State Outsourcing of Censorship: Will the Rogan Spotify Objectors Reveal Themselves as Agents of the State?
Can you know or trust why any living artist really would leave the platform? If not, what can you really surmise?
Attempts to censor or deplatform Joe Rogan continue through the predictable mechanisms fomented, enacted, sponsored or actively employed by vested interests in the media/pharma/tech/government partnership structure.
Glenn Greenwald’s recent work offers a good, broad view:
The emerging campaign to pressure Spotify to remove Joe Rogan from its platform is perhaps the most illustrative episode yet of both the dynamics at play and the desperation of liberals to ban anyone off-key. It was only a matter of time before this effort really galvanized in earnest… Prior efforts to coerce, cajole, or manipulate Rogan to fall into line were abject failures… Many bizarrely urged that everyone buy music from Apple instead; apparently, handing over your cash to one of history's largest and richest corporations, repeatedly linked to the use of slave labor, is the liberal version of subversive social justice… One could easily envision a tipping point being reached where a musician no longer makes an anti-Rogan statement by leaving the platform as Young and Mitchell just did, but instead will be accused of harboring pro-Rogan sentiments if they stay on Spotify.
Indeed, it was once assumed that Silicon Valley giants steeped in the libertarian ethos of a free internet would be immune to demands to engage in political censorship ("content moderation” is the more palatable euphemism which liberal corporate media outlets prefer). But when the still-formidable megaphones of The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, CNN and the rest of the liberal media axis unite to accuse Big Tech executives of having blood on their hands and being responsible for the destruction of American democracy, that is still an effective enforcement mechanism.
Glenn Greenwald - The Pressure Campaign on Spotify to Remove Joe Rogan Reveals the Religion of Liberals: Censorship
Jen Psaki (01:10 into the Fox News segment, below) issues the standard message of “we want our corporate partners to censor anyone who contradicts us.”. Standard blanket “misinformation” & “disinformation” labels are deployed with absolutely zero precision other than that they apply in general to anyone the US State doesn’t like. The USA was dropping 2000lb bombs through 4ft square ventilator shafts from jet fighters doing 500kts at 30,000’ in 1991, yet 30 years later it cannot be even a fraction as precise with its language and its accusations. Why is that? Admittedly, a 2000lb-er does have an indiscriminate blast radius that will execute or injure men, women and children within it in equal measure. Maybe that’s Psaki’s excuse? As long as her side’s self-declared truth bombs are aimed at faces with precision but they have massive blast radii, to win the war against what they label mis/disinformation they just need to dump enough ordnance in order to cleanse the planet of the noises that keep them awake at night? Much like launching a hellfire from a drone at a wedding - the face on the kill list playing card is in there somewhere.
Let’s just ignore the fact that for the entirety of the Trump administration, Democrats created and peddled pure disinformation in the form of the Russiagate dossier, and most media outlets then spread it and grew it. Of course, the investigation served its purposes, as did the Russiagate scam itself, which undoubtedly duped millions of global citizens along the way who were happy to be given their opinons via the corporate media who admitted that they were peddling a literal “nothingburger” via - suprise surprise - CNN and many others. Meanwhile, CNN is collapsing for a variety of reasons including paedeophilia and executive and presenter misconduct.
Speaking of CNN, Rogan’s interview with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta is a must see/hear. That was an exercise in a man using someone else’s platform to humiliate himself. I think the last time I saw that was Prince Andrew’s self-inflicted BBC interview.
Freedom of Speech Is Dialectics
At a basic level, freedom of speech is simply a manifestation of dialectics.
Theses + Anthitheses = Refutation or Synthesis or Combination or Improvement
In classical philosophy, dialectic (διαλεκτική) is a form of reasoning based upon dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments, advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses). The outcome of such a dialectic might be the refutation of a relevant proposition, or of a synthesis, or a combination of the opposing assertions, or a qualitative improvement of the dialogue.
CIA Information outletWikipedia
You say what you want, I say what I want and the conversation evolves (maybe fights break out, or I get your number). This is what’s happening on Rogan, as in most conversations. You don’t have to talk to me, nor I to you. Neither of us has to listen to anyone, unless forced. Every TV has an OFF switch and so does the internet, in personal terms (looking away from the screen and ceasing to click/type). Rogan or whomever you don’t like isn’t forced into your brain. You still have to select and pay attention to information feeds even if they are full of shit. But you would have to actually pay attention to an information feed yourself in order to determine whether, in your opinion, it was full of shit. Unless you want someone else to tell you what your (uninformed) opinion is.
The Oxford Union - Subersive or Expansive? Is it even that binary?
Why is it that the Oxford University Union invites a reasonable diversity of speakers to its hallowed debating chamber at Frewin Court? Is the Union trying to actively poison the finest formative minds of British and international society?
It must be trying to subvert the world because they invited both Steve Bannon and, wait for it… Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon to speak! Ye gads. They even have those debates up on YouTube and - goddamn it! - YouTube has dangerously and irresponsibly allowed them to remain there for years!
I watched both and what I did not see inside the chamber were empty seats or tear-filled eyes. There were some sounds of protest from outside when Bannon was there, as one might expect. I forget if the same happend with Yaxley-Lennon. So that’s the Union exercising free speech by letting these men speak freely while people both inside and outside the Union also exercised their rights of free speech. The simple fact that there was as big an audience for both of these speakers as there was for Stephen Fry says that either there’s a market in diversity of speakers or that Oxford Union is a seat of the subversion of the purity of the human race. Which is it and why?
Yes, that’s who Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon is.
Why on earth would Oxford Union give him a platform? Dialectics, if nothing else. But you’d have to watch and listen in order to make up at least a bit of your mind. Or perhaps you would reserve judgement and may or may not look deeper. It’s up to you, isn’t it?
Not according to Jen Psaki, who is a mouthpiece for a state architecture of a nation with a written constitution wherein freedom of speech is enshrined. You should have access to only what her masters want you to have access to. As for the UK…
Whose opinions are being enacted through artists’ Spotify abandonment?
Are you going to be able to detect whether artists who choose to follow Neil Young, Joni Mitchell etc are acting solely due to their own fully formed opinions and values? Can you distinguish between a genuine stance and virtue signalling? Can you detect accurately the influence of coporate power, money, politics or other things amongst all of this? Many, many people have opinions for money and many, many people cannot detect that, refuse to believe it or do not know. The entire concept of (Instagram) “influencers” is based on pay-for-opinion and people lap it up. It’s not a new concept. The methods are almost transparent, yet advertising in all its forms still works. What does that say about the human brain?
If Bowie’s catalogue moves off Spotify in disgust at Rogan, are you or anyone else going to entertain the notion that this is clear proof of an afterlife that can interact with this plane of existence i.e. Bowie got it a bit wrong with Ashes to Ashes? Or would it be a demonstration that corporate power and agendas exist and seek to affect society?
So, roll on the “political” artists who will “take a stand” against non-specific misinformation and disinformation when they are told to by either their money (whether that’s top down from their corporate labels or bottom up from some of their fans), someone else’s money, or their government. I struggle to see how this can really be made into an issue of genuine conscience because then you’re into First Amendment debates and you could start arguing about all sorts of pointless minutiae, including song lyrics.
I wonder if artists realise that they share the Spotify platform not just with Joe Rogan but also with Laibach? If they listened to Laibach’s back catalogue, what would they make of it and would they stick around or jump ship to Amazon/Apple/Tidal/Deezer blah blah blah?
If you cannot detect the real motives for a living artist’s move off Spotify in supposed opposition to Joe Rogan, what importance can you attach to those moves? Can you really erradicate the possibility that some of them will be following an agenda - possibly that of the coporatocracy or state - for reasons that are nothing to do with morality or truth? If influential artists move for reasons which lack real personal integrity, are they revealing themselves as agents of the state?