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Cleanup in Aisle Lunatic (h/t romad1)


chasfh

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On 6/17/2023 at 8:18 AM, romad1 said:

I listened to the Hacks on Tap podcast the other day and they marveled at his ability to debate.  Basically, his native Jerseyness. 

I love this pod but that's some boomer ass intro music

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On 6/17/2023 at 8:18 AM, romad1 said:

I listened to the Hacks on Tap podcast the other day and they marveled at his ability to debate.  Basically, his native Jerseyness. 

No question he is as quick on his feet as anyone you'll meet. It's also generally unfortunate that our campaign culture rewards that so highly since it's not particularly high on the list of necessary executive skills.

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34 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

No question he is as quick on his feet as anyone you'll meet. It's also generally unfortunate that our campaign culture rewards that so highly since it's not particularly high on the list of necessary executive skills.

Not just our campaign culture, but Americans, in general, value that highly.  I agree that it's not generally necessary and is sometimes a drawback.  

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3 hours ago, ben9753 said:

In all fairness there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have survived either way. 

He would have had a lot better chance had he not put off surgery for 9 months in favor of alternative medicine.  

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I know that he's entertaining to some and, by extension, provides some value to his listeners by adding enjoyment to their day. Even if I find a lot of his positioning objectionable, I get it.

But he's not the one with a license in anything, or who has spent years becoming educated in sciences in order to become an expert in their field. Unlike Hotez or other actual professionals, whether it be medicine or engineering or whatever, Rogan has a very small and limited liability for any of the things that he or his guests say on his podcast. His only real job is to drive podcast downloads and make money off ads. That's literally it.

It's really not unlike cable news; Rogan makes an incredible amount of money for how little value he adds to society. I dont understand why we care about him or his opinions, or why anyone should feel obligated to be on his show for any reason.

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3 hours ago, mtutiger said:

I know that he's entertaining to some and, by extension, provides some value to his listeners by adding enjoyment to their day. Even if I find a lot of his positioning objectionable, I get it.

But he's not the one with a license in anything, or who has spent years becoming educated in sciences in order to become an expert in their field. Unlike Hotez or other actual professionals, whether it be medicine or engineering or whatever, Rogan has a very small and limited liability for any of the things that he or his guests say on his podcast. His only real job is to drive podcast downloads and make money off ads. That's literally it.

It's really not unlike cable news; Rogan makes an incredible amount of money for how little value he adds to society. I dont understand why we care about him or his opinions, or why anyone should feel obligated to be on his show for any reason.

Exactly. I don't believe anyone, including I, is arguing whether Rogan is or is not qualified to hold forth on any of this. I'm arguing none of that even matters. In fact, I might argue that his lack of credentials is exactly what attracts his largely anti-intellectualist fan base in the first place.

Actually, that's probably not right. It's not an anti-intellectualism because they fancy themselves as intellectualists, or perhaps more exactly, alt-intellectualists. What they are is anti-expertise. They don't respect people with expert credentials because they don't respect the very basis for the credentials. They think they're the smart ones because they know things about the world nobody else does, and that the rest of us are sheeple just believing what we are told with any agency for making our own conclusions.

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1 hour ago, chasfh said:

Exactly. I don't believe anyone, including I, is arguing whether Rogan is or is not qualified to hold forth on any of this. I'm arguing none of that even matters. In fact, I might argue that his lack of credentials is exactly what attracts his largely anti-intellectualist fan base in the first place.

Actually, that's probably not right. It's not an anti-intellectualism because they fancy themselves as intellectualists, or perhaps more exactly, alt-intellectualists. What they are is anti-expertise. They don't respect people with expert credentials because they don't respect the very basis for the credentials. They think they're the smart ones because they know things about the world nobody else does, and that the rest of us are sheeple just believing what we are told with any agency for making our own conclusions.

 “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. - Arthur Clarke

I think this is a key to understanding where we are in society now. We are living in the confluence of a highly technology society where the educational system does not prepare people to understand technology and even when it does, often trains them so narrowly that they can comprehend only a small sliver. The result is that while Americans 'know' in an abstract sense that techonology isn't magic, at any practical level they are so ignorant of underlying conceptual frameworks to understand it that that one bit of abstract knowledge doesn't help them. They are still just as subject to the voices of self appointed Shamans as any paleolithic hunter. And so we have seen debates on scientific/techical questions where facts actually do exist devolve to the level of religious argument in our politics

I count myself as tremendously lucky that I happened into an extremely broad techinical education (and put in 50yr since trying to keep up) that allows me to look at primary data from most any field and at least make some sense of it. I don't say that to brag at all but only to say that I personaly can't conceive of how poeple without that kind of background manage to navigate the modern world. To constantly have so much uncertainty, to hear so many conflicting voices and not having tools to sort it all out?  I can see how it would leave  people in a constant state of subconscious level anxiety and in turn prone to charlatans that promise easy resolution of complexity into simplicity. Heck, if you do understand technology it's frightening  enough!

So to bring it back to your point, people end up anti-expertise because they find themselves unable to make determinations about expertise, with the result often being "I don't understand any of you and your conflicting claims! A pox on all your houses" as the response.

And then in addition to that, since the rise of cable TV and especially the internet, the function that elites used to play as gatekeepers for expertise in mass media has broken down. Even if I didn't know immunology, I trusted that a wack job doctor would never get to appear with Walter Cronkite on the CBS evening news.

Edited by gehringer_2
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50 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

I see MAGAs complaining about Juneteenth on Twitter.  You should never complain about a day off.  Enjoy it! 

I said that the same thing when the left complained about Columbus day.  

Not everybody has the day off, right? It's not like Memorial Day or Labor Day where a day off for private and public non-retail businesses is practically mandatory, is it? I gotta believe Juneteenth is considered, more or less, a secondary holiday for which it's a discretionary decision for businesses to close down or remain open. I doubt that machine shops in Alabama are closed today.

That reminds me of a funny situation I lived through. I worked at ad agencies and while a lot of them, particularly the big auto ad agencies, had all the primary and secondary holidays off, the first two agencies I worked at were always open for business on President's Day and Columbus Day and Veterans Day and whatnot, even if our clients closed for them.

The third agency I worked for was in Columbus. It was part of the Bates ad agency empire as a result of a merger with a local agency, and part of the deal was that Bates would give the local guys the Bates name and the access to resources and clout that went with it, but they would get to maintain their own working culture, including staying open to work all the secondary holidays that all the other Bates offices closed for. So that created the weirdly unique situation that the only Bates office that did not close down for Columbus Day was the Columbus office.

 

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38 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

So to bring it back to your point, people end up anti-expertise because they find themselves unable to make determinations about expertise, with the result often being "I don't understand any of you and your conflicting claims! A pox on all your houses" as the response.

 

I think this is because people are told to question everything they read and hear (and half of everything they see), including (particularly) those from institutions, without being provided the educational and intellectual basis for effectively challenging what they're presented with. So where does that leave them? Basically, open and willing to readily accept the argument that most soundly confirms their biases.

This is why a lot of people who are in charge want to completely gut the public schools and make every family responsible for figuring out how to educate themselves. Sure, your family is capable of doing that well. So are yours and yours and yours. We're all capable of that. But is your neighbor's family capable of that? You tell me.

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A common argument I've seen against Juneteenth being a holiday is that "we already have too many holidays" as if any sane and rational person would make that argument.   I play along and suggest that we revoke Columbus Day so that the number of holidays stays the same.  Of course that triggers them even more because for some reason, they really want to celebrate the dude who discovered the Bahamas.  

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Not lying... I've heard we shouldn't have Juneteenth because "they already have MLK Jr Day"

Some lady on our neighborhood page, when someome posted a reminder that there would be no mail "It's called the 4th of July.  Honor your country"

 

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