jayspell

I read Animal Farm in 9th grade and it had a profound impact me. Hmmm is that you Napoleon?

What they could have done is not cancel the Keystone pipeline. Enact common sense energy policy instead of pushing all their chips into green technology, a key component of which is battery based and whose supply chain is heavily linked to Russia.

I agree with you to a point, but it's not my experience that speakers gain credibility and respect by giving good advice / showing good judgement / making accurate predictions. This would be true in traditional discourse, but not online. Online it feels as if speakers gain an audience by demonstrating their world view as loudly and as viciously as possible. It's like a group of children where one has learned that the way to get attention is to scream louder and longer than the others. I also have this feeling that social media is ruled by those who are willing to spend their time and effort to elevate a particular point of view no matter how unpopular it is.

Is this just an exercise?

That didn't work in Canada, a supposedly liberal democracy. Trudeau enacted emergency powers and seized peoples bank accounts, what do you imagine Putin would do?

I have a hard time understanding why NATO keeps expanding despite the fact that the threat it was created to guard against collapsed 30+ years ago. I find the Russian demand that NATO not expand to Ukraine fairly reasonable given the history they have with NATO. I look at this as similar to the US declaration that missiles in Cuba were not acceptable back in the 1960's.

I signed up for Spotify specifically to support Rogan.

Not a troll, appreciate you taking the time to respond. Believe the thread is too deep to respond directly to you. Another question if you have the time - what makes you trust one source over another? For instance when the WHO and CDC don't agree what makes you trust one source over the other?

Can you highlight some of the BS?

If you watch the episodes that are controversial the citations are WHO or studies from Israel / Great Britain / Canada (I don't know them verbatim but this is what I remember - been a month or so). I would make the claim that if you actually watch these episodes the two guests sound very reasonable and have no citations that are "crackpot" in nature. Getting information indirectly is a big problem. He talks to people for three hours, how do you condense this to a five minute read? Before dismissing actually take a look. Watch the episode and see if anything they say sounds unreasonable.

When you say crackpot you are referring to a highly published cardiologist and an epidemiologist whose work is used in the vaccine. In the world today actually being expert enough to work on teams that create a vaccine does not give you the status to hold a differing opinion without being labeled a "crackpot".

Did you actually watch the episodes in question? The big difference is that those Rogan has on actually have credentials to back up their claims, and they provide evidence in the form of studies, it is the opposite of what you've laid out here. On the other side the expert from CNN seemed extremely uninformed.

I don't subscribe to Spotify for Neil Young or Jodi Mitchell, but I do for Joe Rogan. If he pulls back we will have no voice bringing alternative views. I really hate the media landscape today with its monochrome set of carefully curated information which is incomplete.

So why not un-socialize the medical system. Charge a premium for unvaccinated individuals. If I follow this train correctly the process is to declare health a right and therefore something run by the government, and then to declare that because of that right your other rights can be taken away by the government.

You have to use something, SAT/ACT is at least something the individual can act on. A kid from any zip code can apply themselves and improve their chances. Using something like skin color or zip code is not something an individual can act on. It creates a perverse system of discrimination.

There is a downside to some places as well. You have people moving into areas with high paying jobs and expectations of high cost in housing. The locals who have lived there for years are priced out of their own community with the influx. This has happened around Austin TX, and from what I understand in Colorado.

I grew up in Reagan's America, and I didn't find it paranoid or wretched. I remember a lot of optimism around the space program and the fall of the Berlin wall. There were great movies, great music, shopping malls, arcades, and we were united as a country. I find few, if any parallels, to the Trump years. Trump is the polar opposite of Reagan in terms of communication style IMO.

Just about everyone I know despises DST. There is some disagreement about what would become "standard time", but almost everyone wants it to end. The worst part of DST is the assumption that you can just reschedule a kid's body clock. A baby gets really upset with the time change, and older kids aren't that much better.

The other key is that each community decides for themselves what is permitted and not permitted. Some Amish are permitted to drive cars, but only if the car is black, but this is community specific. Source - my brother-in-laws family left the Amish when he was young, so he got to see both worlds.

I have one question... Why?

Two things I would say about this...

1.) It's honest 2.) It's better than most modern / contemporary art

There seems to be some thought that society can force people to do what is deemed best without the awareness that...

1.) Society may not know what is best 2.) Even if it is the best option the push back will still exist and in many cases attempting to force the issue will galvanize opposition

Who would we give these controls to? Would this be the government? Hard pass on that. I do believe in controls, but those controls are best left to the individual. I don't need a bureaucrat telling my kids they can't play video games 8 hours a day, that's my responsibility. I don't need a government agency dictating I can't invest in risky real estate ventures, it's my fault if I invest and lose my money. I don't disagree that control is needed, just the level at which it is applied. I will admit to being conflicted. I don't like the idea of legalized herion, though I did support marijuana legalization initially.

I wouldn't pick this particular point in time to make a defense of "experts". This pandemic was likely caused by "experts" and if climate change is man-made then they caused that too. Wisdom and intelligence are two different things. Intelligence will ask if you can do something, wisdom will evaluate whether you should do something. I trust experts to build a better phone, I don't trust them to tell me when my kids should have access to one. I want them telling us how to build large carbon filters, I don't want them setting policy that everyone needs to lockdown to save the climate.

I have to disagree with you "experts" are wrong ALL THE TIME. Experts in every field at every level are wrong constantly. Watch ESPN and get the predictions for the outcome of games. On CNBC, you have experts giving their predictions, and getting them wrong all the time. Experts change their opinions as new information becomes available. That sounds fantastic, until those expert opinions are used to set policy. I gave an example of bee colony collapse that has recently been disproven, how about something that actually drastically changed the US, the Food Pyramid. Expert opinions changed the way Americans ate and kicked off an epidemic of obesity, or at least helped it along. Expert opinions are only as good as the current study, they shift with the wind. You cannot base your life on expert opinions.

One thing you can do is realize that experts are often wrong. The prevailing knowledge of twenty / thirty years ago has been proven wrong. Experts never admit they were wrong, they just modify their certainty to whatever the new study says. The fact that their previous certainty was disproven never comes up (think the crisis of bee colony collapse or insect die off). Another thing you can do is accept that changes to the climate have occurred since the beginning, and they will continue to happen regardless of what we do. The last thing you can do is turn off the endless reporting on climate change. The media has a vested interest in working you up (this includes social media). They make money off your attention, don't give it to them.

I remember a time in the late 90's when it was considered etiquette to click on the ads to support the websites.

What about telling advertisers that if they want to boycott, go ahead, find another Youtube to advertise on. They make 15 billion a year in advertising and 3 billion on subscriptions. I'm willing to bet with that much advertising it would be very unlikely any advertising boycott could make a significant difference.

“There’s always been this division between your right to speak and your right to have a megaphone that reaches hundreds of millions of people,” - that is the argument totalitarians always use. It's the same as you have the right to free speech, but not the right to print it, or you can print it, but you can't distribute it on the street corner, or talk about it in an assembly of over a certain number of people. In every instance it's about whomever has control attempting to limit the expression of an idea that they happen not to agree with. Totalitarians will always use an example of where speech somehow created harm to exhibit the need for control, the truth is that freedom does cause harm, and will always cause harm, because you cannot eliminate harm completely no matter the system. We have plenty of historical examples of the attempts to eliminate harm causing exactly the opposite.

Cliff I love your website, it makes me all nostalgic for the internet of the 90's / early 2000's - full of personality and humor.