nothing that anyone can stand behind - the writer for the Huffington Post goes about as far as a mainstream media outlet can go in asking, “What can we learn if we don’t know whether this is a joke or not?”

It’s an underlying, objective fact that no one should care what Tucker Carlson has to say. I think the joke-not-a-joke question is our struggle to resolve that with the fact that by all appearances, and quite inexplicably, people do care what Tucker Carlson has to say.

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I might just be young feeling this way, but when I was growing up I never got the impression that editorials had this monolithic weight they do now. It seems like between how to make money as a journalist, how a media organization makes money, and the warm blanket of wanted to read what we like opinion pieces with very soft sourcing has displaced news almost entirely. I mean, at one point people made fun of sports broadcasting but in 2017 nearly all media is treated with the same level of fanaticism that is light on any sort of grounding.

I mean, there is basically no difference in presentation between Tucker Carlson and someone like Jim Rome.

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It’s quite possible that Tucker Carlson doesn’t even rise to the journalistic level of sports colour commentary.

If Jim Rome’s favoured team loses 4-5, he doesn’t pretend they won 13-0.

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Even if it was a joke (and the link I provided includes the video so you can judge for yourself), how many of his viewers took it as a joke? For that matter, how many people saw trump do it and will decide to give it a try (perhaps with a normal sun?) and end up injuring themselves? At best both of them were reckless.

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