Writes journalism professor Jeremy Littau in "Social Media Has Collapsed Good Debate/Joe Rogan’s podcast is an awful venue for serious disagreement. But the alternatives aren’t much better" (The Atlantic).
June 25, 2023
"In 2012, Mitt Romney named Russia as our chief global adversary, a statement the press perceived as a gaffe..."
"... given the war against al-Qaeda that was ongoing. In a presidential debate that year, Barack Obama responded with a zinger: 'And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back.' From a tactics standpoint, Obama did what he had to do. He bent to a format that asked exactly this of him. The rightness or wrongness of Romney’s assertion and Obama’s reply matter less than the takeaway: How Romney’s statement landed was ultimately the result of a cultural interpretation and context more than it was about evidence or reason, even as debates are ostensibly supposed to be about the latter."
Writes journalism professor Jeremy Littau in "Social Media Has Collapsed Good Debate/Joe Rogan’s podcast is an awful venue for serious disagreement. But the alternatives aren’t much better" (The Atlantic).
Writes journalism professor Jeremy Littau in "Social Media Has Collapsed Good Debate/Joe Rogan’s podcast is an awful venue for serious disagreement. But the alternatives aren’t much better" (The Atlantic).
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That Obama/Romney debate was the one where Candy, moderator, put her thumb on the scale. Rogan is more impartial than someone hired to be impartial.
Bobby expects to control his own narrative. Hotez expects the moderator to control it for him.
it's pretty safe to assume,
that anything (EVERYTHING) the democrats say is a lie, and Probably the EXACT OPPOSITE of the truth.
“Social media censorship has collapsed good debate.”
FIFY
Except... Russia wasn't seen as an enemy in 2012, at least not publicly. Russia-as-enemy was resurrected later after Pussy Riot and to impugn Trump. So Obama was right at the time.
What a silly game.
Except... Russia wasn't seen as an enemy in 2012, at least not publicly. Russia-as-enemy was resurrected later after Pussy Riot and to impugn Trump. So Obama was right at the time.
What a silly game.
Up Next: Professor Jeremy discusses the Straw Man argument.
Honestly, Who anywhere is saying that debate is the primary purpose of Joe Rogan's podcast? Who anywhere imagines that the proposed debate between RFKJr and the esteemed Dr. Hotez would take place with Joe Rogan officiating, from his studio? Nobody.
Who thinks that an honest debate on a contested issue in the public sphere, by the appointed experts is a good idea, and a civilized way to get to the truth? Almost everybody - except Dr. Hotez and his friends, including the Atlantic fan club, apparently.
Obama was right, of course. Russia is only our "adversary" strategically in that they have the resources to one day perhaps mount a challenge to us economically, especially if allied economically with say, oh, I don't know... Germany. One providing the tech an manufacturing and the other unmatched stockpiles of commodities, strategic and otherwise.
This is the sense in which Russia is an adversary, as Wolfowitz put it many years ago in describing US strategic objectives regarding Russia; Putin is hated because he has led the rise of Russia from the ashes of the Soviet Union, unlike our patsy Yeltsin, who sold out many of Russia's resources to Western allied oligarchs.
Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. - Wolfowitz
Of course, now we have handed over access to all of those minerals, food resources, and energy reservers to China, because we were afraid that Germany and Russia would create an economic powerhouse to rival our own. Wolfowitz's premis is that Russia would be "hostile," which it never showed any signs of being. Mearsheimer explained this by saying that one of the iron rules of geostrategy is that you cannot know what the leadership of a rival power is going to think in 20 or 30 years, so that means that you have to deny them the *means* to do you any harm, since motives will forever be unknowable.
https://youtu.be/m-2Oy3MVyyA
It's a long video, including Q and A with some harsh questions for Mearsheimer from Ukraine war hawks, which he bats down easily. But if you are interested in the real reasons that we fomented a coup in Ukraine and then used the resulting civil war to our advantage, and probably tried the exact same playbook in Russia (IMHO) maybe you ought to listen to insiders who actually shape US long-term strategic policy instead of sopping up the propaganda that they use to bring along the rubes.
BTW, this is the real reason that we don't *want* Europe to pay for their own military and develop a real capability for self-defense. The same logic that applies to China and Russia applies to Europe. Trump doesn't buy any of this stuff, which is why they hate him like poison and consider him a traitor. Trump just wants economic competition, which the Democrats and Republicans think is a chump's game. I probably would have gone along with this except that they sold out America's working class in the process of pushing their agenda and labeled all opposition to this selling out of America's workers as 'fascism.'
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster." - Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)
Joe’s podcast worked pretty well to expose Twitter back in the day. And it also did a good job on Sanjay from CNN to get that bullshit acknowledged for what it was. This dude just knows what side his bread is buttered.
"...He bent to a format that asked exactly this of him. The rightness or wrongness of Romney’s assertion and Obama’s reply matter less than the takeaway..."
Rightness or wrongness matter less. Example #3,456,119 of why we are doomed.
Biden lies, Biden repeats the lies (Charlottesville as an example). In a sane world he'd be called out EVERY time. Eventually he'd stop. But that's the old world.
Obama "bent" to make a false accusation for political advantage.
Quit trying to say when the left lies, obscures or deflects that they are helpless victims. Or they misspoke.
"Social media has collapsed good debate"
That's right, the Dems and their university/media adjuncts waging all-out war on free expression had absolutely nothing to do with it. It was all the fault of 'social media,' which of course we had nothing to do with, either.
Russia was never our greatest adversary -- the USSR was a unified threat until the 1990s but not Russia. It's a huge place and hard to keep organized, so they've long gravitated toward strong-arm governments. Also, they must deal with harsh winters and that leads to a certain type of survival autocracy.
Our biggest threat in 2012 was China.
Our biggest threat in 2023 is China.
The lizards in DC don't say this because (1) their palms are greased and their personal fortunes depend on China and (2) China is so powerful that they effectively control the US economy. Right wing companies must sell goods to China and rely on low cost Chinese products. The US refuses to produce rare-earth minerals and thereby depends on China for military and battery needs. Left wing companies (e.g., Apple, Nike, Hollywood, NBA basketball) rely on China and speak out both sides of their mouths about Woke support. The Greens rely on outsourcing heavy manufacturing and solar panels and coal to China so they can live a deluded zero carbon fantasy dream with Greta Thunberg.
Russia: A big source of commodities with nuclear weapons, but managed using obsolete USSR strategies by depressed alcoholics. Treat them with care because the world needs their minerals, and they have the potential to destroy us all.
Anti-right press bias...not news. Media changing a story to support the establishment...not news.
Joe Rogan lets the conversation go on for 2-3+ hours. That is a great deal better than the 2 min block allocated in televised debates or news show.
A reminder that the Democrat party need their hack crutch media.... to help sell their lies.
Ah, that's right. Only media/government sanctioned events are venues for good debate.
Translation: We the gatekeepers resent that there isn’t a gate to keep anymore.
No Debate on TV "news" PBS which is All one-sided Trump obsession. Microsoft NBC is Democraxit Party Propaganda central. ABC's joke-fem show "The View"- is all D-hack White LEFTISTS - and I include Sunny and Whoopi as White Leftists... where horrid old white leftists lecture and ridicule.
"Social media censorship has collapsed good debate.”
FIFY"
This. The debate has moved entirely away from the MSM. Kids these days don't even acknowledge TV exists, they call it boomertube. Political discussions on 4chan are more honest than anything you could ever see on fox these days.
Hell, even Rogan self-censors. If there is money behind it, it's mainstream. Period.
Such poppycock.
It wasn’t social media. It was the news media. The Obama/Romney debate was just a more obvious example. It did show that no Republican should trust, as Kate notes, hired impartial debate moderators like Chris Wallace. No Democrats want to debate because they can air their message in friendly town halls with hand picked questions submitted in advance. Let’s not forget that the questions don’t touch on any of the top 5 issues. Can’t talk about immigration, high taxes, inflation, jobs, crime because Democrats are bad at all of them. Should I mention the partisan post debate “fact checkers” that used to be in the “spin rooms because they admitted to spin, but now reside in the news media itself.
That was when Obama and Hillary were pushing the "Reset" button. There was a real possibility of some accommodation with Russia. Then along came Trump and, without a thought about the future, Hillary and Obama used a lie about Russia to attack Trump. Now Russia is an enemy just like Romney said.
Nixon went to China to prevent an alliance between Russia and China. Hillary and then Biden accomplished overturning Nixon's strategy. And for no good reason except domestic politics. Sort of like what started World War I.
The press perceived Romney’s assertion as a gaffe. That doesn’t mean it was wrong. Intelligent people agreed with him. Many sufficiently gullible individuals might regard the writers for outfits such as the New York Times, Boston Globe, or Washington Post as being intelligent and knowledgeable, but truly intelligent peopl know better. As for Obama, there are plenty of people who mistake glibness for intelligence. He’s good at conning people, but not much more than that.
Does anyone want the secret to easy wealth? Just buy modern journalists for what they’re really worth and sell them for what they think they’re worth.
In short: We are not a serious country.
And our press has gone from umpires to cheerleaders, which accelerates the lack of seriousness more, even, than social media. Had it happened in 2012 instead of 1976, President Ford's bonehead comment during the debate with Carter, "There is no Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe," would've been either explained away as "technically true" or ignored if he'd been a Democrat.
White left Obama didn't heal race relations - he made them worse. He gave Biden the keys to the Ukrainian corruption kingdom - so Biden could fill his family coffers with ill-gotten pay-to-play sell-out the American tax payer millions.
Hillary, Obama's pick for Sec of State, set up and used a private server to serve her bank account.
John Kerry is the botoxed billionaire Climate Change BS czar... using the word "Science"! to pass for fraud to enrich the billionaires. Enter Chelsea Clinton.
Trump should have freed Julian Assange.
I have written it before- the Democrats were Putin's best friends right up until he arrested Pussy Riot. That is what got Putin on the Democrats' shit list.
"He bent to a format that asked exactly this of him."
Actually, he just spouted the theprog line of the moment.
"How Romney’s statement landed was ultimately the result of a cultural interpretation and context more than it was about evidence or reason"
Actually, how it landed was the result of prog fabrication and mobilization. And Romney/GOPe cowardice and ineptitude. If Romney had wanted to help O win, what would he have done differently?
"Joe Rogan’s podcast is an awful venue for serious disagreement. But the alternatives aren’t much better"
Progs don't think of any disagreement with them as "serious" and therefore find all "venues" for it awful.
Strictly on the merits, both Barry and Mittens were wrong. The prime adversary was and is China. A realistic foreign policy would not drive the weak and second-rate but large and resource-rich third-ranked power into a dependent alliance with adversary #1.
Kate nailed it at the top. She is exactly right.
PS- back in that debate, before Romney answered, I said aloud, 'Russia'. Even some of us random street folk knew that.
He was right then. Obama was wrong. But Obama's grasp of foreign policy was a shitstorm all 8 years of his term (and beyond). Geopolitics is not his strength. And the people he gathered around him- Valerie Jarret, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, John Kerry- were, and are awful when it comes to understanding the way of the world. They understand the way of Washington and/or UN cocktail parties. But they insist everyone believe as they do. Most of the world does not, including over half of the American public.
That said...Hotez would never go on a format where he is not protected from questions he doesn't like to answer. Debate? We don't have those any longer.
This guy is just butt hurt that sensible people have justifiably abandoned "journalism" for forums that allow more open and honest debate.
"And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Chinc. China is our primary adversary, now.
1. We are in a trade war with China with VASTLY more money and political influence on the line than in Ukraine.
2. China has exponentially increased its military funding and regional sphere of influence.
3. Russia's economy is 1/10th the size of ours and its military is a joke. Putin just dropped all charges against a warlord who marched mercenaries into the country.
Good time to reflect on Obama being 100% correct.
I listened to the Quayle/Gore debate on the radio in 1992, because we have not had TV since 1979. I thought it was clear that Quayle, widely regarded as a fool, had absolutely wiped the floor with Gore. Not because he was a superior debater - neither was that good - but because his content and reasoning were better. I was shocked to learn in the coming days that talking heads believed Gore had done better, then convinced themselves he had done much better, on TV. I concluded this was probably true in terms of use of medium. And it was one more step down the road of convincing me that facts and reason didn't matter anymore.
Once you know that you start viewing historical change in opinion in that light, picking up bits of information that eluded you before. Nixon-Kennedy debates. Walter Cronkite putting the nail in the Vietnam coffin because he was butthurt that the army wouldn't show him cool behind-the-scenes stuff like he used to get in WWII, a different era in media, as he absolutely should have known. (Butthurt seldom sees itself). It wasn't the facts of a successful recent American/SV Tet Offensive, it was the somber feeling and impression of the American people in 1968, facts be damned.
I read the article. It's odd.
What Rogan was trying do was to set up a debate that avoided the issues Littau noted and provide the more reasoned, less talking-point centered bloodsport that Littau properly derides.
It seems he should have been cheering on the proposal.
I suppose he did what he had to do to get published in The Atlantic.
The media was still protecting their boyfriend Obama at all costs, so no debate was possible. The media committed suicide with glee.
A WWIII will not leave America unscathed (except for its young men) but will see us bombed and scarred just like Europe in the last WW, unless we get nuked (like Japan in the last WW).
Our biggest threat in 2012 was China.
Our biggest threat in 2023 is China.
...
[I don't get why the commenter says "right wing" here, but ok:] Right wing companies must sell goods to China and rely on low cost Chinese products. The US refuses to produce rare-earth minerals and thereby depends on China for military and battery needs. Left wing companies (e.g., Apple, Nike, Hollywood, NBA basketball) rely on China and speak out both sides of their mouths about Woke support. The Greens rely on outsourcing heavy manufacturing and solar panels and coal to China so they can live a deluded zero carbon fantasy dream with Greta Thunberg.
Russia: A big source of commodities with nuclear weapons, but managed using obsolete USSR strategies by depressed alcoholics. Treat them with care because the world needs their minerals, and they have the potential to destroy us all.
This will not be a perfect analogy:
Cows kill about 20 people per year in the US, versus bears, who kill 1-2.
We need cows, they don't act crazy (most of the time they are pretty predictable, ISTM), and they're largely contained, in that fences separate them from us unless WE jump the fence, so we absorb that 10x-20x greater risk. Plus, rightly or wrongly, we perceive cows as needing us too.
Bears are VERY unpredictable (or so they seem to the average car camper or dilletante hiker) and VERY unconstrained. In an average person's interaction with a bear, we don't know what will happen and can't tell in advance whether the bear is suddenly going to turn on us.
In short - I think, as others have said, on the merits China is and was a greater risk, but Russia is less predictable and we have less (of an illusion of) control over it. So I can see why Robert would tag Russia as the greater threat, even though China constituted the greater risk to our country.
Good time to reflect on Obama being 100% correct.
Wow ! Where did that come from ? Obama was about racism 24/7. Oh and large houses.
So I can see why Robert would tag Russia...
Oops, Romney!
@Jamie
Bears are also studiously avoided by rational humans.
Cows are at close range with thousands of people daily.
3+hr format doesn't jive with the current efforts to call science settled and silence dissent. Too much room for wrongthink to be unleashed.
Ironically, I was unable to access the article.
Russian irridentism was clear pre-2012 while the China threat was not in yet focus for many.
The talk for many years was extending NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, after Poland and the Baltics in ~2005. Putin was very clear in 2004 when he repeated that NATO expansion to Russia's borders was a Red Line. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, defeated the Georgian army and satisfied itself with two breakaway republics, conveniently hopping the most defensible border and available for further mischief.
Obama, as usual, was wrong but hit that softball out of the park. When guys from Chicago are in charge and have the press in their pockets, there's no limit on corruption and left-wing infantilism.
" People have now access to an enormous amount of information (which increases during crisis) from many different sources, traditional or digital, including for instance online platform offering pre-print access to scientific articles. Health institutions are not anymore, the only provider of information. This new information ecosystem has generated a new “Health Threat” that accompanies epidemics and pandemics, called infodemic.
Infodemic is the overabundance of information -accurate or not- which makes it difficult for individuals to adopt behaviours that will protect their health and the health of their families and communities. The infodemic can directly impact health, hamper the implementation of public health countermeasures and undermine trust and social cohesiveness. Infodemic cannot be eliminated it can only be managed. This is why WHO and partners have developed the approach of infodemic management which encompasses Risk Communication and Community Engagement adding additional tools and approaches to manage it more efficiently in the 21st century."
https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/pret/who_pret_web_28032023.pdf?sfvrsn=4a661650_3
Being a long time fan of Rogan's comedy, I've always wondered why people keep acting like a guy who calls himself an idiot is treated as a genius
Oops. Poland joined NATO in 1999, along with the Hungary and the Czech Republic.
Also that, NATO adopted and action plan that included 10 more countries, including the Baltics, who lined up to come in a few years. That NATO was bringing in the Baltics, a former part of Tsarist Russia, reunited into the Soviet Union, when Hitler and Stalin divided up Poland in 1939.
Anyway. I've let the proofreader go.
The Romney faction wasn't much better bragging about how perceptive and smart the Weasel was - He ran Bain, they said, and saved the Olympics! How awesome he was.
When the proper response was NSS. Mitt the Weasel was only stating the obvious.
Doesn't mean that he wasn't also an obvious disaster. But you folks here didn't listen to me.
Romney was and is a hack and ignoramus, and deservedly got his clock cleaned by a cleverer foe.
Russia was a very manageable rival in 2012, not our most dangerous enemy; it has suited both Putin and the smirking ghouls of Imperial DC (see Jen Psaki today) to inflate his power and the threat he poses to us and our interests, in almost inverse proportion to our own waning power and fortune.
The Crack Emcee said...
"Being a long time fan of Rogan's comedy, I've always wondered why people keep acting like a guy who calls himself an idiot is treated as a genius"
I don't think he's a genius either but he can hold his own with some very intelligent people. He reads and is a good interviewer. However he has interviewed a lot of crackpots.
@Jamie
Bears are also studiously avoided by rational humans.
Cows are at close range with thousands of people daily.
Indeed! That's why I opened with, "This will not be a urgent analogy." I should have said, "This analogy will be grossly flawed."
But it's still an analogy, however flawed. Russia often seems to act crazy - like a wild animal, China appears to act in a fairly predictable, self-interested fashion - like a domesticated animal. That we are MUCH more dependent on China than on Russia is both inarguable and kinda analogous to your "many more people interact with cows than bears" observation, which also occurred to me as I was choosing my dangerous animals.
[Shrug] Just my $0.02, not exactly sticking up for Romney but just recognizing that what he said wasn't self-evidently the "gaffe" it was billed as.
Rogan does comedy? Huh. The things I learn here.
I've watched a few hours of JRE in the last few months; he's less interesting than most of his guests, which is one mark of a good interviewer. Some of his guests are complete wackjobs but they're largely interesting wackjobs.
Not exactly Lamb or Slen on CSPAN but worth an occasional look.
what is global adversary?
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