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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s just a bug, trust me bro”

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

Welcome to Lemmy. Outside of niche subjects and local content I think this place has everything reddit does but with less bullshit. If people keep making the switch in large numbers we’ll build all those communities too and be better off for it.

I don’t think phrasing is the problem. I think the problem is a lack of leaders willing to stand behind it. Democrats are trying to pander to rich people while simultaneously tapping into the anger at rich people and that just comes off as disingenuous at best. I think voters will turn out if we give them a reason to. I think Democrats know that too and that’s why they fight harder to stop progressives from gaining influence than they do to curb the existing influence of the rich.

They may be unrealistic but that says more about this administration than it does about the protests. That’s pretty basic shit imo

That may be true. Still, don’t let them make you afraid. That’s the goal. They can’t arrest all of us.

For posterity, fuck you Donald Trump and fuck you Elon Musk. Send the goons after me and prove you have thinner skin than an apple.

I’m not worried about someone showing up at my door over upvoting posts on the internet. We all just need to decide that if they start doing that we shoot them in the face on the porch. Sooner or later guys will stop showing up. There’s way more of us than there are of them and that’s the realization they want to suppress more than anything. Don’t let the ones who really should be afraid make you afraid.

Am I just jaded about the whole internet or does this read like an AI summary? It feels too specific to be written by a human.

If a small, one time pop-up designed to solve your problem makes you give up on solving your problem then you were never going to solve that problem.

They won the election and made large gains with pretty much every demographic so in a very real sense, yes it is.

Why do I keep seeing this particular comparison? It’s the least obvious part of the whole thing. The rest was clearly a Nazi salute. Without that context you may think he’s clutching his chest because he’s having a heart attack or something.

Edit: nevermind I’m just dumb. I guess gifs don’t auto load on my Lemmy client anymore. I swear they used to.

You’re talking about a guy that could pay 100 million dollars for a new account and not even notice. He obviously wouldn’t pay anywhere near that much for something like this. There is no financial cost you can force on him that will change his behavior.

You’re making a lot of unfounded assumptions about what would have happened if Trump were assassinated. No one else has been able to harness MAGA energy the way he has. It’s entirely possible the movement would splinter without its figurehead. We won’t know that until he’s gone. Although it seems less likely now that he presumably has 4 years to enact policy changes and put people in place to keep his agenda moving after his term is up.

There’s plenty of debate to be had on the topic of the effectiveness of guns in civil resistance. All of which can be found in more detail elsewhere than we’re going to be able to cover here. However, suffice it to say that your understanding of resistance in general and guerilla tactics specifically is severely lacking if you’re assuming that this situation would play out as an open confrontation between the US military and some sort of militia. Despite the fact that such a conflict would provide more room for maneuvering than you are giving it credit, that would not be the preferred method of engagement. Generals and other senior officers have to buy groceries and go to the DMV just like everyone else. You pick your targets when and where you can get them. More than anything else, it’s important to acknowledge that in the situation where it becomes necessary to think about these kinds of things in more detail, my guns afford me many more options than your knives (or whatever else you prefer to rely on) would. Unless, of course, you plan on giving up without a fight, in which case we clearly have such different outlooks that additional discussion will not help us find common ground.