A feud on Twitter highlights the perils of engaging on the platform and a growing tension among researchers and medical professionals.

    • Rogan had RFKjr on his show spouting anti-vax nonsense for three hours, they were called out by a scientist involved with developing COVID vaccines, and then they piled on when said scientist refused to “debate” RFKjr on the podcast.

      • What’s funny is RFK jr admitted multiple times he didn’t understand fuckall about the conspiracies he was spouting, but for some reason they think it would be a good idea for him to debate ANYONE about vaccines lmao

        • They think it would be a good idea because they aren’t interested in actual debate so much as performance and sound-bites to drive advertising revenue - to quote Sartre’s point that increasingly applies in so many situations these days:

          Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

      • I loath the idea of debating conspiracy theorists, it give them a platform and lends legitimacy to their ideas. Daniel Dennett said it right that these people are playing tennis without the net. No logic or reasoning will matter nor proofs of any kind, they aren’t motivated by good faith discovery and discussions.

    • tl;dr
      Joe Rogan hosted RFKjr on his show, vaccine researcher Peter Hotez replied to the post on Twitter with the old article titled “Spotify is no longer even trying to staunch the flow on Joe Rogans vaccine misinformation” while commenting that all Joe does is “spread nonsense”.

      This prompted Joe to offer Hotez a large sum of money donated to his charity of choice, as a reward for publicly debating RFKjr on Joe’s show, with no time limit. Hotez said he would go on the show, but that a debate with RFKjr would not be productive.

      A twitter argument followed involving Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, and RFKjr on the topic of whether Hotez has an obligation or not to accept the debate with RFKjr.

      Why it’s a story: Things came to a head with Hotez being harassed outside of his home by Rogan fans. The individuals demanding that Hotez debate RFKjr recorded Hotez entering his home as they attempted to persuade him. Here’s a time stamped link to a news story that shows the video the harassment accused posted https://youtu.be/Okd-f-0yD58?t=18

        • There’s definitely a divide in his fans. There are the old Opie & Anthony people who mostly just listened for comedy. The pandemic changed a lot, Rogan started with his vaccine stuff and that attracted a lot of MAGA types.

          Comedy in general has taken a right-wing shift. During the COVID lockdowns touring comedians could only perform in areas that didn’t have extreme restrictions, now comedians like Bill Burr and Tom Segura are incredibly popular with conservatives. I saw Bill a couple of years ago and he was making jokes about about conservatives and a large section of the crowd was unironically agreeing with his dumb caricatures.

      • Being a scientist and being a debater are different skill sets. In science debate is done via peer review and papers and in the case of medicine by doing trials.

        RJK and Rogan are fucking morons and the only way to debate them would be to continually call them evil stupid fucks because that’s what they are. Anything else is going to allow them to edit your comments to make them look like to their stupid evil audience.

    • You mean about the time he spoke about strengthening immune systems and not being worries about Covid then getting it and throwing 15k worth of treatment on himself right away? Yeah. I dropped his show too.

        • This is what surprises me. His show, even in the early days, was never worth sticking around for. Rogan tried to be an actor long ago, had a whiff of success and then it fizzled out because he sucks. Then he tried to be a comedian, and that also had a whiff of success but fizzled out because he sucks. So he tried being a reality show host, got some traction, then failed out of that as well. His podcast is just his last attempt to be relevant and famous. And because he failed at the others he’s desperate enough for attention to do this kind of content with bigots and science deniers. He’s opportunistic trash.

        • Some interviews were interesting, (Neil Degras Tyson, Elon Musk, several other comedians and actors that I found interesting). He was always willing to call BS on guests will some quick Googling. He did get things wrong but was willing to own up to it. Unfortunately once he hit Spotify level and doubled down on his expertise on the human physical body, he no longer listened to experts, (carnivor diet, Covid…)

    • I left after the front page continually recommended the “call her daddy” podcast to me over and over again despite my listening history that couldn’t be further from that “content.”

  • I think that what makes Joe Rogan so dangerous is that he is so good at saying things with such confidence that people just believe him. He can outright say “I’m just an idiot and I don’t know anything about this” and his off-the-cuff ramblings still sound like legitimate ponderings to people who also don’t know anything about the topic, just because of the way he says them. It’s scary.

  • All the hatespeech and in places outright Nazi propaganda being posted on there is going to get Twitter banned in most of Europe before long.

    Hopefully sooner than later. Kill that cesspool so that something better can replace it.