If it’s Putin’s fault then no one in the US can solve the problem. If that isn’t the case then there’s no plausible way to avoid accepting that this is our problem to solve internally. Some people aren’t ready to face that reality so they choose the comfortable oversimplification instead.

What is that thing in the sky? It looks like a huge…

JOHNSON!

Yes sir?

It must be nice to have the capacity to care about everything, everywhere, all the time. That sounds like the height of privilege.

They might have some things to say about that if they could read

Yeah well, that’s pretty much where the whole world is at right now. It’s easier to lie than explain the truth

That’s fair. I suppose a better wording would have been “let people articulate their weird positions in their own words”. I think that’s a good thing in conceptual form. However, as you noted, it doesn’t really work if you aren’t equipped to push back and make them address the counter arguments. That’s where Joe is lacking. He’s good at getting people talking and asking layman’s questions but that’s as deep as he can go. He needs to book the guys who can give the rebuttals either on the same show or immediately after.

I’m conflicted about Joe Rogan, or at least the concept he had at the start. Clearly he’s fallen down the right-wing rabbit hole but the original intent he had of letting people defend their weird positions is a good one imo. One could argue that the reason the right-wing funnel exists is because there isn’t really space to talk about some of those things on the left.

For example, it’s not crazy to ask questions about vaccines and how they work. However, when people do that those who are educated on the topic will largely assume ill intent by default and treat the people asking questions as if they’re stupid or malicious. There’s some good reasons for that but such an approach is pretty alienating for those who are genuinely seeking information. That leads at least a portion of those people to listen to more right leaning information because they feel like that is the only group taking them seriously.

We need to do better at meeting people where they are instead of assuming they are trying to spread misinformation. Yes it’s true that all the information you need to develop an informed opinion about the vast majority of topics is available on the internet, but finding and understanding that information does take skills and time that not everyone has. In order to understand why a statement or belief is incorrect or misinformed you have to create a space in which it can be discussed without fear and shame driving people away.

Based on the limited amount of his older podcasts that I’ve been exposed to, I do think that Joe genuinely tried to do that, he’s just not particularly well equipped to handle that kind of environment. Over time he fell victim to the same kind of radicalization that he was intending to subvert by letting people share their actual thoughts instead of assuming he already knew what they were going to say.

I don’t know that I would say “as intended” but it is better than live TV, especially in the educational department. Neil Degrasse Tyson’s yt channel is better than anything on the discovery channel these days. Countless podcasts are better than anything on the history channel. I don’t think they even try to do history anymore. They just air pawn stars reruns 24/7.

Are they wrong?

Which I’m not so yeah, it was pretty easy.

Yeah I heard some stuff about it at the time but not much. About 5 years later I started reading an article about it but only got like 2 paragraphs in before I remembered why I never paid attention to it the first time around and quit reading.

Gamergate was at least easy to ignore. I still don’t really know what it was about. Always seemed like pointless internet drama to me. That may or may not be true but it hasn’t been a problem to stay ignorant about the topic. You can’t ignore what’s happening now unless you don’t use the internet at all and even that isn’t going to be completely effective.

“It’s just a bug, trust me bro”

Yeah OK huge corporation. The followup question is why this mechanism exists at all if it was never intended to be used in this fashion.