i'm not a fan of deplatforming either but it was pretty cool when Obama deplatformed bin Laden

well what's really important to keep in mind is that deplatforming isn't recent and doesn't only happen to neo nazis, and when it has happened in the past it's often been a "suggestion" from the United States government.

But it's great how many people have suddenly developed an opinion about how bad this is ever since it's started happening to conservatives.

By the way, just to make this perfectly clear, I think deplatforming is fantastic. Not the censorship part, but the fact that progressives have finally realized they can use protests and boycotts to drive a wedge between property owners and the voting bootlickers who used to support them. When censoring the right wing becomes a profit-maximizing strategy, you're gonna end up with a lot of left-wing and right-wing voters on the same side of the "private property" problem.

oof

Except it's not really a "private property" problem, is it? These social media companies are publicly traded companies subsidized by governments and publicly traded corporations. Protests and boycotts might hurt a private company but the fear of them virtually paralyze public entities. Of course socialism will solve the problem though.

Publicly traded means there are no restrictions on stock ownership. They are still private property.

They sure AF are subsidized by governments. I don’t know what you mean by subsidized by other corporations. Are you maybe referring to economic rents? Or do you just mean that other companies do business with them?

Protests and boycotts will sway any business that seeks to maximize its profit. This happens whether the business is a publicly traded corporation or a privately traded one.

I do not consider this a “the problem”. The public is using its right to free speech to lobby companies that are doing unpopular things, or using their right of voluntary association to boycott them. The companies are doing the same, to decide whether to comply or not. This scenario will happen whenever people have freedom, whether you like it or not. As far as I’m concerned this is free speech and a market economy working correctly. If you don’t like it, all it means is that you don’t like free speech or markets as much as you think.

Socialism will not prevent this. Fascist or Stalinist dictatorships sure would, though!

Pretty effin’ typical that you think America has a slice of socialism just because you don’t like what they’re doing, gotta be honest.

A trans friend of mine really hates him because he's said/has had guests who said anti trans rights things. I haven't yet looked into it but possibly a bad thing?

Let's put it this way. Can you imagine an old school media outlet allowing someone like Alex Jones spout off for three hours? Rogan's style is to let his guests say whatever they want. It's a different format, for sure. And yeah, it gives shady people a voice, but I'd argue that it's not Joe Rogan per se that gave them that voice, but the Internet. Basically, if Rogan banned them, the niche he currently occupies would be filled by someone even scarier.

In some ways I see him kind of like the Youtube equivalent of Howard Stern. And yeah, Howard Stern of course had his own troubles even being allowed to stay on the air under the rules of old media.

There are about a billion things I'd investigate before figuring out whether Joe Rogan is social justice compatible, so maybe he's fine too. I'm just forwarding what I've heard from someone who has a horse in the race.

I don't think he's "social justice compatible", because I take that to mean "intolerant of intolerance". If Rogan was half as intolerant as the social justice left would like him to be of his guests and their many horrid ideas, his show would have basically no audience.

The real beauty of Rogan is that he goes along with his guests just enough to get them talking, which is often hilarious and damning at once. In fact I've done the same thing in real life with friends who I detected to have very sketchy political beliefs, and whoa boy do you find out a lot about people's true beliefs once you egg them on and let them talk in private.

So you're tolerant of your friend's intolerance of intolerance.

I suppose I am tolerant of your tolerance for intolerance of intolerance.

I mean, afaik Rogan has never hosted an avowed neo-Nazi, right? Why exclude them from the platform? There's gotta be a line somewhere. People are just squabbling about where exactly the line should be drawn.

Am I tolerant of my what now?

He did interview Gavin McInnes? Don’t know if he’s technically a neo-Nazi.

Listen to the episode he did with Adam Conover from Adam Ruins Everything. They have a discussion where one might understand (or construe) Rogan to be anti-trans. Adam effectively repeats a bunch of liberal pieties and says, “I haven’t looked into it but I expect the science would back me up,” which is especially ironic because he spent most of the episode talking about how he likes counter-intuitive ideas that defy conventional wisdom. Rogan has obviously read and thought about the issue a lot, but I have no idea his point of view is at all accurate. But it’s still a place where he takes a pretty clear stance on an issue.

I find Rogan to be well informed about a surprisingly wide array of issues, especially in light of how much he portrays himself as a meat head.

People who think the line ought to be drawn far, far closer than hosting outright neo-Nazis. The 'censor happy', de-platforming left.

As much as I am ambivalent about Joe Rogan's show, I have an active distaste for people who want use their harebrained social theories to justify their authoritarian ideology in order to ostracize their opposition into political irrelevance the moment they detect a linguistic microaggression.

I think he's playing dumb because it is disarming. That's how you get people to talk, and also to be likable yourself. I enjoy his show myself, but I don't really listen very much anymore because there is just too much stupid **** said that goes unchecked.

ok now tell us how you feel about Christian groups pressuring MasterCard to deplatform porn workers.

The right-wing spent 120+ years deplatforming leftists and marginalized people using exactly the same strategies, but boy oh boy does that censorship happy left make me madddddd!!!

I imagine I'd hate them even more. Not only does the right base its ideologies on totally immoral and unjustified sympathies, but they seem to be waaaay better at cynically spreading propaganda than the left (corporate backing?).

Incidentally according to David Berman, his father was one of the architects of the modern-day right wing smear campaign.

Whataboutism.

Actually, when the left tries to "de-platform" people, it doesn't really strike me as coercive. Rather than body slamming their opposition with Machiavellian plans and cynical propaganda, they gently pepper them in scathing rhetorical fortresses in New York Times editorials. Which, uh, nobody but they themselves read anyway. Hmm

What is this, 2015? We're still belaboring this conversation about censorship and pretending the left has a particular issue with it that the right doesn't?

Also, the left reads Jacobin, not the NYT.

I like how I had a friend who suggested not listening to the podcast for reasons, so I could voluntarily select whether to listen to Rogan. At no point did anyone talk about making others not watch Rogan, trying to shut him down, but someone hears someone discuss voluntarily consuming media and the conversation turns to the 'totalitarian left'.

Like I’ve already said in this thread:

People are free to ***** at companies for doing things they dislike.
People are free to take their business elsewhere.
Companies are free to decide whether or not to comply.
You are free to ***** at companies that comply.
You are free to take your business elsewhere.

Are you a progressive? Yes? Then you’d better get ok with this, because this is what your opponents do and unlike you nose-in-the-air free speech liberal fundamentalists they do not have any problem doing it, and they have even less of a problem hypocritically smearing you for doing what they’ve already done.

Don’t like it? Figure out which freedoms you don’t want anymore, and report back.

I am not saying this as someone who is happy with right-wing speech being suppressed. I am saying this as someone who lives in actual reality (a place some people have apparently abstracted beyond recognition). This is how speech and markets work and this is how real people have always used them.

“Protesting businesses that work with groups you dislike is wrong”

~=

“Corporations serve no social goal beyond maximizing profit, so it is morally wrong for you to ask them to satisfy other goals”

~=

liberal fundamentalism.

Liberal political survival is contingent upon their ongoing appropriation of the left, so it’s petty unsurprising that liberals would be more scandalized by ~left wing censorship~ via this channel than the right wing doing the same. Gotta get those pesky back benchers back in line.

Wesley Yang was tweeted some insightful things about Rogan’s role in the culture and why he’s so appealing to his audience. Yang points out, despite the fact that Rogan is described as “alternative” media, he has a larger audience than most cable news shows and most late night talks shows. But yeah I Rogan playa dumb as an interviewing tactic, but I think it’s also a way of enticing a mostly male (and even bro-y) audience that would generally be turned off by sincere attempts at engaging anything intellectually.

I mean... maybe the fact that you believe liberals are bad at propaganda and the right is good at it, despite the fact that it’s so easy to detect right-wing propaganda, is itself a result of liberal propaganda, which speaks to its effectiveness.

I don’t think much of most of Rogans guests, and as a consequence I haven’t seen many of his interviews. What I’ll give him is that he does seem very good at getting people talking. I don’t know what he believes and I’m not sure how confident I am in Rogans audience to realize his guests are being left to incriminate themselves versus Rogan supporting that position.

Hey man when conservatives ruin Star Wars or The Joker then maybe I’ll tolerate ur centrist bothsideism but until then the problem is clearly on the left OKAY?

Now excuse me I have to go listen to Frank Zappa

I guess I’ve listened to enough Rogan to be surprised that so many people say that he doesn’t appear to have positions. Like, sometimes he goes on unprovoked rants about college students, about gender issues, about the nature of debates on race, about. censorship... about whatever knee jerk issues that often vex the right these days.

He often emphasizes that he’s on the left and that he doesn’t like Trump. I think a lot of people don’t take him at his word, but if you listen to him enough I think that’s kind of uncharitable, I think there are a lot of people who have some conservative instincts when it comes to culture war stuff but would never think of not voting Democrat, and he’s one of those people.

I have listened to a lot of Rogan usually so that I can talk to someone about the supposedly mind blowingly deep info they have gleaned from it. He is on the left the same way Elon Musk is a socialist. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1008013111058526209?lang=en

Sorry, by "left" I meant "progressives steeped in identity politics". A group of people who I imagine don't have enough of an understanding of political economy to read Jacobin.

Edit: in other words I was speaking Americanese where left = (social) liberal / progressive.

The really funny thing about this is when the right complains about how they can't simply take their business elsewhere when its an America-loving corporation like Google / Youtube that has a monopoly over their free speech rights... whoops!

For the record (skip to the two minute mark if you're impatient, although he has some... ugh, interesting things to say about Alex Jones before that), Rogan sees himself as not at all right wing.



Edit: but, ugh, on the other hand, when I searched for that on Youtube, another clip which also came up was one from freaking Jordan Peterson, who also (apparently) sees himself as not right wing. Heh

haha wtf. I wonder what Elon Musk thinks about taxes. What does he mean by socialist if I am correct to guess that he doesn't want to be taxed to high heaven? Or have I misread the socialist position on taxation of the ultra-wealthy?

Exactly. So here we are again: if you want to stop this, who is going to give up which freedom? I happen to have some specific ideas but, as Eversor says, “socialist gonna socialist”.



I’m not watching that clip.

According to his tweets, Elon Musk believes in a socialism that doesn’t transfer wealth from the most productive to the least, a socialism that seeks the best for all people. I agree with him absolutely. It is vital for the good of all that the wealth of the workers no longer be transferred to parasite capitalists like Elon Musk.

For the record, then:
[quote=Joe Rogan]
...so, anybody listening to this: if you're saying this, I am NOT right at all, so stop saying that. It's silly,
it's foolish; I've interviewed right-wing people. I am 100% left-wing... the only thing that stops me from... the
only things that I disagree with about left-wing people is: support for the military, support for police,
and the Second Amendment. That's probably it. Everything else, across the board, I lean way left; in terms of
like... Bernie Sanders made a ton of sense to me, and I would 100% vote for him. Tulsi Gabbard is my favorite. I
mean, I'm not I'm not a right wing person, so this nonsense, like so many people were saying that you know, the
Bernie Sanders spent this time on a right wing podcast...
[/quote]

Atlas is shrugging. It just turns out Atlas is the collective majority of American workers.