Putin could not possibly have any dirt on Trump that is worse than the publicly available knowledge we have of his personality and activities. If he’s working with Russia it’s because he wants to, not because he’s being coerced.

Ok, fine, but is making the president put up collateral going to achieve that outcome? It seems more likely to encourage bribing the president to give wealthy criminals a pardon while ignoring those who can’t pay the toll.

I don’t think money is the solution. The pardon exists to correct errors in the justice system. It is inadequate and insufficient to solve all those errors on its own but it can be useful in certain contexts. I think we should be pardoning more people in a thoughtful way, not less.

Clearly the issue here has more to do with Trump being a piece of shit than it does with the existence of a system for granting clemency. You could make the argument that a review board or some other form of independent review would be a good thing to add to the process but you could also make the argument that the best solution is simply to not make a self-serving piece of shit the President.

What is looking like more of an idiot than he already does going to accomplish? He’s the most idiotic politician in living memory, by far, and there are some absolutely colossal morons on that list. The people who haven’t figured that out are never going to. They will be praising him until the day they die.

You don’t see how a comment about military service being generally unappealing relates to your comment about something making military service less appealing to women specifically?

Military service is already pretty unappealing to any empathetic human being imo

So do I, but this problem is much bigger than one man. He could not do what he’s doing without support from many rich donors and his party (which in turn relies on the support of the 30% of the country that reliably votes for them). Trump and many of his voters may be idiots but most of those other people are not, at least not in the intellectual sense of the word. They are making a calculated choice to enable fascism because they think it’s better for them personally than democracy. That belief and it’s associated threat to our country isn’t going away when Trump dies. In fact, it might get much worse if they can find someone who can advance that agenda without being a bumbling fool most of the time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are they wrong?

That might be a more useful skill in the future than you think

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.

He’s not wrong for being pissed at rural red voters. They voted for this more than any other group and they’re going to be negatively impacted by this more than any other group. Causing pain to others is a primary motivation for many of them. Knowing that, it’s only natural to hope they feel that pain acutely.

Undeveloping? Regressing? Devolving?