'Cancel culture' may have started out in good faith (much like Christianity) but it has since morphed into something gross and ugly. There are still a few healthy branches left but since the roots are rotten, the tree is rotten, and the rot always reaches the healthy branches.
I make that comparison because as a Pagan who's done a lot of …
'Cancel culture' may have started out in good faith (much like Christianity) but it has since morphed into something gross and ugly. There are still a few healthy branches left but since the roots are rotten, the tree is rotten, and the rot always reaches the healthy branches.
I make that comparison because as a Pagan who's done a lot of research on the history of Paganism, ancient and modern, and the role the Church (Protestant as well as Catholic) played in the witch and heretic hunts of the Inquisition (heretics were real, witches were not), I see these people as you do, Steve, the modern ignorant, semi-literate, torches 'n' pitchforks mob. I call them semi-literate because they have little input into their brains as their ancestors did in days of yore, when the Bible was their sole or near-sole source of thought and 'learning'. Today, it's intellectually constipated 'woke' culture, which produces fanatics as vicious as their Puritan ancestors. It's no coincidence that woke fanaticism (all flavours) closely resembles Christian fundamentalism, sans a god.
I will note one interesting ethical question posed by Hal's (albeit creative) use of Rogan's guest's racist opinions. I'm with you on Rogan; he's largely uninteresting except when he's talking about psychedelics as therapeutic, which is a fascinating and growing new field in promoting mental health, with a lot of legal challenges and public prejudice. I agree that this clip was selectively edited most likely to make Rogan look more racist than he probably is. But I wonder: Did Rogan know this guy was likely to say something like that? Maybe he didn't. I *do* think we need to start coming down hard on anti-science beliefs or expressions, which we've already begun doing because, from both the left and right, such expressions have become demonstrably harmful to others, preventing parents from getting childhood vaccines for their children to worsening a pandemic in the US because of views based far more on politics than science.
I'm very pro-science and we have GOT to get back to a standard of established facts, and we must hold the 'woke' as firmly to it as we insist on doing to the right. So, in retrospect, should Rogan have perhaps edited that out, if not at the time then later, retrospectively?
I've always been a staunch First Amendment supporter but both the left and the right have forced me to question whether we need more boundaries than the few outlined in the Constitution that present clear and present danger to the Republic. And honestly, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think the guest who expressed those opinions should at the very least have those opinions edited out. Whether Rogan wants to tell his audience what he did if he did that I don't know, but it IS a scientifically invalid view. Social media platforms have been forced by government and public pressure to remove or just warn people about fake news, fake facts, and to flat-out remove certain types of content that are demonstrably harmful. It's a very sticky wicket for the First Amendment, but the Founding Fathers didn't have to deal with Twitter. I imagine a much more wired 18th-century British populace would have overwhelmed the Sons of Liberty and the Valley Forge gang in the court of Twitter and Facebook public opinion.
As for the so-called 'harm' that is caused - yes, I see genuine harm in what Rogan's guest expressed *even though anything else he said might have been valid or at least not run afoul of science*, but I discount the alleged 'harm' caused by his racist joke. Strong-willed people of all races aren't destroyed by something stupid even by someone as popular as Rogan, and the rest are, really, too weak-spirited to be on social media. What some call 'harm' the rest of us call 'challenge to your constipated worldview'.
I think those guest comments should be edited out, and also that the (theoretical) Rogan should say why. If we're going to hold the right accountable we MUST do the same with the left. And science is Ground Zero for me. Expect to be held accountable to it, everyone.
"I'm very pro-science and we have GOT to get back to a standard of established facts, and we must hold the 'woke' as firmly to it as we insist on doing to the right. So, in retrospect, should Rogan have perhaps edited that out, if not at the time then later, retrospectively?"
I'm extremely pro-free-speech, including views I detest, because the fact is that these views are out there anyway. I don't think anybody who listens to this guy and finds him compelling wasn't already racist.
I do wish Rogan was smart enough to push back on his nonsense more effectively. But at least Rogan does push back. That will make a difference to some of his listeners. The fact that these views are so rarely exposed to the light means that most people who believe them never hear *anybody* question them.
I understand the concerns about the boundaries of free-speech, but I firmly believe that it's better to challenge bad ideas than to leave them to fester. Or worse, to "silence" them and have people even more curious about what is being "hidden" from them. In fact, I'd argue that one of the major factors that led to so much COVID misinformation was the decidedly un-scientific way that pandemic information was reported.
The scientific method relies on open and rigorous examination. When doing that becomes taboo, you feed all the fruit loops who want to say they're being censored.
Alas, it's not that easy, however. Each side has the "scientists" or "doctors" who they listen to; both sides are pretty convinced that science is on their side. How can we teach people the skills and proclivity to fairly successfully evaluate which alleged science to believe? How can we instill an aesthetic of valuing accuracy over reinforcement of what one already believes? The former is a much more challenging acquired taste, compared to the easy payoffs of the latter.
I used to be a "question authority" person. Well, I still am, but now I'd insert "intelligently" rather than "belligerantly" as so many people now do. What used to make people willing to trust even authorities who tell you something you'd rather not hear - and why is that breaking down now?
Some of it is kind like the Dunning-Kruger effect - we've empowered the common folks to trust their own authority, to take on complex evaluations of truth which are above their pay grade. There are lots of roots to this disdain for outside authority - conflicting health stories in the paper every day, revelations of corrupted science by corporations (tobacco, pharmaceutical), the Tuskegee experiment, even things like mocking the "lab leak hypothesis" of Covid as a wild conspiracy theory only to later find out it was more credible (and from released Fauci emails, something his own advisors found credible at the time he was publicly dismissing it). There are many factors behind these confusing inputs - like people not realizing that wine might have good health effects in one area and bad in another, rather than "scientists can't make up their minds and keep switching". And it all gets too confusing and requires knowledge and skills and considerable effort to do a good job of sorting through.
So let's throw our hands in the air, make some cynical comments, and find some source which will confirm what we want to believe.
Is there any way to foster an iconoclastic democratic technological culture, composed of the normal range of humans in regard to intelligence and temperaments, without falling into this sand trap of overloaded rationality being swamped by irrationality? I don't know, but sometimes I wonder.
And alas, "trust the science" is having an ever weaker constructive influence.
"Journalism' hasn't helped, for sure, and maybe some courses in critical thinking and fact-checking are in order as required before one graduates school. Journalists have, with a few specially trained exceptions (like actual scientists), been properly schooled in how to write about scientific matters, or explain to the reader what 'peer reviewed' or means or how this is an early study for this question so there will be many more to come, so the jury will be out on its meaning for awhile. Of course for many, that level of detail would be too haaaaard to handle, when, oh look! Kim K's got a new ass photo on Twitter! Is that her real ass? Really?
The problem with 'two sciences' is that one of them is clearly faulty and not real science and the other is not. Science will always, for all of us, be a little bit of a matter of faith...especially with science that's too complex for most of us to understand fully (like physics, which is so bizarre it's almost indistinguishable from magic for many of us, and I mean that in the intellectual sense). But the 'science' for, say, Creationism is clearly false and only critical thinking can discern the truth, and that's a skill that's fallen into disfavour and outright hostility. Parents have been fighting it in the schools of years; when I was in college, it was 'Christian' fundamentalists who fought it, now it's the far left and its religious devotion to critical theory who fight it. Thou shalt believe what we teach you, heretic!
I don't know what the answer is, but often I'm glad I'll be dead in another twenty or thirty years. I don't want to stick around to see how badly the left and right have fucked up America, if Putin and Trump don't destroy us first.
'Cancel culture' may have started out in good faith (much like Christianity) but it has since morphed into something gross and ugly. There are still a few healthy branches left but since the roots are rotten, the tree is rotten, and the rot always reaches the healthy branches.
I make that comparison because as a Pagan who's done a lot of research on the history of Paganism, ancient and modern, and the role the Church (Protestant as well as Catholic) played in the witch and heretic hunts of the Inquisition (heretics were real, witches were not), I see these people as you do, Steve, the modern ignorant, semi-literate, torches 'n' pitchforks mob. I call them semi-literate because they have little input into their brains as their ancestors did in days of yore, when the Bible was their sole or near-sole source of thought and 'learning'. Today, it's intellectually constipated 'woke' culture, which produces fanatics as vicious as their Puritan ancestors. It's no coincidence that woke fanaticism (all flavours) closely resembles Christian fundamentalism, sans a god.
I will note one interesting ethical question posed by Hal's (albeit creative) use of Rogan's guest's racist opinions. I'm with you on Rogan; he's largely uninteresting except when he's talking about psychedelics as therapeutic, which is a fascinating and growing new field in promoting mental health, with a lot of legal challenges and public prejudice. I agree that this clip was selectively edited most likely to make Rogan look more racist than he probably is. But I wonder: Did Rogan know this guy was likely to say something like that? Maybe he didn't. I *do* think we need to start coming down hard on anti-science beliefs or expressions, which we've already begun doing because, from both the left and right, such expressions have become demonstrably harmful to others, preventing parents from getting childhood vaccines for their children to worsening a pandemic in the US because of views based far more on politics than science.
I'm very pro-science and we have GOT to get back to a standard of established facts, and we must hold the 'woke' as firmly to it as we insist on doing to the right. So, in retrospect, should Rogan have perhaps edited that out, if not at the time then later, retrospectively?
I've always been a staunch First Amendment supporter but both the left and the right have forced me to question whether we need more boundaries than the few outlined in the Constitution that present clear and present danger to the Republic. And honestly, maybe I'm wrong about this, but I think the guest who expressed those opinions should at the very least have those opinions edited out. Whether Rogan wants to tell his audience what he did if he did that I don't know, but it IS a scientifically invalid view. Social media platforms have been forced by government and public pressure to remove or just warn people about fake news, fake facts, and to flat-out remove certain types of content that are demonstrably harmful. It's a very sticky wicket for the First Amendment, but the Founding Fathers didn't have to deal with Twitter. I imagine a much more wired 18th-century British populace would have overwhelmed the Sons of Liberty and the Valley Forge gang in the court of Twitter and Facebook public opinion.
As for the so-called 'harm' that is caused - yes, I see genuine harm in what Rogan's guest expressed *even though anything else he said might have been valid or at least not run afoul of science*, but I discount the alleged 'harm' caused by his racist joke. Strong-willed people of all races aren't destroyed by something stupid even by someone as popular as Rogan, and the rest are, really, too weak-spirited to be on social media. What some call 'harm' the rest of us call 'challenge to your constipated worldview'.
I think those guest comments should be edited out, and also that the (theoretical) Rogan should say why. If we're going to hold the right accountable we MUST do the same with the left. And science is Ground Zero for me. Expect to be held accountable to it, everyone.
"I'm very pro-science and we have GOT to get back to a standard of established facts, and we must hold the 'woke' as firmly to it as we insist on doing to the right. So, in retrospect, should Rogan have perhaps edited that out, if not at the time then later, retrospectively?"
I'm extremely pro-free-speech, including views I detest, because the fact is that these views are out there anyway. I don't think anybody who listens to this guy and finds him compelling wasn't already racist.
I do wish Rogan was smart enough to push back on his nonsense more effectively. But at least Rogan does push back. That will make a difference to some of his listeners. The fact that these views are so rarely exposed to the light means that most people who believe them never hear *anybody* question them.
I understand the concerns about the boundaries of free-speech, but I firmly believe that it's better to challenge bad ideas than to leave them to fester. Or worse, to "silence" them and have people even more curious about what is being "hidden" from them. In fact, I'd argue that one of the major factors that led to so much COVID misinformation was the decidedly un-scientific way that pandemic information was reported.
The scientific method relies on open and rigorous examination. When doing that becomes taboo, you feed all the fruit loops who want to say they're being censored.
I too am an advocate for good science.
Alas, it's not that easy, however. Each side has the "scientists" or "doctors" who they listen to; both sides are pretty convinced that science is on their side. How can we teach people the skills and proclivity to fairly successfully evaluate which alleged science to believe? How can we instill an aesthetic of valuing accuracy over reinforcement of what one already believes? The former is a much more challenging acquired taste, compared to the easy payoffs of the latter.
I used to be a "question authority" person. Well, I still am, but now I'd insert "intelligently" rather than "belligerantly" as so many people now do. What used to make people willing to trust even authorities who tell you something you'd rather not hear - and why is that breaking down now?
Some of it is kind like the Dunning-Kruger effect - we've empowered the common folks to trust their own authority, to take on complex evaluations of truth which are above their pay grade. There are lots of roots to this disdain for outside authority - conflicting health stories in the paper every day, revelations of corrupted science by corporations (tobacco, pharmaceutical), the Tuskegee experiment, even things like mocking the "lab leak hypothesis" of Covid as a wild conspiracy theory only to later find out it was more credible (and from released Fauci emails, something his own advisors found credible at the time he was publicly dismissing it). There are many factors behind these confusing inputs - like people not realizing that wine might have good health effects in one area and bad in another, rather than "scientists can't make up their minds and keep switching". And it all gets too confusing and requires knowledge and skills and considerable effort to do a good job of sorting through.
So let's throw our hands in the air, make some cynical comments, and find some source which will confirm what we want to believe.
Is there any way to foster an iconoclastic democratic technological culture, composed of the normal range of humans in regard to intelligence and temperaments, without falling into this sand trap of overloaded rationality being swamped by irrationality? I don't know, but sometimes I wonder.
And alas, "trust the science" is having an ever weaker constructive influence.
"Journalism' hasn't helped, for sure, and maybe some courses in critical thinking and fact-checking are in order as required before one graduates school. Journalists have, with a few specially trained exceptions (like actual scientists), been properly schooled in how to write about scientific matters, or explain to the reader what 'peer reviewed' or means or how this is an early study for this question so there will be many more to come, so the jury will be out on its meaning for awhile. Of course for many, that level of detail would be too haaaaard to handle, when, oh look! Kim K's got a new ass photo on Twitter! Is that her real ass? Really?
The problem with 'two sciences' is that one of them is clearly faulty and not real science and the other is not. Science will always, for all of us, be a little bit of a matter of faith...especially with science that's too complex for most of us to understand fully (like physics, which is so bizarre it's almost indistinguishable from magic for many of us, and I mean that in the intellectual sense). But the 'science' for, say, Creationism is clearly false and only critical thinking can discern the truth, and that's a skill that's fallen into disfavour and outright hostility. Parents have been fighting it in the schools of years; when I was in college, it was 'Christian' fundamentalists who fought it, now it's the far left and its religious devotion to critical theory who fight it. Thou shalt believe what we teach you, heretic!
I don't know what the answer is, but often I'm glad I'll be dead in another twenty or thirty years. I don't want to stick around to see how badly the left and right have fucked up America, if Putin and Trump don't destroy us first.