From "Joe Rogan’s Galaxy Brain/How the former Fear Factor host’s podcast became an essential platform for 'freethinkers' who hate the left" by Justin Peters at Slate. That's a small part of a long article. There's much more, but just in that snippet, notice the anxiety that somebody cool could give air to the nonleft.
Rogan’s podcast has become an important node in the “Intellectual Dark Web,” a loose network of “classical liberal” writers, scholars, and speakers who claim to have been marginalized by elitist progressives intent on maintaining identitarian orthodoxy. These people inveigh against political correctness and identity politics in publications like Quillette and on YouTube videos and one another’s podcasts. They claim to be personally liberal—like Rogan, they mostly all claim to “go left on everything”—even as they profess reactionary ideas. They take the fact that their theories and opinions are unpopular among their peers in academia and the media as proof that their peers are suppressive.
In Rogan, they have found an enthusiastic and receptive interlocutor. For the past several years, Rogan has made a point of regularly interviewing the IDW’s leading figures, declining the opportunity to meaningfully challenge them, and laundering their ideas in the process. Over the past year alone, he has hosted long conversations with Harris, the “Sokal Squared” academic hoaxsters Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, social psychologist and trigger-warning foe Jonathan Haidt, mathematician Eric Weinstein, former Evergreen State College professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, and Canadian psychology professor and anti-PC crusader Jordan Peterson.
We are living in the dumbest period of modern American history, where our centering institutions have destabilized, our governing social norms seem unenforceable, and our fast-food restaurants routinely insult one another on Twitter. Into this breach have stepped myriad articulate charlatans, aggro-provocateurs, and other confident dullards who seek to capitalize on the end of authority by using the internet to proclaim their own truths. Their goal is to convince the world’s least-informed people that they are actually the most-informed people, and they are very good at their jobs....
So how did Rogan—the Fear Factor guy!—become the Larry King of the Intellectual Dark Web? Don’t ask him. “It’s an accident,” Rogan told Harris of his podcast’s success. “I just stuck with it. Stumbled upon it. And kept going. I’m good at that.”
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70 comments:
"Into this breach have stepped myriad articulate charlatans..."
And many of them write for Slate.
Rogan is basically what you’d get if a less-neurotic Marc Maron and a less-manic Alex Jones had a baby who looked like a muscular thumb.
I might know something about Rogan if I happened to know a lot about those other two, but I don't.
He reminds me of many of the intense, talkative stoners I knew in college,
I might know something about Rogan if I happened to know a lot about the intense, talkative stoners that this horrible writer knew in college, but I don't.
Over the past year alone, he has hosted long conversations with Harris, the “Sokal Squared” academic hoaxsters Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, social psychologist and trigger-warning foe Jonathan Haidt, mathematician Eric Weinstein, former Evergreen State College professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, and Canadian psychology professor and anti-PC crusader Jordan Peterson.
These people, according to Justin Peters, are the professors of "reactionary ideas."
Another sign of Peters' inept application of political labels -- his idea that libertarianism is an "also" to liberal views.
Give this man a Venn diagram, for Harris's sake.
The "dumbest period of modern American history" paragraph is almost comically unreflective. You're writing for Slate, man, a commentary bottom-feeder on the Internet.
The "dumbest" claim is worth a few minutes thought. Is this the dumbest period? When, exactly, did "modern American history" begin for Peters? That's my two minutes. 15 seconds, really.
"A baby who looks like a muscular thumb" is a nice bit of description.
They take the fact that their theories and opinions are unpopular among their peers in academia and the media as proof that their peers are suppressive.
No, we are not like you guys who think that every little thing we don’t like is proof of a conspiracy against us that must be crushed by any means available. But it is a kind of evidence.
In Rogan, they have found an enthusiastic and receptive interlocutor. For the past several years, Rogan has made a point of regularly interviewing the IDW’s leading figures, declining the opportunity to meaningfully challenge them, and laundering their ideas in the process. Over the past year alone, he has hosted long conversations with Harris, the “Sokal Squared” academic hoaxsters Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, social psychologist and trigger-warning foe Jonathan Haidt, mathematician Eric Weinstein, former Evergreen State College professors Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, and Canadian psychology professor and anti-PC crusader Jordan Peterson.
Now that comes pretty close to “proof.” You launder illegal money, illicit money. By using that metaphor, you are claiming that these ideas should never get a hearing. That almost sounds *suppressive* to me.
We are living in the dumbest period of modern American history, where our centering institutions have destabilized, our governing social norms seem unenforceable
They went through all the trouble of co-opting our “centering institutions” hoping to use that power to move America to the far left and, son of a bitch, that troublesome free speech has foiled their plans. But such a lament is not an indication that the writer is *suppressive*.
Do you think his profs gave him ‘A's for writing such crepe paper crapola so easily shredded by a stiff breeze? Probably.
Go Left, young man, or you're right out.
There is no such thing as the 'intellectual dark web'. It's not some hidden world on the internet that only people with a secret password can get to. It's just websites and people that the left doesn't like. It's like Amazon calling Etsy the shopping dark web.
I’m reading with interest while the author is quietly sneaking up behind me with s baseball bat. Whack! that third paragraph!
I read first couple of paragraphs over there and that's a pretty high level of dumb.
Peters needs to figure out the difference between "you imply" and "I infer".
He also appears to be ignorant of rhetorical constructs. Note to Peters: It's dumb to take every rhetorical flourish literally.
"...where our centering institutions have destabilized, our governing social norms seem unenforceable..."
Gee. I wonder how that bappened?
"Into this breach have stepped myriad articulate charlatans, aggro-provocateurs, and other confident dullards who seek to capitalize on the end of authority by using the internet to proclaim their own truths."
How dare they not accept our truths!!!
Justin Peters of Slate looks in mirror--
"He reminds me of many of the intense, talkative stoners I knew in college"
“notice the anxiety that somebody cool could give air to the nonleft.”
This is how the Left rolls. It is in their DNA. All dissent must be silenced. Destroyed. Books must be burned. It is the main reason why they hate Fox News.
I got banned from a Creighton basketball board because - in offtopic posts - I expressed my doubt about global warming.
My brother in SF is a hard core Leftist. He was a leader in the boycott movement against advertisers who advertise on shows like Rush.
Free thinking? We cannot have that. Up next on Maddow.
I wish i could find it but YouTube appears to have most likely memory-holed it. John Stewart was interviewed upon closing his tenure at the daily show saying that liberals needed to be wary of what he saw as an increasingly dogmatic bent that was even then making them ripe for parody and that parody was the epitomy of "uncoolness". This is why so many of the left's conservative tropes worked so well. Taking yourself too seriously is a recipe for an inevitable date with satire...
...not even the cultural guardians of "cool" can save you regardless of all their power. This is why the lament for "cool guys giving airtime to the non-left". When you've lost Rogan...etc. etc. Etc. I suspect that this trend will accelerate with a 2nd Trump term...
Their goal is to convince the world’s least-informed people that they are actually the most-informed people, and they are very good at their jobs....
I hate it when people talk about themselves in the third person.
The main thing he does is to treat his guests decently, and to give them an honest chance to explain their stelatents. At 2-3+ hours he has a decent amount of time to have a real discussion. He has a genial sense of humour and doesn't ty play gotcha. He also is prepared. Even though I am not a fan of many of his guests or of some of his views, I will listen to the majority of his popcasts.
Don’t you hate it when some guy who disagrees with you is funny and friendly and easy to like? It makes you want to lash out with an extended stream of sophomoric prose that proves you are his exact opposite. That’ll show him!
"He reminds me of many of the intense, talkative stoners I knew in college..."
Know thyself.
Perhaps he did.
Huh. There’s a whole lot of name dropping, that I can’t tell who or what the article is talking about; like overhearing a conversation between a group of oldsters who have never left a small town gossiping about the locals. I’m sure if you are familiar with them, I’m sure it makes sense.
How can one "lean left on everything" AND be a "libertarian" or "classical liberal"?
Left means maximal govt interference in private lives.
Libertarian/classical liberal means minimal govt interference in Personal lives.
They are polar opposites. It is stupidity on a stepladder to say someone can be both.
John Henry
It's hard to tell exactly what this Slate writer's gripe is. Here, he contradicts his own assertion that Rogan's guest list is drawn from an "Intellectual Dark Web" of like-minded people while at the same time tacitly impugning Rogan for expressing completely reasonable doubt about his guest's assertion:
Joe Rogan is fully invested in the idea that people—progressive liberals, mostly—are too quick to take offense at things that do not offend Joe Rogan. His January conversation with New York Times opinion editor and writer Bari Weiss, for example, began with Rogan riffing on the Covington Catholic story, especially the fact that the students had been wearing Make America Great Again caps:
Rogan: Has there ever been a time like that, where an object like a red hat with white letters was so repulsive to half the country?
Weiss: Yes, well, I mean, some people see it as the equivalent of a white hood.
Rogan: Wow. I don’t know about that.
I get a lot out of the Rogan podcasts. The interviews with Gad Saad are good.
Freethinkers who hate the left.
Freethinkers hate the left?
The Left hates free thinkers?
Now I know the Proper Way of Thinking about Rogan. Guests need to be Controlled and Challenged for their Wrongthink.
Rogan has lots of people on, a couple times a week for long 3 hour conversations. I listened to the Jonathan Haidt interview, 2 hours, and he was just starting to let his hair down.
His gift is getting people to talk. He asks questions trying to understand what they are saying. He doesn't prepare for anything except keeping the conversation going. I find some of them fascinating; there have been two instances recently of prominent interviewers letting loose and being recorded; they haven't come across as likeable, trustworthy or even anyone you want to talk to because they are two faced; one in front of the camera and one behind. Rogan isn't like that, and it is profoundly refreshing. I don't think that the media realizes how bad their formats and the interviewers are.
I find it refreshing and many times lots of fun. I learn things. I find myself in disagreement with Rogan and his guests more often than not. But I disagree with lots of people about lots of things. This is normal.
The Slate article is everything I despise about modern "Journalism". It was an old time religious minister telling his flock what to think about these grifters and people who would dare intrude into the serious business of interviewing people and even daring to have opinions that are obviously not proper. Simple one sentence statements dispatching someone into the abyss, doomed to hell. These people he is talking about are interesting, they all have been in situations that are very interesting and indicative of culture and journalism and academia. Serious things, serious people, very serious issues. And likely every one of them is beyond this particular 'journalists' capacity to think about. Or more likely, if he delved into the issues seriously he would be threatened with excommunication.
Rogan doesn't sell himself as anything except what he is. It is up to me to think about what is said on his show. For the secular priesthood that journalists have become, that is heresy.
I watch his podcasts too. I learned to drink coffee later in the morning to make intermittent fasting more effective. He had a woman scientist on and that was just something they talked about.
I’m sure if you are familiar with them, I’m sure it makes sense.
No, that doesn’t even help. Unless of course you are reading it for what it is a denunciation of enemies of the people.
I ignore the blathering opening 10-15 minutes of Maron's podcast to avoid his personal politics and baggage, and after that Maron is really good at what he does, with whoever. A perfect case in point is his recent interview with Roger Daltrey. Both were gentlemen throughout though obvious politically opposite, but it was Maron who caught himself from upping the ante when Roger made an overtly political comment because Maron seemed to realize the purpose of this interview was apolitical.
I've listened to Rogan, and he is a more sensible and farther out there thinker than Maron (I'll not be listening to Jones.) But the podcasts are sooo long. There are only so many hours in a day, and I've got a core 10-11 podcasts I try and listen to in any week.
It hardly seems fair to complain about Rogan's work ethic, but that's my only issue. I get its more of an editing issue than a complaint about his work. Its a big enough one though to have caused me to seek less involved fields of streaming.
who seek to capitalize on the end of authority
Remember when their mantra was “Question Authority”? Well that was when they weren’t in charge.
What I find incredible is that kids and their parents voluntarily take on huge debt so that the kids can be indoctrinated and then go on to jobs in the lucrative field of food and beverage service. Or be journalists.
But the implication was clear: Holding people accountable for what they say and what those words do is an offense far worse than saying cruel, racist, and divisive things in the first place. The reputational damage done to the utterer is the real social problem, not the more diffuse damage done by the utterance.
Says Peters, sanctimoniously mocking Sam Harris. I remember that interview and the discussion about Liam Neeson. It was subtle and sophisticated. Peters either didn’t get it or didn’t want to get it.
I enjoy Rogan. We need him. There’s plenty of others who hew to Peters’ woke sensibilities.
Forse in Hong Kong
He is the antedote to PC police state
One thing I love about Rogan is he never baits his guests, nor does he bail them out when hanging themselves.
Jimmy Dorr had a great analysis of this when NY Times writer Bari Weiss started using the word "toady". Rogan quietly asked Weiss what that meant....she had to look it up. Weiss
https://youtu.be/jS-sxJFn6O0
dullards who seek to capitalize on the end of authority
Authority
“Peterson is intent on demonizing the entire notion of Marxist analysis as intolerable and anti-Western, since, after all, Soviet Russia was Marxist and millions of people died in the gulags. This is a hell of a leap”. Am I reading this right? Is the author saying that Marxist analysis is a good thing?
Henry,
"liberal", at least by etymology and classical usage Is synonymous with "libertarian".
The problem is that "liberal" has been hijacked to mean its exact opposite. As Hayek pointed out in Road to Serfdom in 1943.
It was adopted by American progressives/fascists when the stink of the progressive label got too bad.
We modify liberal with classical to denote its correct meaning.
Some do, anyway. Me? I am proud to be just plain liberal. "a free man"
John Henry
I’ve heard the name but never listened to him. In reading the description (beyond the bias) I was thinking who do I read or listen to that would fit this description? I came up with two names, both woman:
Ann Althouse
Bridget Phetasy
(PS I wonder Professor if anyone has ever suggested that your last name is a stage name meant to allude to the Alt-right as in “the Alt-right lives in this house”)
Classical liberalism is now "reactionary", which I guess is true considering that modern leftism is so radical that even using language and science honestly is now suspect, harmful, and often desired to be criminal.
Very few modern people are reactionary in the old way it was used as a desire to return to very old systems without the equality and class justice that has long since been achieved. Today's conservatives are classical liberals with libertarian attitudes about the competence and role of government. Rogan is a modern conservative, but like many he is scared of the label. The left has succeeded in gas-lighting many, including themselves, into believing that conservatives want to suppress and discriminate against other races and lifestyles, but that is really just projection. It bugs me that so many people I appreciate like Rogan and Bill Burr can't accept that they are the new conservatives and just call themselves that. They express the same opinions as conservatives, but fall for the left's definitions which like all words on the left, hardly ever match the real meanings of those words. The speak bizarro English.
Its the same old same old. If you don't agree with the dogma handed down by our moral superiors in academia then you are either ignorant or evil. Its rather generous of the man to give us the benefit of the doubt, that the issue is ignorance.
Rogan's podcast is great in that it is essentially an honest open conversation with a curious intelligent man trying to learn as much as possible with an open mind, but he often asks exactly the right questions that can expose bullshit which with most interviewers would be allowed to fly. If it doesn't make sense to him or sounds wrong, he says so and explores that.
I just spent a couple hours watching clips of his show, before coming here. I learn a lot from his show.
He's basically a lot more interesting and relevant than either one.
Slate stopped being relevant long ago. They can continue posing as the decrepit old guard schoolmarm SJWs of the web for as long as they like, but that doesn't mean anyone listens to them. And their website is clunky as hell. It's littered with ridiculous cookies all over the place and loads slower than a sloth.
But that doesn't stop its publishers from declaring to everyone their status as our wanna-be gender-bending betters. I guess that's their issue of the day vis-a-vis an ultimate fighter like Rogan.
Where do these silly assholes get off?
Unknown at 9:02 quotes this:
"Peterson is intent on demonizing the entire notion of Marxist analysis as intolerable and anti-Western, since, after all, Soviet Russia was Marxist and millions of people died in the gulags. This is a hell of a leap."
I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.
The self-proclaimed sexual superiors of Slate are basically our own modern-day monks.
Railing against his self-depiction with a third eye? So now Slate is opposed to meditation, eastern thinking and - quite literally - a humble spirituality aimed at extinguishing the ego. What the heck aren't they opposed to? I'm amused at what it is about their inferiority - culturally, economically and manfully - they think their smugness will save them from. They are the incels of our intelligentsia. The asexuals of academia. Yawn.
Rogan is an interesting guy. On a recent broadcast he said that he eats only wild game, mostly elk, that he hunts himself with bow and arrow.
This statement by the article's author (Justin Peters) annoyed the heck out of me: "A flawed, limited understanding of what the hijab means in Muslim culture leads to broad allegations of liberal hypocrisy."
There is no single Muslim culture, and if there were, it is hardly likely that Justin Peters would know what meaning it assigns the hijab.
This is the old game, where liberal "intellectuals" take a quite ordinary statement, and because they dislike the person who made the statement, they assume that he or she meant it in the worst possible way.
Most people who aren't idiots (as Peters is) would look at Rogan's statement re: the hijab this way: "In many Muslim countries, the hijab is a means used by male Muslims to control the social and sexual expression of female Muslims. Therefore liberals are being hypocritical when they say that they support women's rights, but also support the right of Muslim men to determine what Muslim women shall wear."
@johnhenry100 -- I totally understand where you're coming from. I think the word liberal is still meaningful in some modern leftwing contexts and completely abused in others. Likewise, there are libertarian ideas that are definitively liberal while others are wildly naive and historically dense.
The balkanization of terms that leads to some people using liberal while others use classical liberal with neither side choosing to understand the other's context is pretty irresolvable at this point. I'm willing to get lumped in on the liberal side, knowing there's no elevator pitch that's going to clarify all the context and considerations that go into that.
A columnist jeering at supposedly stupid people should take care with his labels.
"He reminds me of many of the intense, talkative stoners I knew ..."
I wonder where these intense and talkative stoners are because those two words do not describe any stoners I know, and I know a bunch. I think author just writing word salad.
John Henry - how can one "lean left on everything" AND be a "libertarian" or "classical liberal"?
Im classic liberal or libertarian when it comes to size of government and bureaucracy, there should be minimal government.
However, I also believe in charity or helping those less fortunate and money saved by reducing government would free up money for people to donate to worthy charities.
Also, I am one of those people who think gay married couples should be allowed to own weapons to protect their cannabis garden out back, so I can sound left even tho I hate parasite government workers.
"A baby who looks like a muscular thumb" is a nice bit of description.
Unfortunately the thumb itself doesn't have any muscles ('cept maybe in the base, if you're generous about what constitutes a thumb), so I'll repeat: the author is a horrible writer.
Peters' CV:
http://freejustinpeters.com/cv.htm
He usually writes humor or semi-humor stuff, from a lefty perspective, of course.
I wonder why they gave him this assignment. He doesn't do political analysis, many of his articles are glorified listicles.
M Mott said...
One thing I love about Rogan is he never baits his guests, nor does he bail them out when hanging themselves.
The podcast with Tim Pool/Jack Dorsey/Vijaya Gadde is another good example of that. She came off as such a mean girl I wouldn't be surprised Dorsey didn't fire her in the car on the way home.
I have watched several of his podcast interviews- they were all great. Rogan is always well-prepared and he asks good questions, gives his guests ample room to answer and debate- and he always asks good followup questions, which demonstrates that he has the ability to think quite deeply on his feet. Those are qualities that pretty much no one in media have today, including the writer of the essay Ms. Althouse linked to.
And to give you an idea of how much I think of Rogan- I am somebody that will pretty much never invest the time to watch or listen to an interview- I much prefer to read the transcripts if I have any interest at all because I can do so at about ten times the speed of watching.
In Rogan, they have found an enthusiastic and receptive interlocutor. For the past several years, Rogan has made a point of regularly interviewing the IDW’s leading figures, declining the opportunity to meaningfully challenge them, and laundering their ideas in the process.
Based on the relatively little of Rogan that I've watched, he doesn't "meaningfully challenge" anyone. It's not his style, as noted by a couple other posters above. There's a place for pitbull interviewers but it's a mistake to insist that's the only way to do it. You learn all kinds of interesting things when you're not an intense adversary.
But he doesn't limit that approach only to "Dark Web" figures. He recently interviewed Jack Dorsey, the totalitarian Twitter CEO, and they had a typical nice rambling discussion where Rogan scarcely glanced at all the ban hammers raining down on conservatives like Thor hunting Loki. Rogan got a lot of criticism from the right after that. And... I guess this will undermine my point, but he then invited Dorsey and Twitter's chief attorney back to be interviewed on his show in a more adversarial way by Tim Pool. I confess I haven't seen that type of thing done with others. But even Pool is a lefty in virtually all things except free speech, which he supports.
With Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, all of them methodically shutting down voices on the right for the runup to the 2020 election, what really bothers Slate is that we're not New Zealand, yet, and there are still a few popular outposts where they haven't quite managed to gag us, yet.
The best Rogan recently was with Jack Dorsey of Twitter, his lawyer, and Tim Pool.
The show was an epic take-down of the PC culture of Silicon Valley.
It was a three hour illustration of the double standard used in banning and deplatforming on the internet.
The problem with 95% of interviewers is that they seemingly are always trying to make the audience believe the interviewer is smarter than the interviewee.
Joe Rogan is so much more important to the culture than any Slate writer could ever hope to be. He is a lead commentator on MMA fights. A top stand-up comedian, a successful TV star, and now a leading pod-caster. The one characteristic that makes him successful in all of these endeavors is his authenticity.
I wonder what bothers the article's author more. Joe Rogan's success or his influence?
I put Rogan nearly up there with Larry King and Brian Lamb- my two all time favorite interviewers. Another all time great is Johnny Carson, though his guests were usually celebrities.
"It was a three hour illustration of the double standard used in banning and deplatforming on the internet."
Yet it wasn't mindlessly adversarial as much as simply asking questions about what Twitter has done. The Twitter people just denied the elephant in the room or tried to say it was actually just a mouse. The thing that kept going through my mind with each denial was that those things rarely ever happen the other direction. They would use the one in a hundred as proof of their balance.
"Rogan’s podcast has become an important node in the “Intellectual Dark Web,” a loose network of “classical liberal” writers, scholars, and speakers who claim to have been marginalized by elitist progressives intent on maintaining identitarian orthodoxy."
Sounds about right.
I tune in to his podcasts every once in a while - Roseanne, Gary Taubes, others on nutrition/eating, Carrie from King of Queens dishing on the Scientologists. They're all nice and long, and....no commercials. Let's hope he continues.
I noticed AA referred to him the other day saying he eats mostly meat. I guess. But that body on him is heavy, looks like he's sneakin some carbs in!
Joe Rogan's success might have to do with authenticity, but it goes way beyond that.
He's basically open-minded as hell, and leads a life interesting enough to know how to be that way. His interests/professional talents are very broad ranging - MMA fighter AND a comedian??? - and he's not a dumbass. Most interviewers try to go overboard on giving bad ideas a "fair" hearing. Joe Rogan's open to a lot, but smart enough to know what he doesn't know and sharp enough to know how to call out nonsense. He gives a long leash to guests, but isn't afraid to yank it back - often in a funny way.
Jordan Peterson is an anti-intellectual because he refuses to call himself a cis-het.
Joe Rogan is a failure because he couldn't get Elon Musk to make any sense.
The existence of Marxist literary theory ethically mediates the Stalinist gulags.
I never could figure out what Slate thinks Slate is doing.
But to understand Joe Rogan, just listen to his stand-up "Joe Rogan Meets A Crazy Stripper." It belongs in the Norton Anthology. It is worth 14 minutes of your life.
The web is full of writers like this who just extrude the thoughts of the zeitgeist like processed cheese. Roger Simon is one on the right, Craig Gutfeld. On the left side of the ledger we have Gail Collins, and that Enron shill at the New York Times, there are so many of them that simply are not worth reading at all except as object lessons in how not to write.
Also if somebody wanted to make a strong case that our system of elite education has crashed and burned, these kinds of articles would certainly serve as evidence. Of course they are a dime a million, so pathetic as this effort is, it’s just one more spurtle collected into the firehose of stultifying crap that they are using to drown the Enlightenment.
A “denunciation” printed unironically in the United Fucking States of America. It’s so depressing it makes me want to leave America and maybe watch some other country that I don’t actually love go to shit.
Blogger bagoh20 said...
"It was a three hour illustration of the double standard used in banning and deplatforming on the internet."
Yet it wasn't mindlessly adversarial as much as simply asking questions about what Twitter has done. The Twitter people just denied the elephant in the room or tried to say it was actually just a mouse
--------------------------------------------------------------------
and it was back to business as usual for them the next day with the same practices.
Maybe because I've spent the last God-only-knows-how-many years reading Marxist & Fascist theory & history, it just amazes me that people (mostly on the left) get bent out of shape by guys like Joe Rogan & his guests who are so, so anodyne. What sort of an intellectually clueless world do you have to live in where you think Jordan Peterson is a radical thinker? And a clear sign that the writer is an utter moron is when they talk about guys like Rogan or Rubin as being "alt-right".
Speaking of Dave Rubin, I like his shows as well as Joe Rogan's. What I like about both of them is that they get a guest on and they just let the guest talk. The guest gets to shine or hoist himself on his own petard, because it's him or her doing the talking. And for hours, too! This really is something new that the internet has made possible. It's like the old Dick Cavett shows except on steroids!
An alumnus of Cornell University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Jeezum Crow. I went to a SUNY school and this kind of writing would have been shredded, covered in red ink, and possibly thrown in my face with an exasperated and rueful laugh, after I got called to the prof’s office for a little discussion of “what the fuck happened to you with this steaming loaf of shit?"
Dave Rubin is a Koch-bros. bought-and-paid-for tool whose only purpose is to say that he's a right-wing liberal (whatever that means) with no actual record of identifying any issue or cause upon which he's made any impact whatsoever - rhetorically, culturally or otherwise. Oh, and he likes to pretend that people who are duty-bound to oppose any right or interest of his have lots to enlighten him about.
But phonies who are just in it for the money are like that.
So, he's basically the political equivalent of a eunuch.
Rogan's revisiting with Twitter, Inc and Pool was due to his (and presumably his producer sidekick) being completely ignorant of the tech de-platforming and censorship happening on the right...and that perhaps podcast sponsorship conflicts.
On the rare occasion where he interviews someone right leaning, his best behavior is him not saying much about politics and venturing into other territory, if it's someone he likes.
When he gets a personality on who is left/liberal, he is happy to dwell there with gusto.
For more consistently respectful interviews, Rubin is better. Determining "impact" is not easy, but his overriding issue is free speech..
Definitely worth a listen
Joe Rogan strikes me as a nice guy who confuses being open-minded with being intelligent. He believes some of the nuttiest things imaginable (and the more complex the conspiracy, the more he believes it. He really is a calmer version of Alex Jones.) He's also woefully unprepared for this guests; among other things, he can't challenge them because he doesn't have a clue what they stand for. His "interview" with Jack Dorsey was illustrative and an embarrassment.
Joe Rogan and others like him present an existential menace to the left and their hegemony of the current culture. I listen to Rogan and Bill Burr just to get the comedians take of our current state of affairs and the left should be scared shitless. Rogan often talks about how awful pc horeshit has become and lays the blame at the feet of the democrats. He brings guests on that same the same thing. They get in their licks with Trump just to burnish their credentials, but mostly they wail on liberals.
Joe said...He's also woefully unprepared for this guests; among other things, he can't challenge them because he doesn't have a clue what they stand for.
--
It depends..see him lay into Candace Owens with an over the top, emotional appeal to authority/"consensus".
Rogan's youtube videos are a home for those who "hate the left" only if if by "hate the left" you mean people who speak up for for ideas of free speech and individual rights in language that was the liberal mainstream a few years ago.
and...
"Joe Rogan strikes me as a nice guy who confuses being open-minded with being intelligent. He believes some of the nuttiest things imaginable (and the more complex the conspiracy, the more he believes it. He really is a calmer version of Alex Jones.) He's also woefully unprepared for this guests; among other things, he can't challenge them because he doesn't have a clue what they stand for. His "interview" with Jack Dorsey was illustrative and an embarrassment."
Yes, and when people called him out on it he had Dorsey (and his censor) back and got Tim Pool on with them, to even it up. Rogan is far from perfect but this is a podcast, not a network news show with a huge staff to make the front guy look good. At least Rogan was willing to admit he muffed it and tried to fix things.
Just someone who is after truth is a really refreshing and rare thing these days.
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