Writes Helen Lewis, in "How Joe Rogan Remade Austin/The podcaster and comedian has turned the city into a haven for manosphere influencers, just-asking-questions tech bros, and other 'free thinkers' who happen to all think alike" (The Atlantic).
That's a free-access link, because there's a lot going on in that article, beyond what I chose to excerpt.
That's a free-access link, because there's a lot going on in that article, beyond what I chose to excerpt.
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85 comments:
By "all think alike" they mean reject the RightThink that the media tries to impose on us.
haz cheeseburger?
Helen Lewis is a soldier in the feminist/leftist infowar. Rogan must be pigeonholed as a "short,swole man" surrounded by bogus intellectual upstarts. He must be minimized. He is an enemy of progress. Onward, comrades!
As opposed to the Bay Area with its wide diversity of opinion.
Austin in the late 80s was not bad. Haven't been back in a long time.
Woah, that opening paragraph makes it hard to read further.
Did you know that women often run relationship decisions past their female friends?-
Actually, thanks to my wife, I did. She watched one woman break up some of the young, once happy, marriages in our old neighborhood by “advising” the young wives to place impossible demands on their husbands. The notion that a marriage is a partnership is apparently beyond feminist theory.
I live a couple of hundred miles from Austin- that puts me in an exclusive group of maybe 15 million of so people.
None of what the Atlantic author describes exists for me other than in an article that she wrote.
Austin is the blueberry in the tomato soup that is Texas. Texas is way more diverse than its East and West coast reputation- by the most common criteria, Houston is the most diverse city in the US, and Ted Cruz will be lucky to beat Colin Allred in his re-election for Senate. The big cities are all run by Democrats, with the expected results. Fortunately there is a libertarian streak here that will save us from creeping Californication, and the suburbs and exurbs are full of people who are reality based and will oppose any leftward drift. Or else.
Quite so. They march in lockstep in thinking they should be free to have their own thoughts and live their own lives.
"Swole"?
It read well but not a great take on the city. Those tech guys are there because California is a shithole micromanaged by people what received Cs in high school snd want all their money. Her laundry list of political attributes is not the squishy middle right but describes the beliefs of many of the commenters here (and Me) or probably most people at a Trump rally...
...and I had to stop at a third tells him that a deworming drug could wipe out COVID. Clearly this is a reference to the highly politicized CNN version of Ivermectin. It is stupid, ignores decades of data and is the type of bullshit that Rogan has been forced to deal with...
I wouldn't talk to a jackass like that, either...
“Love? Love can be found in Austin.”
I like this writer. This is a brilliant insult:
: "...wore a huge belt buckle with TONY HINCHCLIFFE written on it—presumably for situations in which he is both taking off his trousers and unable to remember who he is."
How to tell me you never met a farmer without using those words: "They shoot guns but worry about seed oils."
I get the sense Austin is what Helen thinks is leaving the big city for the boonies.
"Elon Musk is so keen to get people to move to Texas that he is planning an entire community outside Austin called Snailbrook for workers at his Tesla Gigafactory and the Boring Company."
That Elon Musk got people to move to Boca Chica is far more amazing than getting them to move to Austin. Even by plane, Boca Chica, is an hour south of Austin. There are no comedy clubs or kombucha in Boca Chica. Yet, it is now the leading space port in the world.
"the pandemic probably started with a lab leak in China", I guess she believes there is no evidence for this?
"the January 6 insurrection was not as bad as liberals claim" indeed
"gender medicine for children is out of control" That it exists, for children, is crazy.
"the legacy media are scolding and biased" as on display in the article.
"The liberal case against Rogan usually references one of two culture-war flash points: COVID and gender. " There is a liberal case for COVID?
Woke and MeToo were weapons wielded indiscriminately like a too-heavy mace and it is too much to ask the left to consider the consequences of their actions. You could have been critical about it when it mattered, so stop complaining about avant-garde masturbation jokes...
"IN THIS HOUSE, WE BELIEVE"
In my house, I believe:
Orion Slave Women are real
I will have sex with them
They will love me, we will cuddle
I will be the big spoon
We will make green space babies
You can’t stop me
And all you need do to prove that the claim “they all think alike” is wrong is read the article.
Spot on. I wonder if we (Texas) are 10 years away from California, politically. Demographics determine destiny.
Your welcome for introducing the blog to the Joe Rogan podcast. Did you listen to Jordan Peterson yesterday on Maher's Club Random?
If a city is going to be remade by one person, Joe Rogan is the guy you want. He is great friends with MMA fighters, edgy comedians and intellectuals.
Snarky but funny. Damn it, I did not want to laugh, but did.
Pretty boring article. I don't think she gets Rogan or his humor. She obviously didn't listen to any of the scores of podcasts he does with women. She obviously didn't look into his past, which he talks about a lot, admiringly, especially about his mother, being bullied, learning discipline. She went to a show and stole a bunch of anecdotes from other reporting. She seems mostly pissed off that he was pissed off about a man who disguised his "sex change" and beat the crap out of a woman.
Rogan knows a lot about sports science, far more than this underachiever. Little wonder she didn't engage his real and complex arguments about sex development differences.
The Atlantic used to have real journalists.
It's an essential truth that there's nothing funny about women. Droll but lofty planet.
I think it was Kinky Friedman who said “Austin is Texas for people who hate Texas.”
That would require actual research thats not what the atlantic does
Have you seen him standing up? It does look like he skips leg day...
It's a good article but it's kind of ridiculous to suggest that Rogan has changed Austin. The city has always been like that. It's obvious when you watch Richard Linklater's work. He has captured the Austin vibe perfectly. Check out Slacker (1990) or Waking Life (2001).
His politics defy easy categorization—he hates Democratic finger-wagging but supports gay marriage and abortion rights.
He's a libertarian. Duh.
did you just make that up? I like it.
I made it up a long time ago. Those signs are ripe for parody. I have many more.
Good stuff. She should go on Kill Tony.
Euphemism for muscular. It's a little dated, but still works.
Friends don't let Rogan skip leg day. In his defense, everyone hates leg day. I hate leg day.
I read the whole thing. She makes some interesting abservations about Austin, and seems to acknowledge some of the craziness on the left, but its scary how set she is in some of here unquestioned progressive perspectives, aven after the last 4 years. She still refers to ivermectin as the de-wormer and seems sympathetic to Fauci's "noble lie" (it was the one time he told the truth - masks wouldn't help)? I wonder how many leftist hoaxes she still believes in while sneering at conspiracy nuts on the right.
I can't find Thurber's cartoon series “The War Between Men and Women" online but it's definitive.
Well.... Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and a few other smaller cities are also blueberries.
Austin has always been insufferable in it's self-adoring hipster virtue and its passion for addle-pated causes. It's a western city eager to catch up and play with its older, more mature siblings on the coasts. But it's a fun city to visit, but like all of the Texas cities, its sprawl reaches out well past municipal boundaries. Texas is becoming a Venn diagram of the over-lapping radii of Big City influence, and my property taxes are an indication of that year-on-year velocity of expansion.
Steve Jobs has much to answer for, leaving all that money to his crazy widow so she could turn an old magazine into The Daily Kos.
Almost all comedy clubs (not that i've been to many) lock your phone in a bag. It's not unusual.
Like Trump.
She is humorous at times, but she seemed hell bent on making Rogan out as a bad example to follow, rather than acknowledging positively any of the reasons why people do follow him. And I’m not one that follows or have listened to even one episode of his podcast. I also avoid Austin like most Texans outside of Austin do.
“Anti-wokeness” once encompassed everyone who could agree that Drew Barrymore’s talk show was annoying, that some left-wing activists on TikTok were out of control, and that corporations were largely banging on about diversity to sell more products rather than out of a genuine commitment to human flourishing.
This is a fundamental misreading of her subject(s) and was not why people opposed DEI and the "woke" movement that fueled it.
The writer passes along an insult likening Joe Rogan to Homer Simpson, but she strains to the point of pulling an abdominal muscle to strike Rogan's posture of 'I'm not an ideological scold, just observing and skeptical of Both Sides.'
She tries but fails to hide her contempt for the modern free speech movement, which is pretty much the same as the original free speech movement, the only change being the Left are now the bad guys.
The dog is man’s best friend, amirite
Hey, Helen Lewis! Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in bed!
h/t Kinky Friedman
"Before marriage, eyes wide open. After marriage, half shut." - Ben Franklin
"During the pandemic, The JRE also drew audience members who were frustrated with the limits of acceptable discussion, at a time when Facebook and YouTube were banning or restricting what they labeled misinformation."
Hmm, so it wasn't misinformation, just what they labeled?
Men, women, and our Posterity are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus. It's not a battle of the sexes... genders, but rather a war of the worlds and humans are getting aborted in progressive numbers. Demos-cracy dies in darkness, at the twilight fringe. Let us bray. In Stork They Trust. #HateLovesAbortion
California used to have a strong libertarian streak, until we were filled up with progressive folks from all the other states, looking for financial opportunity and bringing their reactionary frustrations with them.
"Heterodox orthodoxy" = The Truth. Every single example she gave. Every. One.
Like Atlantic readers and liberal Austonians don't all think alike?
If you write something that's unduly flattering to your own side you ought to delete it and start over, but undue flattery is exactly what the tribalized public demands today.
It can't be said enough that Leftists just love their myths about the Right, cannot survive a day without reciting these false truths as a catechism, repeat them to each other endlessly knowing they will get knowing nods in return. An ex-girlfriend won't watch the entire Snopes video on the Charlottesville hoax because "she saw it already on MSNBC. I tried to tell her she only saw a carefully edited bit, but she won't budge. They do not WANT to know the truth or the facts. Facts are to Leftists what garlic is to Dracula.
Dog is increasingly woman's "best friend". In dark corners of the internet stories are arising from doctors and nurses of women that are becoming more intimate than usual with their best friends (hospitals designating semen as Category "X"...don't look it up). Now imagine if dog really was man's "best friend"...women would go the way of the horse when faced with the Model T Ford.
And editors who actually checked facts before publication. Liberals don't mind facts, but once you go hard Leftist as the Atlantic has, well actual facts are off-limits.
Fauci is a fraud. An on-the-take... fraud. I know some hard-core progressives who think so, too.
Both CA and TX are majority Hispanic, but the reason TX is still a somewhat R state is that the Hispanic vote is much less D heavy than the CA Hispanic vote.I have wondered why that is.
Why does humor have to be monolithic? Why do we all have to like the same things? Lefties don’t care for Joe Rogan’s humor? Or Joe Rogan’s podcast? That’s ok. The whole article is a lament that the ability to determine what’s cool might be slipping away from whatever group the author thinks she belongs to.
There’s a video clip of a moderator asking a group of intellectuals what they would do, given a chance to be ruler of the world. Ayn Rand’s response: resign immediately.
We don’t need rulers and we don’t need any self appointed group telling anyone what’s funny.
Is Joe Rogan on the dunking chair now? He must be too influential. It’s his turn,
The key to Rogan is the info dump that he draws out of his guests.
It’s the guests stupid.
From the snippet I know I'm not going to wade thru a 5000 word essay filled with intentionally clever prose. "Manosphere"? Really?
Yes - RE taxes are a killer (and keep going up) if you live in a "desirable" neighborhhood.
Clearly, some people feel threatened by the existence of a strong male.
Amen. It was enough for me. "Manosphere"?
Makes it sound like an illness.
"As Rogan himself says after he emerges in stonewashed jeans, clutching a glass of something amber on ice"
Female writers always leaning into the oddly specific aesthetics.
The first two sentences of the piece:
"It’s a Tuesday night in downtown Austin, and Joe Rogan is pretending to jerk off right in front of my face. The strangest thing about this situation is that millions of straight American men would kill to switch places with me."
Showed me that the author doesn't have a handle on what she is addressing. Stopped reading, despite the recommendation and free link.
Elon Musk had much more to do with changing Austin than Rogan, Musk's Gigafactory Texas alone employs over 20,000 people. Saying it's enormous is an understatement. As noted in the article Musk is building homes to house his employees, current home prices in Austin are outrageous.
Lewis goes off on Rogan's ivermectin stance,...and promoting an unproven deworming drug as a treatment for COVID. This is a BS take, below are selected Wiki quotes concerning ivermectin, remember Wiki is no friend of Joe Rogan.
"In August 2021, the FDA tweeted "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it". (Litigation followed and the FDA deleted their text.) "The CDC described two cases requiring hospitalization; in one, a person had drunk an injectable ivermectin product intended for use in cattle." One person. "Countries that have granted such official approval for ivermectin include the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Mexico, Peru India and the Philippines" Pretty sure these countries aren't totally stupid or trying to kill their citizens, maybe they aren't beholden to big pharma. "Australian epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz wrote "There are no two ways about it: Science is flawed."" This is the money shot that wiki allowed to be printed. Politicized science cuts both ways and it totally destroyed confidence in our institutions.
Lewis continues, "Rogan's sympathetic treatment of his friend Alex Jones demonstrates why power is better mediated through institutions than wielded by individuals." Not an Alex Jones follower but no, no, and no. Our institutions have failed us, see the CDC and FDA examples above.
As a fellow Texan I wholeheartedly agree with West TX Intermediate Crude's comment concerning Texas and its politics. Austin is indeed the blueberry in the tomato soup that is Texas and has been so for a very long time.
Term has been around for years.
"Clearly, some people feel threatened by the existence of a strong male."
A man who is strong mentally, emotionally, ethically and physically is very difficult to control, and virtually impossible for a woman to control. Nature wasn't very kind to women in the lets-play-manipulate-your-universe-or-you-die game, so all women have become evolutionary masters at manipulating others. This is not a bad thing, it's what they need to do to gather the resources to survive.
What people who see a strong male are threatened by is not physical dominance but the realization that he's not going to play their game if they want to interact with him. They'll have to play his. They don't like the idea of playing a game where they can't filch the rules and cheat in their favor.
It is the reason why society seems hellbent on feminizing men. Boys are hard to control. For the right player, women are much easier.
rehajm
"Have you seen him standing up? It does look like he skips leg day..."
Have you seen his round kick to a heavy bag? It doesn't look like he skips leg day...
Have you seen Helen Lewis?
Austin is the Madison, WI of Texas.
NB: The article assumes men are toxic and reasons from there. If you fall for that BS you’ll believe anything,
Yep.
She had a bad experience with the opposite sex. Stop braying about it and change your climate. The sun will come out, the birds will sing, and one day you may share a "burden". To life!
My son and grand daughter did the college tour thing a few years ago. Both concluded Austin was " a shithole." She graduates from U of Alabama next June.
Cite (21 September 2021): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7505114/
Title: "Ivermectin, a potential anticancer drug derived from an antiparasitic drug"
Key Quotes:
"IVM is currently the most successful avermectin family drug and was approved by the FDA for use in humans in 1978."
"IVM not only has strong effects on parasites but also has potential antiviral effects. IVM can inhibit the replication of flavivirus by targeting the NS3 helicase [17]; it also blocks the nuclear transport of viral proteins by acting on α/β-mediated nuclear transport and exerts antiviral activity against the HIV-1 and dengue viruses [18]. Recent studies have also pointed out that it has a promising inhibitory effect on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has caused a global outbreak in 2020."
This lunatic author wants to belittle a drug that can treat HIV1, dengue viruses, and maybe cancer, because she doesn't want to believe the science that it can inhibit SARS-CoV-2. Is she on the payroll of BigPharma?
Helen Lewis interviewed Jordan Peterson once, and from the word go he knew she was trying to destroy him. If you watch the video on Youtube you can see him actively listening to her, playing chess while she thinks she is, too, except he keeps taking her checkers away.
"Rogan's sympathetic treatment of his friend Alex Jones demonstrates why power is better mediated through institutions than wielded by individuals."
Can't have anyone being sympathetic to a friend, if the friend is to be demonized.
What a fascist.
When I got a job in Austin way back in 2000, my wife and I consciously decided not to live there, and chose to live in a bedroom community outside the City of Austin itself. Not a single regret has crossed my mind over this decision. Thinking that Rogan has any influence over the political machinations or Austin's overall social scene, compared to the liberal crowd running things there, is ludicrous. Recall that Texas was solid Democrat until the 90s, and is about to turn blue again thanks to the Republicans' inability to avoid general corruption, and their stepping on their dicks regarding abortion.
Recall that Rogan was pro Berno because "He seems nice"
Austin used to be the location of a university, and every other year the location of the Legislator and lotsa hookers from Dallas and Houston. The city has grown. The vibe remains as above, despite techies, population increase, and Rogan.
This was the most ignorant article I’ve read in a long time.
That’s kind of the problem for Republicans — we don’t all think alike. Nancy Pelosi could just order her Congress critters around and even the “Blue Dog” Democrats would fall in line — even the ones who knew that voting per her orders was likely to cost them their seat! Mike Johnson has to herd cats.
To paraphrase the famous line from “Billy Madison,” everyone who followed that link is dumber for having read even as little as one paragraph of that article.
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