Snowden's book really speaks to me on so many levels. As a hacker, as a boy growing up in the new age of the Internet. As a person who experienced 9/11 and never aligned with the direction it took the USA. As a person who questions my identity and the messages I get about identity on a daily basis.
He will be remembered for a long time because of the actions he took, but if he had not done anything else, his book would be remembered on its own as a discourse on what being human means in these times. But, it will never be viewed on its own, and that is a tragedy.
NSA took this direction long before 9/11 -- Qwest (US telecommunications carrier) was requested to participate in NSA wiretapping program more than six months before September 11, 2001. Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio refused to give customer data to the NSA... he spent 6 years in federal prison.
Yes. I believe this is an example of selective prosecution where the Federal Government was punitive against Mr. Nacchio for standing up to illegal USG activities.
I used to agree with this but now that I've seen where this path leads, I think he should be given a fair trial and judged. Our government and the security of 350M US citizens cannot be held at the whim of a single hacker, no matter how right he believed himself to be. Our Congress has 535 members for precisely this reason, the president answers to Congress and is not a king, and even the Chief Justice does not rule absolutely. Snowden was brave, but he was also wrong. He should be judged fairly by a jury of his peers and that trial should be held in a transparent, fair and open trial for all to see. How many years now has he had to prepare his defense? It's plenty. Let's get the trial going.
He was not wrong. So many people define right and wrong by some system of made up rules and laws, and if someone breaks those rules or laws, even for right, people still say "they should be held accountable" as if the rule and law matter more than anything. The bad guys don't follow those rules and laws and exposing them for that, even if it violates said rules and laws, is not "wrong". It's brave and moral and right. If I was on that jury he would get a "not guilty" or jury nullification from me because despite what rules and laws he may have technically violated the system was wrong, not him. I don't care about idealistic excuses like "he should have....." because those things don't work as history proves over and over again. There are times the ends justify the means. Life is not a series of black and white rules or rule violations. The only wrong part about all of this is that they were spying on everyone to begin with, lied about it, and that nothing has been done about it since everyone was made aware. They have done a fantastic job of convincing the masses Snowden is the REAL bad guy. Shameful. If anyone insists on a trial it should be of the USG for its nefarious activities. Not the little guy for exposing them.
There's this concept of punching up or down. The little guy shouldn't be punched down to - in conventional politically correct culture.
Mostly the legal system is not encouraged to be politically correct.
Mr. Snowden broke his oath and leaked confidential data. His defense is the greater good. That should prevent prosecution.
Mr. Clapper lied to Congress when he said "Not Wittingly."
Mrs. Clinton failed to safeguard confidential data.
Others have broken the law, and they are not prosecuted.
We should prosecute those who break the law. They should defend themselves accordingly.
The real solution to this mess is for Congress to pass a law that exposing illegal activities is allowed. Wait - they did! The whistleblower protections don't work. More corruption.
A jury or pardon could conceivably provide the first, but the latter would require a movement away from the rule of law. Outside of a jury or prosecutor, who has claim to make the call that what he did was for the greater good?
I agree with this opinion fully and I find it odd that the OP you replied to doesn’t call for the federal agencies that were conducting unconstitutional surveillance to be held accountable in court?
Current POTUS has recently threatened a legally protected whistleblower with removal of protection, it wouldn't be crazy to call it a death threat. Previous POTUS wasn't any better disposed to Snowden. I'm not necessarily a fan, but I think it was a very rational choice on Snowden's part to choose "permanent exile and fear of assassination" over "trust the system."
He exposed illegal actions by the government, and as far as i know there hasn't been a trial for that, just a flurry of laws passed to justify what was done after the fact.
What can you do, when the institution you should report illegal acts to, is the one perpetrating them?
Exactly, this is the whole reason whistleblower protections exist. It gives a lone wolf the ability to fight against the machines that are bigger than they could possibly fight themselves.
He should be judged fairly by a jury of his peers and that trial should be held in a transparent, fair and open trial for all to see.
The government won't let that happen. They'll say that, for national security reasons, the public can't be allowed to know the actual impact of the secrets he disclosed. And if we can't see the impact, it's impossible to weigh judgment.
> I think he should be given a fair trial and judged.
That’s his whole point. But if you truly care about the law, shouldn’t government officials also be put on trial for breaking the law on a much more massive scale?
> Our Congress has 535 members for precisely this reason, the president answers to Congress and is not a king, and even the Chief Justice does not rule absolutely.
The reason he went public is precisely because the system of checks and balances didn’t work in the first place. In case you’ve forgotten, government officials actively kept members of congress in the dark and even lied under oath.
He addressed this on the podcast: The Espionage Act does not allow for a fair trial – no matter how well you prepare your defense. All that would be established at the trial is that he is guilty of sharing classified information which nobody, especially not him, denies. No possibility to lay out his motivation for his actions.
>Our Congress has 535 members for precisely this reason
He touches on this in the podcast. He claims the vast majority of Congress had no clue and only the Gang of Eight had that access. If true, the implication is that the full representation of the People was not present to provide those checks and balances
Does it change anything for you if it wasn't just his opinion, but some sort of majority consensus instead—even if that only arrives in the history books? (Only asking in principle, as a hypothetical—not making the claim that Snowden in fact was right.)
There seems to be a fundamental problem with what you're proposing here—of course the vigilante approach is riddled with obvious issues too, but I just want to point out that what you're describing isn't clearly an effective way of dealing with things either.
You're basically saying the system works and we should trust it to evaluate and handle Snowden correctly: we have Congress, and they'll make the right choices if not the president.
But, the giant government programs exposed by Snowden are already a striking example of how we can't rely on Congress, at least to handle this matter correctly. Why would we assume the same entity which created the problems that were exposed is going to then handle the exposer fairly?
(I don't know the precise link between the exposed programs and Congress—so maybe they are separate/unrelated enough that my suggestion is inaccurate.)
A fair trial isn't what he's after. By his own admission he would be quickly and easily prosecuted for his actions. He's after something which doesn't presently exist:
“If I’d made preexisting arrangements to fly to a specific country and seek asylum, for example, I would’ve been called a foreign agent of that country. Meanwhile, if I returned to my own country, the best I could hope for was to be arrested upon landing and charged under the Espionage Act. That would’ve entitled me to a show trial deprived of any meaningful defense, a sham in which all discussion of the most important facts would be forbidden.
“The major impediment to justice was a major flaw in the law, a purposeful flaw created by the government. Someone in my position would not even be allowed to argue in court that the disclosures I made to journalists were civically beneficial. Even now, years after the fact, I would not be allowed to argue that the reporting based on my disclosures had caused Congress to change certain laws regarding surveillance, or convinced the courts to strike down a certain mass surveillance program as illegal, or influenced the attorney general and the president of the United States to admit that the debate over mass surveillance was a crucial one for the public to have, one that would ultimately strengthen the country. All these claims would be deemed not just irrelevant but inadmissible in the kind of proceedings that I would face were I to head home. The only thing my government would have to prove in court is that I disclosed classified information to journalists, a fact that is not in dispute. “This is why anyone who says I have to come back to the States for trial is essentially saying I have to come back to the States for sentencing, and the sentence would, now as then, surely be a cruel one. The penalty for disclosing top secret documents, whether to foreign spies or domestic journalists, is up to ten years per document.”
Excerpt From: Edward Snowden. “Permanent Record.” Apple Books.
That sounds to me exactly like what he wants is a fair trial. The fact that the possibility doesn't exist under the current system is the larger point.
I sort of respect your opinion. His affirmative defense is a plain reading of the 4th amendment. The problem is I believe that our government and courts have lost objective interpretation and we're tending towards corruption. The courts will be biased "for the greater good" v. the actual law.
We see this with Mr. Clapper "not wittingly" testimony to congress.
We see this with the Lavabit case.
When the game is rigged, your only option is not to play. I am occasionally encouraged by our country's judicial system doing something right. The fact that this is astonishingly rare is the canonical problem, circular to the issue Mr. Snowden raises.
The federal courts embraced this quasi-faux legal perspective that they could capture data and store it and then post-hoc get a warrant for the previously captured data. This is is corrupt and immoral. In general this is the reason I believe Mr. Snowden should not present himself for trial, because we do not have ethical folks in the courts or congress who will give him a fair trial.
There will be no fair and open trial, the media will rile up potential jury beforehand with dubiously authored hit pieces. Alternatively, he might decide to suddenly fall into depression and remorse and commit suicide in a jail cell.
I hope he is remembered and his bravery resonates through time. There was Martin Luther and 100’s of years later there was Martin Luther King. Generations from now our descendants could be well served by an EdwaRd Snowden.
There is a real lesson here about just how cavalier the American government - and to some degree the public - is about civil liberties, but that isn't the biggest problem.
The problem here isn't even so much the government is being shady - that has happened before, it will happen again. I can understand people not feeling threatened by constant snooping even though I disagree.
To me the real problem is how effectively the government has kept this subject from creeping into the public debate. The scary part is the secret laws and precedents that elected officials aren't allowed to even tell their constituents about. Government officials are not reliable; this is far to much unaccountable power even if people involved were allowed to discuss what is happening.
Why aren't the not-technically-interesting parts of this wiretapping program legal for government agencies to talk about? If they need to be hidden, why not go straight to the logical conclusion and classify a bunch of other laws?
Democracies can't handle this level of secrecy. The whole thing is going to fall apart one way or another - the path America is going down isn't stable at all; something is going to have to change radically. Either the intelligence agencies will gain supremacy over the government, the government itself will go rogue or the secrecy will have to end.
EDIT I'm going to bed before I see the whole video, but around 1:46:00 - the bit with J. Clapper. Case in point that the whole system of checks and balances can't work.
EDIT2 And around 2:10:00. Barbaric stuff; it is like centuries of accumulated Common Law and parliamentary legal tradition never happened. People need to be able to occasionally talk about this stuff in formal setting.
There is a big difference between Observation (which is what Snowden is doing) and Analysis (followed by Solutions). It's not healthy to confuse the two.
Snowden is pointing out an issue. And he has done it with courage that I massively respect. You hardly see it these days. And that makes it anxiety and fear inducing, as the solutions are unknown.
But think of it this way - tomorrow someone might hand you a diagnosis of cancer. You can freak out about it or you can find a Cancer specialist to see what options are available. Asking the technician who gave you the report what the odds are, doesn't make any sense. He knows only how to create the report.
In this case just look to history, to understand how these things play out. History is the Oncologist.
Intelligence agencies have hard problems to deal with. On top of it, they are giant bureaucracies which means cockups, incompetence, turf wars, hiding issues are the norm. All that amplifies the problems, causes defensiveness, over-reactions and reactions to reactions.
If you read the history (and these days there are tons of resources) this sequence of events (of overreach) has unfolded a thousand times. There are a whole bunch programmes that have been shutdown because one group or the other got carried away or did damage. That history (in out current environment of over information/disinformation/misinformation) is what will always be a source of hope and faith.
“Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.”
― Baruch Spinoza
“the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain by fear, nor to exact obedience, but to free every man from fear that he may live in all possible security... In fact the true aim of government is liberty.”
― Baruch Spinoza
I tend to agree with your sentiments, and my political comments are typically pretty anarchistic, but I don't think we should let language become a barrier to communication instead of a bridge. I can understand how some conceptions of "liberty" are increased by certain security measures. If you can safely have a picnic in the park, you have the liberty of safely picnicing. If the park is full of bandits who consistently take baskets from picnicers, you've lost the liberty of safe picnics even if the official government isn't the one who took that liberty from you.
Again, I'm not arguing for increased security, just for understanding the way others use language.
The freedom from worrying about hunger and basic needs and violence from others is security. It isn't referencing total physical security, it is referencing government vs. no government.
The difference here is that the oncologist doesn't just observe.
The oncologist deals with the consequences of the observation: communicate with the patient, gives advices on treatments, makes a therapy plan, deals with families, answer to their questions, takes the hit when the relatives think that the solution is not good enough or an Indian shaman could cure everything with snake's poison.
Snowden have done good, but escaped from the consequences of his actions.
A position that made everything he's done questionable
Had he faced a trial, even the most unfair of trials, would have put him in the position of being at least true to the values he was trying to protect.
Question the authority, suffer the consequences.
Question the authority, go to Russia is not what generally the public opinion accepts as "honest".
There is much to say also about who leaked the data but didn't protect the source.
The identity of deep throat has been made public after Nixon was already dead for years and Mark Felt was already an old man suffering from dementia.
> Question the authority, suffer the consequences.
I’m pretty sure questioning the authority without fear of retaliation is what the first amendment is supposed to be about. But that aside, your phrasing is a bit misleading. Snowden didn’t question the government. He exposed illegal activities by the government.
I don't think there was ever a question about hiding his identity - the govt was after him before he'd even left Hong Kong or any leak had been published. At the time he said he didn't care what happened to him.
I find it interesting that you posit Deep Throat's approach as somehow more noble. If Snowden had anonymously leaked and kept on working would that have been less questionable or more honest?
> Intelligence agencies have hard problems to deal with. On top of it, they are giant bureaucracies which means cockups, incompetence, turf wars, hiding issues are the norm. All that amplifies the problems, causes defensiveness, over-reactions and reactions to reactions.
This is a good point. In an ideal world their job would be less...complicated. So our job as intelligent, capable citizens is to make the system more ideal for them to do their duties.
Making a "captive workforce" out of AI tools and robots is, to me, the ideal solution. Either way it's inevitable. Since no one else will, I'm trying to get out ahead with thoughtful early planning. Communicating a common goal for the nation without fear is the way to get the technology into the hands of the right people. It's up to us, the intelligent and "good people" communicators, to push for it.
“There is a big difference between Observation (which is what Snowden is doing) and Analysis (followed by Solutions). It's not healthy to confuse the two.”
Very true. For example I think Marx did a great analysis but his solutions lacked. Same happens often in medicine. People who observe something are asked to also explain it. But if they can’t explain the observation it doesn’t mean the observation is wrong.
I don't really get what the line of argument is here, exactly. The CIA & FBI engaged in massive abuses in the past, including psychological and biological experimentation on unwitting US subjects, so therefore we should be blasé about their ongoing mass surveillance program (which, incidentally, has the potential for much more wide-reaching political and societal damage than anything that's come before it)?
I guess one could also argue for calm on the basis that the Stasi once existed and these days East Germany is an okay place.
And the solutions to these issues are perfectly well known: the intelligence agencies need to be curtailed and reined in, and their ability to indefinitely store massive reams of data about every private citizen brought to an end.
I said know the history. Such programmes were shut down in the past. Knowing how and why doesn't just reduce anxiety, it gives you a bag of tools to improve on. Assuming everyone knows the history is a big mistake. On top of that there are lot of characters around who benefit from ignorance and stoking anxiety.
”There has never been this level of government overreach -- if only because of the technology involved. Never has it been like this. Or at least, never has a government survived this”
The parent's post means that the overreach has never had the technology we have now. This drastically changes the situation. The government could secretly mandate that all phone manufacturers must secretly record the phone microphone all the time and then this data gets analyzed. If this happens in 10 years, then the general public might not even find out for years, and even if they do, most of the public will just shrug and move on.
I guess that makes sense but if you take into account technological capabilities then the next overreach will almost always be the biggest because the technology makes larger and larger scale possible.
True. With current and soon to be tech we can build surveillance much more pervasive than what the book 1984 describes. It feels like it’s almost inevitable for this to happen.
It's only "inevitable" because so many people are proscribing the boundaries of political and legislative action on the issue by discussing it with this sense of fatalistic unavoidability. The mere existence of this technology does not imply that the NSA & CIA have to construct a massive data center in Utah which stores all internet traffic forever -- that is a political choice.
The intelligence agencies have proven to be vindictive, and also a back-channel arm for straight up partisan politics. It seems like it goes unnoticed when the outcome is something that aligns with a party's goals. I just can't tell if it's fallible people in positions of power, or a real concerted effort.
I think a lot of our problems stem from the undermining of our system of checks and balances, and whatever is up with
the fourth estate. I'm digressing, but I recall a time when journalists would be roasting public officials over these issues.
If it were partisan politics I don't think we would see the continuity that we did between Bush and Obama.
I think it was clear and overt during the Bush era that there were some dubious claims thrown around about "we need this to prevent another 9/11", with "this" being vague, broad, varying with the particular speaker. It was disappointing to many when Obama embraced some of these conclusions.
Obama presented himself as the anti-Bush when it came to a lot of things to do with the military and intelligence operations. I suspected that once he took office his stance on some of these things would shift closer to Bush’s, and I was right.
I based this on my theory that there are things that the general public does not know, and will never know, that influence the decisions POTUS makes. Until you are privy to that information, it’s easy to take a contrarian viewpoint. Once you have the information, and the responsibility for making decisions that might save American lives, it’s a lot harder.
I’m not saying that any of these policies are right or wrong, or that the general public should be kept in the dark about whatever it is we’re being kept in the dark about. It’s just a theory I have about how the world works. I have no way of proving or disproving it, but I think the evidence supports it.
> If it were partisan politics I don't think we would see the continuity that we did between Bush and Obama.
If it weren't partisan politics, you wouldn't be seeing roughly 15 senior officials from the NSA/CIA/FBI leaving the public sector to take jobs at CNN & MSNBC.
I'm curious why most people don't find this to be deeply disturbing.
I don't find it disturbing as Fox News and the other "conservative" media outlets were already full of ex-Bush era public sector employees. Both sides have an aggressively pro-intelligence agency bend, even if there are partisan differences.
There's a sizeable difference between judges and cabinet officials who have long been media pundits (though I do mostly agree that it's disturbing) and folks whose primary experience is in intelligence and counter-intelligence.
The era of rampant, selective intelligence leaks to the media started when these very same people were in administration.
Intelligence was always this leaky, there just wasn't social media and modern-day yellow journalism to twist it and spread it around. And we didn't have outrage culture, which provides a very blunt and dangerous mechanism for leakers to leverage.
The only real secret intelligence is tactical (military or otherwise), because we aren't quite that craven, exceptions notwithstanding. Everything else is intrinsically political and has a very short half-life as a secret. Work for a few years inside the Beltway, especially with or near people who are connected (e.g. lobbyists, think tank scholars, appointees, Pentagon staffers, international orgs, etc), and this becomes obvious immediately. Secrets are social currency more important than money and maybe even title. Everybody shares secrets, albeit usually in an obnoxious, obfuscated, pretentious way; even the interns.
As the other poster notes, selective intelligence leaking has been going on forever. And if there is a lack of Ex-Bush intelligence community members in the press, it is because the whole torture thing made then step away from the public eye.
I find I want to reply, but I don't know how to do that without getting wrapped up in a discussion that's too easy to be misinterpreted or dismissed here as political.
I think you are conflating a few issues.
On the one hand there is the bipartisan surveillance issue that Snowden shined a light on.
More recently we have a bunch of Trump and anti-Trump narratives and sometimes conspiracy theories.
I suspect some people on the thread have squished those into one. But the intelligence community is likely complicated, motivations multi-faceted, people holding diverse opinions. I don't think these things are the same, or you can dismiss or endorse one cause for the other.
CNN and NBC are not partisan entities, contrary to Republican smears. If they have any faults, it is in how desperately they bend over backwards to maintain the appearance of nonpartisanship amidst bad-faith attacks from the right, to the point that CNN just this week hired an alt-right conspiracy theorist as a full time contributor.
2) CNN and MSNBC absolutely are partisan entities, though CNN does try hard to appear less so. As long as MSNBC keeps employing Maddow and she keeps pushing debunked conspiracy theories, they will absolutely be seen as partisan. Her coverage as of late has been absolutely disgraceful and a huge stain on that network, IMO.
3) None of what you said addresses the very alarming fact that the heads of our intelligence agencies are taking senior posts in these media organizations.
The partisans aren't, "Democrats" and "Republicans" when it comes to intelligence agencies. The partisans are those who support global US hegemony and those who don't. The intelligence agencies do, and they have an "ends justifies the means" mentality. They don't see transgressions against civil liberties or Constitutional violations as troubling or an impediment as long as they perceive themselves as working towards a "greater good". This is not how a lawful, Constitutional society is supposed to (or can) work. Democracy dies behind closed doors and every day more and more doors are being slammed shut in our face by unaccountable government agents who are increasingly seizing the levers of power in government, media, business and every other facet of our lives.
Yeah the idea that the intelligence community pushed these stories doesn't hold up.
If you look into the folks who were in the spotlight pushing "we need this to prevent another 9/11" they were mostly former military and some with intelligence connections... but the real connection was their political connections.
Many outright stated the information they were provided to go on TV with came from politically associated groups not some secretive internal policy. In fact intelligence groups internally pushed back on some of the claims and political appointees ignored them.
The continuity was in foreign policy. Obama, like GW Bush and Clinton, deferred to the 'Deep State' on foreign policy, military and security matters. He started out idealistic, but was quickly subsumed. Trump has bucked the System, and that is why the bipartisan knives are out for him.
The blob will always be dissatisfied because there is always one more country to invade and one more way to escalate a conflict, and eventually any U.S. politician has to stop giving the blob what it desires if they want to get reelected.
Relative to what Hillary Clinton's or Marco Rubio's foreign policy would have been, sure, Obama was a model of probity, but this is damning with faint praise.
I guess this isn't strictly "partisan," but it is highly political: the FBI tried to destroy Martin Luther King Jr., and even attempted to blackmail him with recordings they had taken.
Seriously, I'm amazed how many people are ignorant of this fact. They didn't just blackmail him, they clearly implied that he should commit suicide before recieving the Nobel if he didn't want the tapes released. ("There is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is.") They never released the tapes, of course, but he did die. Everyone also seems unaware that the King family was awarded $1 in damages from the federal government for the wrongful death of MLK; they contend that the US government assassinated him and used James Earl Ray as a patsy, and while they never got Ray's conviction overturned (despite trying) they did get a separate US court to agree that the government should pay them symbolic damages based on this interpretation of events.
Really, "that time the FBI tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into committing suicide" is too far back to count as an example of TLA overreach? We only know about that whole escapade because radicals physically broke into an FBI office and stole evidence of it, this isn't the kind of thing the government willingly admits to us. The CIA destroyed most of the MK-ULTRA documents when they realised Congress was getting ready to ask for them, but we still know that they were drugging unconsenting US citizens with LSD and secretly recording them having sex with hookers (they called it "Operation Midnight Climax") just to see what would happen, but I guess that's old news, too, or maybe it just isn't politcial enough to care about. We probably won't know that they killed Michael Hastings for another couple decades, and then that will be old news, too, so who cares?
Interesting. I would argue that government officials can be reliable, efficient, conscientious, when they are properly incentivized. Instead, there are various pathologies that infect various organs or agencies at various time, often at time seemly mutually exclusive but they coexist nonetheless.
The government isn't given the trust needed to regulate or otherwise do its job efficiently. See various civil engineering projects, explosive cost growth whenever contractors compete for bids. People justify that as evidence that governments as inherently inefficient.
Government is abusing civil liberties through spying on everyday Americans. Relatively nobody cares.
The government is being corrupt, privileging senators' pet projects or program over the good of the nation. See the Senate Launch System. Nobody cares except space nerds. At the same time, NASA also supported the various effort to commercialize space, which is a major win.
I posted links. If you don't think Google has encrypted its cross-datacenter traffic, you can try to access it yourself. If you don't think the NSA has stopped collecting all phone metadata, why would there be records of the NSA collecting a subset of metadata afterward?
There remains no evidence that the NSA is deliberately flouting the law. If there were, Snowden would have leaked that instead of lists of hacked Chinese computer systems.
I don't understand the timeline you're implying. Snowden did blow the whistle on this program, in 2013. Your link was from 2015, and now it's 2019, if I'm not mistaken. Snowden has lost the access he had before his whistleblowing. It will take another whistleblower to reveal the scale of current unsupervised malfeasance.
You're not following the point. The point was that people did care about the leaks and took appropriate action.
Secondarily, you're not understanding the leaked documents. The leaked documents showed that the NSA believed that the phone metadata program was legal. Once there is a court ruling that it is illegal, its lawyers cannot justify the program.
Thirdly, your phrase "another whistleblower" shows that you do not know what a whistleblower is. Leaking thousands of programs where just one of them happens to be illegal but not obviously so (to the point where Snowden was far more interested in PRISM, an obviously legal program) is not whistleblowing.
As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court (in which DoJ faces no opposing counsel) in order to jury-rig a fig leaf for the ongoing destruction of personal liberties. I'm made my peace with the fact that the authoritarians to whose whims we are subject will occasionally overstep their bounds in public. When they do so, the public may protest and eventually conditions might improve somewhat. When the unsupervised services harm us, their putative employers, we have no recourse.
Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower". You guys make a great team!
> As discussed in the podcast, not even a few of the people at NSA believed anything of the sort.
Snowden's documents themselves showed the legal justification for the phone metadata program. It nakes sense that Snowden would claim otherwise in the podcast because he is barely literate and hasn't actually read most of the documents he leaked.
> As detailed there, it took 18 months of lobbying and browbeating the secret court
You don't "lobby" a court. You have lawyers justify a position.
> Also I have to say I'm just loving the concerted effort ITT to redefine the term "whistleblower".
You're the one making a bizarre definition of "whistleblower." Is it whistleblowing to leak all of your company's documents if you don't know they are doing anything illegal so long as somebody can later find one thing that is illegal? Obviously not.
> Snowden was far more interested in PRISM, an obviously legal program) is not whistleblowing
The public outrage was due to various top officials denying that anything like PRISM was going on, when in fact it was.
So either the program was illegal, the false statements made by officials about them, or the classification of the process that prevented democratic oversight. One of the three had to be illegal, it's not really relevant to split hairs over which was one actually was.
The simplest explanation for lots of confusing events is that the intelligence agencies have enjoyed supremacy over the government for some time already. They run the media as well: just look at the glowing plaudits for their fake "whistleblower" as contrasted with the ongoing disdain for actual whistleblowers.
That's not nearly as simple as the explanation that the public doesn't actually care about whether domestic agencies are spying on everyone. I think most Americans are in the "I have nothing to hide" line of thinking.
The media won't carry a story that their numbers tell them doesn't have legs with the audience.
Forget the public, why don't elected officials themselves act more in simple self-interest? Not all of them are bankrolled by the military-industrial complex, yet not a one ever utters a peep about the trillions we spend on evil security-theater bullshit. No, killing lots of people in the Middle East does not make us safer, which anyone on any of the relevant Congressional committees could tell you. Most of them would be happy to spend those trillions on other priorities. None of them, with the partial exception of e.g. Rep. Gabbard, ever say a thing about this.
I would guess that people in general are fearful of reprecussions when the antagonists are 'better connected', 'higher ranked' or 'richer'. Often the scariest threats are those implied.
The possibility of a secret police state scares me more than any bombs or shootings ever could. It is absolutely an existential threat to freedom, because as part of its nature, it is able to quell dissent, and largely control the flow of information "in the name of freedom".
There are plenty that do. They end up making waves in the libertarian and conspiracy communities and are generally blacklisted by the mainstream press.
The two communities above are receptive to messages about government overreach and corruption, the general public seems not to care much.
I suspect this is largely because libertarians and conspiracy theorists (which do overlap to some extent) are already skeptical of government "goodness" and anything that feeds that skepticism is easily accepted. The general public places government on a higher moral plane of existence and any challenge to that is met with skepticism and excuses.
The end result is that those that speak out/expose the government are sidelined and punished through smears or government action. See: Attacks on Gabbard, Ron Paul, Snowden, Bill Binney, Assange, etc.
It always fascinated me that the discussion of the leaked Clinton emails conveniently focused on the speculative source and motivation, never on the content of the emails with valid DKIM signatures. There is literally no question that those emails are real and unaltered.
> It always fascinated me that the discussion of the leaked Clinton emails conveniently focused on the speculative source and motivation, never on the content of the emails with valid DKIM signatures
Because there was nothing in them that painted Clinton in a bad light. They were normal boring emails that were sensationalized in conspiracy blogs but recognized as normal boring emails by professional journalists.
There were multiple emails from journalists at supposedly neutral reputable outlets asking the campaign to check and edit their articles before publishing. Also in an email Donna Brazile of CNN agreed to forward the debate questions to the campaign before the debate.
If the act of leaking emails about media collusion is a "bad" thing that influenced the election in one way, so can the media collusion itself be a "bad" thing that influenced the election the other way.
> There were multiple emails from journalists at supposedly neutral reputable outlets asking the campaign to check and edit their articles before publishing
Despite what the conspiracy bloggers would have you believe, this is standard fact checking. If the conspiracy bloggers did that, they wouldn't have anything to report.
> Also in an email Donna Brazile of CNN agreed to forward the debate questions to the campaign before the debate.
This was heavily covered mainstream news and resulted in CNN firing Brazile. Brazile also assisted the Sanders campaign as the Sanders campaign has admitted, but we don't have the Sanders campaign emails to see how much.
Conservatives are not offered the opportunity to review or edit articles about them beforehand by these same outlets. The standard is to reach out for comment, not for permission or editorial review.
> Conservatives are not offered the opportunity to review or edit articles about them beforehand by these same outlets.
Clinton's team was not offered the opportunity to edit or review the articles either. They were sent articles about the costs of policy proposals to respond with their own numbers. If you think this is out of the ordinary or that conservatives don't get the same consideration, what do you think "
did not immediately respond to requests for comment" means at the end of news articles?
Was there ever any evidence that having the questions is actually dirty pool, or was that more an instance of "ask and ye shall receive, and nobody else asked?"
Yes they must feel like fools, believing that multiple national politicians would associate with an organized pedophilia ring, for instance even flying on a private plane that had been nicknamed "The Lolita Express".
I mean, they should probably feel like fools believing there was child sex trafficking going on in the basement of a building that has no basement, even if some other conspiracies turn out to be real. It's a textbook case of mob mentality that so many people believed the lies and nobody did even basic legwork.
(And let's note: it's not like 4chan broke open Epstein's crimes. Old fashioned FBI legwork did. And the guy had a history of sex trafficking already, which nobody in Pizzagate did. As fun as it is to pretend to be an armchair sleuth, it sure isn't a pass-time that's got a good batting average over professional investigation).
FBI washed their hands of this when the rest of DoJ did, in 2008. Two things caused national attention to return to Epstein: Alexander Acosta's nomination to Labor, and Julie K. Brown at the Miami Herald refusing to forget about Epstein's victims even after the rest of the media had. FBI had fuck-all to do with any of this; they don't like to investigate people who can afford to hire lawyers.
And some are so sure of their worldview that they believe in a wholly-manufactured conspiracy theory long after the reasonable evidence has discredited it, including physical evidence like the fact a building has no basement. It's a big world with a wide variety of people.
Not jakeogh though. like I said, he's part of a conspiracy to make us believe people still believe Pizzagate. The purpose of which is to undermine confidence in average human reasoning skills, which undermines faith in democracy. This is important for the next step of the Triluminati's plan.
Pointing to a specific claim that was not made as if it was. Anyone can find something to point to that is false. It's an effective way to avoid specific things that were brought up.
Real whistleblowers: Snowden, Kiriakou, Binney, Drake, Manning, Winner. Notice a theme of career loss, prison, total life upheaval, and a press that DGAF.
Fake whistleblower: still works for CIA, whistleblowing has purely political rather than administrative effects, and ongoing adulation in the press.
If you don't want to see this on HN, then downvote and move on.
I have a whistleblower hotline available to me at work... If I see something and call that number, my identity will be protected. That is the way my company would prefer I handle ethical issues and I will keep my job. If I gather up evidence and release it to the press, I will lose my job. That is the difference between, say Snowden and this whistleblower. But that does not negate the validity of the complaint.
tfandango says> "If I see something and call that number, my identity will be protected. That is the way my company would prefer I handle ethical issues and I will keep my job. If I gather up evidence and release it to the press, I will lose my job."
Do NOT believe that!
The reality is probably quite different. Many organizations (both private and civil) make such promises but, in truth, the complaint phone line/box/e-mail is a direct line to either higher-ups in the company or to someone in another agency who will, very quickly, pass identifying information to higher-ups. The whistleblower will be tracked down mercilessly and driven out always. Those for whom the whistle blows will, not infrequently, be rewarded.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I've been in many public and private endeavors and, in every case, so-called whistleblower phone lines, complaint boards or monitoring companies have proven to be ineffectual and/or downright deadly to the career of anyone who contacts them. They are usually honeytraps for those poor individuals who believe their complaints will be fairly judged.
With reasonable care the press can be relied upon to vent complaints to the public w/o identifying the complainant.
That's great. Very few people in the unsupervised services imagine that they are so well protected. Thomas Drake and John Crane might have thought using the established procedure would protect them... and we've heard of them.
...heavily covered in the media because he or she aligns with the orginization's goals (sell headlines) is not 'fake'.
"Heavily covered in the media", that's an interesting criterion for "whistleblower", and I'm sure it would serve someone's interests if it got any traction. Also "critical thinking" is now defined as "believing what the war media tell us"? This would be Orwellian, if it weren't so silly.
You are misrepresenting what was said. "Heavily covered in the media" wasn’t cited as a criterion for a whistleblower. Actually to be more precise, it was cited as a criterion—by you—when you claimed that as a hallmark of “fake” whistleblowers.
Parent claimed that media coverage was a sufficient criterion; I disagree. You've interpreted the discussion as concerned with a necessary criterion. That abuse of the idiom will come later, after the war media has moved the Overton window a bit further.
Snowden's revelations are massive. They should be cited anytime every time an intelligence reptile anonymously leaks something to the press, which is every day. Instead, the only time Snowden makes the news is when they want to announce some new persecution like this recent lawsuit over his memoir. Here is on Joe f@#$ing Rogan for goodness sakes! That is not widespread coverage.
Media coverage tells you nothing about the authenticity of a whistleblower. You have not demonstrated any useful criterion for identifying 'fake' whistleblowers other than "I do not agree with his/her goals."
You're right, media coverage tells us far more about the media than about the people they cover. That was actually the point I made at the top of this thread:
What you refer to as "fake whistleblower" still has their job because they followed the legal procedure for reporting abuse and therefore enjoy whistleblower protection.
The others sited didn't follow the legal procedure which would have allowed them to also enjoy whistleblower protection.
Thomas Drake followed procedure, and he got burned. John Crane was one of the bureaucrats involved with that procedure, and he didn't think the burning was proper. So he followed procedure in order to blow the whistle on the burning, so then he got burned.
I've been to Reddit a couple of times, and never to that section. Unlike you I post under my own name. Anyway, the time for that valuable advice would have been before that comment spawned a big subthread and got upvoted into double digits...
"Run the media" in this context doesn't mean there's some CIA commissar approving every article or broadcast. What it means generally is that access to "leaks", scoops, "anonymous government sources", "high level intelligence officials", etc is predicated on uncritically toeing the "intelligence community" line. Failing to do so means no more access, and you will be replaced by someone else.
Take the lessons of Manufacturing Consent and apply them to the contemporary political context instead of Vietnam and East Timor, even if the elite media seems to be aligned with your own political beliefs.
How could you be a member of any standing in the elite media if you don't have access to "leaks"? If something leaks that wasn't actually approved by the agencies, what do you think is going to happen to the leaker?
My point is that any time an "anonymous government official" or "high level intelligence official" or whatever leaks something to the prestige press - meaning, the article says "according to anonymous government sources..." - AND the leaker is not jailed / prosecuted, THEN you have to assume that the leak was deliberate (approved at a high level) and in service of the intelligence agency's own ends.
> To me the real problem is how effectively the government has kept this subject from creeping into the public debate.
Well you are on a technical discussion board. There are many people here who are in the position Snowden described there.
You can bring your brick to this discussion without having to become a hero as he said. This would push a public debate if you'd kept it up.
Why isn't it happening?
Maybe the government doesn't have to do anything at all and it's still not happening.
"You can't awaken somebody who pretends to be asleep" goes for all sides.
I would argue that the JFK assassination marked the moment that the intelligence agencies officially gained supremacy over the government. That pt is long gone, our goal now should be to make their job of subverting our democracy as difficult as possible.
I don't think this passes even the sniff test. The shifting policies of the US seem to be driven by politicians, not some "intelligence agencies" boogeymen.
Snowden is really clever with these interviews. Right away in the interview he establishes his concerns about the government, then briefly mentions the government smear campaign against him without hanging on the point too much. He calmly explains himself in an articulate way, establishing himself as perfectly sane. Then he reaches out to connect and empathize with his interviewer:
> When I hear you just speak, I go "actually this is a thoughtful guy."
When he validates Joe, he validates Joe's audience, and it becomes Snowden's audience. He did this with Trevor Noah too; I think he's intentional about it while very cleverly appearing not to be. It's a good thing Snowden is the one who blew that whistle, and not somebody less calculating.
Oh, man. I completely disagree. I feel like he just talks and talks about whatever he wants to talk about with almost no regard for whether his technical language is being understood or if he's dominating the discussion or anything like that. I don't think I've seen him develop a natural rapport with anyone or even make a firm, memorable point in an interview. I'll always be grateful for his leaks but over 2.5 hours he just became a soft background murmur in my room.
Completely agree, he rambles all over the place with no clear narrative arch. And he completely failed to build any rapport by making weird comments about the shows logo and his lack of engagement with Joe at the start. Given he knew he was going to have 2+ hours to make his points, and the audience was going to be several million, he should have considered his approach far better.
I imagine being cooped up in an embassy gives you a lot of time to think and plan what you want to say and, eventually, you end up with a real fire-hose of pent-up expression.
That's a fair point. Maybe the technical language isn't very friendly to a wide audience, that hadn't occurred to me. I'm trying to keep a wide perspective, but I might just be fanboying.
I can imagine the potential advisors/pr folks, having helped shape that type of image. It’s hard to be in the public spotlight and not have PR consultants spamming you.
The success of Joe Rogan is fascinating and encouraging.
For a long time there was a view that attention spans were diminishing. Facebook and Tik Tok reduced content to the smallest possible dosage.
But look at this. This is one of the world's most popular podcasts and it's nearly three hours long. You see it too in TV: what is a Netflix series but a 13 hour movie?
I see a definite trend towards long form content right now, which I think is quite positive.
With old media (specifically television and newsprint) "information bandwidth" was restricted to a limited number of channels and pages. This meant there had to be a calculation where the editors had to maximize the audience by making the content short enough to not lose the easily distracted, but long enough to be engaging.
High-speed internet has blown open the information bandwidth cap so that now content can be created for every attention niche. This is just anecdotal, but it seems to me part of the decline of traditional journalism has to do with article length. People either want short, snappy headlines that tell them the essential information, or long, elaborately-written pieces thousands of words long. The only reason mid-length articles existed before was a compromise between the two groups.
And a subtle but massive change is the removal of imposed formats i.e. artificial time boundaries, as if there were only a few possible lengths for any piece of content — 5 min, 22 min, 42 min, because commercials.
Online audiovisual content is refreshing in that it lasts exactly as long as the creator(s) intended to treat the topic. Likewise for article length in blogs.
I feel like there's also something to be said about old media and their revenue models. Commercial breaks are written in to most shows, and show length matters.
With newer media, it doesn't matter if you have a 22 minute episode 1 and a 47 minute episode 2 - you create the scene, shot and/or episode length that works for you artistically.
Until you listen to his actual content and it is, the vast majority of the time, pretty "easy" listening in the sense that it is pretty vacuous and doesn't really require any sort of concentration to follow along. Don't get me wrong -- I listen to it often on my way to work, but one of the reasons I do is because it is not something that really requires much of my concentration to follow along.
That's not necessarily a negative. Rogan is wide not deep. The eclectic guest selection means listeners are exposed to a wide range of ideas. Well, at least as wide as the guests Rogan can book, and the topics and people that interest him personally.
The show is successful because it knows that Google exists - it knows there's a universe of information outside the bounds of the show. It provides the gestalt and it's up to the listener to explore the details.
There is that, but there is also the fact that when the conversation is cognitively challenging, the guest cannot relax as much. More relaxed guests tend to reveal more of their personality in my experience. The main reason I watch Joe Rogan Experience is to learn what sort of human being the guest is.
What I have found interesting about Rogan's show is that on the rare occasion he has more of a previous generation personality as a guest, I find these personalities are about 15 minutes of interesting. It's as if this new format requires personalities of greater depth, which, somehow, feels more gratifying.
I think thats Podcasts as a medium in general. IMHO Rogan could use pretty heavy editing, I guess people like having it on in the background or something.
Heavy editing can drive me crazy. The really bad ones are the podcasts/videos that jump in between each sentence. It's really disconcerting to hear somebody talk with no pauses in between sentences. I like the format of Joe's podcast because it feels like a real conversation and I'm participating in it, even if I'm not. Editing would ruin that feeling and make it something else. There's plenty of other podcasts that service that.
Joe's issues are that can be long winded at times, and he fails to press people on some issues which occasionally sucks (the first episode with Jack Dorsey, the last episode with Alex Jones, or the recent episode with Bob Lazaar). Most of the time, however, that's exactly what I want. I don't want two blowhards shouting at each other, I want two people trying to understand each other's ideas and to learn something new from it.
It's a spectrum right? No editing on one end, every second spliced together on the other. Most podcasts I listen to you can't really tell it's been edited. They just cut out banter that's off topic etc.
A solution I've found is to listen on 1.7x speed. Originally I bumped to 1.3x, but over time your brain adjusts and has no problem following along at faster speeds.
To be clear, a big reason behind the popularity of podcasts is that you can listen to them while doing other things - working, driving, etc. so I'm not sure long podcast episodes really dispel the idea that attention spans are diminishing.
His podcasts are infinitely better than any amount of talking-head punditry available on the major news networks. I've not run across one yet that wasn't well-reasoned, patient, and interesting - even if I didn't agree with conclusions being made or the thought processes expressing them.
> I've not run across one yet that wasn't well-reasoned,
Then you cannot listen to many. Joe speaks so much bollox with an authoritative air that if you didn't know the subject you would think that Joe did, when many many times he clearly does not.
I agree they are interesting when he lets the guest speak (even if completely disagree with them) or it is on something Joe does know about / has researched. But that is far from all the time.
Joe also has a habit of ignoring the guest at times and carrying on down his own little conversation alley, usually when he got too stoned - which ruins the conversation IMO
I really like Joe Rogan, and the format of its podcast. I don't know other medias where they let people speak for three hours. I was suspicious the first time I listened to him. I thought, can this beefy archetypical MMA dude say anything interesting? actually he can. He's at ease with all types of guests, he just seems to be an outspoken, honest guy.
I agree that he tends to bring up his favorite topics all the time, which gets a bit repetitive but it's ok. You can't expect him to run hundred of conversations without being repetitive.
Whatever you think of Chapo Trap House, and there's a lot to criticize them on, from both the left and the right, when they let Virgil Texas do an interview for a whole episode, it's damned good.
Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman is also a very good interviewer, but her guests are often too niche for me to recommend to a general audience.
I think you’re right. But... Joe Rogan often claims he’s not a genius, and not an expert in many topics. I also feel his fan community strongly understands this. There are a lot of YouTube videos making fun of his mannerisms and when he might be too high on an interview.
To me this is as good as it gets for a talk show that has a wide ranging set of topics like the JRE. Joe Rogan isn’t an expert and doesn’t pretend to be unbiased on all issues. His community, I think, understands his limitations. He just runs a good conversation, and that’s all I want to hear.
Yes, he does a great job playing the curious and interested, but mostly uninformed everyman. This has the "explain it like I'm 5" effect on his guests, which forces them to be relatable instead of using jargon. It's a lot more valuable for most listeners than two people trying to one-up each other in how intellectual and sophisticated they can sound.
I'm a frequent listener and the only subject I assume Rogan is an authority on is martial arts and nutrition. I ignore much of what else he says, but I respect his knowledge on those two topics.
Other listeners I've spoken to feel the same way. And I reckon Rogan knows that too
He is very biased toward the carnivore/keto kind of diet and dismisses any kind of plant-based diets with "bro science". I would never listen to his nutrition advice, it's just incredibly biased and factually incorrect.
Most of our current long-term (>1 year long) studies about diets deal with the problem of "subjects not sticking to the diet" by just saying that X% of participants stopped the diet and then proceeding to analyze the health benefits for the Y% that stuck to it.
That's a fair thing to do, but what's not supported from those results is the conclusion that such a diet would have worked very well for the X% had they stuck to it.
He certainly spouts some "bollox" but I don't think I agree about "authoritative". He tends to show a lot of humility and asks a lot of questions rather than making statements
It really depends. Go listen and to his interview with Adam Connover where he uses him as a foil to spout off a lot of nonsense about trans people and their agency.
What is his “nonsense”? It’s reasonable to not allow people to cross their biological gender league. He’s seen how biological males have absolutely destroyed in biological female leagues.
He kept repeating that trans women were “confused gay men” on the basis of one very shoddy Swedish research paper, as if that was somehow authoritative.
That was in regards to using puberty blockers on children, I believe. The study stated that many children that believe themselves to be trans ended up simply being gay, and that this lack of certainty (as well as the fact that we don't think of children as rational consenting entities for most things) makes the issue of using puberty blockers controversial.
I could be wrong, but I am almost positive that this is what was being argued.
That matches with what I remember, and I don't understand why that's a controversial thought here. Changing gender is a big deal, it can wait a few years so you're sure.
A big issue is that the longer you wait, there longer your body has permanent effects from puberty. Someone who is ultimately right in their convictions about themselves then has to wait longer through something irreversible.
I think the purported advantage of puberty blockers is that they help “waiting a few years so you’re sure” while taking the path that’s the lesser of evils.
But how do any of us know we are making the right call here? This is one of those wickedly complex problems where there is no right answer. It just sucks for everybody involved, nearly every decision you make can have a horrific outcome and the effects are permanent.
You can't be that surprised that in a situation like this, most people would tend to be very conservative (not republican conservative, but careful, do no harm, don't rock the boat kind of conservative).
No, puberty blockers don't cause any permanent body changes: that's the whole point. They delay the decision. You can still go through a male or female puberty once you're older.
Most people are "conservative" on this issue because they have no idea what they're talking about, just like every almost every other issue related to trans people.
Or you can transition once you've reached an age where your body is not in a constant state of flux. When I was young, I intensely wanted to be female. As I got older, it turned out to be a result of curiosity. If I was young today, I'd be far more likely to be going through some hormone regimen because of a childish curiosity.
That "constant state of flux" is what makes your body into a prison that you have to inhabit the rest of your life. Every single trans person I've met desperately wishes that they had transitioned earlier. I transitioned relatively early, and I'm still intensely jealous of trans teens who are getting proper treatment today. My older friends who've transitioned in their late 20s-40s regard their lives as being hopelessly ruined. And some of them repressed their trans feeling for a while, only to have them come back later with vengeance. But you never hear about those people in these arguments.
My mom said something similar about "curiosity" to try and convince me that I couldn't be trans. As it turns out, what she meant was "when I was your age, I wanted to cut my hair short." Likewise, pretty much every story I've heard like this turns out to be either obvious lies meant to discredit trans people, or something that would have been easily sorted out by a psychologist. Eg. I've heard of gay people wishing they were another gender so that they wouldn't get bullied for their orientation. No decent professional would mistake that for genuine dysphoria.
But even supposing that your psychologist was incompetent, you still would have socially transitioned in some capacity before you ever started hormones. This almost certainly would have let you know if transitioning was really right for you. And even if it didn't, and you went all the way to starting estrogen, you could always stop if you didn't like what it was doing. Estrogen works very slowly. I've been on it for three years, and I know cis men whose boobs are bigger than mine. If I changed my mind, I could easily start living as a man again.
It's absolutely unfair to impose life-ruining misery on trans teens because of the off-chance that it might do a fraction of the same harm to a cis person.
Uh thats exactly what it was about... For 20 minutes Mr flamboyant Adam tried to spout bullshit about how it should be perfectly acceptable to give children, who don't even know themselves or bodies, incredibly powerful psychoactive drugs that drastically alter their behavior
Except he's actually had trans people like Eddie Izzard on and they got on just fine, so this is obviously wrong. He takes issue with trans females competing in female sports.
Right. My comment was just that I found it to be low quality content. It was like something you might overhear from a table of not-so-bright senior citizens at a Denny’s.
I was responding to a comment that introduced the transphobic comments, simply to attest that I had heard the episode and that the skinny guy who is on that episode with Rogan was venting/ranting in a way that I found very dumb.
Rogan himself was holding back from joining in, and I think some of the commenters here mistook my comment as critiquing Rogan for being transphobic, which I did not observe. It was the skinny guy (whose name I don't know).
Stupidity and validity being decided by whom? If you believe someone's opinion is stupid, you may not consider it valid, but that changes nothing about the actual opinion. Remember, Newton had a series of "stupid, invalid" opinions about physics and astronomy, and now look at us.
(rpmisms and hnbroseph both make excellent points! I want to add that "Stupid opinions are not valid." is, of course, just my own stupid opinion, eh? Combine that statement with "Opinions are valid, even if they're stupid." and you have a logical self-referential paradox, eh?)
The purpose of puberty blockers is to delay body changes until the teenager (not "child") is ready to decide. They don't cause permanent changes like actual hormone therapy, and trans teenagers can always go through a "natural" puberty later if they change their mind. On the contrary, denying a trans teenager puberty blockers causes permanent changes to the body that are likely to cause massive distress and take many years of therapy, training, and surgeries to correct. Many trans people regard having gone through puberty as literally having ruined their lives.
His views on the topic lack nuance. First, you need to determine that the presence of male-to-female trans athletes is indeed a significant problem in a given discipline. Then, we as a society have to decide whether or not we want to do something about it, which is not necessarily a given. For example, are you aware that the top 30 male marathon runners are all from Kenya and Ethiopia? It sucks for Europeans that we apparently just can't compete at the highest level, but most people would probably argue that this is just the way it is. Finally, the actions that should be taken will depend on the sport in question.
Case in point: Rogan talks a lot about fighting. But in that particular case, we already discriminate by weight. So it might be possible to make things more fair by giving a weight penalty to male-to-female fighters that want to compete in the women's league.
The whole point of female leagues is, that females don't become overpowered by males. So the decision you are talking about is already made. If one starts to introduce biologically males back into the female league one could arguably instead remove the female league and introduce a unisex one. This would be more coherent with your reasoning in my eyes.
The purpose of female leagues is to allow women can participate in sports. If all sports were unisex, then pretty much all competitive athletes at every level would be men, denying women access to an important part of culture and social life. This is pretty exactly what you advocate doing to trans women, who could not possibly compete against cis men.
Trans women are rare, and transition dramatically reduces muscle mass and other attributes related to performance. In fact, trans women typically have a lower testosterone level than cis women due to hormone treatments. There's absolutely no reason to believe that allowing trans women to participate in sports would prevent cis women from being able to compete. Trans women have been allowed to participate in women's Olympics events since the early 2000s, and not a single one has won a gold medal. You use the term "biological males" to refer to two completely different sets of people, which is dishonest and despicable.
The decision about female leagues was made at a time when transsexuality wasn't socially acceptable and hence did not factor into it.
My point is, there are options to explore besides an outright ban. For example, a trans woman that goes through HRT will lose some of the advantages of her birth sex. However, she might still enjoy the advantage of the male frame, hence my suggestion of an additional penalty.
A unisex league as you suggested could also be a posibility, and one could think about introducing not only weight classes, but testosterone classes as well.
But again, the female leagues were established because of the physical differences between men and women. Yes, some trans people who undergo some medical interventions have some of their physical sporting attributes brought closer into line with the opposite sex, but it’s not all attributes and it’s not all athletes. It’s exceedingly complicated.
The reality is that female leagues was a cultural hack that worked well enough in the 20th century. But in a world where we recognise that neither sex not gender fit neatly into binary categories, it is impractical to assume that we can fit people into two sporting categories.
testosterone is highly variable even at the individual level to the point that I think this particular metric would difficult to implement.
Before the higher level of testing, there were plenty of rumors that fighters would overtrain (or cycle on steroids) to the point of plummeting their testosterone levels to be given a TRT exemption. By the time their baseline levels recovered by fight day, they could still be on TRT
I feel like you're picking one thing you feel strongly about and disagree with to discredit the entire show. I don't agree with a lot of what Rogan believes, but I feel this is an unfair characterization of him and his show.
Yes because he’s not an expert on trans issues, he’s a comedian, which Rogan knows, but chose to use him as a foil for his equally misinformed stances.
Connover, to his credit, went so far as to provide additional context for his defense of trans people’s agency post-interview:
Multiple commenters have stated his stances are misinformed. Are his stances misinformed or is he simply poor at arguing for one of the many stances people can take on trans issues (issues which, if everyone is honest, are pretty complex)?
The stance that it is wrong that there should only be male and female sports leagues AND that trans people should automatically be included in whichever their identification maps to, is a completely defensible and not misinformed stance. It may be wrong, but so might the opposite stance held by trans activists (which is also likely completely defensible and not misinformed).
I listened to that episode by accident (autoplay). He was just venting ignorantly about his prejudices toward trans people. It was honestly quite an ugly spectacle. It was the kind of commentary one might overhear from a table of not-so-bright senior citizens at a Denny’s.
There has to be conversation. There are some who just want to shut it down with 'bigot-transphobe' type spit-words. Gotta let it grow. Transcend the offended feeling.
I thought the episode with James Damore was a good example of Joe ruining what could have become an interesting interview: lack of direction, ranting, pushing James towards particular statements. But I don't mind his show being hit or miss, given the sheer number of episodes.
It didn't help that Damore was a terrible interviewee. He was clearly nervous and awkward and not particularly good at arguing his viewpoints. I put more blame on Damore sucking for that one than Joe.
Exactly, he generally seems to get dragged on by the guest, especially if they have a strong personality. Someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson will call out Joe on make he starts saying bollox like the moon landing conspiracies. But then other people will go on the conspiracy path with him and let him spew shit neither of them understand.
He even does this in an area he should be knowledgeable in: MMA. For example how he went on how you should destroy yourself in training, and always go 110%, while his guest (I can't remember who, maybe Firaz Zahabi the coach of GSP) said the exact opposite.
> how he went on how you should destroy yourself in training, and always go 110%
I've been listening to him forever and watch MMA every single weekend. I have hard time imagining him saying this. Infact, one of his MMA pet peeves is over training.
Yeah, I’ve noticed he likes to do this around issues I imagine are red meat for his audience (e.g. the rights of trans people). It really detracts from what are otherwise decent interviews.
Be careful, because his podcast is a bit of an echo chamber.
The other day he set up a debate on nutrition where he covered the topic of heart disease, and he put a cardiologist (Dr. Khan) with 20 years of experience debating with an acupuncturist (Kris Kresser) on the causes of heart disease.
And he kept interrupting the doctor and taking the acupuncturist side on the most absurd claims.
He is also into things like moon landing conspiracies and all that good stuff that generate a lot of internet traffic, but I think in a bit of a hypocritical way as I'm pretty sure he doesn't really believe in any of that stuff and just talks about it for the clicks.
Dr. Khan is not just a cardiologist, he's a vegan and my problem with him specifically and with veganism in general is that it's often ideological.
Chris Kresser is not an "acupuncturist". And this is a classic ad-hominen ;-)
Joe kept interrupting Khan because Khan was avoiding answering the asked questions.
And Chris kept mentioning the elephant in the room, which is that the randomized-controlled trials (the gold standard in nutrition) don't show a statistically significant link between heart disease and meat or saturated fat consumption and that's a fact, being also the subject of recent meta analysis, that used GRADE to reach the conclusion that there is no good evidence for the claim that meat causes cancer and that adults should probably continue their current meat consumption:
This isn't to say that meat or saturated fat is good or bad, but if listening to such a podcast causes anger at the people daring to question a "cardiologist with 20 years of experience", then maybe you should consider that you yourself have stepped in the land of ideology / religion and that's just not compatible with science or health for that matter.
It's his formal training, he is a licensed acupuncturist. The man has absolutely no business talking about heart disease, especially with an experienced cardiologist.
The problem of putting someone with acupuncture training debating a cardiologist is that, in the eyes of that huge audience, he presents those opinions as perfectly equivalent, alternative to each other and equally valid.
When in fact, one person has basically no idea of what he is talking about, but in the eyes of the public, and because they are put side by side, they are seen as equivalent when they are not.
Why not put him against a non-vegan cardiologist then? Someone at least with equivalent training.
From a scientific point of view, the only diet that as ever shown to stop the progression of heart disease is a whole-food plant-based diet.
Khan replied to the questions, not sure why you are saying he avoided anything. It's obvious that Joe took Kresser side during the debate.
What kind of tough questions did he ask Kresser compared to Khan?
> It's his formal training, he is a licensed acupuncturist. The man has absolutely no business talking about heart disease, especially with an experienced cardiologist.
This is an extremely closed minded view—not everyone with formal training is automatically an expert. This is the appeal to authority fallacy, and a poor one at that.
> From a scientific point of view, the only diet that as ever shown to stop the progression of heart disease is a whole-food plant-based diet.
This is not true either, and I find it ironic it’s stated authoritatively with no sources.
Not everyone with formal training is an expert, but its the minimum requirement. Literally no one without formal training can be an expert in such a complex topic as heart disease.
Why is Joe Rogan asking about heart disease to a licensed acupuncturist in a podcast with 60 million downloads a month?
It's like asking for legal advice from a massage therapist.
If you had heart disease or someone in your family had it, would you ask an acupuncturist for advice?
For the sources:
"proved decades ago that heart disease could be reversed solely with diet and lifestyle change"
> Not everyone with formal training is an expert, but its the minimum requirement. Literally no one without formal training can be an expert in such a complex topic as heart disease.
I have no bone in this particular fight. I'm inclined to agree with you, most of the time, but it's clearly possible to be an expert in nearly anything without formal training:
It depends, if looking for advise on how to use excel from someone, I don't think that they need to be certified or whatever.
For asking someone to do some web design or a logo, I don't think it's necessary either, but there is a limit somewhere.
Think about this way, if you yourself or someone in your family would have heart disease, would you take advice from an acupuncturist?
I bet you wouldn't. What are the odds that Kris Kresser without any formal training or experience managed to better understand the science behind such a complex topic like heart disease than full-time scientists and cardiologists?
Self-learning is great for a lot of things, but heart disease is likely not one of them.
The recent meta-analysis got to the same conclusions as before (the link between meat and cancer), it's just that the interpretation of the authors was different.
They said that although a link exists, its not worth it for people to change their diet, which has triggered outrage on the scientific community.
One of the authors of the studies meta-analysed complained that he never saw such as misrepresentation of the data.
The author of the meta-analysis is someone with strong financial links to the meat industry, so thay study is suspect, to say the least.
When you open someone up after a heart attack, what do you find clogging their veins? It's cholesterol. What happens when you eat cholesterol? Your cholesterol serum goes up.
If Joe could have found a serious cardiologist that would claim that cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, he would have long invited him to the show.
But the best he could come up with is Kris Kresser, which kind of says it all.
> When you open someone up after a heart attack, what do you find clogging their veins? It's cholesterol. What happens when you eat cholesterol? Your cholesterol serum goes up.
That’s an incorrect oversimplification of the situation. Like most of what is being bandied about here.
The amount of cholesterol in the blood is largely produced by our own body depending on the mix of fat and carbs that we eat, and a smaller but still significative part comes from dietary cholesterol.
Most people eat more than just an egg a day in terms of cholesterol. They eat dairy, meat, eggs, and fish multiple times a day typically one or more of those at every single meal.
So dietary cholesterol does add up over the day, combined with a bad mix of processed carbs and fats it's a recipe for disaster.
Yes, you can eat one egg day and get away with it, but most people eat way more cholesterol than that every single day.
> The other day he set up a debate on nutrition where he covered the topic of heart disease, and he put a cardiologist (Dr. Khan) with 20 years of experience debating with an acupuncturist (Kris Kresser) on the causes of heart disease. And he kept interrupting the doctor and taking the acupuncturist side on the most absurd claims
I haven't listened that episode, or really many Joe Rogan podcasts at all. But isn't that kinda the opposite of an echo chamber? He had two guests on with opposing viewpoints, and gave both of them a fair shake, even when one of the guests had an minority (absurd) opinion?
An echo chamber is a place where the local acoustics make it difficult to speak clearly.
Medical science is able to speak with brilliant clarity hard-earned from centuries of experimentation on the topic of heart disease.
If I hear a discourse involving a cardiologist and a layperson, and it's not really made apparent who is the expert and who is not, then I call that an echo chamber.
That's not the conventional definition of a metaphorical echo chamber.
> an environment in which a person encounters only beliefs or opinions that coincide with their own, so that their existing views are reinforced and alternative ideas are not considered
which is a silly position to take because putting quacks and experts into a room on topics that require domain knowledge and scientific expertise is counter-productive and gives a false impression that both opinions are equally valuable or justified.
In reality, the show is an excellent avenue to mainstream conspiracy theorists and people who want to sell their latest books or products or whatever, and the people who will listen to it will get a hugely distorted view of what the actual consensus on certain topics is.
This is the same sort of dynamic that recently cropped up around a certain youtube 'educator' who claimed to teach people ML and to have disrupted the cartel of higher education, only to turn out that he had plagiarized a lot of his content and that the education was actually of extremely low quality. The same mentality, gatekeepers are evil, listen to the pot-smoking show-host who brings you the real information that they don't want you to know, yada yada.
>I think in a bit of a hypocritical way as I'm pretty sure he doesn't really believe in any of that stuff and just talks about it for the clicks.
Or maybe he just finds it interesting? I find myself on paranormal sites from time to time even though I know it's 100% (or at least 99.9%) bullshit. It's still fun to read.
There are a couple of huge differences. You don't have financially anything to gain by that, and you are not influencing the opinions of a huge number of people in the process.
There is already so much scientific ignorance in the general public, there is so much misrepresentation of science already.
A ton of people actually believe thinks like the Earth is flat, Joe many times gives a voice to that type of quacks for clicks.
His podcast many times acts as a vehicle for spreading ignorance, other than that yes its entertaining and people should know better. But often they don't and that's the problem.
It's also quite educational and interesting when he has good guests on. I don't know why people have to judge the entire podcast based on his worst guests when there is simply no other mainstream outlet, or at least one as big as Rogan's, that has nearly as many interesting scientists, philosophers, journalists, etc. on. Yes he also has idiots on. So what? The point is the entire world steps through that studio and people blanket generalize the podcast away whenever he has someone they disagree with on, which is a sad stance to take in my opinion.
>He is also into things like moon landing conspiracies and all that good stuff that generate a lot of internet traffic, but I think in a bit of a hypocritical way as I'm pretty sure he doesn't really believe in any of that stuff and just talks about it for the clicks.
That was just an example among many. Anything from alien landings to Atlantis to god knows what is fair game to Rogan.
He will gladly give his huge platform to the most complete wacko as long as it makes a good story and gets him his clicks, spreading a ton of misinformation and reinforcing common ignorant beliefs in the process.
Well, it wasn't really an example at all as he's petty open about how silly he was to believe it, but ok.
Rogan invites anyone on who he finds interesting. Yes, he has a proclivity to want to believe things that are a bit out there, but he challenges a lot of those "wackos" as well. He also brings on many field experts just to hear what they have to say.
I think you're wrong about Joe fishing for clicks. He's been doing this a long time now and his format hasn't really changes. He's not purporting to be an expert of any kind (hell, he doesn't even claim to be intelligent) and he's an intellectually open person.
His show is not a platform for guests who won't offend your sensibilities, and he has no obligation to censor for you. If you don't like what a guest is saying then great; make up your own mind. He's not trying to convince you.
Why does he? He's not a journalist, he's a talking head. He'll challenge statements he can't get behind, but this is an opinion/entertainment show, and he's not throwing up slogans that read "fair and balanced" at every opportunity.
Journalist or not, he still has a responsibility to his audience.
It's a shared responsibility, between him and the guests and the people that listen and take it at face value that should know better.
He can very well balance better the entertainment aspect with the accuracy of the information, especially on topics that have an actual impact on people's lives like health-related topics.
What? If people stop liking what he has to say, they'll stop listening to him. I don't know what your point is. Set up federal regulations on the Joe Rogan Podcast because you disagree with some things he says?
My point is that Rogan does have some sort of moral responsibility for not letting his platform be used so easily to massively disinform the public on non-scientific beliefs.
What? If people stop liking what he has to say, they'll stop listening to him. What's your solution? Set up federal regulations on the Joe Rogan Podcast because you disagree with some things he says?
He's since disavowed the moon landing conspiracy theory beliefs. I agree he has a bunch of episodes that dabble in pseudoscience, though. At least there are a lot of episodes with actual scientists as well.
Any individual podcast definitely is. He will agree with a lot of the stuff the guest says and not really fight back much. Arguably he doesn't have the knowledge to anyways.
But as a whole, I do find that he has a very wide variety of guests which show all sorts of view point. Just don't take what you hear in any single podcast as absolute truth.
Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac. - "M.S. L.Ac." means Master of Science, Licensed Acupuncturist. This is his formal training, all I'm saying is that he shouldn't be presented as an expert to Joe Rogan's audience in the topic he was interviewed on.
Each show has like 50% of just general Rogan filler. It's really noticable if you listen to many of them in a row. I only listen to the really interesting guests like Elon Musk, John Carmack since they're so outside of the entertainment/social media field that the talk stays pretty focused on what they've done.
Joe is a master interviewer for the reasons you mention. I'd also add he has broad interests in almost any topic and subject matter, which helps. Another technique he employs is "listening". There are many times when I want to butt in when listening to his podcasts. But Joe just waits and let's the other person speak and soaks it in.
There are of course the interviews which are actually him being interviewed (he does most of the talking)... But I think that's part of why it makes for good listening. He keeps the conversation going. Even with a reticent guest, most interviews go for 2 hours or more. So in the end you extract something useful out of it.
Joe is not a master interviewer. Compare him to someone who does a lot of research ahead of time and comes prepared with thought-provoking questions, and can keep pace with the deep conversations, like say a Tim Ferriss.
Joe does little research on most guests (mostly due to the sheer volume of guests I'm sure), which could be a more stylistic choice if he were a deft interviewer who could think on his feet and dig deep anyway, but he's not. He's an everyman and asks very surface-level questions. As you say guests are (usually) given wide latitude to own the mic, which works great when it's a guest with a compelling narrative. It works terribly when the guest is very ideological or has some sort of agenda they are adept at selling.
The times he does challenge a guest (sometimes way too aggressively as others in the thread have shown), oftentimes he has missed the point entirely, and the guest has to back up and try to patch the conversation. Once that happens a couple times the flow of the interview is really disturbed and it takes a long time to recover.
I like Joe as a person, and admire his discipline, but to call him a master interviewer would be as accurate as calling him a master comedian because he has been grinding so long.
Narduar is my favorite example of a master interviewer. Watch him leave Pharrell speechless multiple times (starting around the 5:15 mark is a good example). This guy does his homework better than anyone.
He also seems to be able to 'find' people just before they really make it big/mainstream, like Kendrick Lamer, Billie Eilish, and Tyler the Creator. I heard about them from Narduar before anywhere else.
His researching skills are indeed impressive, but I feel like he's a bit "loud" in his personality/character and that can take some attention away from the interviewee.
I'd say he's just eccentric, and takes a bit of getting used to in terms of style. also, IIRC, this interview got him some REALLY big ones (including Jay-Z, I think) because Pharrell told everyone he knew to that they had to talk with Nardwuar.
At the very least in terms of doing proper research on a subject, I think there's no one better.
In his interviews he really doesn't draw attention away from the interviewee. You're right about him having a strong personality but it's obvious to me that he tries very hard to never outshine the person he's interviewing.
If you're not used to him, and are coming in 'cold' to watch one of his interviews, then it can be a bit distracting. After a few I think it goes into the background more.
Peter Robinson (of the Hoover Institution) is a good example of a master interviewer, with his Uncommon Knowledge series. Here's one of the last ones I saw:
Peter Thiel on “The Straussian Moment” (Sept 2019)
Definitely; he actually came to my mind but I didn't want to ruffle ideological feathers due to his neoliberal ties. Not that he should be pigeonholed as such - an excellent interview about Leon Trotsky he did with Christopher Hitchens and a Trotsky biographer comes to mind.
He is in the style of Larry King, who famously doesn't do research so he can put himself in the shoes of the audience and ask questions that would be on their mind. It's a valid technique and works well with a laymen audience. What you are describing is a totally different type of show that goes more in depth on fewer subjects.
Since others are posting examples of who they consider master interviewers, I need to include Sean Evans from the spicy-chicken-wing-gauntlet interview show Hot Ones.
His guests routinely compliment him on his prep and the questions he ask. The show would be just as good without the hot sauce gimmick.
It's been quite a long time since I watched a Hot Ones but my impression was Sean Evans does great research with excellent questions, but he's often pretty stiff when he has to steer the conversation - it's like he has a clipboard with questions that he is focused on getting through. He is pretty quick and capable of riffing off guests' comments, but - perhaps due to time constraints - he jumps right back to his list of questions.
The Hot Ones episodes I found the most entertaining were the ones where the guest was the dominant one, steering the conversation, and the questions were incidental / not necessary.
He honestly doesn't add that much by being in the room vs if someone else had the same questionnaire sheet. And in some ways his wooden demeanor can even be detracting instead of some of the best interviewers who can melt away and give the interviewee the space and direction to shine.
Perhaps him acting as uninformed and a layman helps bridge the gap between an average joe and someone who is very informed. Sometimes acting stupid or being stupid is a great way to help smart people explain their points.
One of my favorite interviewers is Sean Evans from Hot Ones on Youtube. Fantastic questions every time. Most guests also remark how good his questions are.
I enjoy Rogan but he's no master interviewer. In fact he strikes me as a kind of conversational Zelig who will nod along in agreement with nearly any idea a guest might put forward.
For a supremely frustrating example of Rogan not 'getting it' listen to the last hour-ish of JRE#1350 with Nick Bostrom, where Joe simply can't wrap his head around The Simulation Argument.
Oof, I mostly only ever listen to Rogan on long flights and then choose episodes based on whether I have any interest in the person interviewed. I was excited to listen to Nick Bostrom, but came away from that episode wanting to scream. I feel like there are other episodes that have been reasonably good... I’m struggling to think of any that stood out in recent memory.
But yeah, Rogan’s a mediocre interviewer at best, though he can be entertaining himself. And the long format of the podcast means that interviewees can sort of talk themselves out, which can give real insight into what they think.
Oh yeah, I did listen to that one. It was a perfect venue for Carmack because I could listen to John speak about anything for as long as John wants to speak about it. Rogan didn’t need to do much prompting for Carmack to spill his solid-gold guts, and he also didn’t feel the need to cut in.
It helped that Rogan is a self confessed Quake nut. If someone didn't have exposure to those early id software games, they might not have been as much at home with Carmack.
Joe is an OK interviewer if he remains sober, and he doesn't inject current events randomly just so he can comment on some talking point going around that week in the media, cut it into a promo and stick it on his channel. By OK I mean he will actually let the person talk most times without interruption and trying to take over like most other annoying interviews.
I noticed that over time too. My guess is that he has a feel if a guest is entertaining or not. And if they are not he is going into story mode and just sharing the joys of bow-hunting.
You should see JRE#917, Steven doesn't really care about the whole marijuana issue and Joe completely bullies and flames him for like thirty minutes.
That one was not well-reasoned or patient, but other than that, I've found almost all of Joe's podcasts to be very good. He's definitely one of the greatest interviewers on the planet right now.
He did apologize for that. His excuse was that he had a lot to drink and smoke. Also I think him being on good terms with the guests made him more comfortable with being an asshole
Why anyone would listen to anything with a bigot like Crowder is beyond me. If you can’t defend your conservatism without devolving into racist and homophobic slurs, you really shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Sorry, but I’ve lived enough of my adult life to know that I can tune out people who do mocking imitations of queer people on YouTube and be intellectually just fine.
Crowder was harangued by Maza for years, Crowder responding by doing a mocking impression of the self-referential non sequiturs that Maza would proclaim amidst his criticisms seems like fair game and not homophobic.
I don't see how it is any worse than when Crowder mocks Trump's braggadocios by imitating his common catchphrases. Such material is low comedy, for sure, but not cancel-worthy.
He was homophobic because he used homophobic slurs, not because he did a mocking impression (which is just childish, and is also a good reason to not take the guy seriously). The guy is a fucking joke.
The slurs in question were repeatedly and brazenly used by Maza in his past attacks on Crowder, and thus were part of the impression in Crowder's response. Context matters. Otherwise, if simply uttering or referencing homophobic slurs makes one a homophobe, regardless of context, then wouldn't Carlos Maza be a homophobe too?
I don't follow Carlos's work, but looking at his twitter he is very openly gay, so I would find it very difficult to call him a homophobe. Also even outside of this one incident, the nicest way I would ever describe Crowder is a leach - I was shown his work by a family member (who thankfully doesn't watch his bullshit anymore) before this incident. The guy stirs up shit and offers no value; absolutely worthless.
I agree with you in general, but there are much better people to do that with than Crowder. He doesn't seem like he's acting in good faith, and more generally, think about stuff very much.
There are plenty of intelligent conservatives/whatever that don't do the stuff he does that's just intended to be offensive/get attention.
Not to mention the fact that Crowder's own material tends to show how severely misinformed he is on some of the views he criticizes - in fact in that respect he's become somewhat of a meme in some circles.
> talking-head punditry available on the major news networks
That's also because most news networks don't have the luxury (or the willingness) to do 2 hours interviews with a single person in the first place. They need to make things short so they can drown you with ads at every break.
I am not too sure what to make of Joe Rogan’s podcasts. Note that I do not listen regularly, and mostly only listen to some of the ‘big name’ guests. On one hand, it is cool that he is able to attract big names from diverse fields to come onto his podcast.
On the other hand, it feels like most of the podcasts have a shallow content level if you are already familiar with the subject, and sometimes the conversation/questions tend to go into the stoner mysticism realm.
Interviewing Nick Bostrom was cringe worthy. I don't know what Joe was trying to achieve - maybe forming an argument against the simulation theory? But it was so bad. The youtube comment section is amusing.
But mostly Joe gets it spot on and does a great interview. What this does to popular discourse? When a small % of the population watch these types of long form interview and get deep, thoughtful and insightful answers to complex ideas .... and some % of the population watch Fox and read tabloids to get their news.
> Interviewing Nick Bostrom was cringe worthy. I don't know what Joe was trying to achieve - maybe forming an argument against the simulation theory? But it was so bad.
Bostrom really failed there. He simply did not explain the argument very well. Everything Bostrom said is clear to someone who already understands the argument or has experience with statistics, but it was not at all a good explanation for someone who doesn't have the necessary intuitions to understand why they are more likely to be a simulated agent.
I had the opposite impression. Bostrom is just making up nonsense, then dressing it with fancy words and big numbers to prevent people from calling out his bullshit. It's the opposite of clear. If you look a little deeper he has nothing meaningful to offer in any field.
His argument is extremely clear. It's just unclear to anyone with absolutely no background knowledge, like Joe. He didn't explain it in the clearest way on the podcast because Joe was missing a lot of necessary basics, but if he sat down with Joe for longer and perhaps drew a diagram or something, I think he'd get it.
Perhaps "clear" isn't the right word. Sometimes when someone is spouting total nonsense I initially assume that I didn't understand them clearly because obviously no educated, articulate person could actually be that stupid. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, right? But no, in Bostrom's case it's total unsupported bullshit all the way down regardless of whether he's talking about AGI / singularity / simulations / etc. A complete and utter waste of time. It's disappointing that he's managed to con so many otherwise intelligent people into taking him seriously and buying his books.
Please refute his simulation argument and arguments related to AGI, then. I find pretty much everything he says to be supported and insightful. If so many intelligent people like and agree with him, maybe the issue is with your understanding of his arguments than with the arguments themselves.
How would one "con" so many intelligent people for so many years with purely logical arguments, exactly? An argument is either coherent and valid and sound or it isn't. There's no room for conning or personal charm or anything related to the person themselves.
my impression is that you seem to have an emotional commitment to your position. why do you say that bostrom is "that stupid" talking about "bullshit all the way down" and is "conning" people?
Its not just the lack of long form interviews, its the lack of long form in general. News is too short to be meaningful.
I just checked the word count in the top 10 stories on BBC news.
Average number of words per article was 764.
While you can get long form fewer and fewer people read it, myself included.
If a major player like the BBC resort to news in an average of 764 words the majority of people are not getting deep/insightful/challenging news or information.
In my 20s I used to read long form broadsheet articles on a Sunday, I don't seem to have the attention for it any more.
Even articles from hacker news that are too long I just go straight to the comments to get a digest.
I suspect my mobile phone addiction is to blame, even last week I signed up for blinkist after I tried to read Ray Dalios Principles for the third time and didn't have the attention for it when I saw an ad for the summary on blinkist and just signed up.
Not sure what point I'm trying to make but I just believe super shortform, dopamine induced hit of information may be detrimental to me/society in the long run.
This operates under the assumption that your thing is good while the other is bad. I think the people in the other group would see it differently.
I also imagine on some other forum out there someone is lamenting the popularity of the Joe Rogan Experience while the media of their liking gets even less exposure, and wondering how they fix that knowledge divide in society.
The fact that the people in the other group see it differently doesn't mean they're right though. It doesn't mean either group is right, but at the end of the day one can still take a step back and evaluate the two sources/modes of informing oneself and decide that one is good and the other is bad - with respect to what we agree it's good to optimize for (forming more accurate mental models, being well informed in general and not being deceived either by others or self, etc).
Just a few hundred years ago it was actually possible for a single person to learn essentially everything that was known in Western civilization. And some wealthy people with a lot of leisure time pretty much did that. So now we still see it as a goal to strive for even though it's no longer achievable.
But how many people really try to do that? I’m not aware of any well known true renaissance men/women. Perhaps, perhaps Elon Musk comes close. But even then he’s far too concentrated in tech, just different tech industries. And even short of that, what percentage of people have any kind of cross-training in orthogonal disciplines? Getting an advanced degree in one field is seen as a huge accomplishment. Is society missing out on something due to this? My impression is that ‘way back when,’ everyone who was ‘educated’ had a pretty solid background in history, literature, and philosophy. It was just what you did if you were ‘educated.’ I think much of that tradition is diminished now. Not gone, but diminished.
To some degree, yes, but a lot knowledge can be accurately summarised, and is also both useful in general and even necessary for the good functioning & growth of society. It's not even really about knowledge, it's more about ability - to think critically, to exercise empathy, etc.
This kind of issue makes me think I should believe all most nothing. When I know the topic and then know how wrong they got it then I assume that the same is true for all the experts in other topics. I suppose I only have a sample of 1, the topic I know, but I have zero samples of the opposite where some expert tells me "they totally got it correct"
This is kind of the opposite of what Michael Crichton named the "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" [1][2]. Often in the media we recognise stories in our area are wrong, but don't extend resulting distrust to all the other topics.
> I've not run across one yet that wasn't well-reasoned, patient, and interesting
You should check out #947 - Ron Miscavige [1]. It is the one episode that comes to mind where JR's behavior and impatience really bothers me. The guy's story is quite sad and Joe seemed distant and distracted the entire time.
It's funny, I thought that was one of the better ones. Because Ron Miscavige seemingly is trying to avoid all responsibility, and Joe pushes back on this several times. That episode in particular sticks out to me where Joe asks difficult questions which elevate the interview
To me, it seemed like a story of a father being terrorized and subjugated by his narcissistic son. He seemed pretty apologetic for getting him involved in the first place.
Where do you think he was trying to shirk responsibility? I've listened to a lot of his podcasts and that was also the only one where I couldn't understand why Joe was acting so harshly towards him. Once his son was absorbed into the cult, I don't think there's anything he could've done. Not to mention how hard it is even to get yourself out of it, as he explained in great detail.
There are interviewers out there that are far more knowledgeable than him and conduct genuinely interesting interviews with smart people. For example, check out Intelligence Squared podcast. It is true that Rogan's breadth of types of guests is probably unmatched.
The breadth is what I really come for. Like he interviewed John Carmack and Chuck Palahniuk, two people I've admired immensely but who come from two very different fields. Sure, he only covers surface level stuff, but if you knew nothing about writing, game design, or rocket science, you wouldn't get that within two podcast episodes anywhere else
This is the first time, and maybe it's just because of the length of the interview; that I've noticed Snowden's being slightly untethered from sensibility. The first 10 minutes in particular was a little worrisome.
I imagine that being stuck in Russia, with the pressure he's under has contributed to this. I do wonder how much of this personality bubble was in place when he made the decisions he did.
Nevertheless, I do have a love hate relationship with what he did.
could you clarify what you mean by "untethered from sensibility"? you make it sound like he's losing it, when really it sounds pretty coherent and his (Edward's) usual content/style.
The first few minutes sound like cold opening, so I'd expect them to be more loose. I don't usually watch the JRE though.
> Hate - revealed to the world endless amounts of national security data that was not directly relevant to these constitutional encroachments.
He worked with journalists in order to avoid this. He gave the government a head's up before the press released anything everytime they released something new.
If he really wanted to be treated as a whistleblower, he should have only leaked the specific things that he took issue with, not grab anything he could get his hands on and give it out. For example, there's no good reason for him to give documents to China that tell them which Chinese computers NSA has access to [0]. This myth that he responsibly leaked information needs to die.
He didn't give them any documents, he didn't tell them all the computers, he only _showed_ them a sample of them. They were also only civilian computers.
I think civilians all over the world had a right to know that they were being spied on by the U.S. government. What difference does it make if a person is a U.S. citizen or a Hong Kong citizen? Human rights are human rights.
Every other government, including the Chinese, are spying on US civilians as well. And in this case, it seems like the Chinese civilians were the kinds of civilians any other country would be spying on as well. I haven't seen a convincing argument for Snowden or others as to why he took documents unrelated to domestic spying. If he had only whistleblew the domestic stuff, I bet a lot more politicians would be open to pardoning him.
If a Russian citizen published documents proving that the Russian government was extensively spying on Americans, I doubt you would condemn the leaker. I wouldn't.
> revealed to the world endless amounts of national security data that was not directly relevant to these constitutional encroachments.
How were those documents not still incredibly valuable and shed a lot of information on the functioning of the American Empire. US citizens should just be interested in their constitutional rights, but also in the absolute shit-show that is their foreign policy.
Sadly those insights got mostly ignored, as the US really has no actual foreign policy debate anymore.
I'm pretty sure he said he was now a professional speaker and then he meandered in monotone for 20 straight minutes, seemingly oblivious. I couldn't help but cringe a little.
I have to be honest here, I was very disappointed with this episode. It's basically a very long monologue and feels like a marketing gig for his book and not like a podcast with Edward Snowden. For someone who's familiar with Snowden and his story, this had very little informational value.
I would've wished they talked about a bit more about other topics to see what Snowden and his opinions are like outside of the general theme of mass surveillance. At the 2 hour mark, Joe tries to switch and asks about his current day-to-day life. But they switch back to the main theme after about 10 minutes.
I think Joe’s style benefits from being physically in the same room as the interviewee. Had it not been a remote interview I think it would have gone very differently.
And if you do, and he is smart guy for you, that makes you a dumb man. Not a disrespect in anyway but that should humble everybody on the sense that nobody can know everything in depth, even when bragging about their own “unmatched wisdom”.
He insists on guests being in studio. He did a remote with John Anthony West (controversial Egypt scholar) making an exception because he was very ill at the time.
I watched his interview with Sean Carroll the other day and they touched on this. Joe said he vastly prefers face-to-face, and only really does OTA interviews when the person can't actually come to his studio.
Different circumstances: Snowden's location is well-known, he's protected via political asylum. El Chapo on the other hand was being hunted by the local government so he was dependent on his location remaining secret.
John Oliver from Last Week Tonight did fly over to interview Edward Snowden[0]. But considering the worries their team went through, it's fair others decide to not do it.
This seems like the perfect post to showcase a little weekend project of mine.
I kind of wanted to checkout Joes podcasts on the go, but I don’t want to listen to the whole 2 or 3 hours. Instead, a list of topics with timestamps would be much better. So I hacked together a little feed and a player doing just that.
Your point is valid and that was a great episode as well but I think the best episodes are those where he questions and prods the guest to expound far beyond talking points, to give what is essentially a statement of philosophy after which Joe then dissects the points enumerated in that statement of philosophy. What makes Joe's process of doing this so compelling is that he's not doing it with an agenda to change the guest's mind about something but to deeply and truly understand WHAT the person believes, WHY they believe it, HOW that affects and influences their live and decisions and why that person thinks other should agree with them. Another thing that is great about Rogan's guests is that he doesn't limit the guest list to people who agree with him. If Adolf Hitler were alive today (and spoke English) Joe would not only interview him but get him to not only enumerate all of his beliefs but then explain why he hold those beliefs to be true. This process of explication is IMPOSSIBLE in the mainstream media and allows the listener to get to raw, fundamental truths at the base layer. It's a shame that not all Americans (and non-Americans too) have the intellectual curiosity and patience to REALLY LISTEN to and understand why people of different political, religious, and ideological beliefs hold the positions they do and then amicably coexist with them in respectful disagreement.
I love the long form discussion. I feel I can actually here someones thoughts and perspectives rather than short meaningless soundbites. The lack of guests shouting over each other is great as well. He has also exposed me to some wonderful thinkers like Sean Carrol who I otherwise would not have come across.
to be honest, he's made me appreciate Ben Shapiro which didn't feel incredibly likely going in.
Prior to that, my experience with Shapiro was the stupid videos people would share on Facebook of him "OWNING the libs." So I expected an absolutely terrible interview where I was going to be disgusted with the guy constantly. Granted, I don't agree with him on a lot, much at all really, but when he's just talking out his views on points, I appreciated the candor as to reasoning for various things on his end.
My takeaway from it, outside of the "for the clicks" YouTube videos that are shared, is that while I may not agree with him on a lot, when he is explaining his points and not going for the jugular, I feel like he isn't questioning my intelligence by tossing various falsehoods at me constantly that I then have to go look up. Instead, it is typically analysis of a situation followed by a conclusion I don't personally reach typically.
And had it not been for the Shapiro interviews on JRE, I'd have just continued to outright ignore this guy as another "provocateur" out for the clicks and shares.
I agree, it's very interesting to listen to Shapiro reason his own beliefs as he talks.
It definitely helps me to see how other people might think about a topic which they may not be able to articulate well.
He certainly reaches some strange conclusions, but it is fascinating to see how someone gets to that point and try to better understand other viewpoints.
Snowden mentioned something about Android and iOS refusing to implement his idea about cutting network access to specific apps. He said they claim it's a security risk. What is the security risk and where can I see the discussion about this feature?
Joe Rogan's booking and showrunning team(s) needs a lot more credit where it's due.
The politically and professionally diverse guests they are able to get, no doubt with the assistance of Joe himself, is absolutely incredible. You rarely see a show where you can have an extreme right wing radio host be a guest, only to have a slew of high profile left wing candidates on months later, with zero fucks given in making sure it's family-friendly.
I can't help but feel Snowden comes off as a frustrated naive insider spilling details out of disappointment. Lacking perspective here. Most of his points are basically peter's principle, hierarchy failure, internal competition, all traits that made the response to national threats inappropriate before and after 9/11.
I really don't think that his actions were clearly thought out and he won't get a pass any time soon.
Sorry, also I was only half way through the interview.
My conclusion is that part of his reveal was clearly naive and that it doesn't have any value regarding citizens or national improvement (incompetence in big groups ? color me surprised).
He would have been more beneficial to sleep on the knowledge for a while, filter what's important and find better leverage to make a change. Something less naive.
When he talks, only very rarely I hear something relevant. At best, his good points are:
- shift toward abusing surveillance technology
- paradoxical laws regarding accountability of the government (you cannot have a fair assessment of government actions if it's illegal to look at it)
- a bad government can abuse long stored data against you
But really he's babbling for hours and very few comes out at even surprising. NSA had access to network/deep packets long before Google and even 9/11. Yes we all have smartphones.. boohoo, it's well known that these are potential privacy backdoors. People just don't care, or at best the rich enough will buy an iphone (if Apple is really that good regarding crypto and privacy).
Again, that's just an opinion right now, if someone can shed a light on what's important in his case, please do, I'll read carefully.
ps: there's also a lot of moments where he's mostly telling his life which I find disturbingly immature in tone.
It's not strange many interesting people want to visit Joe Rogan podcast.
First, he is willing to give a voice to many who won't be able to tell their stories on mass media.
Who other will let speak people like James Damore? What major broadcaster is willing to interview Jordan Peterson without protraiting him as a villain?
He respects his guest, when in disagrement. His interview to Jack Dorsey (not much of his liking, I presume), was criticised for not being aggresive enough.
The interviewed is not afraid of a headline out of context.
Given the current political climate, I'm not suprised a MMA guy is capable of doing what most journalists don't.
I doubt he is making much money doing standups in LA clubs. vs having a podcast with an audience of about 10 millions, which is more than most TV shows can claim.
Not just Youtube, he gets paid sponsors on his podcast.
For example (in my case) if you listen on Apple Podcasts you can hear 5 minutes of him talking about brands. These brands probably pay him tens of thousands per episode to get a shoutout. Pretty sure YT may make a good contribution, but not so much that he relies on it.
Podcasts can also be uploaded to services that intersperse advertising (or place them at determined points) on their own, even if the host doesn't read the adverts during the podcast.
Midroll is the big name in that business.
I thought the Dorsey interview (and the round table with them, the legal/moderation lady with multiple titles, and that Pool or whatever his name is guy) were pretty good.
Not a fan of Stephen Crowder (sp?), but that interview was pretty uncomfortable. Generally though, yeah, I think he does well interviewing people.
I question the value of letting people like James Damore and Jordan Peterson speak on such a big platform.
Edit: The people downvoting me are hypocrites. The function of downvoting to make something less visible. Are you saying what I say has less value and should therefore have a lesser platform?
But to be serious, everyone acknowledges that what some people say is of more value than what other people say, and should be seen by more people. We just disagree on what the things that have value are. And your insistence on arguing about the former, rather than the latter is tiresome and dishonest.
Yes, we should selectively filter people whose ideas we don't like from being able to speak them to any audience. In fact I question the value of letting people like <person whose ideas you value> speak on such a big platform.
/s
Surely you understand that what you're suggesting here is totalitarian? The value you mention is the strengthening of a society where freedom of ideas is considered a core value.
Your "totalitarian" remark is such a shameless misrepresentation of what the person you're talking to is saying that you might as well be talking to yourself.
I noticed you called out both Jordan Peterson and James Demore. So I'd guess you're a radical leftist with some kind of funny gender agenda. I find that just as distasteful as white supremacists on the far right.
Unlike you though, I think freedom of speech trumps everything. You should be free to espouse your unfortunate views, as should everyone else. When you deny a voice to people you just drive the thinking underground where they get stuck in an echo chamber like Nchan with no moderating or criticizing voices. That's the real danger.
I'd much rather have neo-nazis giving talks at universities where people won't take them seriously, boo them, and debate them than escalating in an 8chan echo chamber until someone does something radical like a mass shooting.
This is me pushing back against your ideology and hopefully providing a small check to the certainty with which you hold your views. Slightly more productive than trying to silence you.
I'm sorry, where is the right wing ideology exactly? He's pretty passionate about his criticisms of the far left. That doesn't automatically make him right wing. Most of his views are more left than right.
If I watch anymore JRE at all it's going to be in a "private" tab. Not that Youtube recommendations/suggestions are good anyway, but watching JRE absolutely destroys them
Though, as much airtime as Rogan has given to conspiracy theories- I guess it makes sense that it turns my recommendations into absolute nonsense
We live in a time where the president of the United States himself questions any law that inconveniences him personally, same goes for any oversight, and he retains a great deal of support from the population and his own party.
I wonder how / if it is possible to convince the public that laws and oversight are necessary for good government.
"It is from their foes, not their friends, that cities learn the lesson of building high walls" -Aristophanes
The public learns the lesson that X is necessary when they see the consequence of not-X. Hopefully there is a gap between total lawlessness and the public realising that some laws are good and not just "red tape".
I've always been rather suspicious of this way of reasoning. It basically goes, "Things aren't as bad as they need to be for people to change their ways, so hopefully they get worse so people change their ways." And it is implicit in this line of reasoning that there is some terrible and inevitable catastrophe waiting to befall the people who don't change their ways. (Because why would a catastrophe be worth it, unless it prevented another, worse, catastrophe?)
An alternate response to "Things aren't bad enough for people to change their ways," is to revise our predictions of the likelihood of catastrophe, and eventually decide that perhaps things aren't quite as doomed as we think.
For things like climate change, where we have scientific evidence of the necessity of change, it seems like it needs to get worse before the change will happen, though I still don't hope for things to get worse. But for something as subjective as civic values, it seems especially wrong to me to hope for disaster just for the sake of shaking things up. After all, there's no guarantee that a disaster under Trump would move civic values in the right direction anyway.
The issue is that those in power can seize power from the people without the people knowing as long as there isn't some huge mistake. Once there's a mistake/catastrophe/whatever, those in power come under scrutiny of the public, and changes get made.
So my fear would be that everyone continues on in complacency, and one day we wake up and realize we live in an authoritarian state, where mass catastrophies can occur and no one can do anything about it.
I don't want people to get hurt or die, but I also don't want power to be quietly seized by the few.
The problem here is not that the people in power want to "question" the laws, they're literally ignoring them and breaking them, in secret, without the consent of the people.
It's only when this stuff is uncovered that these perpetrators shift to "questioning"-- as though it's a open debate, it's not.
I don't want to get in to a line item list but he tweeted that it was inconvenient that the justice department indited two Republicans near election season (ignoring that they actually committed crimes).
His recent statements about the emoluments clause.
The list goes on.
That's not someone looking into strange random laws as part of an effort to improve government, that is questioning things purely to further his personal goals / enrich himself personally.
Then you should make an effort to change the law and not just complain and try to get away with breaking the law. Until the law has been changed the president should stay firmly within it.
Hypothetically, suppose you work for an intelligence agency. Suppose that your specific role is to monitor foreign influence in the US.
What do you do when in your opinion (possibly supported by classified evidence) that duly elected president is compromised by foreign intelligence? What do you do when the president makes decisions that hurt the US and help countries opposed to us?
Suppose there's some irrefutable classified evidence that he's compromised and under foreign control. Do you really sit by and do nothing?
Reality Winner didn't sit by and do nothing, in precisely the situation you describe. What are you doing to support her?
Classification isn't holy writ. In order to save the union, you'd be justified to publish anything under your own name. That would be more believable than anonymous leaks that can't be discerned about the general noise floor of anonymous leaking. Snowden put his own name on his releases. Why can't this hypothetical heroic spook do the same?
Suppose there isn't really any such evidence, your opinion is all there is, your intelligence agency has an awful reputation and is infamous for steering the country into conflicts and crises through falsified evidence and statements, and you work to remove the president.
Do you agree that if there is real legitimate evidence of him being compromised then working with congress to legally remove him from office according to the process given in the constitution is the right choice?
Do you agree that if there's real legitimate evidence of the FBI and CIA lying to the FISA court in order to spy on a political campaign that Comey and Brennan should be imprisoned?
That was an allegation in the Steele dossier. What Nunes had alleged in the “Nunes Memo” was that the FBI mischaracterized the provenance of the Steele dossier in their FISA application to surveil Carter Page. At the time, the FISA application was classified and no one could see it.
> I really did have hopes for the Democrats, but they just can't quit on Biden
Biden’s polling in the 20s, occasionally breaking into the 30s, and he's running low on money. Sanders and Warren have much bigger warchests, and there's a lot of votes to be picked up as minor candidates fall off, which it'll be hard to compete for without funds. He's in a weaker position than the early frontrunners that ended up not winning in basically every Democratic primary in a generation without an incumbent President or Vice President in the race. (EDIT: Yes, 2016 was an exception to this, but Biden has nothing like the DNC backing Clinton had, nothing like the office-holder backing Clinton had, and nothing like the DNC rules that magnified the effect of both of those advantages.)
Sure I am interested in civil polite conversation. I have to warn you that I am supporting Tulsi Gabbard in the upcoming primary. Also I am neither Republican nor Democrat.
You agree that Tulsi is a Manchurian candidate sponsored by the Kremlin? Not even CNN went along with that. I think that is extraordinarily unlikely. As in, I expect the aliens to land and give us the recipe for cold fusion before that's ever the case.
As I said above, I'm not a Democrat. I understand that some who identify strongly with one or the other of the two status quo parties care about this concept of "spoilers". Many of the voters they claim to want to reach do not. If HRC had wanted to win Wisconsin, she should have campaigned in Wisconsin. If she had wanted to appeal to the same voters who voted for Obama, she should have been a completely different person for her entire political life. Gary Johnson voters didn't owe her a damn thing.
> You agree that Tulsi is a Manchurian candidate sponsored by the Kremlin?
That's...not what Clinton said, but instead something that seems like a hyperbolic retelling of the initial NYT misreporting that mixed what Clinton said about Russia and Gabbard with what Clinton said about Republicans and Gabbard, and reported the combination as having been said about Russia and Gabbard. (But still, even as misreported, would not fairly be characterized as calling her a Manchurian candidate.)
So, no, agreeing with Clinton on Gabbard’s spoiler role doesn't require believing she is a Russian plant.
"Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said Thursday the Russians are currently "grooming" a Democrat running in the presidential primary to run as a third-party candidate and champion their interests."
CNN making the same misrepresentation (possibly as an uncredited copy) that NYT originally did, but lacking the integrity (or lacking ever going directly to the original quote because they were plagiarizing something that they didn't realize was wrong) to issue a correction?
The actual quote says the Republicans are grooming her, and that she's the Russians favorite (and implying that that plays a role in Republican calculations), not that the Russians are grooming her.
Do they read the article before writing the headline? Did you read the whole thing? From your link:
[Gabbard is] the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, ‘cause she’s also a Russian asset.
"She" in the final sentence refers to Jill Stein. So, Hillary is at the very least slandering a genuinely good person with a baseless accusation. For shame.
But, there's another word in that sentence, "also". In isolation, we might think it means that Stein is a Russian asset in addition to her other allegedly unsavory qualities. That reading doesn't make sense in light of the previous sentence, however, which is mostly about Gabbard and only introduces Stein at the end as someone who might or might not do something. Might or might not do it, because she's also a Russian asset. In English you don't say "also" about the thing that explains the first thing. You say "also" about some unrelated thing. The only reasonable reading is that Stein is a Russian asset in addition to the only other person under discussion also being a Russian asset.
I can't believe we're trying to steelman something a Clinton said in an edited interview by a loyal Democratic "operative" she has known and worked with for years. Those are the perfect conditions for saying exactly what one intends to say. She wasn't taken out of context. There was no trick question. English is her first language. I really think she thought it was a good idea to make this baseless accusation.
Really, though. I can't believe you've got me suggesting you could trust the media a bit more, if only when it comes to reading transcripts. This whole thing has come under intense scrutiny. If this obscure financial site had unearthed a bombshell, do you really all the big media firms who love to hate on Gabbard would have ignored it?
Yes, the description of “grooming” refers to Republicans, not Russians. The CNN article made a gross error (if not an outright lie) and failed to correct it.
> "She" in the final sentence refers to Jill Stein. So, Hillary is at the very least slandering a genuinely good person with a baseless accusation.
Er, no, there's nothing baseless about Stein being described as a Russian asset; it might be disputable based on the public info, but there was plenty of information from which one could reasonably draw that conclusion that came out publicly during and in the aftermath of the 2016 election; that Russia was directing efforts at boosting her—as well as Trump and Sanders—is pretty much beyond dispute; that she (like Trump and unlike Sanders) failed to acknowledge and repudiate that effort is also beyond dispute.
> But, there's another word in that sentence, "also". In isolation, we might think it means that Stein is a Russian asset in addition to her other allegedly unsavory qualities. That reading doesn't make sense in light of the previous sentence, however, which is mostly about Gabbard and only introduces Stein at the end as someone who might or might not do something. [...] The only reasonable reading is that Stein is a Russian asset in addition to the only other person under discussion also being a Russian asset.
Yes, Clinton described Gabbard and Stein as Russian “assets”. That's she did so is not in dispute. Note that Russia, like the USSR before it, has and recognizes agents/assets with looser relationships that aren't of control the way the US intelligence community aims for in what it describes as it's assets.
> Those are the perfect conditions for saying exactly what one intends to say.
She said exactly what she intended to say, which is not what she has been widely characterized in the media (some of which has corrected the error) as saying, nor is it what she was characterized as saying upthread, which is even more extreme than the widely-spread media mischaracterization.
> I can't believe you've got me suggesting you could trust the media a bit more, if only when it comes to reading transcripts.
Since on the point actually in dispute, you've done nothing to actually defend the mischaracterization you say should be more trusted, which literally took what Clinton said Republicans were doing and said she said it about Russians, I can't believe it either, since it is clearly defending the indefensible. Yet here we are.
Wow, we've finally reached the bottom. If "Russian asset" is to have such a diluted meaning, I don't really see what the big deal is. By that definition anyone with a brain is a Russian asset. Of course, anyone with a brain also knows what was implied in the interview. This is like calling someone a racial epithet and then explaining, "oh but I didn't mean it in precisely that way". Give us a break.
I'm a Democrat because this is a two-party system and any shred of old-school conservatism left the GOP a long time ago. The GOP today is the Trump party.
A spoiler is by definition any candidate that takes votes away from a possible winner in a close race. That is uncontested. Many consider Ross Perot to be a spoiler.
Regardless of "rumors", there is the fact that she's been the darling of the right wing: Tucker, Karl, David Duke, et. al.
Give me one reason other than spoiler why they would liker her.
We also know that Russia operates disinformation campaigns here and has weaponized social media. There is documented proof of them setting up BLM vs. "All Life Matters" events to intentionally divide us.
They will seize every point of division and amplify it to their best abilities.
Whether or not she actively solicits the KGB's help, they will be helping her.
Rove and Duke are horrible people, so if they were to support her I'm sure it would be for suspect reasons. (If Duke weren't consulted every time we have an election, would anyone remember he still exists? Does he still exist?) For whatever other faults he may have, Carlson actually seems like a pacifist to me. Perhaps he hasn't always been, but I haven't always been either. (Perhaps, like me, and unlike anyone else on TV news, he has paid attention for the last two decades?) He has already interceded directly to cool down the conflict with Iran. [0] Incidentally, opposition to foreign wars is one of the oldest authentically conservative political values in USA. The military-industrial complex has no values, conservative or otherwise. Fools who styled themselves conservative have long been useful to MIC. Fools who style themselves liberal have been so recently. From my increasingly pacifist point of view, it's hard to differentiate the two packs of fools.
I suspect that Carlson isn't actually a Gabbard partisan. He is, however, one of the few people on TV who have interviewed her with an open mind. This tells us more about TV media than about Gabbard.
Even if I believed every single thing I've heard about what Russia supposedly did about our last election (and I don't) I wouldn't care. They haven't been accused of changing votes or stuffing ballot boxes. They have been accused of excessive communication. 1A, dude. If our democracy can't handle speech, it ain't really a democracy. KGB didn't put Trump on all four channels of TV news for 25 hours a day starting in mid-2015. KGB didn't decide we'd waste trillions of dollars and uncounted lives on decades of pointless war. Etc.
Also, living where I live, I've heard a lot of awful shit said about BLM. I don't think any of it was as obnoxious as the idea that they were about the KGB rather than, you know, what their fucking name says.
I'm quite bemused to find myself in the Eisenhower Republican camp: Russia is our enemy and wants to destroy us. They've found it's easiest and cheapest to simply inject some cash and let us do it from the inside.
> If our democracy can't handle speech
Speech or propaganda? An unfortunately high number of our citizens are either too stupid or too uninformed to vote "correctly" (i.e., assess and analyze proposed candidates, laws, etc). I'm not trying to be elitist, just pessimistic about things.
This is all an "Experiment in Democracy", right? We're applying a system developed in the agrarian age that now is suffering from information overload, nationally coordinated disinformation campaigns, and the influx of unlimited money in political campaigns.
We need to rethink how to achieve the original goals without bad guys gaming the system.
Sorry, this is kind of rambling, but HN sucks fluid dialog.
This may have been true decades ago when a different polity existed there and conditions in general were quite different. I see no evidence that this is true today. Occasionally Russian politicians might rattle the saber, but that's mostly for domestic political reasons, like it is in every other nation on Earth including USA. Just as USA society is not a monolith, neither is Russia society. Russian military interests are specific to particular nations like Ukraine and Syria where they also have economic interests. The main thing they want from USA is something they have in common with a number or other nations: please stop the sanctions and related economic aggression.
I'm sure anyone here could come up with a variety of USA war media articles or presentations criticizing the conduct of the Russian state in one way or another. In every such article I've read, Russia is held to a standard that USA hasn't met since the start of the Philippine-American War at the latest, and in some cases since the Pilgrims landed. I'd like to think that such articles insult their readers' intelligence.
Claiming that the investigations yielded nothing is frustratingly dishonest. The conclusion of the Mueller report was that the president would have been indicted if it weren't for a standing policy that the president cannot be indicted.
Mueller clarified in his final hearing that he misspoke when answering Lieu's earlier question and stated that the OLC policy you describe was not a deciding factor. Video is embedded in the below PBS link.
I believe you are mistaken based on Mueller's own statements[0]:
> … Mueller said. "We did not reach a determination as
> to whether the president committed a crime."
>
> That statement was more in line with his report, and
> with his earlier opening statement to the Judiciary
> Committee, where he said, "Based on Justice Department
> policy and principles of fairness, we decided we would
> not make a determination as to whether the President
> committed a crime. That was our decision then and it
> remains our decision today."
Any suggestion that the Mueller report asserts that crimes were committed by the president, to my best interpretation, are false. The report does not include any suggestion to indict the president and was never a consideration of the investigation due to the policy you referenced. These claims are repeated incessantly, however, which makes them easy to believe.
To anyone who disagrees with this, is there any inaccuracy above? I was trying to make a factual observation and included a source.
Does anyone have a reference to support the "conclusion of the Mueller report was that the president would have been indicted if it weren't for a standing policy that the president cannot be indicted"?
Three years of investigation and multiple prison sentences and impeachment hearings. If that's nothing, I'd like to know what your idea of "something" would be.
Not sure I would call it "nothing". If Trump could have been indicted (OLC opinion to blame here), it's likely he would have been for obstruction of justice. https://youtu.be/1G9cB4vk7Go?t=31
Also keep in mind how many associates have been indicted. Is it possible that they acted alone without direction or influence from Trump? Sure. Plausible? Not to me.
Also, a nitpick, but I'm pretty sure it was 2 years not 3 years.
I'm not a fan of either parties establishment members, but that doesn't mean I'm going to ignore the obvious.
Mueller clarified in his final hearing that he misspoke when answering Lieu's earlier question and stated that the OLC policy you describe was not a deciding factor. Video is embedded in the below PBS link.
Regarding indictments -- staff indictments were for unrelated crimes, and the indicted foreign entities were found to be unconnected to the campaign. The legal system cares about deductive logic, not inductive.
Interesting, I wasn't aware he corrected himself. Just to be clear though, what he said in the video you linked was slightly different than you describe, and nuance matters.
Mueller: "That is not the correct way to say it. As we say in the report and as I said in the opening, we did not reach a determination as to whether the president committed a crime."
Fair enough. He doesn't mention whether it was a deciding factor unless I'm missing some earlier quote? The OLC opinion (assuming he abided by it, which seems to be the case) means he has no business even making a determination as to whether the president committed a crime. It's very frustrating that the OLC opinion prevents us from really learning more, but I'll grant you we have to live with it, and shouldn't legally assume any more than what was presented.
We'll see what history decides. I'm pretty sure he's a crook, but I'm pretty sure OJ is guilty too. Hope I'm wrong.
You're selectively choosing where you get your information which is the real crux of the problem; there is no "news" anymore, only opinions and narratives put forth for political and financial gain. The comment elsewhere in this thread about the failure of the 4th estate is the relevant one.
"It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS." -- Leslie Moonves
News is what it is. Facts and truth may be found but not by turning on the TV. Journalists working by themselves and for themselves still exist. We have to seek them out; they don't get any airtime with billion dollar media conglomerates.
NBC News employs a Bush daughter, and previously employed a Clinton daughter in one of those no-show jobs that the mafia loves. A McCain daughter is at ABC news, but they make her appear on "The View" so that may not be such a great deal. The Vanderbilt scion figurehead at CNN is a former CIA recruit. ("Mr. Cooper, we feel your talents would be more suited to a slightly different role with our agency.") When retired admirals and generals appear on the shows as respected experts, their management roles and board membership at armaments manufacturers is not disclosed.
Everything is a narrative. The problem in this day and age is we can't agree on compatible narratives. There are truths, but there is no objective political truth.
> ...there is no "news" anymore, only opinions and narratives put forth for political and financial gain.
"News" isn't a product you can just take out of the box and use. "Some assembly is required" and that's what citizens are expected to do (unless they're graduates of Trump "University", I guess).
There is a big difference between 1) admitting difficulty in discerning a more-or-less truthful version of events, and 2) simply throwing up your hands at the idea of objective truth.
And why, if all "news" is simply fact-free narrative, have you chosen to believe the the Trumpian narrative? Do you believe that all news that casts a negative light on POTUS is simply fabricated?
I do think ignoring the rules is part of his success. If you add the ridiculous stories about Russia, which was one of the worse conspiracy theories, but was mainly driven by the intelligence community, the current political situation isn't a surprise at all.
The spying was equally supported by the Democrats as well as Republicans. They further try to restrict freedom on the net by their newest attempt with the CASE law. It is one of the most consistent pattern of established parties.
Trump didn't win because it would be helpful for his base. It is to evict people that failed to bring forth sensible policies.
It is reactionary, but perfectly understandable. If everyone ignores the rules, we will do that too.
>What is your explanation for the success of Trump?
I'm not sure why I would have to explain that to understand what you're saying.
>Because he has a pretty clean alibi for not implementing mass surveillance.
I have no idea what that means in relation to the first sentence. Are you saying he wasn't a part of government during the establishment of some surveillance and that means something now? and/or Do you feel voters cared about that?
You referenced the current president as an example of someone ignoring the law, while previous administrations were responsible for implementing and extending mass surveillance consistently while ignoring the law. I said that could be part of Trumps success, because his voters had similar ideas.
This conversation seems to be the status quo for many parts of the internet and I don't understand what the point is.
It starts with some empty taglines and talking points and then lots of questions like:
>What is your explanation for the success of Trump?
or
>Which laws did Trump break by the way?
That don't seem related to anything I said.
It just feels like pushing talking points or a push poll, by constantly asking someone to prove random things in order to provide some support to some weird concepts like because some user can't explain something... that means something or other...
Democracy is a system of government where the three powers: law giving, executive, and judicial are separated and at least the law giving is in the hands of (representatives of) the people.
In the case of the massive spying by government we are dealing with secret laws and/or the executive branch writing its own law. This is not very compatible with democracy.
While I understand your definition, this is not what Wikipedia nor what Merriam-Webster use for it.
The separation of powers in three branches is not strictly necessary for a democracy, just a mechanism through witch it is attained. Surely, there could be examples where the powers are slpit another way that could still qualify as democracies.
If, somehow, the will of the people were to accept spying as a cornerstone of their society, trading privacy for safety, would it still be a democracy?
Anyways, sorry, for nitpitcking, but something just sounds... incomplete in your answer.
You're not really nitpicking, the parent comment has stretched democracy somewhat to encompass a lot of what I assume they associate with a good government.
> If, somehow, the will of the people were to accept spying as a cornerstone of their society, trading privacy for safety, would it still be a democracy?
It's an interesting question. For reasons like that I prefer to talk about liberties, which include privacy and the need for authority to be checked. These are of greater necessity than universal suffrage, though having representatives of the people elected for set terms certainly can help to put a check on authority, it's not always a guarantee of that! How often have tyrants been voted into power.
Interestingly, I recently learnt that the judicial branch as implemented in most democracies (presently), holds no real power. In my country, for instance, it is appointed by the government -- in the USA, if I'm not mistaken, it's also the case that the Supreme Court is appointed by the president, but I believe they need the consent of your Senate. I've read that there are a few democracies where the judicial power is somewhat independent, but I don't recall specific examples. I was also surprised to read, also, that Montesquieu also made a note about the judicial power. Short version of that observation, taken from wikipedia:
> Montesquieu actually specified that the independence of the judiciary has to be real, and not merely apparent. The judiciary was generally seen as the most important of the three powers, independent and unchecked, but it is also likely to claim to be the least dangerous one.
He also touches on this in the video (around the 1h40m mark). It seems quite difficult to keep our democracies in check if the judiciary doesn't really hold real power.
Well, these distinctions are not all-or-nothing. A common way to further the independence of the judicial branch is to appoint judges for life. A judge that cannot be fired by the executive branch has less need to appease it.
We're trying for a bit higher of a signal/noise ratio than internet default, so it's important to post thoughtfully here. 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 site guidelines in the future.
supposedly the power is with "the many" and not concentrated. The current standard is that "the many" is not really everyone but at best half of them. That's something. Under different mechanisms, e.g. if offices are appointed by lot, then power can truly be "with almost everyone"
Reality winner is only serving 5 years and she showed good faith. Ellsberg won in court and served 0 years. If Snowden weren't a coward he could be there in person right now.
The act of fleeing made it harder for himself. Had he not fled overseas and really did attempt to follow proper whisleblower procedure he would most likely be a free man today.
The whistleblower protections that Snowden did not bother to use are the same ones currently providing the spark for the impeachment proceedings in the US House of Representatives.
Really wish he had gone that route instead of the one he chose - and we'll never know for sure how pure his intentions were/are because of it.
He will be remembered for a long time because of the actions he took, but if he had not done anything else, his book would be remembered on its own as a discourse on what being human means in these times. But, it will never be viewed on its own, and that is a tragedy.
Pardon Snowden.