[FRIAM] Joe Rogan interviewing Bernie Sanders.

[glen]

These tangents are a great example of why Drew's content is good. But even though Pieter zoomed out a little bit, he didn't zoom out the whole way. Drew's primary point was that Abbott et al *use* useful idiots like Rogan to achieve their agenda. All the morons who mindlessly plug into Rogan think about litter boxes in schools, geometric unity, how 1x1=2, and fighting the "woke mind virus". And because they're spending their precious attention on that bullshit, they *don't* pay attention to how money is being funneled into the bank accounts and corporations of the wealthy.

As with many of the optimistic framings of technologies¹ like school vouchers, were they used in complete Good Faith, by diligent Good Faith actors, maybe they'd be good things. But, as with *any* other tech, they will inevitably be abused. They will always be abused. And that's what Drew's pointing out, here. Vouchers funnel money from the poor to the wealthy.

And idiots like Rogan are a primary part of *how* the funneling happens.


[1] Vouchers are similar to financial instruments similar to mortgage backed securities and such. These are fundamentally technologies, part of Steve's "computronium".

On 6/26/25 10:31 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> I just want to rewind a bit to what Glenn said earlier in this thread:
> 
> "Joe Rogan’s Lies Just Destroyed Public Schools In Texas"
> https://youtu.be/sJO_xCw35WI?si=5zr2NGFAGvTQagfM <https://youtu.be/sJO_xCw35WI?si=5zr2NGFAGvTQagfM>
> 
> I listened to the video, and — as it was presented — my knee did what knees do best: it jerked. I found myself instinctively nodding along. But then, somewhere between the outrage and the YouTube autoplay, I remembered a tiny detail… I don’t actually know enough about the specifics to have a firm opinion. So I’m parking my knee and diving into some homework before picking a side.
> 
> However, for now I wish to zoom out from the details of the Texas school system and focus on the principles around this issue:
> 
> Full disclosure: I don’t subscribe to the Christian Bible myself. If given a choice between a secular school and a religious one — and everything else is equal — I’d pick the secular option without hesitation.
> 
> But if my neighbour is a Christian and wants her kids to go to a Christian school, am I going to criticize her for that? Absolutely not. Not even a side-eye.
> 
> Now, here’s where it gets interesting. If we’re all chipping in tax money for public education, then yes — I’m 100% on board with keeping religion out of public schools. That’s not only a fair deal, I would be horrified if any religion were included.
> 
> But if my neighbour is still paying her taxes like the rest of us, and on top of that has to fork out again to send her kids to a private Christian school — that's also just not right. A voucher system, to me, seems like a fair compromise. It respects both freedom of choice and fairness of contribution. Maybe it’s not a perfect solution, but it does stop us from double-charging parents for believing something different.
> 
> For me, diversity of opinions and freedom to choose your religion is a very good and positive thing.
> 
> On Fri, 27 Jun 2025 at 02:33, Santafe <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto:desmith at santafe.edu>> wrote:
> 
> 
>>     On Jun 27, 2025, at 7:31, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     Dave writes:
>>
>>     <My 'mysticism', like my hallucinogenic experience, is nothing more than a source of what I consider to be "real" data and a supply of fascinating questions—never answers.>
>>
>>     Not clear why something that supposedly cannot be captured by mere language keeps getting pitched as a real and intersubjective thing via language.
> 
>     I am much less bothered by this _in principle_, since I generally hold the two premises:
> 
>     1. Language is a collection of signals _within_ a system, that are part of coordinating states among people; it doesn’t follow that language should “contain” or “capture” anything that works as a model “of” the system, in the way I would want formalism to have a mappability to phenomena in anything I consider science.  Often language-in-general will have some mutual information with something closer to a model, but that is partly luck and not uniform.  Languages that do have those mappable qualities tend to be more bespoke, because they were under heavy pressure to do that job, which is somewhat different from the background social/material criteria for the great majority of language (though scientific language and sense can both, I would argue, be seen to grow out of their counterparts that have some presence in the broader bulk of language and commonsense); and
> 
>     2. The term “reality” is a problem in general.  It is still too close to its origins in the hand-me-down umbrella term from common usage, which gets it accepted and used with a fluency that belies its evasive and indefinite character.  I would put it, in most instances of usage, in the category I call “placeholder terms”.  They enable the rest of discourse to proceed, because something is needed in those slots, but that doesn’t mean they necessarily carry very good meanings on their own.  To the extent that “reality” has a central tendency of meaning, it seems (to me) to be around the notion of “since we are always trying to economize on attention, which things are safest to turn your back on, in the expectation that they will still be there and not bite you in the meantime?”
> 
>     So for a language-term to be suggesting that it is trying to coordinate a state, with some somewhat reflexive situation-statement acknowleding that it does not have a model of the state, together with the state itself’s being so loosely handled that it is not clear when the people really are coordinated or how they would decide on that, I can certainly see this kind of pattern as an ordinary occurrence.  Even if some intersubjectivity would be reasonable to expect, in view of our vast overlapping constitution shared by all being people, primates, mammals, and so on.
> 
>     I do like the idea that this is just a version of the normal confusion, for things not understood very well (like, quite badly), and that one could find ways to do better.
> 
>     Eric
> 
-- 
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