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Month: January 2022
Late Night Open Thread: Spotifried
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Neil Young released Harvest in 1972 and Joni Mitchell released Blue in 1971 and people still pay to listen to those songs. No one is going to be replaying Joe Rogan podcasts 50 years from now. He has to keep feeding words into the big bullshit machine or his audience goes away, because cheap junk doesn’t last. – Kay
Joe Rogan is TFG in a hoodie and jeans — a television-made ‘celebrity’ tickling an audience of resentful racists by ‘just saying’ all their favorite slurs & fantasies out loud. Vanity Fair:
… Rogan—who recently hosted Robert Malone, a controversial medical doctor and infectious-disease researcher who promoted a “mass formation psychosis” conspiracy theory, on his podcast—apologized to Spotify and thanked the company for supporting him. “I’m very sorry that this is happening to them and that they’re taking so much heat from it,” Rogan said on Sunday in a 10-minute video statement posted on Instagram. Spotify obtained exclusive rights to The Joe Rogan Experience in 2020, when it struck a reported $100 million deal with Rogan. Financially, that contract has paid off for Spotify, as Rogan’s show and his millions of listeners have played a key role in helping the tech company’s plan to grow its user base through podcasting. But Spotify’s association with Rogan has also caused the company headaches, particularly due to his pandemic-related content, such as when Rogan endorsed the use of ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19 and advised “healthy” young people not to get vaccinated. (Rogan did clarify that he’s “not an anti-vax person” after the White House shot down the latter claim.)
Rogan has largely remained unshaken throughout his past controversies. In August, Ek made a public stand in support of the podcaster’s creative independence, stating that Spotify will not censor the content of Rogan’s show. But that tune seemingly changed in light of Young and Mitchell’s boycott of Spotify—protests that came after Rogan’s recent episode with Malone, in which the guest made “several falsehoods about COVID-19 vaccines,” according to the open letter from medical experts. (Malone had already been permanently suspended from Twitter and saw an unofficial upload of his podcast episode with Rogan swiftly removed by YouTube.)
“If there’s anything that I’ve done that I can do better is have more experts with differing opinions, right after I have the controversial ones,” Rogan said on Sunday. “I would most certainly be open to doing that. I would like to talk to some people that have differing opinions on those podcasts in the future. We’ll see.” He went on to say that while he schedules his own guests, he does not “always get it right.” Rogan also noted that his intention with the show has always been “to create interesting conversations and ones that I hope people enjoy,” adding, “I’m not trying to promote misinformation, I’m not trying to be controversial. I’ve never tried to do anything with this podcast other than to just talk to people.” …
Rogan’s not an ideologue, he’s just another media whore. He gives his audience what it wants — watching people eat bugs or get kicked in the head, spouting racist rhetoric, medical misinformation — as long as he’s paid up front.
This here's a company that is panicking.https://t.co/OKrMXl09UI
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 30, 2022
ie following the Twitter playbook for yrs when it allowed Trump to violate terms of service everyday before deplatforming him
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) January 31, 2022
Here is Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's statement, in full: https://t.co/pTrkqdg51k
— David Gura (@davidgura) January 30, 2022
IMO, depending on whether other high-profile artists join Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, this is still a quite possible outcome…
My guess? They work out a deal where he gets to say he was Fired For Truth
, he gets a big cut of that money, signs another, non-exclusive deal with a small, right-wing streamer like Rumble, then largely goes back to being every teenager's third click in the YouTube algorithm.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) January 30, 2022
… which is a pity, because it’s not just Rogan who’s the problem here.
our stupid band gets close to a million monthly streams on spotify. spotify pays out .003 cents per stream. 100% of that goes to our former label sony who is a part owner of spotify. this is why i’m mad
— nigh eve6 (@Eve6) January 31, 2022
this is not a culture war issue for most artists it’s a material one. i cannot feed my kids with “spotify exposure”
— nigh eve6 (@Eve6) January 31, 2022
thank you guys for your solidarity and your support. it’s been frustrating seeing this story get painted as a culture war thing. we are trying to shift the narrative. joe rogan is only important in that he highlights spotify’s absurdly exploitative business practices
— nigh eve6 (@Eve6) January 31, 2022
The post Late Night Open Thread: Spotifried appeared first on Balloon Juice.
Academic Journal Claims It Fingerprints PDFs For ‘Ransomware,’ Not Surveillance
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World’s Fastest Gaming Monitor Hits 500 Hz Refresh Rate
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DESPITE DESPERATE EFFORTS TO PROVE OTHERWISE, IT’S STILL TRUMP’S NOMINATION TO LOSE
Poll results are presented:
In a recent Associated Press survey, 44 percent of Republicans said they did not want Mr. Trump to run for president again....But then we get numbers from Patrick Ruffini, a GOP pollster.
In a reversal from Mr. Trump’s White House days, an NBC News poll in late January found that 56 percent of Republicans now define themselves more as supporters of the Republican Party, compared to 36 percent who said they are supporters of Mr. Trump first.
The Trump-first faction had accounted for 54 percent of Republican voters in October 2020.
Mr. Ruffini polled Mr. Trump vs. Mr. DeSantis last October and again this month. Then, Mr. Trump led by 40 percentage points; now, the margin is 25.There's some slippage, but please note that Trump still gets 57% of the vote, compared to DeSantis's 32%. (All the numbers are here.) So if it's true that, according to that NBC poll, only 36% of Republicans consider themselves Trump supporters first, it's also true that voters who don't consider themselves Trumpers still intend to vote for Trump.
Ruffini tries to massage the numbers in order to get a bad result for Trump.
But among Republicans familiar with both men, the gap was just 16 points, and narrower still, only nine points, among those who liked them both.So Trump is still beating DeSantis by 16 when name recognition is equalized -- except when you poll just Republicans who like both of them. There's just one problem: Elections don't work like that. Challengers don't get to choose an electorate made up exclusively of people who like them.
Ruffini insists that the numbers look bad for Trump for other reasons.
“His voters are looking at alternatives,” Mr. Ruffini said of Mr. Trump. While there is scant evidence of any desire for an anti-Trump Republican, Mr. Ruffini said, there is openness to what he called a “next-generation Trump candidate.”In fact, Ruffini polled precisely that. He asked his poll respondents which they'd pick: Trump or
A conservative Republican candidate who was a strong supporter of Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, vocally opposed Covid lockdown and vaccine mandates, would have fired Anthony Fauci as president, and wants to represent the future of the MAGA movement.Trump crushes this dream "next-gen" candidate by 17 points.
(And there's no interest in "A conservative Republican candidate with a measured and responsible tone who didn't agree with Donald Trump's actions following the 2020 election and on January 6, 2021." Trump crushes that candidate by 29. So put away your childish dreams of Liz Cheney wresting the nomination from Trump, or from anyone else.)
I know, I know: Trump's numbers have slipped. If this continues, Trump seems vulnerable.
But these poll numbers came at a time when Trump was mostly lying low. That won't be the case if he runs. And remember that anyone who dares to challenge Trump will be humiliated by Trump, the way Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio were in the 2016 campaign. It'll get ugly.
Republican voters won't dump Trump, because if they do, we win -- "we" being the hated Democrats and RINOs and mainstream media. Voting for DeSantis will never be the thumb in our eye that voting for Trump is.
This could change if Trump faces serious legal problems. But just being indicted won't necessarily hurt Trump. Remember, he survived two impeachments with undiminished GOP support. Trump is very good at gulling the rubes into believing he's doing fine when he really isn't. When his businesses were in trhe process of losing a billion dollars, he published a book called Trump: Surviving at the Top. He lost an election in 2020 and convinced tens of millions of voters that he actually won. He's good at this.
But if it's obvious even to his fan base that he's pinned down by DAs or the Justice Department, it's over. That's why Bridgegate killed Chris Christie's reputation on the right: not because Christie did something wrong (Republican voters don't care if their heroes do that), but because all the investigations and indictments and jokes made him look weak. A bully can't sustain his reputation if it looks as if he's being bullied.
On the other hand, when has Trump ever gotten his comeuppance? He's never been truly held accountable. There's a good chance he never will be. In which case, DeSantis should bow out and wait for 2028.
Website Fined By German Court For Leaking Visitor’s IP Address Via Google Fonts
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Monday Evening Open Thread: Giving Their Voters What They Asked For
Sen. Ron Johnson asked about reducing child care costs: "Well, people decide to have families and become parents. That's something they need to consider when they make that choice. I've never really felt it was society's responsibility to take care of other people's children." pic.twitter.com/HyJr4iTwUG
— Heartland Signal (@HeartlandSignal) January 26, 2022
in many ways Ron Johnson represents the evolution of the modern GOP, rising from a simple reactionary small business tyrant to a full throated loon after consuming a firehose of insane bullshit for a decade https://t.co/DCYK3I1pi1
— miserable, non-binary candy is all we deserve (@lib_crusher) January 27, 2022
Is there an honest chance of taking this loon down?
Move Wisconsin to lean Dem. https://t.co/LS7bOxIMX6
— Jeff Fecke (@jkfecke) January 9, 2022
And, of course {sigh}, our Democratic disgrace:
Bucking his party has paid off for Joe Manchin who raised $1.6 million in the 4th quarter and a total of $4.8 million in 2021, his highest total ever in a non-election yearhttps://t.co/ZiF27NQovf via @bill_allison
— Mario Parker (@MarioDParker) January 31, 2022
From August to January, the percentage of people in West Virginia having difficulty paying usual expenses rose from 27.3% to 40.8%. https://t.co/56ybMh5JPx @elwasson @bpolitics #westvirginia #wv pic.twitter.com/ZI9hMayVhe
— Mike Dorning (@MikeDorning) January 31, 2022
The post Monday Evening Open Thread: Giving Their Voters What They Asked For appeared first on Balloon Juice.
Amazon Warehouse Manager Pleads Guilty To Stealing $273K of Computer Parts
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OH Whoopi Goldberg NO
So, while The View team discussed the MAUS-banning school board, it turns out Whoopi Goldberg needs to be working thru her business:
[Whoopi] Goldberg continued to assert that Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution” was not racial.[Edit and Emphasis mine — MisterDancer]“What is it about?” Behar asked at one point.
“It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about,” Goldberg replied.
“But it’s about white supremacy,” co-host Ana Navarro retorted. “It’s about going after Jews and G*.”
Goldberg, meanwhile, claimed that “these are two white groups of people,” prompting co-host Sara Haines to point out that “they didn’t see them as white” while Behar noted that the Nazis targeted Black people as well.
Now, I showed my ass in comments on this topic a few days ago. I’m still working thru my crap on this. So take this post with that pound of salt y’all keep in the pantry, please.
Yet: who just drops Jewish identity as unambiguously “white,” even in my relative ignorance compared to many? She should at least understand that whiteness, and the power it’s stamp brings, is a social construct. As such: it can be granted, denied, or even rescinded. Its arbitrariness is a boon to those who wield it — and Jews are so not in charge of that wielding.
And sometimes, that is explicitly laid out, in black and white.
See, Whoopi might not know this: Jim Crow and related US laws were used by the Nazis to baseline their Nuremberg Laws:
[…]American law, hard though it might be for us to accept it now, was a model for everybody in the early 20th century who was interested in creating a race-based order or race state. America was the leader in a whole variety of realms in racist law in the first part of that century. Some of this involved American immigration law, which was designed to exclude so-called “undesirable races” from immigration. In 1924 American immigration law in particular was praised by Hitler himself, in his book Mein Kampf.But it wasn’t just about American immigration law. There was also American law creating forms of second-class citizenship — for African-Americans, of course, but also for other populations including Asians, Native Americans, Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. Not least, there were statutes in 30 American states forbidding and sometimes criminalizing interracial marriage. Those were of special interest to the Nazis.
[Bill] Moyers: And these lawyers saw America’s “Negro problem” as similar to their “Jewish problem?”
[James] Whitman: You bet they did.
Moyers: American law did not specifically target Jews, but—
Whitman: But it certainly had a highly developed body of law targeting other groups.
Being a born-and-bred New Yorker, she might have heard about the 1939 Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. If she had, its implications should have been echoing in her ears as she made that horrible argument, pulling her up.
That implication? That our struggles are united. Harm done to one easily spreads to all. It’s imperative we understand the cross-currents of bigotry, lest we fail to see the warning signs.
Yes, she should know better, as should have I. I’m not going to dive into the long a painful history around Black and Jewish communities, and struggles for equality. Yet I must say: to buy into this “they both white!” bullshit is beyond merely “harmful.” And we Black folx should know that, more than most.
She deserved not just the pushback on the show, not just the callout from the ADL, but a lot more, besides. And it’s something to not just throw vitriol at, but to learn from and strive to avoid.
I don’t have a great ending for this post. Just a promise that I’ll try to do right by y’all — and a fucking great heap better than Whoopi.
(Also, too: I get The View person trying to correct Whoopi via incorporating the other groups targeted. Yet Romani is a much better term to use; something else I learned the hard way. Those folx are to this day getting the short end of damned near every stick there is, and deserve at least a modicum of respect.)
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Twitter’s Algorithm Favors the Political Right, Study Finds
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