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Joe and I Don’t Understand
I don’t understand. I’ve never had patients send me links to podcasts about high blood pressure or gastroparesis, but with COVID, it’s every day. I’ve never been threatened by insurance companies that if I use a certain drug to treat a certain disease, they will remove me from their plans. I’ve never been threatened by the CDC that I could lose my medical license if I don’t repeat whatever it is they’re saying today. This is so odd. I really don’t get it.
Joe Rogan must be thinking the same thing. Some group has demanded that Spotify no longer carry Mr. Rogan’s podcasts (which average 11 million listeners EACH), with a letter which includes the following passage:
The episode has been criticized for promoting baseless conspiracy theories and the JRE has a concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals.
So they’re worried about an entertainment streaming service hosting a podcast by a stand-up comedian because they disagree with one of his guests. Strange that they chose this particular guest. Think of some of the other guests that Mr. Rogan has spent three hours with:
Bob Lazar is a physicist who claims to have worked on covert operations within Area 51 that were focused on reverse engineering alien technology taken from alien spaceships in the possession of the United States government. Who knows, right?
He discussed with Graham Hancock his belief that human civilizations extend back much further than what is accepted in academia. Graham also theorizes that these civilizations excelled in arts, science, and technology at levels we can not even comprehend. These civilizations and their progress have since been wiped clean entirely due to dramatic shifts in the earth’s composition.
He’s had Sam Harris on, who proposes that science can be used to identify values, which he defines as “facts that can be scientifically understood: regarding positive and negative social emotions, retributive impulses, the effects of specific laws and social institutions on human relationships, the neurophysiology of happiness and suffering, etc.”
I could go on and on. He’s had a lot of guests (around 1,800) with a lot of controversial beliefs. That’s why he has them on — their outside-the-box thinking makes them interesting, and makes for entertaining podcasts. I’m not criticizing these guests or anyone else. They may be right about some of these things, even though their beliefs are considered to be outside mainstream thought. I admire Mr. Rogan for at least listening respectfully to them, even though I suspect he doesn’t buy all of what they say, either. At least he listens.
And he is allowed to listen. Until the guest discusses COVID and says something that is not in step with whatever the CDC says this week. Then, Mr. Rogan is not allowed to listen. And neither are you. And neither is anybody else.
Once a guest says something provocative about COVID, then Mr. Rogan changes from a stand-up comedian to a threat to humankind.
I find it fascinating that liberals hate Mr. Rogan. He voted for Bernie Sanders, but he’s hated by leftists.
Why? Because he listens.
He has people on his show that he doesn’t necessarily agree with, but he politely asks questions, and respectfully listens to their answers. Leftists hate that.
And conservatives love it.
And leftists are open-minded, and conservatives are closed-minded.
I think that leftists really believe that. I think they honestly believe that they are open-minded, and at the same time believe that people shouldn’t be allowed to discuss opinions that those open-minded leftists disagree with. Maintaining both of those thoughts in your head at the same time should be impossible, but I think it’s common.
I don’t understand. Neither does Joe.
I should be allowed to say what I want. So should Joe Rogan. You disagree? Fine — let’s talk about it. We’ll probably both learn something. Maybe we’ll learn a lot. Maybe we’ll learn less.
But we can’t learn anything when we can’t talk freely.
I had a patient tell me that she was glad that the “COVID fake science” theories were being taken off of Twitter and YouTube. I asked her when, in history, has censoring ideas, and destroying those you disagree with — when has that, in retrospect, been a good idea? When have the book-burners ended up being the good guys? Has that ever happened? Ever? Perhaps — but I can’t think of an example. She couldn’t either, but she was peeved for my temerity.
Tough. It’s ok to be peeved. That’s what happens when you disagree. We argue our point. Sometimes we get peeved.
But when we’re not allowed to disagree, then things tend to escalate beyond “peeved”.
Disagreeing is better than stifling. Let the pot boil sometimes. If you try to contain it, it will blow up. Eventually. Every single time.
This is scary stuff.
Published in General
I would like to see the scientific study results showing that any of their propaganda campaigns are having the desired results. In the case of one California advertising campaign, it seemed that it was a way of giving millions of dollars to preferred cronies. Though I don’t remember any evidence that it was cronies who got the contract. Probably it was just a suspicion of mine.
Maybe in the 1930s. Here’s what Stalin’s master propagandist, Willi Munzenberg, told Arthur Koestler, back when Koestler was still a Communist:
Don’t argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror. That, Arturo, is propaganda!
And that seems to be the objective, recognized or not, of much of today’s ‘progressive’ speech. People are being intimidated from speaking their minds not only out of fear of practical consequences…loss of customers, loss of jobs…but out of fear of being publicly demonized as a Bad Person.
The episode has been criticized for promoting baseless conspiracy theories and the JRE has a concerning history of broadcasting misinformation, particularly regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals.
It’s funny how all tyrants in history who attacked free speech had their “reasons” for doing so. They all thought they were justified in one way or another. They all said things like this. Although this specimen sounds more modern and sinister for some reason. It stands out as almost stereotypically evil and Orwellian, and yet they just spout it out with no more self awareness than a toad.
Doc Bastiat, you mentioned that before now you’ve never been threatened by insurance companies for prescribing certain medications. I’d be interested to know if you ever heard of this happening before the Covid virus. That is, did you ever hear of an insurance company threatening “quality reviews” or the like for prescribing any FDA approved drug off label, until they began doing so for ivermectin etc for treatment of covid?
Yeah – that bolded section gives me the creeps. Evil and Orwellian, indeed…
Atlantis is Camelot for the New Age religious.
80% of prescriptions are written off label. Which has never been viewed as problematic.
No – I’ve never heard of anything like this. Foreign concept.
If I write a prescription they don’t like, they may not cover it. But they don’t penalize me in any way – certainly not kick me off their plan.
Insurance companies try hard to avoid the appearance of making medical decisions. Malpractice nightmare. So they may take a drug off their formulary, but they won’t penalize the doctor.
(insert video clip of Joe Rogan kicking Dr. Sanjay Gupta right in the slats on his show)
Huh. So why this time? And why for these specific drugs? I mean, I have a good idea of what the real an$wer i$, but . . . what do you think?
Please tell me this is satire. Please.
Its from the Babylon Bee. I retort. You decide.
New rules in our prescription plan, as of Dec 2021: The exact words:
While not disciplining a doc, this seems like an override of a doctor if you ask me.
The fact that docs are not independent anymore, but tied to corporate seems not good, as well.
“More appropriate options” means cheaper. They want you to use genetics for everything. They’re not telling you how to treat heart disease. They just prefer that you use cheap drugs.
I could treat a heart attack with penicillin, and it would be approved, no problem. Because it’s cheap.
They don’t care about medicine. They care about money. Which makes sense – insurance companies are financial institutions.
Until now. Now, they’ll kick me off their plan if I use Ivermectin to treat COVID. It’s cheap, and very safe. But absolutely forbidden.
I can still use penicillin to treat heart attacks if I want. But no Ivermectin for COVID.
I don’t understand.
This is what I was trying to understand, whether what they are now doing is completely unprecedented. It sounds like there needs to be congressional investigations and hearings on this. Put insurance and pharmacy execs on the hot seat and make them tell you exactly why they did what they did. If it really is unprecedented…meaning no business or medical reason for it… it will be really interesting to hear what they say.
What Americans for the most part have failed to understand until now is that Canada’s healthcare system is simply the logical endpoint of the convergence of the HMO/Insurance company model – Canada simply has a single payer, the government, whereas Americans have multiple payers being coerced by government. Its rapidly becoming a distinction without a difference.
I am sure that anything I have to say has already been covered in the previous comments, however, I feel a real need to blow off some steam. I don’t know what it was about this pandemic that has turned it into some kind of religious crusade by the left, but I find it incredible. I suppose that it began with the overwhelming need they felt to blame it on Trump, and that motive simply got completely out of control.
I am just finishing John Barry’s The Great Influenza for the second time. I read it a couple of years ago at the start of the Covid nonsense. Now with the retrospective of two years of this idiocy it is possible to understand why in the beginning it looked like it might be a repetition of the 1918 Flu epidemic, but that should have rapidly lost credibility once the real statistics evolved. People weren’t dropping like flies. Many had pretty minor symptoms. Children were largely uneffected. However, the media took the bit in their teeth and ran with it. Demagogues like Fauci and Wallensky were loving their notoriety and newly gained power and simply fed the beast. Trump was still the “ancient enemy”, so it went from an idiotic over-reaction to a religion.
Rogan is a heretic, as is everyone of us who claim that the emperor has no clothes, including the Great Barrington group. Vaccines are baptismal. Masks are the sign of belief, a sort of cloth crucifix. In a country that has gone essentially amoral and anti-religion, a new belief system has evolved around the pandemic. For all of our pride in civilization we are no better than the peasants who threw Jews in a well or burned them because they believed that the Jews had somehow poisoned the waters and caused the plague. This is total insanity, and I refuse to participate in anymore of it. Biden, Fauci and the rest can go straight to Hell, and not pass go or collect $500 on their way.
Yep. And you’re better when you write coherently. ; )
I love his theme for The Black Hole.
I listened to a three-hour Rogan interview for the first time last week because some people on Ricochet were extolling his interviewing skills. They were right. He is very good. The guy he was interviewing was Dr. Peter McCullough, who I think is a little loony in some of his conclusions about Covid, but Rogan respectfully gave him wide latitude to state his case and asked him very pertinent questions. Rogan doesn’t ask leading questions or make opinionated statements while asking a question, as some other annoying interviewers do. He lets the audience make up its mind about the substance from the guest.
That was a very good interview, and I only heard half of it.
But yes, Rogan is good because he asks questions, not leading questions as you say, and lets his guests talk.
Learning how to properly interview people is a skill I don’t think they ever really taught in J-school. I actually picked it up more from some youth ministry training I did after college.
One place to learn some of those techniques is from historical societies that offer classes in how to do oral history interviews. For oral histories the interviewer is supposed to step out of the way even more than a newspaper journalist or YouTube journalist should do, but all kinds of interviewers need the skill of shutting up and letting the interviewee talk.
But it doesn’t mean the interviewer should turn off his brain. I once attended a small-group workshop where Philip P. Mason (since deceased) was one of the presenters. He explained some of the perils of just letting the interviewee talk. One of Mason’s main specialties was labor history (which was very appropriate for a professor at a Detroit university). He was recording oral histories of participants in some of the big labor strikes of the 1930s. At one point he challenged one of the interviewees with a “How could that be?” because it didn’t square with other known facts. The interviewee said, “Turn off the tape.” After Mason turned the tape recorder off, the guy said, “Now I’ll tell you what really happened.” One version of those events went into the historical record that is preserved in an archive for posterity, and the other did not. (There are often legal agreements obtained by which the archive is obligated to keep those interviews untouched and unavailable during the lifetime of the interviewee, or for some other specified period of years. It gets interesting when lawyers learn of their existence and want those agreements breached so the interview can be used in a court case.)
Rogan is good because he unintentionally backed into studying the medieval trivium. He’s a comedian, actor, broadcaster (of live, usually unscripted dramatic events) and sometime martial artist who’s taken an above average interest in his health for quite some time. The observational skills required to balance all those different domains and be successful at it requires a mental discipline that suppresses the urge to go Rachel Mad Cow.
You’re saying he’s well-rounded, and well-rounded people are better thinkers?
No, I’m saying he swears a lot. And weed. And mushrooms.
Oh yeah. Now I remember.