Castle Magus

I don't have a "joe rogan" tag... hmm... not sure if even this 1:18:01 episode of Some More News that is explicitly about Joe Rogan is enough for me to bother creating a "joe rogan" tag. I mean, sure I could just plop "joe rogan" down there in the tags list and then have a "joe rogan" tag for the future, in the unlikely off-chance that I ever mention him again, but he's absolutely not worth the effort of finding and back-tagging the very rare few posts from the past in which I may have mentioned the asshat. Eh... okay, I guess I'll throw a new "joe rogan" tag on this post, for what tiny bit that is worth (even just to me, let alone anyone else).

Also, disclaimer: I have never seen anything of Joe Rogan's show myself, other than a few short clips here and there over the years of him saying stupid shit.

Anyway, on with watching the video at 2x playback speed...

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...all right, not even five minutes in, and there's some transphobia. Off to a good start.

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Side bar: "Walmart fires 6'4" cisgender woman threatened by man who thought she was trans"

Wow. So, basically, a man came into a women's bathroom at a Walmart to harass and threaten a cisgender woman, who worked at that Walmart, because he wrongly, stupidly thought she was transgender merely because she happened to be tall, and then the woman was fired from her job at that Walmart after she reported the incident. (Ostensibly because she rEpOrTeD iT tO tHe WrOnG tYpE oF mAnAgEr... what the actual fuck ...so, then, why was the manager she did report it to not also fired for not reporting it up the chain to the, supposedly, "correct" type of manager? Probably because said manager wasn't a tall woman who "looked trans.")

And, of course, this fucking happened in goddamned Florida. That tracks.

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And now, onto the COVID disinformation part of the show...

Ah, and there's the racism... hmm, turns out Joe Rogan apparently had very different views back in 2019 or whenever, compared to now...? Gee, I wonder why? Oh, right, it's because of the Trump stuff.

And here comes the Trump-specific stuff (though that's really been an undercurrent of the entire video all along)... Joe Rogan before: "The morons had a king." Joe Rogan now: "He's real." Also, it does indeed seem really weird that Joe Rogan, who apparently hates everything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, had Donald Trump, someone who really appears to have been a close, personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein, as a guest on his show, and apparently never once mentioned Jeffrey Epstein. Go figure.

Joe Rogan didn't like Tim Walz, because Tim Walz was, supposedly, "a liar." Therefore, all in for Trump I guess????? The guy who has spouted literally multiple tens of thousands of documented lies over the past decade????? Okay, Joe Rogan. Okay.

Elon Musk? A genius? The smartest person alive? Okay, Joe Rogan. Okay.

Trump is "an outsider" and "anti-establishment" in the same way that GamerGate was "actually about ethics in video game journalism." Joe Rogan, by supporting Trump, is also no longer "anti-establishment," because Trump, like it or not, is the fucking, goddamned "establishment" now. Thanks, in part, to Joe Rogan, specifically.

Ah, and there comes the anti-abortion sentiment and the homophobia, too. Keep 'em comin', Joe. They're all just beach ball issues with no actual substance or value, amirite? *eye roll*

I'm on the tail end of Gen X, having been born in 1979 (Google/Wikipedia says Gen X was from "1965 to 1980"), and believe you me, I have absolutely not undergone a "right-wing turn." Maybe I'm just an aberration, though. *shrug*

Oh, and we're even getting just a smidge of antisemitism up in here (along with some Nazi propaganda/Hitler apologia), too. The hits just keep on comin', Joe.

So, in conclusion, while Joe Rogan isn't the absolutely worst grifter/con-man/right wing dumbshit that Some More News has done a video about, he's also obviously not the greatest dude in the world, either. I don't know... maybe Joe Rogan could be one of the rare few Trumpanzees that potentially could be shamed into changing his ways by being called a hypocrite, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that. In any case, this video has not convinced me to suddenly start watching the 6000+ hours of The Joe Rogan Experience or whatever the fuck.

(They didn't manage to get through this video without at least some dumb skits involving Katy and Warmbo. Short as they were, they were still present. *sigh*)

"Hi. Now that Trump is president... again... we're going to look at how he and his party are always focused on problems that aren't really problems (DEI, immigrants, and censorship) instead of problems that are (climate-enhanced wildfires, oligarchy, and actual censorship)."

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One of the comments under the video: "So is this sense of unreality what Germans circa 1933 felt?" I would say... maybe? Probably. The difference is that we should have goddamn known better, this time. Doubly so, given that we've already endured a hellish four years with Trump as the President of the United States of America before the current, likely way more hellish four years still to come of Trump as the President of the United States of America. It's not going to be great, and we're going to be trying to repair the damage caused by 2025-2029, for much, much longer than just those four years, like how we're still trying to repair the damage caused by 2017-2021 even now. Well, some of us are trying to repair the damage, anyway. Too many of us are actively, maliciously trying to cause the world to burn (both figuratively and literally).

So anyway, yeah, this is an almost hour long video pointing out all the finding out that's happening as a result of all the fucking around that happened in November 2024.

Anyway, in conclusion, to hell with Donald Trump forever, as usual.

(Beware: Warmbo is in the video. Not a lot, but still... a little bit of Warmbo goes a very, very long way.)

"Hi. Today we're looking at AI-generated images, why they look like that, why fascists love them, and how corporations want to use them to cheapen the valuable work of creatives."

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Very small aside, I loathe everything about that "based" modern slang bullshit, so Cody mildly mocking it once and loosely associating it with alt-right incel MAGAt dildos in this video brought a vague quarter-smile to my face.

Yep. That was something I did almost two years ago now, after some fits and starts of doing it even earlier, then coming back, then leaving again, then coming back again. And now, I don't miss it at all and, in fact, I rarely even think about it, unless I happen to see an article someone has written about it like the above, or I see news things about some fresh hell being unleashed on the now renamed 卐 I mean X (no, I really mean 卐).

"If you’re still on it, I recommend you leave it too." Totally agree.

"Surround yourself with adoring bots instead of humans."

Doing God's work with AI there. *eye roll*

Alternative take: "the Twitter clone where no other humans are allowed"? So... basically current Twitter X 卐, then? Well, no, I guess this SocialAI thing (probably) has far fewer Nazis, at least.

Basically this post, again, except reformatted to not be a bunch of now dead tweets. I got to thinking about this stuff again, and remembered that I'd already written something about it.

Here is the original post, reformatted to not be Twitter:

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It's funny how the general names given to certain things can sometimes make those things seem much scarier than they really are, e.g. Schwarzchild radius, Cherenkov radiation, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, Fermi paradox, Higgs boson, St. Elmo's fire, Schrödinger's cat, etc. I mean, granted, some of those things actually are a little freaky if you really stop and consider them, but the names can make them seem even scarier, in a strange way. Or they can make things that are completely innocuous sound sinister or at least more grandiose than they are.

Scientific phenomena named after people
List of scientific constants named after people
List of scientific laws named after people

Or maybe it's just that some people have scary-sounding names? I don't know. I mean, I guess the opposite is true, too. You could call something "the Bob effect," or "the Larry principle," or "the Timmy rule," and no matter how scary they may actually be, it still sounds silly.

But even then, if you had something called "Chad radiation," or "Cletus waves," or "the Bubba paradox," or "the Goober-Woody effect," it would still sound at least a little bit ominous, regardless of what it actually stands for. Basically, anything like "<name> radiation" or "<name> paradox" is always going to sound a little creepy, no matter what <name> may be and no matter what it's actually referring to.

Actual headline (which I changed up there for editorial purposes, to better reflect what has really happened): "Twitter is officially X.com now"

X.com is not, has never been, and will never be Twitter. Twitter technically died on October 28, 2022. It then became a brain dead coma patient for a little over a year and a half. And now, finally, the life support machine has been officially unplugged. Like so many other Internet things, Twitter has become a mostly irrelevant thing of the past, replaced by an already entirely irrelevant thing of the present, called X.com.

Not that Twitter was some utopian bed of roses even before Phony Stark took over, mind you, but still.

(EDIT) Just to note, all I personally see when I go to X.com is a "JavaScript is not available" warning page, which is explicitly because I do not have NoScript disabled for X.com. I will not ever be disabling NoScript for X.com. (/EDIT)

"Hi. There sure are a lot of media layoffs happening! Let's look at how and why that happened and what we can do to make sure quality journalism doesn't get phased out like National Geographic and Sports Illustrated."

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I almost immediately nope'd out of this episode when I saw that it was going to be yet another one that involved Warmbo (which the video's own captions repeatedly misspelled as "Worm Bow"), but I decided to stick it out, regardless.

The basic gist (or, at least, my own personal interpretation of the basic gist): advertising, marketing, capitalism, and just, like, the greedy pursuit of unsustainable and ever increasing amounts of money is deathly poison to journalismthe Internetthe world as a whole, in general. Also, I typed that previous sentence when I was literally only maybe two minutes into watching the video. Now that I have actually finished watching the whole video, I see absolutely no need to go back and change that prior sentence in any way, because that pretty much was the actual gist of the video. It was, pretty much, a fifty-five minutes and twenty-eight seconds long restatement of the phrase "the love of money is the root of all evil."

Also, all that shit makes this seem like an even more impossible task than I already imagined it to be.

(Really, though, whoever did the captions for this particular episode did a rather piss poor job of it. Did they, perhaps, use an "AI chatbot" to write them or something? Oh well, tangentially speaking, at least Worm BowWarmbo didn't play much of a role in this ep. The fact that he played any role at all wasn't great, but it could've been far, far worse, I suppose.)

"John Oliver discusses Elon Musk, the influence he has over more than just his businesses, and the perfect place for him and Mark Zuckerberg to finally have that cage match."

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Elon Musk is a piece of shit, and I'm sick of anything to do with him.

So, of course, I watched a 30+ minute Last Week Tonight video that is solely about Elon Musk.

Honestly, this Whole Thing™ is even worse than I thought. I thought he was a just an egomaniacal dumbfuck rich asshole, but he is apparently an egomaniacal dumbfuck rich asshole who actually has the US government kowtowing to his whims.

"Hi. In today's episode, we look at how people make money on the internet, how vulnerable tech platforms affect people's livelihoods, and why 'being your own boss' often means your boss is just Jeff Bezos."