political correctness gone mad

[Ab]

Originally Posted by crocos

What stan told you that? Because it's not true.

Even changing it to "First mass-produced major work of literature printed in Europe on a movable type press" is a disputed statement.

What do you nominate as earlier candidates of mass-produced major works of literature printed in Europe? The Bible checked in at 1454.

[blynk]

Originally Posted by Cyberbob

which sounds reasonable at first glance until you see the result, which is that things that are completely proven wrong are given equal weight to legitimate ideas

Yeah, thats the key thing.
99% of experts could say 1 thing, 1% of experts say the opposite.
And they will both get to say their views for an hour.
That's not balanced.

[DrTiTus]

Try 99% get two years to talk, and the 1% gets cancelled.

That's not balanced either.

[Cyberbob]

It's just classic 'both sides'.

Tonight we'll be talking to a scientist about the solar system, and to balance her views, we've invited a member of the flat earth society.

It's not supposed to be balanced. Views and opinions are not as valid as fact based evidence. If you disagree with that statement, then there's nothing more to be said here.

[Ab]

I think Rogan is just being Rogan and sensible people can listen or not listen. I think Spotify is trying to have its cake (owning the world's biggest podcast) and eat it too (we're not responsible for what gets published by our content creators) and is not looking good. I think Neil Young is a hypocritical angry white Boomer who sees an opportunity to hurt Spotify in the media (see: Pono). I think there are a bunch of people I hate on the US right up in arms because freedom, and a bunch of people I hate on the US left up in arms because opinions they don't like exist. I think Internet disinformation is particularly dangerous at the moment because vaccination is important, and I think we live in a capitalist society where people can and should be free to choose where they spend their money.

[DrTiTus]

Originally Posted by Cyberbob

It's just classic 'both sides'.

Tonight we'll be talking to a scientist about the solar system, and to balance her views, we've invited a member of the flat earth society.

It's not supposed to be balanced. Views and opinions are not as valid as fact based evidence. If you disagree with that statement, then there's nothing more to be said here.

What exactly is not supposed to be balanced? We're talking about Joe Rogan here, on a streaming platform, doing interviews with whoever he chooses. And if we don't get to hear the arguments or ideas from the other side, how will we know that they're wrong?

I watched "Behind the Curve" - a documentary giving airtime to flat earthers. I was interested to see what they had to say, not because I believe the Earth is flat, but to find out how they came to their conclusion. I did not cancel Netflix because they gave airtime to people pushing an idea which is wrong.

[Lightspeed]

Originally Posted by Ab

see, that's not crazy at all to me, interpreted a certain way.

Yeah, but almost anything is true if we're willing to interpret generously and anything can be false, if we're not.

It would be one thing if Rogan was digging up fringe/nuanced views about the history of books, but I find his pursing hot takes about issues of acute consequence unfortunate.

I find Spotify promoting Rogan to me when I was using the service for advertising free music unfortunate.

This doesn't make me part of an agenda to cancel Spotify or Rogan. They do their thing, I do my thing. Trying to lump these things into competing agendas is an agenda.

[fixed_truth]

Originally Posted by DrTiTus

And if we don't get to hear the arguments or ideas from the other side, how will we know that they're wrong?

People don't know that these arguments are wrong from hearing the other side.

[Ab]

Originally Posted by Lightspeed

Trying to lump these things into competing agendas is an agenda.

And that's the problem. It becomes a huge virtue-signallingfest as people show their tribal allegiances to their followers. I presume Neil Young pulled his songs from Spotify because he feels very strongly about vaccination, and a podcast produced by Spotify hosted interviews with people who are anti-vax and whose charismatic host had expressed vaccine skepticism. I don't think it's a coincidence that Neil Young has in the past launched a commercial competitor to Spotify that then failed, so he probably has an axe to grind.

At the heart of this is an accusation that Spotify is the producer of material that has negative consequences for society by broadcasting material that is not true. Spotify should get its fucking shit together and have fact-checkers and executive producers who can cancel guests or delete untruths or put disclaimers at the start of episodes. You know, like normal broadcast media.

But now this is turning into a general accusation that Joe Rogan – not Spotify – exposes listeners to dangerous ideas and he should be punished. Rogan said it was unfair for males to fight in UFC Women's fights, which means he's transphobic, which means that he is personally responsible for the wave of anti-trans murders which actually hasn't happened but we can't say that either. What the popular media says Joe Rogan says is far worse than what Joe Rogan actually says.

And the thing that shits me massively, exemplified on the previous page, is that the people criticising Rogan's podcast include among them shitty people from whom I would never take moral guidance in a thousand years. Neil Young thinks gay people are faggots who could give him AIDS. Joni Mitchell thinks its amusing to dress and perform as a black man. Harry Windsor, one of the most pampered and privileged media whores in the history of the universe, thinks its funny to dress up as a Nazi. And they think Joe Rogan shares dangerous ideas? Fuck them all.

[Ab]

Originally Posted by Ab

see, that's not crazy at all to me, interpreted a certain way.

Originally Posted by Lightspeed

Yeah, but almost anything is true if we're willing to interpret generously and anything can be false, if we're not.

We're nowhere near "almost anything is true" levels of relativism. What Peterson said was a perfectly-sensible true statement about Western culture. But where there's an opportunity to get out the pitchforks for Rogan and Peterson at the same time, US lefties can't help themselves. They have to rend their garments in front of their peers, because otherwise they might be accused of impurity.

[fixed_truth]

Crosby, Stills and Nash joining the Spotify boycott. Might need artists that are a bit more contemporary to get some real momentum

[Ab]

Spotify doesn’t care if some old boomers no one under 30 has heard of pull their catalogs. Spotify will care if popular podcasts start pulling out.

[StN]

Originally Posted by fixed_truth

Crosby, Stills and Nash joining the Spotify boycott. Might need artists that are a bit more contemporary to get some real momentum

Boomers gonna boom.

Disclaimer- I have a 7” single by them…

[Nothing]

Originally Posted by Ab

I think Rogan is just being Rogan [...]

If only it were that simple, but unfortunately Joe keeps doing things like spreading islamophobia, funneling people into extremism, and platforming fuckwits.

Maybe he is just being Joe, but if that's who he is, it's pretty fucking cancerous.

[Ab]

He also called opponents of gay marriage idiots, and advised listeners to vote for Sanders in the last US primaries. Unlike sex, it ain't a binary.

[Ab]

Also spreading thoughtcrime with Rogan:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/people/cu...covid-science/

Astrophysicist and science communicator Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium and host of TV documentaries including Origins and Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, in Episodes 919, 1159, and 1347.

Physicist and science communicator Professor Brian Cox, Royal Society Professor for Public Engagement in Science and host of BBC documentaries including Human Universe and Wonders of the Solar System, in Episode 1233.

Evolutionary biologist and science communicator Professor Richard Dawkins, fellow of the Royal Society and author of books including The Selfish Gene and The Greatest Show on Earth, in Episode 1366.

Sociolinguist and popular science author Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of books including The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, in Episodes 1073 and 1743.

Mathematician and philosopher of science Sir Roger Penrose, Nobel Laureate in Physics and co-author (with Stephen Hawking) of The Nature of Space and Time, in Episode 1216.

disclosure: I wrote the article I'm quoting. At least I got a Strong Bad joke in there

[wazza]

gg on the article

[Lightspeed]

Originally Posted by Ab

But now this is turning into a general accusation that Joe Rogan – not Spotify – exposes listeners to dangerous ideas and he should be punished.

Nah, that's what it's being made into by those who don't like the idea they can't get away with anything they want. But there isn't anything general happening here at all.

I have a response to circumstances, some other folks talk about their own similar but still personal responses, all of a sudden fingers are being pointed "Look! They want to punish!".

Rogan is making bank as a contrarian, finding that distasteful doesn't make me a US liberal. Spotify promoted him to me unlike they've promoted anything previously, finding that distasteful doesn't make me a US liberal.

There isn't anything general happening here at all.

[Ab]

I've never had the JRE promoted to me, so I'm not sure what the experience of that is like. Is that in a Spotify advertisement or something?

[Lightspeed]

It was a splash screen I had to click through. A complete "wtf is this shit?!" moment. I get impatient when I have to click through Spotify Wrapped. Now they're showing me Rogan like "hey, maybe you wanna huff on this shit".

Then I hear about Spotify buying up Rogan for $100m, and I'm "So that's what that was about. Cheeky money grubbing cunts."

So, when it comes I've got to make a decision about renewing Spotify, I opt not to. How long that decision persists is to be seen, how much that decision will be impacted by events can't be known.

It's affirming that some other fullas are having their own responses. The reaction to those responses seems to have captured the foreground, but that's about something else.

[Ab]

Well that's a response I can dig - I pay money to not see ads.

[Nothing]

Originally Posted by Ab

I've never had the JRE promoted to me, so I'm not sure what the experience of that is like. Is that in a Spotify advertisement or something?

How Do I Block the Joe Rogan Podcast?
The Joe Rogan Experience - How do I remove it from my home page?
Vote for all-platforms-option to disable / hide podcasts
Finally figured out how to remove joe rogan from my spotify homepage

Honestly, I'm not the only one whose nose this has gotten up. Until spotify started ramming Joe down my throat I wasn't even aware of the fact that you could vote for shit in the spotify community forums, or even that the spotify community forums existed. I'd say I'm probably more likely than your average Joe to look for shit like this where I can tell a corpo that they're being a numb nutz. Given that there are literally thousands of votes for some of these things, I gotta wonder how many people it has been pissing off who just have no clue even where to begin about it. I'd be extra pissed off if my parents, for example, who are total tech noob boomers, started listening to Rogan and asking me if I'd heard Episode #### with some anti-vaxxer on it. I saw one comment on the reddit thread which basically said "Of course spotify is shoving it down your throats, they already paid $100M for it and they don't have to pay any further royalties for listens, but they still get the ad-revenue."

[Ab]

Thandiwe Newton has issued a tearful apology to “darker-skinned actresses” for not representing them

https://flip.it/mEjGBE

Gotta max those oppression/allyship points.

[wazza]

watched Westworld recently, Thandiwe's midriff to tit ratio is on point.

[crocos]

Originally Posted by Ab

What do you nominate as earlier candidates of mass-produced major works of literature printed in Europe? The Bible checked in at 1454.

I'll take "What is Nong Shu?" for $100, thanks Ab!

[Ab]

Have you lost the ability to read?

[Lightspeed]

We're nowhere near "almost anything is true" levels of relativism. What Peterson said was a perfectly-sensible true statement about Western culture.

Given what I've read, that's exactly what it looks like. It's the only way Peterson's claim holds up. That, or by calling people with more robust information nerds.

We know that literate homes across Western history would have held more than the bible, we know that as literacy grew there were more books than the bible available. That a subset of people might have had the bible as their most accessible book does not make the bible the first or only book.

[Ab]

The only reason they were literate is because they had to be to read the Bible.

[Lightspeed]

That might be true for a subset of people. But other books existed that people were incentivised to understand since before the bible existed. The bible was not the first or only book in Western culture.

Dude was just rambling, you can tell by how he repeats "literally" like a teenager trying to make a point.

[crocos]

You said mass produced. Nong Shu was. Not as many? No. I didn't claim that though. Nong Shu was produced initially via a wooden-block printing press, then laterly via a wooden movable-type press. In the 1300's.

Oh right - Europe. If you said metal-movable-type press in europe, yes 100% correct - famously the Gutenberg Bible. Yet again, the Koreans has a metalloid moving type press about 70 years earlier. (Yes the Gutenberg press was BETTER, but not first-of-type)

Peterson's rambling nonsense however: He wasn't claiming first mass-produced book, nor that it be eurocentric other than an ill-defined "western culture" reference. He claimed that the Bible was the "first book" and before that was only scrolls and papyrus. This is utterly and provably bullshit. Even in Europe.

Your comment gave him FAR too much credit.

[Ab]

Originally Posted by Lightspeed

The bible was not the first or only book in Western culture.

For a long time it really really was. It was the reason that people learned to read; sola scriptura made it their duty as Christians. If you were to overlay a map of Europe with data showing literacy rates and the change in literacy rates over time, the map would be a map of Protestantism with two "Ground Zeroes": Wittenberg and Mainz.

If you want to nerd out on this, I recommend the following:

McGrath, A. E. (2007). Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution—A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First

Becker, S. O., and Woessmann, L. (2009). Was Weber wrong? A human capital theory of Protestant economic history.

Becker, S. O., and Woessmann, L. (2010). The effect of Protestantism on education before the industrialization: Evidence from 1816 Prussia.

Cantoni, D. (2012). Adopting a new religion: The case of Protestantism in 16th century Germany, in The Economic Journal 122

Dittmar, J. E., and Seabold, S. (2016). Media, markets, and radical ideas: Evidence from the Protestant Reformation. Working paper, http://www.jeremiahdittmar.com/files...t_religion.pdf

Edit update: also Henrich, J. (2019) The Weirdest People in the World, and Ferguson, N. (2018) Civilization: The West and The Rest

The spread of literacy through the West is the spread of Protestant Christianity. They are the same thing, because of the Bible, which is doctrinally prima scriptura, the first mass-produced work of literature printed in Europe, and the first book most people in Europe had ever seen. To describe the Bible as the first book in Western culture is perfectly sensible.

[crocos]

Only book? No. Only book most people were able to access? Fair enough.

First book? Not even close. First book a large number of people were able to access? Yep.

[Ab]

Plutarch writes of Julius Caesar dissing Gnaeus Pompeius by referring to him as the second man in Rome. Caesar was obviously an idiot because Rome was hundreds of years old by that point and there was no way that Pompey was the second man to have been there.

[Lightspeed]

Originally Posted by Ab

To describe the Bible as the first book in Western culture is perfectly sensible.

It's perfectly sensible if you're setting up a particular frame, promoting a particular worldview.

It's a distortion however if you're presenting to a lay audience. Anyone could find a book that pre-dates the bible that exists in contemporary Western culture and wonder "what could have that podcast fulla meant?". Others would never find that book and accept uncritically that no other books could be found: the bible was progenitor of books. Something which is true only through a particular lens.

[StN]

Originally Posted by Lightspeed

It's perfectly sensible if you're setting up a particular frame, promoting a particular worldview.

[Ab]

Jews erased from history of Hollywood:

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/...ation-1283537/

[fixed_truth]

They're coming for him . . . (Joe)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZlnH8MAb8L/

[Ab]

It's violence and erasure when actors and actresses play characters who aren't like them, episode 39879021

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/...rly-legitimate

[_indigo1]

Originally Posted by fixed_truth

They're coming for him . . . (Joe)

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZlnH8MAb8L/

Woah before I unmuted I was getting a real Vincent D'Onofrio's Wilson Fisk vibe from that vid.

[Ab]

Calls for legislation to punish Netflix for a Jimmy Carr special that contained a joke that some people didn’t think was funny

https://www.theguardian.com/politics...immy-carr-joke