Category: US politics

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Television versus Joe Rogan, and other topics

Spotify's dilemma: Censor Joe Rogan or call his podcast free speech? | National Post

 

This past week I spent a few days with friends at their cottage. They have a complete spectrum of broadcast television available, whereas I have not subscribed to cable for at least five years. During that time, I have cultivated my news and opinion sources by selecting twitter feeds, facebook friends, and youtube videos. I am not living in an outrage bubble. I see more of Joe Rogan and Douglas Murray, for instance, than talking heads. Even my favourite broadcaster, Tucker Carlson, is watched solely through the Intertubes. I have become accustomed to conversations on Triggernometry and other interview shows where questions are asked sincerely and answered comprehensively, where issues are engaged, and answers are open to debate rather than assumed to be false or true according to the Narrative – the tale the media are making up today for our consumption.

It was thus something of a shock to the system to watch reaction to the Speech From the Throne on CTV this week. I simply could not believe the rudeness of the chief Talking Head, Lisa Laflamme. Every question was a gotcha or a “when did you stop beating your wife?”. She made the current Finance Minister look good in that Chrystia Freeland answered hysterical questions with factual responses, and kept her cool throughout.

So naturally as Joe Rogan enters the world of broadcasting, he becomes the target of the hysterics and witch hunters of the MSM. The case in point this morning was a hit piece by Sadaf Ahsan, “Spotify’s dilemma: Censor Joe Rogan or call his podcast free speech?”

She writes:

“But here’s the thing: Rogan has long had a habit of spreading misinformation, sharing his own personal feelings and thoughts as facts, and he’s also a very big fan of conspiracy theories. It’s partly why he’s so popular for a very specific brand of fanboy, which Slate once generously described as “freethinkers who hate the left.”

Oh my goodness, how shocking! An opinion journalist who is sometimes wrong! And add to this the phony dilemma of whether Spotify’s staff has some role in censoring Joe Rogan, or Douglas Murray, or amy of the other thinkers who appear in Youtube. Apart from factual errors he is also accused of “transphobia” – the thought crime of insufficiently accepting that biological males are fmals when they declare themselves to be so.

Joe Rogan now draws viewership that competes seriously with entire cable TV networks.

This is from the article hyperlinked above.

  • “Joe probably gets 5-7 million views of full podcasts a day, which makes him far larger than any TV host.

  • Joe gets 200 million podcast views a month. CNN gets 330 million views a month, NBC and Fox are way bigger.

  • Factoring in Rogan clips, and media website views. Joe gets 400 million views a month. CNN 800 million, Fox 1.2 billion, 700 million for NBC. So Rogan is gigantic, but not bigger than the big media corporations. 1/2 of CNN though, and 2/3 of NBC. That’s insane.”

Other sources show cable networks drawing about 2-3 million viewers a month.( https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-network-viewership-usa/)

Our busy little thought controller Sadaf Ahsan writes:

“Relatively politically liberal, Rogan has supported Bernie Sanders (though recently shifted his support to President Donald Trump), is pro-choice and believes in more social spending for the working class, but he also regularly gives right-wing commentators the space to share their ideas and often questions issues of LGBT equality. So it’s not all that surprising Rogan is loved by so many and that, as a figure who perpetuates a kind of toxic masculinity – what with his penchant for hunting, MMA fighting, and heteronormative views – he has become a beloved figure particularly in conservative circles that largely thrive online.”

 

Joe Rogan is a centrist Democrat, a male, a focused martial arts combattant, and a political liberal who likes Trump (sort of). He sounds like a quite typical American male of his generation, and he and millions more like him will secure Trump’s next term as President.

Rebel Yell rightly chides me for my naivety, in that I still think there might be some truth occasionally permitted in the MSM. Maybe there is, but the economics of slime hurling obviously provide more eyeballs than sobriety. The economic incentives of the MSM are skewed towards lies and outrage. Stay away from them.

 

 

Four years ago

 

 

 

The media have not changed. They have been against Trump since he announced his candidacy. I took this photograph on October 19, 2016. The Atlantic says “don’t vote for Trump” in the upper right corner. The New Yorker says “last chance to train Trump”. Time said “Total Meltdown”. And the Economist depicts Trump as the asshole of the Republican elephant.

Need I say more? There will be a hoax a week between now and November.

 

 

The Democratic Party’s Value Proposition

1. Nominate a presidential candidate who is manifestly in mental decline. He is embarassing to watch.

2. Nominate a Vice-Presidential candidate more PC and less popular than Biden or most of the other runners-up for the Democratic presidential nomination.

3. Burn the downtown cores of cities when they are in Democratic Party control.

4. Promise whites that they will suffer for all eternity for their “whiteness”, because whiteness, like a voodoo emanation, is the all-sufficient explanation for black underperformance.

5. Promise to defund the police and in the meantime fail to support them against rising tides of crime and lawless behaviour.

6. Rigorously pursue policies in the work place that discriminate against white males, and require thought crime confessions in public shaming ceremonies.

7. Invade neighborhoods after dark in deliberate acts of annoyance and terrorization.

8. Blame Trump for the urban violence and intimate that a Biden election victory might possibly end it, or not.

Do I have this right? Am I missing anything?

Seen in this light, the clever minds of the Democratic Party must be wondering at this stage whether their strategy is working. Thirty seconds of clear thought would indicate that this strategy is suicidal, yet they cannot back down, or shift to something more positive. They are doubling down on a bad bet. Meantime their thugs are out losing the election for them,

Have you noticed the meme going around that Portland is “mostly peaceful”?

I am reminded of the line in Gladiator, “people should know when they are conquered”.

 

Going around the mainstream media – surprize, suprize!

This is Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) on Twitter this morning. He makes the case that the mainstream media are being circumvented, and that, in consequence, millions of people are getting a view of reality that the MSM cannot control. This comes as news to them, it would seem. I have seldom seen so well confirmed the view that we are all in information bubbles.

My liberation began when I got rid of cable television, with its state-approved sources of “news” and its minute number of approved filtering agents for the much wider assortment of filtering agents, whom I choose.

The following is Kevin Roose of the New York Times, reporting to a CNN panel his surpise at “discovering” the parallel universe of FaceBook.

“Didn’t have time to list it, but I pulled some data for this segment:

August FB interactions CNN: 21 million NYT: 8M Ben Shapiro: 55M

August FB video views CNN: 73M NYT: 12M The Hodgetwins: 84M

August FB shares: CNN: 2.2M NYT: 800K Dan Bongino: 5.6M”

 

I had onlhy become aware of the cheerfully moronic Hodgetwins last week, and Dan Bongino is as yet unknown to me. But I will look them up, fast.

 

Little Miss Westmount

 

Meet your new would-be president. They don’t even pretend she was a popular candidate. Half Tamil, half American black. Parents were professors on both sides. Grew up in Westmount from the age of seven. Westmount is  a largely Anglo enclave in Montreal. I should know, I grew up there too. Nice place.

“Little Miss Westmount” – I offer it freely to Trump as a kill-shot.

From Wikipedia:

“Her parents divorced when she was seven; she has said that when she and her sister visited their father in Palo Alto on weekends, neighbors’ kids were not allowed to play with them because they were black.[18] When she was 12, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Canada, where their mother had accepted a research position at Jewish General Hospital and teaching at McGill University.[20] Harris attended Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, graduating in 1981.[21]“

Notice, in passing , how much they try to persuade you in the Wikipedia article that she grew up black and in the United States, and a victim of discrimination, because some children would not play with her and her sister. The house they lived in in Westmount is not pictured, the one in Berkeley California is. If you had lived in Westmount your house would have been significantly more posh that the duplex pictured.

War after Civilization

Thomas Hobbes - Wikipedia

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Some redneck speaks the truth (below) about defunding police.  I find that the best exponents of what it would be like to live in the “nasty, short and brutish” world of a sovereign-less world envisaged by Thomas Hobbes are Americans, perhaps because they are so close historically to a world without externally imposed order. Some of them escaped authority at the time of the Revolution and have never been tamed since. The redneck in question bears a surprising resemblance to Thomas Hobbes, portrayed above. Coincidence?

 

 

Making decisions – about riots

I was watching a video of US Marines about to attack a town in Afghanistan. The Captain addressed his battalion. At about 2:20 into the video he said (I paraphrase) : “The plan we have gone over and over – as soon as you land, it will fly out the window. You will be called upon to make a hundred decisions that there is no right answer to. But guess what? you will have to decide; you will have to act.”

I enjoyed the approach, and it ought to be better understood. You will have to act, you will have to decide. I wish it were more broadly understood in society. You have to decide and you have to act. Make a wrong decision? Go ahead and make another. This one may be better. This approach is utterly contrary to the bureaucratic mindset which fears decision-making.

A former boss of mine was a judge. He said: “Make ten decisions. Eight will be right. One will be wrong. One you win or lose on appeal”. But the message was” keep making decisions.

This brings me around to Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s book on the newest generation, and it is not pleasant reading.  The Coddling of the American Mind 

chronicles the increase of neurotic levels of fear among American college students: how good intentions and bad ideas are generating a generation of weak people. As he says: prepare your children for the road not the road for the children.

 

The message Haidt is giving in his YouTube lecture is that we are heading for tribal war. That was in 2019. Look around you. What do you see? Dogmatism, groupthink, a crusader mentality and anti-intellectualism [at 42:40]. The riots and revolt we have been witnessing these last few days have been long prepared by the erosion of cultural and educational standards. The failure of the forces of order to act, because they have been told to lay off by mayors and governors, is yet another signof the scale of  the rot inside our institutions.

 

Someone, possibly Jonathan Kay, said that this could be Trump’s Reichstag Fire moment. I avoid the connotation that Kay would like to put on these riots. These are an excuse for  looting and for anti-fa to break windows. Everyone is seeing far too much disorder to be enthusiastic for kneeling before the black race and beseeching forgiveness, as the Left would have us do. Time for some violence from the state against Antifa and the looters. And yes, Derek Chauvin disgusts me. But so does mass break down of order.