I think this is an appropriate way to deal with any ultimatum. It's a much weaker form of "don't negotiate with terrorists". It's in no organizations to embolden people into bullying them into something. I wish we saw more of this.
(As a hedge, most times when I see something principled like this happen, there is some small blowback and instead of letting it pass, the organization capitulates and reverses their decision. We'll see if that happens here)
The posturing in this argument is silly. The other person thinks joe Rogan is being irresponsible and should change. That’s not a violation of your freedom.
> So my options are switching between streaming platforms or having Rogan's podcast censored down to the guests you and Neil Young like?
Because you’re acting like these two “either or” options are being forced on you. The options are 1) misleading and 2) not your only options.
Option #1 - Switching streaming platforms - There are already artists far more popular than Young not on Spotify (https://www.ranker.com/list/musicians-against-spotify/ranker...), like Prince, the Beatles, Taylor Swift, Pink Floyd, etc. If you’ve ever wanted to listen to these all-time artists, you already had to switch platforms, so this is not a new option.
Option #2 - Censorship - Find me a quote where Young says he wants to curate Rogan’s content. You’re leading here. And censorship is way too strong a word. It’s not censorship if the content is (or can be) easily accessible elsewhere. Censorship is the total banning of a piece of content everywhere.
Totally fine to be upset by what Young did, I get that it’s a crappy move, but it doesn’t rise to the level of censorship or inconveniencing you, beyond the tiniest amount.
No, a free market doesn’t require any statement of preferences, just freedom to buy and sell. Your wallet states your preferences in a free market, not your words.
Stating your preferences online is just practicing free speech.
I agree that it's the right move. It's Spotify telling artists and content creators that it won't be a part of either their political statements or grudges. Imagine a streaming platform where Eminem tells the platform to remove Machine Gun Kelly or else he's removing his content. And once one person pulls it off, a lot of people will try to do the same.
> It's Spotify telling artists and content creators that it won't be a part of either their political statements or grudges.
I realize I'm pulling a quote out of context from your comment, itself a specific reply to another comment. That being said:
This doesn't seem to address what I understand to be the issue. I would draw a distinction between political statements based on differences of opinion/perspective and statements that target misinformation. If one believes that the latter is at play, this distinction is relevant, and the idea is somewhat codified (with some variations) in the free speech, hate speech, and libel laws of many jurisdictions for reasons that seem justifiable to me.
More specifically, I would have a problem with Spotify engaging in specific political disputes between artists on their platform. I wouldn't have a problem with Spotify adapting their terms to target misinformation on their platform, assuming this was done in good faith and enforced reasonably.
I guess this is one way to get media attention. Probably the increased media coverage from this will help boost sales from other sources to negate loss of Spotify revenue.
How much of a loss can Young leaving be? Nothing against ol' Neil but his relevance is long gone. He's a great artist. He has a right to his opinion. But in terms of "cultural juice" he's heading in to sunset.
I don't understand what motivates a move like this. Is he really that indignant about Joe's views on COVID that he can't sell on the same platform. If so why? Because he cares about public health initiatives that much?
I think it is more virtuous to send honest signals than to be a hypocrite.
Also, "virtue" in these cases usually just means conforming to social pressure and the norms of particularly vociferous factions of society.
Even if you happen to agree with those norms (which are seen as Draconian by many), the sanctimonious holier-than-thou attitude probably won't help the cause in the long run.
Honesty is better than hypocrisy although the two are not mutually exclusive. More often one has to choose between being honest and hypocritical or being dishonest and consistent.
What evidence do you have that this move by Neil Young is anything other than his honest feelings on the subject? A lot of people are sick of Rogan spreading BS. It's not suprising someone like Young would choose to use what little leverage they have to push for him to be removed.
Engage with peoples points, don't just claim that they're sanctimonious or that there's a lot of them, so you get to ignore them - that's absurd.
A lot of people sharing the same opinion doesn't magically make that opinion less valid, engaging with the world as if there's some great conspiracy against you is counterproductive.
I kinda made the opposite of the that claim in my comment :-) I think a lot of people see the norms "virtue signallers" want to impose as Draconian. I don't think a guy having controversial guests on his podcasts is something many people find intolerable.
There are people out there who care more about the truth and acknowledge that such a thing exists than giving every crazy person a megaphone.
If we want to live in a circus where people who have no idea what they're talking about get to disseminate lies while thousands of people die preventable deaths every day we've lost our collective minds.
Is he though? He asked them to remove JRE or remove his catalog. He's exercising his choice to remove himself from the platform because he doesn't want to be associated with Spotify and the people they employ.
Supporting censorship would be more along the lines of asking the government to jail Rogan, erasing his content, etc.
Spotify has actually removed certain JRE episodes from the available catalog as a condition of their deal.[1]
This is just a lazy buzzword you can use to shut down other peoples opinions without having to actually engage with them.
It's just "virtue signalling", it's just "PC gone mad", it's just "cancel culture", they're just "crazy SJWs". Notice how none of these things actually have any substance, they're just a way to dismiss someone else and walk away feeling like you've won a pointless argument.
He knew what the outcome of what his "ultimatum". He put his personal profits on the line and followed through. This clearly isn't a case of virtue signaling.
> I don't understand what motivates a move like this
There's been this big shift the last 10 or so years that hasn't got enough attention. People somehow now act like the world has to align to focus all its priorities on exactly what they prioritize, and can't imagine the idea that things matter differently to different people.
The way things previously worked, you didn't have to agree with everything someone else did or said, you just had to get along. Now it's like "if you don't drop everything and take my cause as seriously as I do, you're dead to me"
I had previously thought it was a "me generation" thing, but Neil Young is like 80 so i guess it's a societal shift.
hahaha you surely must be joking. what a ridiculous spin! being political & caring about the world is not new. Young has been a strong advocate, loudly held moral stances for probably longer than many many of the readers on HN have been alive[1]. having backbone, a stance, caring: it's not new.
this isnt really that different than asking Young to share a show with someone. our systems and our services have gotten more centralized, more controlled. the connection is not as clear & apparent as sharing a stage. but this is not some new radical new interpersonal cruelty Young has fostered. it's the simple desire to not associate with trash & cruelty, to find better spaces. that's not new. it's just good sense.
we dont all have to follow the same code, but we should not be party to those supporting the despicable. obvious, & anything else anything less in madness.
Pretending that the current brand of "activism" is the same as previous ones is disingenuous, and disrespectful. Previous struggles for rights, for example by women, blacks, and gays, as well as pushing back against "the man" - conformity with the establishment, were important causes, I don't need to dwell on that. The current need for outrage and attention while simultaneously being ultra conformist brand of slacktivism is nothing like that. Neil Young may have been an important part of past struggles, but he's just another establishment shill looking for attention now if this is the kind of hill he's dying on.
> Previous struggles for rights, for example by women, blacks, and gays, as well as pushing back against "the man" - conformity with the establishment, were important causes
Ironically your attitude itself is not new. During the Civil Rights era it was a common meme among the "center" that emancipation was a worthy and noble cause but that ending segregation and Jim Crow was a bridge too far. Hindsight is 20/20...
Yes I've heard that before, but I don't think the comparison makes it impossible that this time is different. It's the shift from fighting for freedom to using more and more obscure perceived slights as a pretext for complaining that makes this time different. The goal is not equality or rights, the goal is securing the status of an elite
> The goal is not equality or rights, the goal is securing the status of an elite
That's kind of an odd take. By the time the dust settles there will be more than a million Americans dead from COVID. The lion's share of them will have been unvaccinated.
I don't think it's radical for someone to believe that they have a social duty to help ensure that public discourse around our most potent public health tool is rooted in science.
Moreover I don't think there can be any reasonable disagreement that Joe Rogan is in a position of considerable influence to many millions of Americans, and consequently his commentary about vaccines (and COVID treatments) has been the proximate cause of many deaths, perhaps thousands, and I'm pretty sure that history will take a dim view.
Neil Young's actions here are quixotic, certainly, but considering the personal cost he can hardly be accused of failing to walk the talk.
> The lion's share of them will have been unvaccinated.
Most of them died before vaccines were available. So, you aren't wrong but...
> ensure that public discourse around our most potent public health tool is rooted in science.
Fact checking is not aligned with science, which is a continual process of correction. Remember when fact checkers all jumped in about how masks didn't do any good when that was the official CDC and WHO position? We have known since the 1990s with SARS that masks are effective.
> Pretending that the current brand of "activism" is the same as previous ones is disingenuous, and disrespectful.
Young recognizes who is hurting us & is standing apart.
Youcre trivializing what is happening, trying to make it look unimportant. Saying that this malignance isnt as toxic as past ones so we should just quietly hold our noses.
Personally i disagree with your assessment of scale about whats happening. But as important to me is whether society quietly suffers it's toxic, harmful, animosity-based elements, or whether we have a society that actively thinks/cares/promotes goodness & cooperation. It is outrageous that small-minded anti-societal reactionary-ism has winded us so bad, that anti-activism has such a huge banner, garners such animosity against doing good. Rogan is a head wolf, one of the main profiteers selling hardened uncaring individualism & trading misinformation to boost his popularity.
No side here is free from claims of attention seeking or outrage-generation. But one side pretends it's doing something else, one side gets offended when the other side is activist, & it's not the side that seems to be very interested in dealing in peace & coexistence.
Multiple states are currently making teaching about racism illegal based on whether or not parents subjectively feel "uncomfortable", and half of the country is trying to perform a fascist coup but you want to boil it down to "outrage and attention"?
This is the most hilariously sheltered and out of touch comment I have ever read in half a decade of reading HN
While this is definitely an anti-CRT bill, it does not make "teaching about racism illegal" in any sense.
> half of the country is trying to perform a fascist coup
> Fascism
> often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
Oddly enough, "half of the country" would be approximately a majority. If they are "performing" something, it would basically just be Democracy, though I suspect you're equivocating between a small group of insurrectionists and 175,000,000 people.
> This is the most hilariously sheltered and out of touch comment I have ever read in half a decade of reading HN
Well, you were at least self prescient if mistimed.
"Military" is by no means the only form a coup can take, and indeed it's just one of the examples in that definition.
This might be the benefit of international distance but it seems to me it is really _unambiguous_ -- based on known facts and no matter which side you come from -- that at the end of 2020 Trump and his DC faction attempted a legislative self-coup:
It's at least very arguable that there are ongoing, truly widespread, state-level efforts among his supporters to secure politicised control over the administration of future elections.
You do not need to be left-wing, or anti-conservative, to acknowledge the above. You merely have to make an honest appraisal of what we know (not least based on what various Trump-affiliated political actors have openly said).
I will leave it to others to decide whether Trump met the definition of a fascist, but one tech-related episode that strikes me as instructive on the subject is his attempt to force the sale of TikTok to a company of his choosing if they paid what amounted to a kickback levy to the Treasury.
A coup is via a military or other governmental power structure. When it is citizens, it is an insurrection.
You and I both agree Trump did not have his cabinet members attempt to dissolve Congress or such.
You might have the belief that Trump coaxed citizens into raiding a Congressional building. That would be "formenting insurrection".
> It's at least very arguable that there are ongoing, truly widespread, state-level efforts among his supporters to secure politicised control over the administration of future elections.
No, it's not. At most he has some loud and frothy followers demanding "recounts", which they got and were still disappointed with.
If you actually dislike Trump, do not repeat the mistakes of 2016. Don't paint him up as some master Hitler who is one step away from being dictator for life. Don't bring him up in every topic and let him live rent free. The media did that and he got a better PR campaign then he could have ever bought.
He's just not that smart, nor are most of his followers actually that dedicated. Even "insurrection", while accurate, gives the Jan 6th stunt too much credit.
> A coup is via a military or other governmental power structure. When it is citizens, it is an insurrection.
Yes, but you're misunderstanding/misrepresenting what is going on if you think the Capitol insurrection is the entirely of the story. The insurrection was _clearly_ provoked as a single component of a self-coup. There's abundant evidence of this; it's really not in doubt.
> You and I both agree Trump did not have his cabinet members attempt to dissolve Congress or such.
The "or such" is attempting more work here than it can pull off. For example, he and people close to him (like Giuliani) attempted to illegally establish a corrupt slate of electors to throw the election. And he attempted to literally intimidate his Vice President into not certifying at all.
Yes, he was dissuaded from some actions. but he was so much closer to pulling it off than you seem to suggest.
> No, it's not. At most he has some loud and frothy followers demanding "recounts", which they got and were still disappointed with.
Again, you are suggesting that the activity of citizens is the end of it. It is clearly not. It is a multi-state state-level legislative agenda, heavily co-ordinated.
> He's just not that smart, nor are most of his followers actually that dedicated. Even "insurrection", while accurate, gives the Jan 6th stunt too much credit.
You don't seriously think people should believe he did it all on his own and just discount it? It didn't succeed, yes, and he didn't surround himself with the best people, but it was a co-ordinated campaign by many people around him (see the Willard group for example).
In many ways it is still ongoing. If you are content to imagine that Trump and Trumpism are no longer a threat, you are mistaken. Trump may not get to run in person in 2024 (he's clearly dangling this in part so he can claim that his many legal troubles are political persecution), but Trumpism will not be reversed, and minority rule is not off the table.
From a distance, the USA looks increasingly like it is heading towards a very big political reversal from democracy. The GOP certainly won't ever close the lid on everything coming out of Pandora's Box and go back to being a normal political party, and there's no evidence they want to. (They are paying millions of dollars of Trump's legal fees, right now).
It’s more like sharing a shopping mall with them. Merchants don’t endorse each other and may not have many customers in common, yet outsourcing common construction and parking and security is better for all of them.
We didn't have a large, loud faction of conspiracy theorist celebrities and politicians disseminating disinformation about public health in the middle of a pandemic any time in the last 100 years either.
Those things certainly don't require that we break societal norms or use them as an excuse for taking any kind of extreme action. There are lots of ways to constructively disagree with things, my point is that we've strayed from those into new territory where complaining and outrage are the end and not the means
I don't think the way to deal with people whose opinions we don't like is to pretend they don't exist and forbid those opinions to be discussed.
I don't think that teaches children or society in general a healthy way to deal with different opinions including misinformation and form your own opinions.
I also think the reaction shows or gives the appearance of fear, which itself gives undue power to them. Banning words and phrases and people like some nazi or communist police state makes people sit up and wonder why the regime is so terrified of words and in some ways marvel at their power (and don't give me the "private companies" line, we all know the corrupt government-corporate complex all work for one another).
I would like to live in a society with a healthy disdain for purveyors of lies and misinformation. People like Neil Young standing against the BS on Rogans podcast is an example of free speech in action and civil society at work. The more the better.
If you want to stand up against Orwellian police state BS look at the county in Tennessee that just banned the graphic novel Mause or the states passing laws banning teaching anything that might make white people feel guilty as a response to the BS moral panic that was whipped up around critical race theory.
> I would like to live in a society with a healthy disdain for purveyors of lies and misinformation.
You say that like it's opposite what I said.
My position is that I don't think censorship and banning of ideas and people is a healthy way to develop that disdain in society.
> If you want to stand up against Orwellian police state BS look at the county in Tennessee that just banned the graphic novel Mause or the states passing laws banning teaching anything that might make white people feel guilty as a response to the BS moral panic that was whipped up around critical race theory.
There's lots of things to "stand up against". Corporate censorship and other kinds of proxy attacks on anybody who questions certain narratives pushed by the ruling class is a big one even if you sometimes agree with the establishment. They don't have your interests at heart even if they coincidentally appear to align from time to time. One day it is be about vaccines, but another day it will be war with Iraq or intervention in Libya or conflict with China over Taiwan.
We have always had various false news, conspiracy theorists and outright disbelievers and angry mobs about pandemics, including 1918 [1][2]. None of what we have gone through is new in any meaningful way.
Because its outside of the lived experience of pretty much everyone alive right now. It's not the reaction to the disinformation thats special. Its the circumstances under which people are spreading disinformation that is special. These aren't JFK assassination conspiracy theories. Almost 2000 Americans died yesterday. A lot of them needlessly because a huge segment of society is treating reality as optional.
Oh I certainly agree with the effects, I just don’t think it’s worth excluding the last pandemic where similar things happened (even if it was a while ago). It just seems to be a perpetual problem and when there are consequences for that misinformation spreading we see bad results :(
I think it's more than 2000. Many are dieing from over eating, over drinking, drug addictions, and other bad choices. It's just that we have gotten used to all the other reasons people die.
There's been a big shift recently, but the general phenomenon of weird performative stunts isn't new at all. Did you know about the time Marlon Brando refused to accept an Oscar because he was mad about the government response to a protest in South Dakota? It'd be another story if Young were going around saying that he's gonna try to cancel any artist who stays on Spotify, or that you and I have a moral obligation to quit Spotify, but taking your ball and going home is a very well time-tested protest strategy.
> Did you know about the time Marlon Brando refused to accept an Oscar because he was mad about the government response to a protest in South Dakota?
He also went on Dick Cavett and made some insane connection between that random protest and the stereotypes of Native Americans in Hollywood movies and tv shows.
Not only that, he traveled back in time to participate in the civil rights movement to gain enough credibility to convince an actress who'd been at the occupation of Alcatraz to accept his Oscar and give a speech connecting Native American stereotypes and that random protest. We're talking serious Back to the Future level shit here.
It's pretty stunning how consistently intense, passionate arguments get sanitized to mere disagreements in the popular imagination. You read about the Cross of Gold speech, where William Jennings Bryan declared that the gold standard is an enemy to humanity and whipped up a mob to cancel anyone who supported it, and it comes across as some kind of polite dispute.
It went way beyond offending their audience. The Dixie Chicks were black listed. This was also a time when people started calling french fries, freedom fries, among other insane "patriotic" things.
There is an interesting and (imo) humbling take I heard about this from a local radio host who was asking the same question ("what motivates somebody to expose their true value?"). In this case, the host brought up that several (all?) of Neil Young's children suffer from medical maladies, which may cause him to be more sensitive to situations that he believes could cause them undue harm. I still disagree with Neil's position and decision, but I found that this really helped humanize him in ways other pundits have missed.
It seems like the ultimate form of virtue signaling or a cry for attention. If that is what he wanted, he succeeded. It is all over the news today. Everywhere. Have to commend Spotify for not backing down despite the heap of criticism they have gotten over the past year about Rogan.
First off, We live in a society not a free for all dystopia. Second, that poster could be one of the 7 million people in America with immune issues or one of the probably 10x that cares about one of their friends or fsmily who has those health issues, but even if not, people being vaccinated helps keep health care costs down for all and could save the posters life if they got in a car accident tomorrow the local ER may already be overwhelmed due to the unvaxxed.
So anyway, thanks for that meaningful addition to the comments.
> First off, We live in a society not a free for all dystopia.
Well, looking at the past two years, I'm not so sure about that. Locking up the whole world in their apartments, fining people for being on the street, locking up playgrounds, banning outside exercise or limiting your "outside" time to 1 hour or allowing you to go no further than 1-3 miles from your home sounds pretty dystopian to me. My mom died of cancer after being ignored for 1 and a half year (in the EU she couldn't get a CT scan for 6 months because the hospital staff didn't want to disinfect the machine after each use) and I was able to see her only in the last 2 weeks of her life after being forced to stay in quarantine for 10 days, even if I had negative PCR tests before travelling, so yeah, let's all pretend we care about people and health, and not about people like you feeling superior and better than everyone else.
> I don't understand what motivates a move like this.
Neil Young was saved from Polio as a child by being one of the early recipients of the Salk vaccine. As someone who is living proof of the effectiveness of vaccines, he likely has very little patience for people who profit off of spreading vaccine misinformation and put his own profits on the line to make the statement. Good for him.
It is not productive to see antivaxxers as rational actors. They are concerned about vaccine breakthrough cases but have no issue ingesting ivermectin, vitamin D or hydroxyquinone?
Even if there was something wrong about mRNA vaccines would it not have been better to campaign for Covaxin or Sputnik to be allowed by the FDA?
Okay that comment is going to be awkward for you to digest in a moment.
I think you should know that one of the main polio vaccines doesn’t actually prevent you from getting polio, you still get it and can spread it it just doesn’t paralyze you.
And that’s the Salk vaccine, the other vaccine is literally giving people a weakened stain of polio. And it actually causes some paralysis in about 3 in every million so that vaccine isn’t perfect.
It was clear from context he was referring to rates of polio-induced paralysis, in an analogous theoretical scenario that doesn’t quite fit the actual history.
Your comment was interesting, though. I did some additional reading about the history of those vaccines.
Let me clarify: the polio vaccine is effective enough that after getting it, we all get to live our lives exactly the same way we would if polio didn't exist. You don't have to show proof of polio vaccination to keep your job or go in public places, and you don't have to take any other precautions to protect against polio.
Differing dynamics of diseases calling for different measures. We could go down a rabbit hole debating moot points.
The fact is the original comment as phrased was totally wrong, and we could debate the clarification.
Instead let’s just acknowledge that if smallpox were around today and we had a world wide epidemic but we had a vaccine that prevented ill effects in nearly all cases but still allowed transmission, then it’s safe to assume there would be vaccine mandate. That would be different dynamics just like polio. Different dynamic need different responses.
Never in history has there been such a widespread mandate for such a leaky vaccine. Saying there would be in a counterfactual world isn't a strong argument, especially since the smallpox vaccine was effective enough at stopping transmission that we were able to eradicate the disease.
I saw cotton and I saw black
Tall white mansions and little shacks
Southern man, when will you pay them back?
I heard screamin' and bullwhips cracking
How long? How long? How?
I will be curious to see if NY will stay off of Spotify forever, while JRE is there, or if once covid is not the main news story, that NY is back on Spotify.
Can anyone recommend the best alternative to Spotify that still has Neil Young? Ideally with a linux client and the ability to control one device from another device's linked client.
I listen to quite a bit of Neil Young and not-so-much Joe Rogan.
I can not relate. To me, their ui is frustrating, the reccomendations aren't great, and when in offline mode you cannot search for an album, you must use a playlist or your entire library.
I enjoy Apple Music as it works on my Apple Watch without an iPhone. It holds both uploaded music and streaming additions to my library. I previously used Google Play Music which was an MVP its whole life cycle. The switch to Apple Music was rather easy.
On the Beach is one of my favorite Young albums and its on AM.
I'm making the switch to tidal and I'm really enjoying the high quality audio (I have the hardware to match). And it has Neil Young on there. There are some very, very obscure punk rock albums that aren't on there but I was honestly surprised that Spotify even had them so it's not a deal breaker. Their price tiers match Spotify's so for me it was a 'why didn't I do this ages ago' moment. The move wasn't for one specific reason but more a gathering of many small things that finally made me push through the inertia.
Edit to add that the phone app needs some polish. I've got a few really unusual errors and it's not as slick as the Spotify app. It works but I could easily see less technical users just dropping it because of them. But the web player and desktop apps have been great.
I didn't know they were actively standing behind Rogan - I kind of expected they signed him on before he went completely off the deep end and are now just keeping up the status quo.
I remember most of the interviews being Joe bringing in someone to talk about interesting topic (neuroscience, nutrition, mushrooms, astronomy) while Joe sat there saying "woooooo, thats craaaaaazy". That changed when he started interviewing various alt-right talking heads.
You have to ask yourself, did Joe move politically or did you?
because in my experience I have seen the "Alt-Right" be expanded to include a whole host of people that are not what "alt-right" was it was originally described, instead anyone that disagrees with any position of the authoritarian left is now "alt right" also anyone that expresses any support for any person previously called "alt-right" is now themselves "alt-right" by their mere limited association or support..
i could go to COVID as it provides many examples of this, but lets take another hot button issue of the day, Abortion. I am pro-choice 90's style democrat on the topic, I support the idea of "Safe legal and Rare" but if I say the new law out of NJ may be going to far, or that maybe we should not out right celebrate abortions instead viewing it as something tragic that ultimately may be needed and certainly should be outside of the purview of government regulation I am viewed as "Alt-right bigot" for my very centrist and rational position
You have people with very classically liberal positions, libertarian positions, 1990's democrat positions, etc being called "alt-right", including some of the recent guests of JRE
You haven't supplied any context into "any position of the authoritarian left". Who are they and what are their positions that you can't disagree with?
Where to start.. Sex/Gender, Abortion, COVID Public Policy, Tech Censorship, "hate Speech", Who should participate in Female sports, any number of other cultural issues...
Then you have topics like Universal Healthcare, Gun Control, etc etc.
I mean the "context" is literally everything
as to "who" is the authoritarian left, hmm lets start with this definition. Blue Checkmarks on Twitters, and.or has Pronouns in the bio of any social media platform, and.or rides alone in a car with mask on.
> as to "who" is the authoritarian left, hmm lets start with this definition. Blue Checkmarks on Twitters, and.or has Pronouns in the bio of any social media platform, and.or rides alone in a car with mask on.
Welcome to HN in [current year]. You can write any nonsense you want and it’s perfectly fine as long as it goes along with the current zeitgeist of the userbase.
I know plenty of Uber drivers who wear a mask alone while on then way to pickup for conscience, as getting reported for not having it can get you kicked off, but yes surely those people are the authoritarians.
I used to listen to the podcast a lot before it went to Spotify. While Rogan is a self-admitted "ignorant", it was that aspect that made his interviews interesting and enjoyable. He always had guests of all types and beliefs.
Unfortunately, it seems that the pandemic has thrown him into a conspiracy hole. I think the whole thing started with one of the Weinstein brothers and the ivermectin push and it just went downhill from there...
Is anybody really all that surprised by this, though? Setting Spotify's deal with JRE aside, removing the show from the platform would set an unenforceable precedent for the majority of podcasts. If we just start banning people for saying things that go against the status quo, what would we even be left with? A handful of NPR shows minus The Moth Radio Hour?
Joe Rogan is a hilariously bad entertainer and an even worse podcast host, but how could this have gone any other way? If Spotify caved, everyone would have gotten the worst of both worlds: people who don't care would have a diminished Spotify experience while every other artist gets a piece of the virtue-signalling pie, and disenfranchised podcast hosts would just go back to RSS and keep distributing their content to the exact same people.
The average person is not stupid, but the average person is irrational about some topic that has high visibility, usually due to tense emotions. I find that this is usually what people are referring to when they say people are "stupid" - not that they aren't clever or don't have good instincts or are low IQ.
Rolling Stone, the publication that lied about Oklahoma ERs over ran by "horse dewormer overdoses" who had a room of gun shot victims that could be seen? (bc you know... Oklahoma rolls hard with those gun shot victims)
Yes, having the reasonable expectation that publications with long histories occasionally get things wrong is definitely an immutable support for authoritarianism...
I don't think an appeal to popularity is a useful or interesting challenge, even on topics so closely related to popularity like this. It's perfectly valid to have an opinion that some piece of entertainment media is "bad" while acknowledging that it is popular. There are plenty of reasons a non-fiction content creator in particular can gain popularity without being good at entertaining. E.g. if he gets guests that are perceived by a large group of people as challenging a status quo that they hate, he may develop a religious-like following among that group, and that certainly is viable outside the context of entertainment value.
For the record, I am coming from the perspective of having listened to very few episodes, but enjoying what I heard.
He says what people want to hear. People like having their sensibilities pandered to, so they tune in and the whole thing turns into a pretty lucrative cycle.
His opponents aren't arguing he's not entertaining. The argument is that he platforms dangerous misinformation.
Militant extremists, climate change deniers, COVID misinformation, antivaxxers, etc. And he's generally credulous. He had Jordan Peterson in doing climate change denial just the other day.
This misinformation has material negative impact on all our lives. He's like Paltrow's Goop but for men.
And while we have freedom of speech, we also acknowledge as a society that some lies are too dangerous to allow -- that's why fraud, perjury, slander, filing a false report, false advertising, etc. are all illegal. It's just that reality itself can't sue for defamation.
Oh, wait wait wait, no, those people are actually right, it's the ones saying it _is_ happening who are wrong-thinking. Got it. Let me check my notes again; it's the global warming that is definitely happening and cannot be denied, and the great replacement that is definitely not happening and must be denied (or alternatively you can acknowledge it but say it's actually a great thing).
Do you see where I'm getting at? We must debate all those things in a healthy democracy. We can debate whether Russia or the US is right regarding the Ukraine. We can debate immigration. We can debate vaccines. We can debate whether or not it's true that Saddam actually has WMDs and whether it's wise to invade Iraq. We can debate whether or not smoking causes cancer. We can debate whether or not there is actually a risk with asbestos. We should debate all this stuff.
In case my point is not clear in a sarcastic form let me be more explicit: history has shown that we have been wrong about so many things in so many fields (medical, diplomacy, etc.) over the years. And conventional wisdom about certain things can completely flip over time. Thus we should never exclude debate and skepticism.
Mmm I’m interested on your reasons for saying that as I think the opposite. He lets the interviewed to talk freely and requests explanations when bullshit claims are made. He never attempts to conduct the interview to follow his way of thinking. It’s a show that surprisingly on these times, doesn’t have an agenda or ideology behind. The show feels like the classic easy going guy from the gym having a innocent conversation with someone who knows about some area.
Overall, I think he is a great interviewer and the only thing I could complain is that sometimes he might brings some wacky people, but hell, I have enjoyed a lot of those too.
I haven't even watched 5% of his episodes, and yet I've seen him call things out a number of times. Sometimes asking his producer to Google stuff to check in real time.
Do you think it is conceivable that what the parent comment is pointing out is found... I dunno, somewhere in the other 95% of Rogan's content that you haven't seen?
Apparently the lookups themselves are a really funky ruse sometimes actually, so it looks like he's fact checking but the source of the fact is like, some random opinion article somewhere.
There is “misinformation”, saying something untrue, then there is straight up spreading lies you know are untrue (Duke rape case), trying to cover it up when exposed and doing it multiple times.
I think the 2nd can permanently destroy credibility.
You can see him using motivated reasoning to defend the talking point he was trying to advance -- a talking point that itself has an obvious agenda behind it.
> It’s a show that surprisingly on these times, doesn’t have an agenda or ideology behind.
I used to think this, but the more popular JRE has become, the more and more I believe it less. The program is deliberately sold as being "neutral" - hence its popularity. Rogan's ideology is "question everything" and "consider everything" no matter how crazy it is. That's the problem - it's slowly turning into a conspiracy theorist field day and an anti-science field day. And it's not facilitating critical thinkers, it's facilitating anarchy.
Anyone who makes a living in media has some sort of agenda - which is to make money. This is why you'll never have an unbiased source in news. It's just literally impossible because at some level, money is involved. JRE is proof you can never truly provide an objective 3rd party viewpoint on news and current topics.
As an example, I've watched the JRE episode on Alex Jones. It's surprisingly well done for how much a wack job Jones is. Rogan does a great job of dismantling Jones's hyperbole and gets him to be, essentially, genuine. While fascinating to watch, it's setting an odd precedent - no matter how much of a wack job you might be, you can always end up on a show with millions of subscribers. If Jones wasn't given a megaphone, he'd just be some village idiot that everyone would ignore.
If Rogan was more objective, less controversial and bring on less interesting guests, he'd essentially be boring. He's the modern day Howard Stern, where people tune in to see "what will JRE's guests say next!".
There's a big difference between "saying things that go against the status quo" and spreading obvious and dangerous misinformation, lies and conspiracy theories.
I don't understand this whole misinformation thing that's appeared in the last couple of years. I've seen a ton of documentaries and listened to music that spreads misinformation. Why is doing it on social media different? I'm asking an honest question. Why can't people just listen to what they want?
Yes misinformation is nothing new. The type of bullshit I see now being promoted now on social media is no different from the bullshit that used to appear in Weekly World News or Nexus Magazine in the 90s.
Hell in "So I Married an Axe Murderer" Mike Myers even does a bit about how his mother reads batshit crazy conspiracy theories and refers to them as "news". Fringe batshit crazy conspiracy theories have always been out there and have always been a space where the far left overlaps with the far right[1].
The problem is that now we have an entire class of politican, forming an increasingly powerful faction in global politics, whose pitch is based on misinformation and it's reinforced by a media network that is increasingly divorced from any sort of regulation or oversight, has the veneer of "news" and the trust that goes with it, but which is just a bunch of sociopaths in equal measures crazy, greedy and stupid, amplifying each other into authenticity.
Social media has enabled this, it would have been impossible to do otherwise.
Yes the writers of Nexus Magazine could publish something and sell it in the newsagent alongside Time Magazine and National Geographic, but what Social Media does is the equivalent of running Nexus Magazine articles inside Time Magazine, or worse it just lets a whole bunch of people who can imitate rational, educated thought create content that too many people fail to differentiate from actual scholarly or journalistic work.
The politicians lend credibility to the shitposters, and the shitposters do the same back. Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Tim Pool, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Ted Cruz, Judge Janine, Laura Ingraham, Peta Credlin, Rowan Dean, Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts, George Christiansen, Paul Murray, Rita Pahani, Miranda Devine, Adam Creighton, you name, it, they're all the fucking same, all over the world (I've only cited US and Australia because that's what I'm most familiar with but these same cutouts appear throughout global media and politics).
None of them are "telling it like it is", they're just a bunch of big greedy stinking fucking liars, or they're too dumb or too crazy to know that what they're saying is wildly inaccurate.
The unifying thread of this dangerous and insidious political movement is libertarianism, which has pitched itself as anti-authoritarian but which is ultimately the most authoritarian form of government imagineable (essentially feudalism) because "liberty" and "freedom from regulation" mean very, very different things when you're super rich than they do when you're super poor.
The rebellion against "regulation" has turned into a rebellion against "authority" which has in turn lead to a rebellion against ALL expertise, to the point where football players think they should be able to debunk scientists.
> Several things come into play for Spotify artist payouts like the listener's subscription tier and country of origin, the number of streams a song has, advertising revenue per market, and distribution contracts.
> In a tweet, classical violinist Tasmin Little with 755,000 monthly subscribers has disclosed earning £12.34 ($17) for five to six million streams.
The only way we'll know is if they release the information, and my guess is that neither party will do so publicly. I would guess $2k/mo. but I could be wrong. This is still pretty good considering there are multiple streaming platforms.
Just checking out Neil Young on YouTube Music he has only approx 440k subscribers, vs someone like Jason Mraz with 3.4M. I am guessing that the numbers on Spotify are likely skewed by a bit as well.
It seems dangerous to be so condoning of censorship. Let people make up their own minds about the validity/importance of the content. The more information that is available the better.
What were the exact things that Rogan or his guests said that were misinformation? I don't watch him, but the excerpts I watched from the Robert Malone interview weren't misinformation. The guy even seemed to be pro-vax.
Joe rogan claiming that Texas won’t give vaccines to obese elderly white people because he knows one person that was denied. Denies official source.
https://youtu.be/tR0bO1KKl60
But neither of those are from the Robert Malone interview? Which is what Neil Young was angry about and what the GP asked for examples of misinformation from.
Specifically, I think he said that if a 20-year-old healthy person were to ask him if they should get the vaccine, Rogan would say “no”. He then applied the anecdote about his two kids and their experiences to it, which is obviously not very sound justification for the position. To a certain extent it’s understandable that he’d have that position given anecdotal experience, but it wasn’t the right thing to say.
Some of the recent data on the risk factors for myocarditis in young people (particularly males) is, however, at the very least, interesting. I’m not a doctor, biologist or immunologist though, so I don’t have any reason to suggest anything regarding vaccine use in young adults either way.
Gavin isn’t left. Or lefty. That is misinformation. 19 years ago Gavin was saying things like:
“Last month, he wrote an article for Patrick Buchanan in The American Conservative boasting of having converted Vice readers to conservatism.
He actually leans much further to the right than the Republican Party. His views are closer to a white supremacist's. ''I love being white and I think it's something to be very proud of,'' he said. ''I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”[0]
—
When was the Proud Boys purportedly just a joke? Also, 4chan, Vice’s non lefty people like Gavin, have hid behind the cover of “just a joke” for decades.
There are many times where Gavin calls himself, Proud Boys, or others alt-lite/new right. A distinction that means nothing when the people who label themselves as these, are no different than the alt right. I have a very hard time believing Proud Boys was ever created as a joke in good faith and not as cover. Nothing from quick reading shows your take to be true.
Is it not true that Proud Boys was created in 2016 on Taki's Magazine, a far-right/alt-right site?
And then he had Bernie Sanders on. Should we disavow Bernie Sanders for speaking to a man who has conversations with horrible people?
Walter Cronkite had a conversation with Fidel Castro and it was broadcast to millions around America. Was that an abomination, spoiling the minds of the impressionable people too weak to think for themselves?
For some reason these pro censorship people think that by letting someone share an opinion that it is dangerous, not realizing that they are actually making these people more dangerous and others more likely to engage and follow their ideals by censoring them than by letting them share their opinions. A society controlled by fear is one that is easily manipulated and very unstable.
To me censorship is like adding backdoor into encryption. There may be times where it helps, but for the most part is is waiting to be exploited maliciously. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I do not agree with everything I see on the Internet, but I also support individual freedom and choice. People should be allowed to be ignorant if that is what they choose, and rather than get angry I generally just feel empathy for most people.
I think it is best to use logic and reason, it is okay to listen to someone. If they say something that fundamentally conflicts with your personal beliefs then you are allowed to set personal boundaries to not listen to them. If someone is following you around trying to intimidate you and threatening you then you can get a restraining order. If you go out seeking people that oppose your views then demand no one interact with them anymore because they have different opinions, then many times it is you that has the problem and not them.
>If you go out seeking people that oppose your views then demand no one interact with them anymore because they have different opinions, then many times it is you that has the problem and not them.
This framing of "we need to figure out who's wrong/who's weird/who has the problem" is really unhelpful. We should focus on the actual, practical, consequences of our choices and how that changes the world, not obsess over being normal. The practical effects of speaking freely and without challenge on a platform with 200M listeners are disastrous. It doesn't matter if it's weird for me to think that, its still true.
Lefty McCommunism goes on JRE and says to 200 million people “Texas has a 97% case rate of Ebola and all goods exported from Texas are poison”. Joe doesn’t object. 30% of the people believe him. 60 million customers abandon Texas and thousands of small businesses close.
Is society better off because joe rogan allowed this deplorable person to enter the marketplace of ideas? Or would it have been better if he had challenged the guest to back up the claim, or simply not had the guest on in the first place?
Being able to discuss ideas is good. But why do you need to be able to discuss your fabricated ideas in front of 200 million people at once?
As a follow-on thought experiment, if 60 million customers stop buying from Texas companies, let’s say, from whom do they now end up buying those products? Possibly from some existing mega-corporations, which probably has a net negative on society as a whole, or possibly from small business owners elsewhere —- maybe mainly those that've been somehow disenfranchised by those Texas-based companies in the past. The latter maybe being a net positive for society as a whole.
Not arguing that you’re wrong; just suggesting that a seemingly simple thought experiment in this case is still very complicated on a societal scale. In general I’d argue that facts and truth are most central to productive and well-balanced societies, and combatting non-truth is therefore the most generally useful approach, but widespread discussion of ideas in general is also central.
Mr. Rogers having an open discussion with a post-WW1 / pre-WW2 Hitler would be fascinating and probably not useless.
The problem starts when Hitler is having discussions with only people who listen to Hitler. Without an interlocutor to say "wait a minute, that's crazy talk and here's why", it's easy to fall into an echo chamber of group-think.
Hitler was a manipulator. He would never come into a discussion with a rational, balanced perspective, or be open to feedback. He wouldn’t even really be speaking with Mr. Rodgers, he’d be using him to talk to disaffected, vulnerable people he can use to further his aims.
I agree that it’s interesting to think about a conversation between the two, but only if Hitler approached the conversation in the same way Mr. Rodgers would and unfortunately from history there’s no indication that would ever happen.
It’s banned in Germany. Not saying it solves the problem, but there are many different shades of free speech and every country I know of has at least some limitations.
You can refer to almost any political talk radio, any hosted segments on cable TV news networks and any opinion piece in the newspaper for starters. Almost no fact checking and incredibly biased, or downright misinformation.
Think about what you’re saying: No open discussion can possibly contain misinformation. That’s certainly not true by any stretch of the imagination. That fact that a statement is made in public doesn’t make it true.
> Think about what you’re saying: No open discussion can possibly contain misinformation.
That is not what I'm saying. I am opposed to the boiling down of a non-establishment discussion podcast to the singular word "misinformation. Just as I'm sure the commenter I replied to would object if I referred to any news source he cited - NYT, WaPo, WSJ, CDC, FDA, etc. - and defined it simply as "misinformation".
The word in and of itself is misinformation, typically meant to steer people away from reading, hearing, and seeing information they don't like. And it shouldn't be tolerated. We as a society need to start fostering open discussion of topics and viewpoints that the establishment and its followers doesn't like or approve of.
> I am opposed to the boiling down of a non-establishment discussion podcast to the singular word "misinformation.
Right, but they are calling some of the specific content misinformation. The fact that it’s an open discussion on a non-establishment podcast is irrelevant to the content being verifiable or reliable or rational.
And no, we don’t need more open discussions about every single viewpoint, regardless of feasibility. Just being anti-establishment doesn’t mean you have something worth saying or sharing. You need to have a little more substance than just doubting the establishment for the sake of doubting the establishment.
If you doubt the vaccine efficacy because you’re a virologist and have a theory that can be tested or a question about the research or development process that the establishment can’t answer adequately, great, let’s get that view out there. If you doubt the vaccine efficacy because doing so gets you attention from Rogan’s ~11M listeners per episode, or because you just want to challenge the establishment then sorry, you’re not adding value to the national conversation.
As another comment pointed out, if Taylor Swift or Beyonce joined Neil Young it would really tip the scales. Spotify can't give in to the demands of any one creator, perhaps. But if the right ones got together they could get probably get someone like Joe Rogan booted off the platform
> But yeah, it's the only sane decision not to let one content creator strong arm you into booting other content creators he doesn't like.
One difference is that in the case of Young and most other content creators on Spotify, their content is available all over the place. Spotify pays them royalties based on how many people listen to it on Spotify.
If Young were saying that he didn't want his music on Spotify unless they dropped, say, Nickleback that would just be ridiculous because Spotify isn't doing anything special with Nickleback. They didn't specifically chose to have Nickleback, and if Nickleback gets any money from Spotify it is proportional to how many people choose to listen that way.
With Rogan, Spotify has paid him in advance to make his content exclusively for Spotify. There's a much closer relationship between Rogan and Spotify than between Nickelback and Spotify.
Harvest is still one of my favourite albums of all time. Good on Neil for taking a stand. He doesn’t need the money, and he’s never been enamoured by Spotify.
I have no love for Rogan. But I don’t necessarily think Spotify should remove Rogan. But if Neil doesn’t like the way Spotify operates, removing his music is putting his money where his mouth is in terms of protest, and I respect that.
He had the option to simply leave Spotify and state the reasons why. But instead he chose to make threats about leaving unless someone else was cancelled.
When that didn't work, he moaned about Spotify's poor audio quality on his way out the door, adding something about young people believing everything they hear. I can't see anything respectable in that coarse of action.
Not really. NY was standing up to Spotify's bad decision to broadcast dangerous misinformation, and he was making a protest to try to get them to see sense. Good for him! I hope he sticks to his principles.
Note that "dangerous misinformation" changes entirely based on what the orthodoxy is currently promoting.
Particularly, CNN/MSNBC/NBC/AP all promoted the "masks don't work" lie promoted by the CDC at the start of the pandemic, which likely directly led to deaths.
But if CNN slaughters some grandparents with CDC-backed lies it's water under the bridge compared to Joe Rogan, right?
Your mistake is falsely claiming ivermectin is "dangerous", when it has been an FDA approved drug for humans for decades. When taken in advised doses, the worst ivermectin is is harmless.
So, your rebuttal for CNN and friends literally causing death by anti-mask propaganda in 2020 is a harmless drug? You're going to need more evidence.
How about the City of New York encouraging residents to visit Chinatown when the pandemic ramped up? [1] Seems a lot more dangerous than an FDA approved drug.
Dr Fauci also has made repeated dangerous claims, such as the vaccines being "100% effective at preventing hospitalisation" [2] -- this fabricated lie DESTROYED public confidence in officials.
A recent Decision Desk poll showed only 31% of Americans trust Dr Fauci (likely due to repeated lies), and less than 50% trust the CDC (which lied repeatedly about masks and bungled health advice constantly). Most notably, news media enjoys a pathetic 10% trust among the public. [3]
Except that they're creating a political movement that's about as dystopian as one could possibly imagine by convincing people to vote against their economic interests and hand massive power to the already wealthy and corrupt. Libertarianism is the means by with capital captures labour politically, and will be the ruin of the planet.
You're welcome to your own political beliefs. Personally, I'm happy to live in a pluralistic society.
Trying to silence everyone you disagree with seems truly dystopian, but I agree with your distaste for those people. None of them are libertarian; they're extremely socially conservative conspiracy theorists.
I can't imagine being in Australia during COVID and arguing against ideologies of personal freedom, though.
That's because you've been mislead into thinking that something bad is happening in Australia, because of libertarian propaganda propagated by those aforementioned new media dickheads. They are absolutely libertarians, that's what unites them.
What does "woke" have to do with anything I've said? My primary opposition is to libertarianism, which is the philosophy underpinning all said new media dickheads, and what unites them
None of the people you have named are libertarian, to be fair. Also, for someone arguing a potential dystopia being brought about but these people, you sound like someone very willing to create your own, by arguing for silencing everyone you disagree with.
It’s not a matter of silencing people I disagree with, it’s a matter of having integrity in publishing. Because the “we all have a right to free speech” argument has been distorted to mean that everyone should have what amounts to modern day prime time access even though they’re a bunch of liars and grifters and, in some case, just kind of stupid.
Feudalism is about the localisation of military and legal aspects of government. Libertarianism is about trying to restrict the power of government. Slavery requires a strong central government to be enforcible. Feudalism and Libertarianism are both anti slavery.
I would like to think this is because Spotify grew a spine and is defending free speech. But I doubt it, given they've removed many of Joe Rogan's episodes. This is probably just a cold hard business decision, since the number of people seeking Neil Young content is likely very low by comparison.
I wonder if Neil would think about being a guest on Joe's show. I've never listened to Joe Rogan, and I don't know if I've ever heard a Neil Young song, but that seems like it might be the principled thing to do, to explain your position to Joe's audience. And I wonder if Joe would have him on? Would people just expect Joe to talk over Neil or otherwise be rude to him? If that was the expectation, then of course I wouldn't expect Neil to participate.
When's the last time Rogan has eaten anyone alive though? No matter how incredulous or inconsistent their views, he seems quite satisfied to have a good time chatting them up about nothing in particular.
Even if you don’t like it, by the numbers Joe Rogan is far more relevant, today, to any dissemination of news/ideas (and even music) than Neil Young. Fewer people bought Neil’s garbage music player than listen to a throwaway clip of Joe Rogan’s podcast. Objectively, Joe Rogan would have nothing to gain from giving Neil Young air-time, while Neil Young would have everything to gain.
Edit, to add: this is not a comment on the wild conspiracy theories that Joe Rogan entertains.
Probably true today, but I would bet (if you're willing) that thirty years from now more people will be listening to Neil Young's music than old episodes of the JRE. Podcasts are perishable; music recordings and (especially) compositions have no expiration date.
Rogan would have him on. And he’s a great conversationalist, very polite, so Young would be fine (incidentally that why I cant stand to listen to Rogan… too chill)
And you’ve heard Young’s songs. “Keep on rockin’ in the free world” (?) is a staple.
Young’s no Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) though. Easiest decision for Spotify ever
"If you disagree with someone, the only honorable thing to do would be to go on their platform of misinformation to make them more money while they present your position in the most disingenuous way possible."
Come on, you can't be on hacker news and have this poor of critical thinking skills, right?
This is a reddit tier comment and not nearly as clever. This exact idea could be conveyed in more thoughtful way than "you must be an idiot". Unfortunately my own comment is guilty of the same thing, which is to reduce some one else's comment into a more absurd and ridiculous version.
I think the direct parent of this comment is a Digg style comment. Unfortunately, alas, I did exactly what I'm presently complaining about in this very comment.
It was expensive compared to spotify and the file sizes where way larger, since the files where in loseless format, something that is very niche, since most people cant tell the diference beetween a good quality mp3 and other formats.
It went a little further than that. IIRC it was specifically higher quality than the human ear could possibly hear. Young's response to this rational, science-based criticism was just pathetic; actual fact-based reasoning had no chance against his ego.
Excuse me if this latest drama of his makes me roll my eyes.
Let's not forget the hiper expensive player that came together, the Pono. How the Hell was you suposed to put that thing in your pocket with that triangular shape?
Heh, I had one of those players as well. A coworker of mine purchased it, didn't use it often and when he decided to use it for biking, it stopped working. In the meantime the company went out of business and he couldn't even get it serviced. So he gave it to me. I did manage to fix it after waiting for spare parts for many weeks.
The reason why it looks like a Toblerone bar is because they decided to use through-hole electrolytic capacitors (because audiophile reasons) and the battery was round too (an 18650 IIRC): http://mikebeauchamp.com/wp-content/gallery/pono-teardown/ca...
The triangular shape and inability to carry it comfortably in jeans pants pockets doomed it from day one. I'm amazed something like this passed the design stage. And first encounter with user testing would have made it crystal clear that the shape was a no-go. Yet it not only got funded but was also mass-produced. It was a massive waste of money.
I mean, it plays, and the audio quality was good (doubtful it was due to the reasons they claim, but it was good). But I hated the screen and you're right, the form factor would have never passed a focus group that tried to actually use it.
Yeah, that's all I immediately think of when I think of Neil Young. Griping about mp3 quality and nonsense no average listener cared about. He's probably very pleased to be off some streaming mumbojumbo site he already hates, and got to put out some positive PR about his 'principles' at the same time. Whatever. Anyone who cares about his music either owns hard copies or finds it on other things like youtube heh
Some of the prohibited episodes were obvious candidates for suppression like Alex Jones but I remember seeing the list and finding a few real headscratchers. Going to guess there were some specific comments in those episodes that an employee didn't like rather than a general opposition to the guest overall. It's unfortunate that Spotify wasn't more transparent about their review process but tech companies seem to be really fond of the notion that rules cannot be made clear because then people the hate might follow them, denying the opportunity to silence them.
Neil Young insulting young people: "Most of the listeners...on SPOTIFY are 24 years old, impressionable and easy to swing to the wrong side of the truth." [1]
24yo's don't need informational protection by the actions of crusty old rockers.
Neil Young: "...these young people, people who believe what they are hearing because it is on SPOTIFY.... they think everything they hear on SPOTIFY is true."
Ridiculous and condescending. He thinks young people are mindless zombies, dazzled by big tech platform brands, unable to think for themselves.
Neil Young: "unfortunately SPOTIFY continues to peddle the lowest quality in music reproduction. So much for art. Soon my music will live on in a better place."
He sounds like a grumpy old man, throwing around ultimatums, then burning bridges on his way out when the plan didn't work.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The problem with this kind of requests if you comply with it, then you've set a precedence. Then who knows who else is going to get offended and then start demanding something else to be taken down.
And the worst case scenario in this attention hungry culture how many others will start making demands like this just for more publicity? I can't read minds. I didn't know this artist before this debacle. It certainly brought him a lot of free publicity. How many people are going to start doing the same now given the amount of free publicity?
Neil Young was one of the most gifted songwriters and musicians of the 60s and 70s (and produced popular music since then but not anywhere near that peak, save a brief resurgence in the 90s). If you haven’t listened to him before, “Heart of Gold” was his biggest hit.
Anyway, it’s a huge stretch to say that he’s looking for attention 60 years past his prime, and probably only a few years from his 80th birthday. He’s already made his millions and lives quietly in rural Canada and California.
My guess is that he actually is bothered by Rogan’s content and doesn’t want to be associated with him.
It’s more akin to a boycott than a publicity stunt IMO.
>> Young, a long-time proponent of high-resolution music files, also wrote that "many other platforms, Amazon, Apple, and Qobuz, to name a few, present my music today in all its High-Resolution glory—the way it is intended to be heard, while unfortunately Spotify continues to peddle the lowest quality in music reproduction. So much for art."
It is interesting how Young will stand up against spreading misinformation, and continue to make blatantly untrue statements such as this. I wonder if he somehow isn't up to date with the technology, science and research in this field after being involved in it for so long, or if it is a branding decision and some persona to be kept as a public entertainer.
Do you mean that Spotify has same quality, or that there's no perceived difference between Spotify vs other higher bitrate? (Any links to validate?)
Spotify has quality setting in app but from what I've heard it's still lower bitrate than Tidal for example and apparently the diff can be heard. (Although I saw some blog a while ago claiming that quality distortion on Spotify is a side-effect of some DRM/watermarking they do).
Apparently Spotify's 'Very High' means 320 kbps[1]. Tidal uses FLAC, which uses as high a bitrate as is necessary; I've seen flac bitrate as high as 1800 kbps. There is an eternal debate among audiophiles as to whether FLAC makes a difference, and because the debate is about sensory quality, it seems unlikely to ever be settled: even if you say that the variations between the two are below any perceivable threshold, people will say that it causes distortions that are perceivable.
As far as I know, there is no one who can reliably tell apart 320kbps mp3 and FLAC, and I'm CERTAIN that I can't. Here's a website that let's you try: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/spotify-hq.html fair warning: it's very tedious and it takes a long time.
> As far as I know, there is no one who can reliably tell apart 320kbps mp3 and FLAC, and I'm CERTAIN that I can't.
‘Reliably’, no, it’s accurate to say it’s not possible. It’s occasionally possible given certain samples, though typically only to a fairly well-trained ear. I’ve personally failed double-blind tests against lossless at bitrates as low as 80 kbps (modern encoders are very good). That says also nothing about which sounds better, which is its own subject altogether.
I think it’s fine to advocate for more of a cushion when it comes to encoding and bit rates, even if it’s just a “feel good” thing. Sure, lossless streaming: why not. But Young’s beliefs about digital audio simply don’t jive with reality.
> It’s occasionally possible given certain samples
MP3 in particular has some fundamental problems (even at maximum bitrate) when dealing with short sharp sounds (e.g. castanets), which have been fixed in the subsequent generations of audio codecs such as AAC, Vorbis or Opus.
Now, he's free to have his own opinions, but he hasn't exactly been a defender of science in the past. I agree with his vaccination position here, obviously, but that doesn't mean Spotify erred in their judgment either.
It would only take 34 more artists to have the same demand to make dropping Rogan worth it, which seems doable. I'm glad someone got the ball rolling; Hopefully others take it to the finish line.
Maybe not. I can't imagine Spotify wanting to set any precedent in this area. Who's to say it would stop with JRE and not end with all of their content creators fighting to platform each other. There is a lot of potential for objections across a broad swath of art.
Doesn't work like this. Rogan pulls in people for Podcasts. Otherwise even Spotify users are going to go elsewhere for their podcasts (PocketCast, OverCast, Apple, etc..). 34 artists likely aren't going to be deal breakers for most of the customers. Most will just not listen to those 34 artists rather than leave Spotify.
I'll immediately leave Spotify too as a user if Spotify bends to the will of Neil Young (and I'm a NY fan as well).
I imagine there's more listeners like me, and I assume there's no listeners out there that will suddenly start listening to Spotify if they aren't already.
Joe Rogan has fuck you money also. Dave Chappelle walked away from a big project because of creative differences. Joe Rogan could do the same if he were forced to.
JRE will roll on regardless of what Spotify does. Neil Young will always be Neil Young.
The only people hurting here are the decision makers of Spotify.
I don't know the degree of editing that Spotify does. If they are only removing episodes, that's different from constraining Joe Rogan in his creative direction.
Note: I may have been wrong about the reasons for Dave Chapelle leaving. If I'm recalling correctly, that was the reason he originally cited when leaving. But more info came out in later interviews. Seems like he just needed a break from the spotlight.
They both have fuck you money. One difference is that Joe Rogan is 54 and makes most of his money from producing new content. Neil Young is 76 and makes most of his money from the music that he has already made. Rogan needs Spotify for his future income. Young, much less so.
Joe Rogan would still be pulling in millions without the Podcast: MMA commentary, stand up comedy tours, and whatever residuals he has. If Spotify let him go, he would just be back on Youtube tomorrow, with arguably a larger audience than he has on spotify, because youtube is free.
> If Spotify let him go, he would just be back on Youtube tomorrow
Sure. But without the remainder of the $100 million that Spotify are paying him. Could he monetise a YouTube channel to that amount over the same time period? Perhaps, but Spotify are currently handling his marketing for him, so I'm sceptical.
I wasn't criticising Rogan, simply pointing out that the situation is different for him and Young - due to their differing ages and the nature of their creative output.
Yeah, I think we can agree that staying on Spotify is likely the most lucrative option for him, but my point is that greed notwithstanding, he's probably got enough money that he would be fine to never earn another cent. Either way, IMO this whole thing is so crazy overblown.
> Rogan supposedly pulls in 200M monthly listeners while Young's spotify page says he gets 6M per month.
Somewhat pedantic note: this statement seems misleading to me. I think you mean "200M monthly listens", unless you're claiming that 2.5% of the world's population listens to Rogan every month?
Good point. Spotify uses the term "monthly listeners" and it seems like they do mean unique individuals. That number is 6M for Young, but they don't reveal what it is for Rogan. He's claimed that he gets 200M monthly downloads, so the number of actual listeners is probably smaller.
According to this Neilsen chart [1] JRE is most watched media at 11 million viewers per show, far ahead of even the number two spot.
JRE does 3-4 shows on a typical week. So:
3.5 / 7 * 30 * 11 = 165m
So the other 35m per month must be groups of people viewing? Not sure how they took measurements or if this is apples to oranges comparison or if the graph is to be trusted [2].
They had little choice. If you let someone anyone dictate your decisions, others will leverage their power too. Soon, it would descend into who has more clout than whom and the parties shoot at each other in a cross-fire as they race to the bottom. It would be a no-win for Spotify.
>Much of the left now believes that the flow of information should be centralized and controlled to achieve certain social objectives; the right or freedom to express one’s self — even if you’re dead wrong — is not really seen as important in and of itself. That’s a big reversal from the modern left’s values, at least the left that existed since the New Left came of age in the sixties.
Sounds like a lot of misinformed bleating to me
I mean, he says that Young's changing views simply mirror the changing views of "the left" then spouts some stat about Democrats. Democrats are left of Republicans, but very few leftists consider Democrats to be of the left in the main
I am not particularly fond of Joe Rogan, but I respect Rogan's principles a lot more than Neil Young. Neil Young wanted to make a political statement and the media ran with it to try to pressure Spotify into breaking a large multi-million dollar contract. Neil Young's music on Spotify is prob worth very little. I'd be surprised if Neil Young was making a $2k/mo from Spotify. Neil Young had very little to lose by making this political statement to help the media, which I'm guessing he prob got some money from the attention of pro-vax people that wanted to try to censor Rogan and thought by supporting Young that they were going to be able to have any pull.
As I recall, that song came out in the days following 9/11, and was based on the account of Todd Beamer and others who fought back on United 93. It was not about support for the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.
I could be mistaken, but I don't think Neil Young ever came out in support of the wars. He spoke out plenty against the Iraq war, including the song "Living With War".
"Let's Roll" was adopted as a Bush slogan at the time. The lyrics also talk about going where evil hides and rooting them out.
He clearly supported the administration. I replied to another comment in this thread with sourced quotes.
The vast majority of Americans were of the same mind as Neil, and they all eventually turned against the administration when it was clear what was going on.
Please tell me that you don't consider the later appropriation of "Let's Roll" to somehow mean that people like Neil Young had committed the original sin of supporting the wars. By that logic, is Todd Beamer guilty of the same?
It's startling the ease and quickness with which some people will see a way ascribe some perceived right-wing guilt to someone like Neil Young. I'm not a fan of Young, and my politics are very different than his, but I certainly won't lay blame at his feet for being too right-wing or supporting wars, as this was never the case.
> He was a big supporter of the Iraq war, even making a song "Let's Roll".
“Let's roll” was released in 2002, and was very explicitly about the passengers of United 93 and the story constructed from the available information from that flight of the passengers fighting back against the hijackers after becoming aware of the earlier attacks. Neither the timing nor the lyrics nor anything else about it supports the idea that it is about the 2003 Iraq War.
This is so far off base it strains credulity. Charitibly I'll ask for citations.
Young's 2006 album "Living With War" was specifically critical of the Bush administration and the Iraq war.
"Let's Roll" was a Bush slogan when Neil released that song.
If you read my comment carefully, I said he "eventually came around", i.e. the 2006 album.
I specifically remember him being on TV supporting war in the middle east. I found some quotes to corroborate my memory:
"Many artists also seemed to take unpredictable positions as spokespeople. Neil Young shocked his audience at the 2001 People for the American
Way gala, at which he received a Spirit of Liberty Lifetime Achievement
Award, when he endorsed administration policy by saying that “we’re
going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of
time.” [1]
"We're going to do the job, and then we're going to get back to being who we are." [2]
But somehow my comment gets flagged, because everyone can't believe that their hero made a mistake, which over 90% of the US population made by the way.
But neither of those quotes are about actually going to war. If we read both of your cited sources, there's nothing in context before, during or after each quote that says war is what he was referencing. Rather, he was speaking each time about giving up our freedoms for a bit and then getting back to where we were; think additional security screening at airports, not being allowed to bring water bottles on a plane, beefed up security presences elsewhere, etc.. He's very specifically talking about civil liberties, not war.
Do you have an actual quote where he talks about war itself?
Edit: So, both of your links reference the exact same event that Neil Young spoke at, the People for the American Way gala in 2001. The timing of this event is key. The second article you cited was published on 12/13/2001, and says Neil Young claimed that "Bush's anti-terrorism measures were necessary". The PATRIOT Act had just gone into effect on 10/26/2001[1], but we didn't go to Iraq until 2003.
It's terribly obvious that Young discussing Americans giving up certain freedoms temporarily is in regards to a law that was just passed that stripped away certain levels of freedom. I'm not sure how sending troops to Iraq two years later would have stripped away freedoms from citizens domestically. I'm also not sure how Neil Young - a famously anti-war individual - would be speaking out in support of a war that wouldn't happen for another two years without ever actually saying anything about fighting, military, "war", etc.
Edit 2: Even USA Today confirmed this way back when[2]...
>Not long after recording the song "Let's Roll," a tribute to passengers who apparently fought back against hijackers on doomed United Airlines Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, Young came out publicly in support of the U.S. Patriot Act.
>The legislation, which gave law enforcement authorities broad new powers aimed at bolstering the administration's war on terror, was harshly criticized by some as threatening Americans' civil liberties.
>But at a December 2001 ceremony accepting an award from the free-speech advocacy group People For the American Way, Young said he believed the measure was necessary, though he urged the audience to ensure that its more controversial provisions were only temporary.
Your bias is predictable. I actually lean left and do support peoples choice, just not mandates. I am not a big fan of Joe Rogan, but you can believe whatever helps you sleep at night. You can think I'm a racist Nazi Trump supporter if it helps you build images in your mind of what you think people that have different thoughts of you must be like.
At least 6 million monthly listens at $0.00331 per listen is about $20k per month, so you're off by an order of magnitude. Still not terrible for a wild guess based on nothing. My numbers may be wrong for all kinds of reasons. Young himself apparently said it's 60% of his streaming revenue.
>Neil Young had very little to lose by making this political statement to help the media, which I'm guessing he prob got some money from the attention of pro-vax people that wanted to try to censor Rogan and thought by supporting Young that they were going to be able to have any pull.
What a bizarre comment. He most definitely did do it in hopes of forcing Spotify to drop Rogan. Appearing on the same streaming platform as Rogan costs him nothing (neither financial nor moral). Nobody believes that he and Rogan share beliefs just because they're both on Spotify.
If his principles are that he won't be streamed on the same app as somebody he disagrees with, that's seriously pathetic. He's literally the polar opposite of the coexist bumper sticker.
The other comment said it best. Also, note that Young has dropped out of Spotify before. He made a hue and cry about its audio quality, dropped out, launched his own music player, it didn't do very well, and then he came back.
I feel like he just wanted an excuse to leave, to be very honest, so he could promote competitors that encourage high-quality streaming.
Yea, he just blackmailed a platform to censor fellow content creator. Perfectly fine principled gentleman. Because that's how we all should do with each other, and the peace would come upon us
With great power comes great responsibility. You don't see spiderman ripping in pieces that reporter who harassed him, and if you did, it would be a completely diff character. You don't abuse your power to punish people you disagree with. It's evil. Call it whatever you like, what this guy did is very very bad
Let me lay down some parallels here: reporter posting fake news, damaging reputation of good people. Actually causing tangible harm to innocents by his bad reporting. Spiderman was given powers to be his judge, jury, and executioner, but he chose to not use them in that manner. Because you can not exercise your power on people just because you can, and because they piss you off. It is morally reprehensible. Good people don't hit somebody like a ton of bricks just because they don't like what this somebody said. You must learn to coexist with people you disagree with. You can't just bully the others to make them exclude people you don't like.
Look: if you think you have a case, ask Joe to invite you to a program, and argue your point. I don't think he is of the anchors who would argue with you in bad faith. I am pretty sure that if Neil actually had something valid to say in favor of his position, that road was and likely still is available to him. He just preferred to strike below belt, because he thought he could get away with it. It also demonstrates that he likely does not have a valid point he can present and defend in a fair debate.
Yes, the title of the article is misleading. It's not Spotify that is removing Neil Young, it's Neil Young removing his music from Spotify as a protest against them hosting Joe Rogan.
It's kind of annoying to me that Spotify went all in with podcasts (in the name of "growth"?), and promotes them so heavily. That's really different from music. Do people really decide to subscribe to Spotify because of podcasts? Would they change providers if Joe Rogan was on another service? I doubt it.
It's because they can get better margins from podcasts. Personally I want music and no podcasts but I understand the business pressures that have caused this.
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[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] thread(As a hedge, most times when I see something principled like this happen, there is some small blowback and instead of letting it pass, the organization capitulates and reverses their decision. We'll see if that happens here)
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/neil-young-dem...
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/neil-young-dem...
I don't love my options.
Because you’re acting like these two “either or” options are being forced on you. The options are 1) misleading and 2) not your only options.
Option #1 - Switching streaming platforms - There are already artists far more popular than Young not on Spotify (https://www.ranker.com/list/musicians-against-spotify/ranker...), like Prince, the Beatles, Taylor Swift, Pink Floyd, etc. If you’ve ever wanted to listen to these all-time artists, you already had to switch platforms, so this is not a new option.
Option #2 - Censorship - Find me a quote where Young says he wants to curate Rogan’s content. You’re leading here. And censorship is way too strong a word. It’s not censorship if the content is (or can be) easily accessible elsewhere. Censorship is the total banning of a piece of content everywhere.
Totally fine to be upset by what Young did, I get that it’s a crappy move, but it doesn’t rise to the level of censorship or inconveniencing you, beyond the tiniest amount.
We mostly think a free market means freedom for consumers, but it’s also freedom for suppliers.
Stating your preferences online is just practicing free speech.
It states the preferences you can afford.
I realize I'm pulling a quote out of context from your comment, itself a specific reply to another comment. That being said:
This doesn't seem to address what I understand to be the issue. I would draw a distinction between political statements based on differences of opinion/perspective and statements that target misinformation. If one believes that the latter is at play, this distinction is relevant, and the idea is somewhat codified (with some variations) in the free speech, hate speech, and libel laws of many jurisdictions for reasons that seem justifiable to me.
More specifically, I would have a problem with Spotify engaging in specific political disputes between artists on their platform. I wouldn't have a problem with Spotify adapting their terms to target misinformation on their platform, assuming this was done in good faith and enforced reasonably.
Also, "virtue" in these cases usually just means conforming to social pressure and the norms of particularly vociferous factions of society.
Even if you happen to agree with those norms (which are seen as Draconian by many), the sanctimonious holier-than-thou attitude probably won't help the cause in the long run.
What evidence do you have that this move by Neil Young is anything other than his honest feelings on the subject? A lot of people are sick of Rogan spreading BS. It's not suprising someone like Young would choose to use what little leverage they have to push for him to be removed.
A lot of people sharing the same opinion doesn't magically make that opinion less valid, engaging with the world as if there's some great conspiracy against you is counterproductive.
I kinda made the opposite of the that claim in my comment :-) I think a lot of people see the norms "virtue signallers" want to impose as Draconian. I don't think a guy having controversial guests on his podcasts is something many people find intolerable.
If we want to live in a circus where people who have no idea what they're talking about get to disseminate lies while thousands of people die preventable deaths every day we've lost our collective minds.
Supporting censorship would be more along the lines of asking the government to jail Rogan, erasing his content, etc.
Spotify has actually removed certain JRE episodes from the available catalog as a condition of their deal.[1]
[1]: https://nypost.com/2021/04/09/spotify-quietly-deletes-contro...
It's just "virtue signalling", it's just "PC gone mad", it's just "cancel culture", they're just "crazy SJWs". Notice how none of these things actually have any substance, they're just a way to dismiss someone else and walk away feeling like you've won a pointless argument.
Post something substantial or don't post at all.
It can be used that way, but it isn't just that. You could say the same about the word "racist", "TERF", or "transphobe".
> Notice how none of these things actually have any substance
I notice substance to these claims all the time (as well as non-substantial ones).
People to whom these words accurately apply have a stake as dismissing them though.
There's been this big shift the last 10 or so years that hasn't got enough attention. People somehow now act like the world has to align to focus all its priorities on exactly what they prioritize, and can't imagine the idea that things matter differently to different people.
The way things previously worked, you didn't have to agree with everything someone else did or said, you just had to get along. Now it's like "if you don't drop everything and take my cause as seriously as I do, you're dead to me"
I had previously thought it was a "me generation" thing, but Neil Young is like 80 so i guess it's a societal shift.
this isnt really that different than asking Young to share a show with someone. our systems and our services have gotten more centralized, more controlled. the connection is not as clear & apparent as sharing a stage. but this is not some new radical new interpersonal cruelty Young has fostered. it's the simple desire to not associate with trash & cruelty, to find better spaces. that's not new. it's just good sense.
we dont all have to follow the same code, but we should not be party to those supporting the despicable. obvious, & anything else anything less in madness.
[1] https://www.antiwarsongs.org/do_search.php?idartista=224&ste...
Ironically your attitude itself is not new. During the Civil Rights era it was a common meme among the "center" that emancipation was a worthy and noble cause but that ending segregation and Jim Crow was a bridge too far. Hindsight is 20/20...
That's kind of an odd take. By the time the dust settles there will be more than a million Americans dead from COVID. The lion's share of them will have been unvaccinated.
I don't think it's radical for someone to believe that they have a social duty to help ensure that public discourse around our most potent public health tool is rooted in science.
Moreover I don't think there can be any reasonable disagreement that Joe Rogan is in a position of considerable influence to many millions of Americans, and consequently his commentary about vaccines (and COVID treatments) has been the proximate cause of many deaths, perhaps thousands, and I'm pretty sure that history will take a dim view.
Neil Young's actions here are quixotic, certainly, but considering the personal cost he can hardly be accused of failing to walk the talk.
Most of them died before vaccines were available. So, you aren't wrong but...
> ensure that public discourse around our most potent public health tool is rooted in science.
Fact checking is not aligned with science, which is a continual process of correction. Remember when fact checkers all jumped in about how masks didn't do any good when that was the official CDC and WHO position? We have known since the 1990s with SARS that masks are effective.
Young recognizes who is hurting us & is standing apart.
Youcre trivializing what is happening, trying to make it look unimportant. Saying that this malignance isnt as toxic as past ones so we should just quietly hold our noses.
Personally i disagree with your assessment of scale about whats happening. But as important to me is whether society quietly suffers it's toxic, harmful, animosity-based elements, or whether we have a society that actively thinks/cares/promotes goodness & cooperation. It is outrageous that small-minded anti-societal reactionary-ism has winded us so bad, that anti-activism has such a huge banner, garners such animosity against doing good. Rogan is a head wolf, one of the main profiteers selling hardened uncaring individualism & trading misinformation to boost his popularity.
No side here is free from claims of attention seeking or outrage-generation. But one side pretends it's doing something else, one side gets offended when the other side is activist, & it's not the side that seems to be very interested in dealing in peace & coexistence.
This is the most hilariously sheltered and out of touch comment I have ever read in half a decade of reading HN
They are specifically outlawing teaching racial superiority or inferiority. You can read the Texas bill here: https://capitol.texas.gov/BillLookup/Text.aspx?LegSess=87R&B...
While this is definitely an anti-CRT bill, it does not make "teaching about racism illegal" in any sense.
> half of the country is trying to perform a fascist coup
> Fascism
> often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
> Coup
> 1 : coup d'état a military coup
From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/coup
Oddly enough, "half of the country" would be approximately a majority. If they are "performing" something, it would basically just be Democracy, though I suspect you're equivocating between a small group of insurrectionists and 175,000,000 people.
> This is the most hilariously sheltered and out of touch comment I have ever read in half a decade of reading HN
Well, you were at least self prescient if mistimed.
This might be the benefit of international distance but it seems to me it is really _unambiguous_ -- based on known facts and no matter which side you come from -- that at the end of 2020 Trump and his DC faction attempted a legislative self-coup:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-coup
It's at least very arguable that there are ongoing, truly widespread, state-level efforts among his supporters to secure politicised control over the administration of future elections.
You do not need to be left-wing, or anti-conservative, to acknowledge the above. You merely have to make an honest appraisal of what we know (not least based on what various Trump-affiliated political actors have openly said).
I will leave it to others to decide whether Trump met the definition of a fascist, but one tech-related episode that strikes me as instructive on the subject is his attempt to force the sale of TikTok to a company of his choosing if they paid what amounted to a kickback levy to the Treasury.
You and I both agree Trump did not have his cabinet members attempt to dissolve Congress or such.
You might have the belief that Trump coaxed citizens into raiding a Congressional building. That would be "formenting insurrection".
> It's at least very arguable that there are ongoing, truly widespread, state-level efforts among his supporters to secure politicised control over the administration of future elections.
No, it's not. At most he has some loud and frothy followers demanding "recounts", which they got and were still disappointed with.
If you actually dislike Trump, do not repeat the mistakes of 2016. Don't paint him up as some master Hitler who is one step away from being dictator for life. Don't bring him up in every topic and let him live rent free. The media did that and he got a better PR campaign then he could have ever bought.
He's just not that smart, nor are most of his followers actually that dedicated. Even "insurrection", while accurate, gives the Jan 6th stunt too much credit.
Yes, but you're misunderstanding/misrepresenting what is going on if you think the Capitol insurrection is the entirely of the story. The insurrection was _clearly_ provoked as a single component of a self-coup. There's abundant evidence of this; it's really not in doubt.
> You and I both agree Trump did not have his cabinet members attempt to dissolve Congress or such.
The "or such" is attempting more work here than it can pull off. For example, he and people close to him (like Giuliani) attempted to illegally establish a corrupt slate of electors to throw the election. And he attempted to literally intimidate his Vice President into not certifying at all.
Yes, he was dissuaded from some actions. but he was so much closer to pulling it off than you seem to suggest.
> No, it's not. At most he has some loud and frothy followers demanding "recounts", which they got and were still disappointed with.
Again, you are suggesting that the activity of citizens is the end of it. It is clearly not. It is a multi-state state-level legislative agenda, heavily co-ordinated.
Here is a quite good summary of what is going on:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/23/voter-suppre...
> He's just not that smart, nor are most of his followers actually that dedicated. Even "insurrection", while accurate, gives the Jan 6th stunt too much credit.
You don't seriously think people should believe he did it all on his own and just discount it? It didn't succeed, yes, and he didn't surround himself with the best people, but it was a co-ordinated campaign by many people around him (see the Willard group for example).
In many ways it is still ongoing. If you are content to imagine that Trump and Trumpism are no longer a threat, you are mistaken. Trump may not get to run in person in 2024 (he's clearly dangling this in part so he can claim that his many legal troubles are political persecution), but Trumpism will not be reversed, and minority rule is not off the table.
From a distance, the USA looks increasingly like it is heading towards a very big political reversal from democracy. The GOP certainly won't ever close the lid on everything coming out of Pandora's Box and go back to being a normal political party, and there's no evidence they want to. (They are paying millions of dollars of Trump's legal fees, right now).
It is not a time to pretend things are OK.
I don't think that teaches children or society in general a healthy way to deal with different opinions including misinformation and form your own opinions.
I also think the reaction shows or gives the appearance of fear, which itself gives undue power to them. Banning words and phrases and people like some nazi or communist police state makes people sit up and wonder why the regime is so terrified of words and in some ways marvel at their power (and don't give me the "private companies" line, we all know the corrupt government-corporate complex all work for one another).
If you want to stand up against Orwellian police state BS look at the county in Tennessee that just banned the graphic novel Mause or the states passing laws banning teaching anything that might make white people feel guilty as a response to the BS moral panic that was whipped up around critical race theory.
You say that like it's opposite what I said.
My position is that I don't think censorship and banning of ideas and people is a healthy way to develop that disdain in society.
> If you want to stand up against Orwellian police state BS look at the county in Tennessee that just banned the graphic novel Mause or the states passing laws banning teaching anything that might make white people feel guilty as a response to the BS moral panic that was whipped up around critical race theory.
There's lots of things to "stand up against". Corporate censorship and other kinds of proxy attacks on anybody who questions certain narratives pushed by the ruling class is a big one even if you sometimes agree with the establishment. They don't have your interests at heart even if they coincidentally appear to align from time to time. One day it is be about vaccines, but another day it will be war with Iraq or intervention in Libya or conflict with China over Taiwan.
[1] - https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/16/health/1918-flu-lessons-p...
[2] - https://www.history.com/news/1918-pandemic-spanish-flu-censo...
He also went on Dick Cavett and made some insane connection between that random protest and the stereotypes of Native Americans in Hollywood movies and tv shows.
Not only that, he traveled back in time to participate in the civil rights movement to gain enough credibility to convince an actress who'd been at the occupation of Alcatraz to accept his Oscar and give a speech connecting Native American stereotypes and that random protest. We're talking serious Back to the Future level shit here.
Brando's nuts.
So anyway, thanks for that meaningful addition to the comments.
Well, looking at the past two years, I'm not so sure about that. Locking up the whole world in their apartments, fining people for being on the street, locking up playgrounds, banning outside exercise or limiting your "outside" time to 1 hour or allowing you to go no further than 1-3 miles from your home sounds pretty dystopian to me. My mom died of cancer after being ignored for 1 and a half year (in the EU she couldn't get a CT scan for 6 months because the hospital staff didn't want to disinfect the machine after each use) and I was able to see her only in the last 2 weeks of her life after being forced to stay in quarantine for 10 days, even if I had negative PCR tests before travelling, so yeah, let's all pretend we care about people and health, and not about people like you feeling superior and better than everyone else.
Neil Young was saved from Polio as a child by being one of the early recipients of the Salk vaccine. As someone who is living proof of the effectiveness of vaccines, he likely has very little patience for people who profit off of spreading vaccine misinformation and put his own profits on the line to make the statement. Good for him.
Even if there was something wrong about mRNA vaccines would it not have been better to campaign for Covaxin or Sputnik to be allowed by the FDA?
I think you should know that one of the main polio vaccines doesn’t actually prevent you from getting polio, you still get it and can spread it it just doesn’t paralyze you.
And that’s the Salk vaccine, the other vaccine is literally giving people a weakened stain of polio. And it actually causes some paralysis in about 3 in every million so that vaccine isn’t perfect.
Your comment was interesting, though. I did some additional reading about the history of those vaccines.
The fact is the original comment as phrased was totally wrong, and we could debate the clarification.
Instead let’s just acknowledge that if smallpox were around today and we had a world wide epidemic but we had a vaccine that prevented ill effects in nearly all cases but still allowed transmission, then it’s safe to assume there would be vaccine mandate. That would be different dynamics just like polio. Different dynamic need different responses.
Edit: Looks like he already sold it off recently. Wonder why he has any say on this anymore.
Well I heard ol' Neil put her down
Well I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don't need him around anyhow
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_Home_Alabama
Alexa, set a reminder for 3 years from now...
I listen to quite a bit of Neil Young and not-so-much Joe Rogan.
Very much considering spotify or any alternative
On the Beach is one of my favorite Young albums and its on AM.
Edit to add that the phone app needs some polish. I've got a few really unusual errors and it's not as slick as the Spotify app. It works but I could easily see less technical users just dropping it because of them. But the web player and desktop apps have been great.
I will go cancel my Spotify subscription now.
Personally I don't think anything has changed. He is the same, long form open dialog on topics he is interested it, we need more Joe Rogan's, not less
I remember most of the interviews being Joe bringing in someone to talk about interesting topic (neuroscience, nutrition, mushrooms, astronomy) while Joe sat there saying "woooooo, thats craaaaaazy". That changed when he started interviewing various alt-right talking heads.
But yeah, I might be misremembering things.
because in my experience I have seen the "Alt-Right" be expanded to include a whole host of people that are not what "alt-right" was it was originally described, instead anyone that disagrees with any position of the authoritarian left is now "alt right" also anyone that expresses any support for any person previously called "alt-right" is now themselves "alt-right" by their mere limited association or support..
i could go to COVID as it provides many examples of this, but lets take another hot button issue of the day, Abortion. I am pro-choice 90's style democrat on the topic, I support the idea of "Safe legal and Rare" but if I say the new law out of NJ may be going to far, or that maybe we should not out right celebrate abortions instead viewing it as something tragic that ultimately may be needed and certainly should be outside of the purview of government regulation I am viewed as "Alt-right bigot" for my very centrist and rational position
Reading that over-the-top hyperbole I firmly believe that you're the one that's been moving around.
You have people with very classically liberal positions, libertarian positions, 1990's democrat positions, etc being called "alt-right", including some of the recent guests of JRE
Then you have topics like Universal Healthcare, Gun Control, etc etc.
I mean the "context" is literally everything
as to "who" is the authoritarian left, hmm lets start with this definition. Blue Checkmarks on Twitters, and.or has Pronouns in the bio of any social media platform, and.or rides alone in a car with mask on.
Wow. That's even a worse reply than I imagined.
I know plenty of Uber drivers who wear a mask alone while on then way to pickup for conscience, as getting reported for not having it can get you kicked off, but yes surely those people are the authoritarians.
Unfortunately, it seems that the pandemic has thrown him into a conspiracy hole. I think the whole thing started with one of the Weinstein brothers and the ivermectin push and it just went downhill from there...
Joe Rogan is a hilariously bad entertainer and an even worse podcast host, but how could this have gone any other way? If Spotify caved, everyone would have gotten the worst of both worlds: people who don't care would have a diminished Spotify experience while every other artist gets a piece of the virtue-signalling pie, and disenfranchised podcast hosts would just go back to RSS and keep distributing their content to the exact same people.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/jordan-pet...
Could replace Joe with either of the Weinsteins as well.
That’s what they do. Same with Jordan Peterson.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/rolling-stone-cov...
Rolling Stone - the publication that ran fake rape accusations?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Rape_on_Campus
And you want to talk about dumb as a rock and cite that shit hole rag?
For the record, I am coming from the perspective of having listened to very few episodes, but enjoying what I heard.
Militant extremists, climate change deniers, COVID misinformation, antivaxxers, etc. And he's generally credulous. He had Jordan Peterson in doing climate change denial just the other day.
This misinformation has material negative impact on all our lives. He's like Paltrow's Goop but for men.
And while we have freedom of speech, we also acknowledge as a society that some lies are too dangerous to allow -- that's why fraud, perjury, slander, filing a false report, false advertising, etc. are all illegal. It's just that reality itself can't sue for defamation.
Oh, wait wait wait, no, those people are actually right, it's the ones saying it _is_ happening who are wrong-thinking. Got it. Let me check my notes again; it's the global warming that is definitely happening and cannot be denied, and the great replacement that is definitely not happening and must be denied (or alternatively you can acknowledge it but say it's actually a great thing).
Do you see where I'm getting at? We must debate all those things in a healthy democracy. We can debate whether Russia or the US is right regarding the Ukraine. We can debate immigration. We can debate vaccines. We can debate whether or not it's true that Saddam actually has WMDs and whether it's wise to invade Iraq. We can debate whether or not smoking causes cancer. We can debate whether or not there is actually a risk with asbestos. We should debate all this stuff.
In case my point is not clear in a sarcastic form let me be more explicit: history has shown that we have been wrong about so many things in so many fields (medical, diplomacy, etc.) over the years. And conventional wisdom about certain things can completely flip over time. Thus we should never exclude debate and skepticism.
Can you give a specific example of a material negative impact that Joe Rogan's show has had on your life?
Mmm I’m interested on your reasons for saying that as I think the opposite. He lets the interviewed to talk freely and requests explanations when bullshit claims are made. He never attempts to conduct the interview to follow his way of thinking. It’s a show that surprisingly on these times, doesn’t have an agenda or ideology behind. The show feels like the classic easy going guy from the gym having a innocent conversation with someone who knows about some area.
Overall, I think he is a great interviewer and the only thing I could complain is that sometimes he might brings some wacky people, but hell, I have enjoyed a lot of those too.
I award your claim with 4 pinocchios.
Rogan has a long history of false vaccine claims on his show, presented both by him and his guests:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/covid-misi...
He'll surely challenge a guest when he thinks they're wrong, it's his own mistruths and the ones he ignores that are at issue here.
The Duke rape case completely blew up Rollingstones credibility pretty much forever it was that egregious.
So what you're saying is that one act of disingenuous credibility should forever taint a publisher? Say...like Joe Rogan?
And Rollingstone has multiple examples of either exaggerating stories or making them up out of whole cloth.
Ok so then maybe don't make statements like this:
> blew up credibility pretty much forever it was that egregious.
There is “misinformation”, saying something untrue, then there is straight up spreading lies you know are untrue (Duke rape case), trying to cover it up when exposed and doing it multiple times.
I think the 2nd can permanently destroy credibility.
You can see him using motivated reasoning to defend the talking point he was trying to advance -- a talking point that itself has an obvious agenda behind it.
I used to think this, but the more popular JRE has become, the more and more I believe it less. The program is deliberately sold as being "neutral" - hence its popularity. Rogan's ideology is "question everything" and "consider everything" no matter how crazy it is. That's the problem - it's slowly turning into a conspiracy theorist field day and an anti-science field day. And it's not facilitating critical thinkers, it's facilitating anarchy.
Anyone who makes a living in media has some sort of agenda - which is to make money. This is why you'll never have an unbiased source in news. It's just literally impossible because at some level, money is involved. JRE is proof you can never truly provide an objective 3rd party viewpoint on news and current topics.
As an example, I've watched the JRE episode on Alex Jones. It's surprisingly well done for how much a wack job Jones is. Rogan does a great job of dismantling Jones's hyperbole and gets him to be, essentially, genuine. While fascinating to watch, it's setting an odd precedent - no matter how much of a wack job you might be, you can always end up on a show with millions of subscribers. If Jones wasn't given a megaphone, he'd just be some village idiot that everyone would ignore.
If Rogan was more objective, less controversial and bring on less interesting guests, he'd essentially be boring. He's the modern day Howard Stern, where people tune in to see "what will JRE's guests say next!".
Hell in "So I Married an Axe Murderer" Mike Myers even does a bit about how his mother reads batshit crazy conspiracy theories and refers to them as "news". Fringe batshit crazy conspiracy theories have always been out there and have always been a space where the far left overlaps with the far right[1].
The problem is that now we have an entire class of politican, forming an increasingly powerful faction in global politics, whose pitch is based on misinformation and it's reinforced by a media network that is increasingly divorced from any sort of regulation or oversight, has the veneer of "news" and the trust that goes with it, but which is just a bunch of sociopaths in equal measures crazy, greedy and stupid, amplifying each other into authenticity.
Social media has enabled this, it would have been impossible to do otherwise.
Yes the writers of Nexus Magazine could publish something and sell it in the newsagent alongside Time Magazine and National Geographic, but what Social Media does is the equivalent of running Nexus Magazine articles inside Time Magazine, or worse it just lets a whole bunch of people who can imitate rational, educated thought create content that too many people fail to differentiate from actual scholarly or journalistic work.
The politicians lend credibility to the shitposters, and the shitposters do the same back. Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Tim Pool, Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, Ted Cruz, Judge Janine, Laura Ingraham, Peta Credlin, Rowan Dean, Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts, George Christiansen, Paul Murray, Rita Pahani, Miranda Devine, Adam Creighton, you name, it, they're all the fucking same, all over the world (I've only cited US and Australia because that's what I'm most familiar with but these same cutouts appear throughout global media and politics).
None of them are "telling it like it is", they're just a bunch of big greedy stinking fucking liars, or they're too dumb or too crazy to know that what they're saying is wildly inaccurate.
The unifying thread of this dangerous and insidious political movement is libertarianism, which has pitched itself as anti-authoritarian but which is ultimately the most authoritarian form of government imagineable (essentially feudalism) because "liberty" and "freedom from regulation" mean very, very different things when you're super rich than they do when you're super poor.
The rebellion against "regulation" has turned into a rebellion against "authority" which has in turn lead to a rebellion against ALL expertise, to the point where football players think they should be able to debunk scientists.
[1] https://gen.medium.com/nazi-hippies-when-the-new-age-and-far...
That is not factually objective.
But yeah, it's the only sane decision not to let one content creator strong arm you into booting other content creators he doesn't like.
I don't care if you're right or wrong (because he is right, Rogan is misinformation these days), but you don't get to control who gets to say what.
Of course you do! If you have more leverage and power than the person you’re trying to silence, then you get to silence them.
See: Nearly every cop who killed an innocent person up until about the last 5 years.
Yeah. And it turned out Young didn't have more leverage in this case.
$0.004 per play
https://www.makeuseof.com/how-much-spotify-pay-per-stream/
~6M monthly listeners
https://www.newsweek.com/spotify-unlikely-drop-joe-rogan-ove...
$24k/month
~$300k/year
Not sure how much goes directly to Neil and how much of a cut the record label gets.
Neil Young’s net worth is ~$200M
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/rock-s...
So, he’s losing about 0.15% of his net worth as a result.
Or, if he had a $100k/year salary, about $150 before taxes, maybe around $75 after taxes.
> Several things come into play for Spotify artist payouts like the listener's subscription tier and country of origin, the number of streams a song has, advertising revenue per market, and distribution contracts.
> In a tweet, classical violinist Tasmin Little with 755,000 monthly subscribers has disclosed earning £12.34 ($17) for five to six million streams.
The only way we'll know is if they release the information, and my guess is that neither party will do so publicly. I would guess $2k/mo. but I could be wrong. This is still pretty good considering there are multiple streaming platforms.
Just checking out Neil Young on YouTube Music he has only approx 440k subscribers, vs someone like Jason Mraz with 3.4M. I am guessing that the numbers on Spotify are likely skewed by a bit as well.
It’s naive to think that if a person with enough power wants to censor me, they won’t be able to accomplish it. Accept it as the way of the world.
Joe rogan claiming that Texas won’t give vaccines to obese elderly white people because he knows one person that was denied. Denies official source. https://youtu.be/tR0bO1KKl60
Joe Rogan saying young healthy adults don’t need the vaccine because his two children didn’t have bad symptoms https://mobile.twitter.com/AlexPattyy/status/138707714515606...
Some of the recent data on the risk factors for myocarditis in young people (particularly males) is, however, at the very least, interesting. I’m not a doctor, biologist or immunologist though, so I don’t have any reason to suggest anything regarding vaccine use in young adults either way.
“Last month, he wrote an article for Patrick Buchanan in The American Conservative boasting of having converted Vice readers to conservatism.
He actually leans much further to the right than the Republican Party. His views are closer to a white supremacist's. ''I love being white and I think it's something to be very proud of,'' he said. ''I don't want our culture diluted. We need to close the borders now and let everyone assimilate to a Western, white, English-speaking way of life.”[0]
—
When was the Proud Boys purportedly just a joke? Also, 4chan, Vice’s non lefty people like Gavin, have hid behind the cover of “just a joke” for decades.
There are many times where Gavin calls himself, Proud Boys, or others alt-lite/new right. A distinction that means nothing when the people who label themselves as these, are no different than the alt right. I have a very hard time believing Proud Boys was ever created as a joke in good faith and not as cover. Nothing from quick reading shows your take to be true.
Is it not true that Proud Boys was created in 2016 on Taki's Magazine, a far-right/alt-right site?
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/style/the-edge-of-hip-vic...
Walter Cronkite had a conversation with Fidel Castro and it was broadcast to millions around America. Was that an abomination, spoiling the minds of the impressionable people too weak to think for themselves?
And there was backlash: https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/24/politics/bernie-sanders-joe-r...
In both examples, politicians and news anchors are in the attention business. Same thing with conspiracy theorists. They want your attention.
Doctors aren’t supposed to be motivated by attention but by helping people improve or maintain their health.
I do not agree with everything I see on the Internet, but I also support individual freedom and choice. People should be allowed to be ignorant if that is what they choose, and rather than get angry I generally just feel empathy for most people.
I think it is best to use logic and reason, it is okay to listen to someone. If they say something that fundamentally conflicts with your personal beliefs then you are allowed to set personal boundaries to not listen to them. If someone is following you around trying to intimidate you and threatening you then you can get a restraining order. If you go out seeking people that oppose your views then demand no one interact with them anymore because they have different opinions, then many times it is you that has the problem and not them.
This framing of "we need to figure out who's wrong/who's weird/who has the problem" is really unhelpful. We should focus on the actual, practical, consequences of our choices and how that changes the world, not obsess over being normal. The practical effects of speaking freely and without challenge on a platform with 200M listeners are disastrous. It doesn't matter if it's weird for me to think that, its still true.
I believe our society is better for it than worse. And I think big tech censorship will take us in a negative direction if we allow it to continue.
Lefty McCommunism goes on JRE and says to 200 million people “Texas has a 97% case rate of Ebola and all goods exported from Texas are poison”. Joe doesn’t object. 30% of the people believe him. 60 million customers abandon Texas and thousands of small businesses close.
Is society better off because joe rogan allowed this deplorable person to enter the marketplace of ideas? Or would it have been better if he had challenged the guest to back up the claim, or simply not had the guest on in the first place?
Being able to discuss ideas is good. But why do you need to be able to discuss your fabricated ideas in front of 200 million people at once?
Not arguing that you’re wrong; just suggesting that a seemingly simple thought experiment in this case is still very complicated on a societal scale. In general I’d argue that facts and truth are most central to productive and well-balanced societies, and combatting non-truth is therefore the most generally useful approach, but widespread discussion of ideas in general is also central.
People having open discussions with people I don't like and disagree with is "giving a platform" and must be punished.
The problem starts when Hitler is having discussions with only people who listen to Hitler. Without an interlocutor to say "wait a minute, that's crazy talk and here's why", it's easy to fall into an echo chamber of group-think.
I agree that it’s interesting to think about a conversation between the two, but only if Hitler approached the conversation in the same way Mr. Rodgers would and unfortunately from history there’s no indication that would ever happen.
You can refer to almost any political talk radio, any hosted segments on cable TV news networks and any opinion piece in the newspaper for starters. Almost no fact checking and incredibly biased, or downright misinformation.
Think about what you’re saying: No open discussion can possibly contain misinformation. That’s certainly not true by any stretch of the imagination. That fact that a statement is made in public doesn’t make it true.
That is not what I'm saying. I am opposed to the boiling down of a non-establishment discussion podcast to the singular word "misinformation. Just as I'm sure the commenter I replied to would object if I referred to any news source he cited - NYT, WaPo, WSJ, CDC, FDA, etc. - and defined it simply as "misinformation".
The word in and of itself is misinformation, typically meant to steer people away from reading, hearing, and seeing information they don't like. And it shouldn't be tolerated. We as a society need to start fostering open discussion of topics and viewpoints that the establishment and its followers doesn't like or approve of.
Right, but they are calling some of the specific content misinformation. The fact that it’s an open discussion on a non-establishment podcast is irrelevant to the content being verifiable or reliable or rational.
And no, we don’t need more open discussions about every single viewpoint, regardless of feasibility. Just being anti-establishment doesn’t mean you have something worth saying or sharing. You need to have a little more substance than just doubting the establishment for the sake of doubting the establishment.
If you doubt the vaccine efficacy because you’re a virologist and have a theory that can be tested or a question about the research or development process that the establishment can’t answer adequately, great, let’s get that view out there. If you doubt the vaccine efficacy because doing so gets you attention from Rogan’s ~11M listeners per episode, or because you just want to challenge the establishment then sorry, you’re not adding value to the national conversation.
One difference is that in the case of Young and most other content creators on Spotify, their content is available all over the place. Spotify pays them royalties based on how many people listen to it on Spotify.
If Young were saying that he didn't want his music on Spotify unless they dropped, say, Nickleback that would just be ridiculous because Spotify isn't doing anything special with Nickleback. They didn't specifically chose to have Nickleback, and if Nickleback gets any money from Spotify it is proportional to how many people choose to listen that way.
With Rogan, Spotify has paid him in advance to make his content exclusively for Spotify. There's a much closer relationship between Rogan and Spotify than between Nickelback and Spotify.
I have no love for Rogan. But I don’t necessarily think Spotify should remove Rogan. But if Neil doesn’t like the way Spotify operates, removing his music is putting his money where his mouth is in terms of protest, and I respect that.
When that didn't work, he moaned about Spotify's poor audio quality on his way out the door, adding something about young people believing everything they hear. I can't see anything respectable in that coarse of action.
Particularly, CNN/MSNBC/NBC/AP all promoted the "masks don't work" lie promoted by the CDC at the start of the pandemic, which likely directly led to deaths.
But if CNN slaughters some grandparents with CDC-backed lies it's water under the bridge compared to Joe Rogan, right?
Cdc goes with the evidence, which changes as science evolves. Some people deliberately misrepresent the evidence.
So, your rebuttal for CNN and friends literally causing death by anti-mask propaganda in 2020 is a harmless drug? You're going to need more evidence.
How about the City of New York encouraging residents to visit Chinatown when the pandemic ramped up? [1] Seems a lot more dangerous than an FDA approved drug.
Dr Fauci also has made repeated dangerous claims, such as the vaccines being "100% effective at preventing hospitalisation" [2] -- this fabricated lie DESTROYED public confidence in officials.
A recent Decision Desk poll showed only 31% of Americans trust Dr Fauci (likely due to repeated lies), and less than 50% trust the CDC (which lied repeatedly about masks and bungled health advice constantly). Most notably, news media enjoys a pathetic 10% trust among the public. [3]
[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/079-20/mayor-d...
[2] https://twitter.com/independent/status/1366125427144732672
[3] https://www.newsnationnow.com/polls/newsnation-poll-voters-t...
Well, I heard old Neil put her down.
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember.
A southern man don't need him around anyhow.
Edit: Downvoted for singing a classic, smh
https://groovyhistory.com/content/123649/ef5e0e961b40d5108f2...
Trying to silence everyone you disagree with seems truly dystopian, but I agree with your distaste for those people. None of them are libertarian; they're extremely socially conservative conspiracy theorists.
I can't imagine being in Australia during COVID and arguing against ideologies of personal freedom, though.
I don't see an avenue for productive conversation so I'll leave you to it. All the best.
> we've removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to COVID since the start of the pandemic
Doesn't sound like they're principled on free speech.
My guess is it wouldn't matter:
Neil Young is not prepared to spend 3 hours discussing ideas calmly and politely with somebody who listens carefully and challenges him.
I actually hate it when I agree with NY on a topic (quite often) because he makes my side look like the looney toon side.
But in fairness, even then, Rogan attacked his employer and not the individual.
Edit, to add: this is not a comment on the wild conspiracy theories that Joe Rogan entertains.
And you’ve heard Young’s songs. “Keep on rockin’ in the free world” (?) is a staple.
Young’s no Roger Waters (Pink Floyd) though. Easiest decision for Spotify ever
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Come on, you can't be on hacker news and have this poor of critical thinking skills, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service)
Must not've been that great of a selling point
Excuse me if this latest drama of his makes me roll my eyes.
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/01/and-now-for-something...
The reason why it looks like a Toblerone bar is because they decided to use through-hole electrolytic capacitors (because audiophile reasons) and the battery was round too (an 18650 IIRC): http://mikebeauchamp.com/wp-content/gallery/pono-teardown/ca...
The triangular shape and inability to carry it comfortably in jeans pants pockets doomed it from day one. I'm amazed something like this passed the design stage. And first encounter with user testing would have made it crystal clear that the shape was a no-go. Yet it not only got funded but was also mass-produced. It was a massive waste of money.
This is business.
Wouldn't it be interesting if someone compared the current cuts with past cuts to see what they wanted/needed to remove.
Audio equivalent of selling donut holes.
I mean they would say that, ofc, but seems like really that was the case?
24yo's don't need informational protection by the actions of crusty old rockers.
Neil Young: "...these young people, people who believe what they are hearing because it is on SPOTIFY.... they think everything they hear on SPOTIFY is true."
Ridiculous and condescending. He thinks young people are mindless zombies, dazzled by big tech platform brands, unable to think for themselves.
Neil Young: "unfortunately SPOTIFY continues to peddle the lowest quality in music reproduction. So much for art. Soon my music will live on in a better place."
He sounds like a grumpy old man, throwing around ultimatums, then burning bridges on his way out when the plan didn't work.
[1] https://neilyoungarchives.com/news/1/article?id=Spotify-In-T...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27951569
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29756061
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29835124
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
And the worst case scenario in this attention hungry culture how many others will start making demands like this just for more publicity? I can't read minds. I didn't know this artist before this debacle. It certainly brought him a lot of free publicity. How many people are going to start doing the same now given the amount of free publicity?
Anyway, it’s a huge stretch to say that he’s looking for attention 60 years past his prime, and probably only a few years from his 80th birthday. He’s already made his millions and lives quietly in rural Canada and California.
My guess is that he actually is bothered by Rogan’s content and doesn’t want to be associated with him.
It’s more akin to a boycott than a publicity stunt IMO.
It is interesting how Young will stand up against spreading misinformation, and continue to make blatantly untrue statements such as this. I wonder if he somehow isn't up to date with the technology, science and research in this field after being involved in it for so long, or if it is a branding decision and some persona to be kept as a public entertainer.
Spotify has quality setting in app but from what I've heard it's still lower bitrate than Tidal for example and apparently the diff can be heard. (Although I saw some blog a while ago claiming that quality distortion on Spotify is a side-effect of some DRM/watermarking they do).
As far as I know, there is no one who can reliably tell apart 320kbps mp3 and FLAC, and I'm CERTAIN that I can't. Here's a website that let's you try: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/spotify-hq.html fair warning: it's very tedious and it takes a long time.
[1] https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/
‘Reliably’, no, it’s accurate to say it’s not possible. It’s occasionally possible given certain samples, though typically only to a fairly well-trained ear. I’ve personally failed double-blind tests against lossless at bitrates as low as 80 kbps (modern encoders are very good). That says also nothing about which sounds better, which is its own subject altogether.
I think it’s fine to advocate for more of a cushion when it comes to encoding and bit rates, even if it’s just a “feel good” thing. Sure, lossless streaming: why not. But Young’s beliefs about digital audio simply don’t jive with reality.
MP3 in particular has some fundamental problems (even at maximum bitrate) when dealing with short sharp sounds (e.g. castanets), which have been fixed in the subsequent generations of audio codecs such as AAC, Vorbis or Opus.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/neil-youngs-long-record-of-spr...
Now, he's free to have his own opinions, but he hasn't exactly been a defender of science in the past. I agree with his vaccination position here, obviously, but that doesn't mean Spotify erred in their judgment either.
I imagine Young's manager/label tried their best to talk him down, if this wasn't a stunt for some other purpose.
I imagine there's more listeners like me, and I assume there's no listeners out there that will suddenly start listening to Spotify if they aren't already.
JRE will roll on regardless of what Spotify does. Neil Young will always be Neil Young.
The only people hurting here are the decision makers of Spotify.
Note: I may have been wrong about the reasons for Dave Chapelle leaving. If I'm recalling correctly, that was the reason he originally cited when leaving. But more info came out in later interviews. Seems like he just needed a break from the spotlight.
Sure. But without the remainder of the $100 million that Spotify are paying him. Could he monetise a YouTube channel to that amount over the same time period? Perhaps, but Spotify are currently handling his marketing for him, so I'm sceptical.
I wasn't criticising Rogan, simply pointing out that the situation is different for him and Young - due to their differing ages and the nature of their creative output.
Somewhat pedantic note: this statement seems misleading to me. I think you mean "200M monthly listens", unless you're claiming that 2.5% of the world's population listens to Rogan every month?
JRE does 3-4 shows on a typical week. So:
3.5 / 7 * 30 * 11 = 165m
So the other 35m per month must be groups of people viewing? Not sure how they took measurements or if this is apples to oranges comparison or if the graph is to be trusted [2].
[1] https://i.redd.it/or4mhemo8j981.jpg
[2] https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/joe-rogan-viewers.html
See https://www.inquiremore.com/p/neil-youngs-transformation-on-...
Sounds like a lot of misinformed bleating to me
I mean, he says that Young's changing views simply mirror the changing views of "the left" then spouts some stat about Democrats. Democrats are left of Republicans, but very few leftists consider Democrats to be of the left in the main
I could be mistaken, but I don't think Neil Young ever came out in support of the wars. He spoke out plenty against the Iraq war, including the song "Living With War".
He clearly supported the administration. I replied to another comment in this thread with sourced quotes.
The vast majority of Americans were of the same mind as Neil, and they all eventually turned against the administration when it was clear what was going on.
People are too quick to flag comments.
It's startling the ease and quickness with which some people will see a way ascribe some perceived right-wing guilt to someone like Neil Young. I'm not a fan of Young, and my politics are very different than his, but I certainly won't lay blame at his feet for being too right-wing or supporting wars, as this was never the case.
“Let's roll” was released in 2002, and was very explicitly about the passengers of United 93 and the story constructed from the available information from that flight of the passengers fighting back against the hijackers after becoming aware of the earlier attacks. Neither the timing nor the lyrics nor anything else about it supports the idea that it is about the 2003 Iraq War.
If you read my comment carefully, I said he "eventually came around", i.e. the 2006 album.
I specifically remember him being on TV supporting war in the middle east. I found some quotes to corroborate my memory:
"Many artists also seemed to take unpredictable positions as spokespeople. Neil Young shocked his audience at the 2001 People for the American Way gala, at which he received a Spirit of Liberty Lifetime Achievement Award, when he endorsed administration policy by saying that “we’re going to have to relinquish some of our freedoms for a short period of time.” [1]
"We're going to do the job, and then we're going to get back to being who we are." [2]
But somehow my comment gets flagged, because everyone can't believe that their hero made a mistake, which over 90% of the US population made by the way.
[1] http://www.posgrado.unam.mx/musica/pdfLR/sesion9/GarofaloUSP...
[2] https://freerepublic.com/focus/fr/589986/posts
Do you have an actual quote where he talks about war itself?
Edit: So, both of your links reference the exact same event that Neil Young spoke at, the People for the American Way gala in 2001. The timing of this event is key. The second article you cited was published on 12/13/2001, and says Neil Young claimed that "Bush's anti-terrorism measures were necessary". The PATRIOT Act had just gone into effect on 10/26/2001[1], but we didn't go to Iraq until 2003.
It's terribly obvious that Young discussing Americans giving up certain freedoms temporarily is in regards to a law that was just passed that stripped away certain levels of freedom. I'm not sure how sending troops to Iraq two years later would have stripped away freedoms from citizens domestically. I'm also not sure how Neil Young - a famously anti-war individual - would be speaking out in support of a war that wouldn't happen for another two years without ever actually saying anything about fighting, military, "war", etc.
Edit 2: Even USA Today confirmed this way back when[2]...
>Not long after recording the song "Let's Roll," a tribute to passengers who apparently fought back against hijackers on doomed United Airlines Flight 93 over Pennsylvania, Young came out publicly in support of the U.S. Patriot Act.
>The legislation, which gave law enforcement authorities broad new powers aimed at bolstering the administration's war on terror, was harshly criticized by some as threatening Americans' civil liberties.
>But at a December 2001 ceremony accepting an award from the free-speech advocacy group People For the American Way, Young said he believed the measure was necessary, though he urged the audience to ensure that its more controversial provisions were only temporary.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act
[2]https://www.today.com/popculture/young-sings-impeaching-bush...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.google.com/url?q=https://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
https://www.planetarygroup.com/do-artists-get-paid-every-tim...
https://mobile.twitter.com/jclarachan/status/148646182068449...
This was hilarious, thanks for the laugh! :)
If his principles are that he won't be streamed on the same app as somebody he disagrees with, that's seriously pathetic. He's literally the polar opposite of the coexist bumper sticker.
No - he did it because he has FY money and FY reputation.
And if doesn't want to be associated with a platform he doesn't like -- he's not going to be associated with it.
He's literally the polar opposite of the coexist bumper sticker.
In the sense of not wanting to "coexist" with the vapid corporate opportunism as exemplified by Spotify, you're completely right.
How many years was he on Spotify?
Why is he selling music in the first place then, why not make it free for anyone who wants to listen to it?
Well now he totally is going to be "that guy that tried to get jr off Spotify".
I feel like he just wanted an excuse to leave, to be very honest, so he could promote competitors that encourage high-quality streaming.
Someone should tell JR(E) that, being the largest podcast on the planet.
It's kind of annoying to me that Spotify went all in with podcasts (in the name of "growth"?), and promotes them so heavily. That's really different from music. Do people really decide to subscribe to Spotify because of podcasts? Would they change providers if Joe Rogan was on another service? I doubt it.