A feud on Twitter highlights the perils of engaging on the platform and a growing tension among researchers and medical professionals.
Man, Joe Rogan had his chance to be a unifying voice for America 3.5-4 years ago, but that fuck decided to take $$$ instead and now spouts non-stop garbage nonsense like this.
Rogan’s been a dickhead for decades. Here he is appearing on Alex Jone’s show Infowars back in 2010. According to Alex Jones, him and Rogan are great buddies and talk/text all the time.
Note, the podcast I linked is called KnowledgeFight and is two comedian types covering Infowars. Just letting you know if you listen to that you won’t be exposed to a straight feed of Infowars nonsense, you’ll have the filter of two smart and funny guys giving context and breaking things down in between clips.
It’d be really interesting to see what he’d be talking about if the Corona pandemic never happened.
Anyone mind summarizing what this is about?
I dont feel like falling for clickbait
Rogan had RFKjr on his show spouting anti-vax nonsense for three hours, they were called out by a scientist involved with developing COVID vaccines, and then they piled on when said scientist refused to “debate” RFKjr on the podcast.
What’s funny is RFK jr admitted multiple times he didn’t understand fuckall about the conspiracies he was spouting, but for some reason they think it would be a good idea for him to debate ANYONE about vaccines lmao
They think it would be a good idea because they aren’t interested in actual debate so much as performance and sound-bites to drive advertising revenue - to quote Sartre’s point that increasingly applies in so many situations these days:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
I loath the idea of debating conspiracy theorists, it give them a platform and lends legitimacy to their ideas. Daniel Dennett said it right that these people are playing tennis without the net. No logic or reasoning will matter nor proofs of any kind, they aren’t motivated by good faith discovery and discussions.
tl;dr
Joe Rogan hosted RFKjr on his show, vaccine researcher Peter Hotez replied to the post on Twitter with the old article titled “Spotify is no longer even trying to staunch the flow on Joe Rogans vaccine misinformation” while commenting that all Joe does is “spread nonsense”.
This prompted Joe to offer Hotez a large sum of money donated to his charity of choice, as a reward for publicly debating RFKjr on Joe’s show, with no time limit. Hotez said he would go on the show, but that a debate with RFKjr would not be productive.
A twitter argument followed involving Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and RFKjr on the topic of whether Hotez has an obligation or not to accept the debate with RFKjr.
Why it’s a story: Things came to a head with Hotez being harassed outside of his home by Rogan fans. The individuals demanding that Hotez debate RFKjr recorded Hotez entering his home as they attempted to persuade him. Here’s a time stamped link to a news story that shows the video the harassment accused posted https://youtu.be/Okd-f-0yD58?t=18
Jesus christ what an utterly toxic community JRE is. I always knew it, what with the way the guy enthusiastically platforms the likes of Peterson, but still, yuck.
There’s definitely a divide in his fans. There are the old Opie & Anthony people who mostly just listened for comedy. The pandemic changed a lot, Rogan started with his vaccine stuff and that attracted a lot of MAGA types.
Comedy in general has taken a right-wing shift. During the COVID lockdowns touring comedians could only perform in areas that didn’t have extreme restrictions, now comedians like Bill Burr and Tom Segura are incredibly popular with conservatives. I saw Bill a couple of years ago and he was making jokes about about conservatives and a large section of the crowd was unironically agreeing with his dumb caricatures.
Being a scientist and being a debater are different skill sets. In science debate is done via peer review and papers and in the case of medicine by doing trials.
RJK and Rogan are fucking morons and the only way to debate them would be to continually call them evil stupid fucks because that’s what they are. Anything else is going to allow them to edit your comments to make them look like to their stupid evil audience.
If you subscribe to Spotify, your money contributes to this behavior.
You’re right. Where should I go instead? I’m on Android so I can’t do Apple music.
A YouTube music subscription also gets you YouTube Premium. Granted, you might just use ad blockers for the primary benefit of Premium, but if you’re going to pay for one thing you can technically get for free, that same purchase might as well get you something else that’s free.
This 100%. I use YouTube Music and have a premium subscription and it’s fantastic. Even without premium it’s still great.
Apple Music exists on Android and is very good. Supports all sorts of Android specific features. It’s a good citizen of the platform.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.android.music&pli=1
My solution is Newpipe. It is an alternative YouTube front end you can download via F-Droid that lets you access YouTube, peer tune and Bandcamp without ads. It isn’t as good as YouTube music especially since you don’t actually have an account, but you can still make local playlists and download music.
I left Spotify a couple years ago because of Rogan’s anti-vax bullshit. This is not new.
You mean about the time he spoke about strengthening immune systems and not being worries about Covid then getting it and throwing 15k worth of treatment on himself right away? Yeah. I dropped his show too.
Why would you ever pick it up?
I’ve never heard anything from this dipshit because he was pretty obviously a dipshit years ago and nothing has changed.
Some interviews were interesting, (Neil Degras Tyson, Elon Musk, several other comedians and actors that I found interesting). He was always willing to call BS on guests will some quick Googling. He did get things wrong but was willing to own up to it. Unfortunately once he hit Spotify level and doubled down on his expertise on the human physical body, he no longer listened to experts, (carnivor diet, Covid…)
This is what surprises me. His show, even in the early days, was never worth sticking around for. Rogan tried to be an actor long ago, had a whiff of success and then it fizzled out because he sucks. Then he tried to be a comedian, and that also had a whiff of success but fizzled out because he sucks. So he tried being a reality show host, got some traction, then failed out of that as well. His podcast is just his last attempt to be relevant and famous. And because he failed at the others he’s desperate enough for attention to do this kind of content with bigots and science deniers. He’s opportunistic trash.
hey its one of those titles I hate. And everyone thinks it will take so long to be like reddit was.