The Neil Young situation is really sad.
Right wing twitter is being dumb and Trumpian about it, talking about how they think his music is bad.
Neil Young's site is the most boomer website I have ever seen. It has white text on light background.
neilyoungarchives.com/news/1/article
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He doesn't understand the information landscape today, saying nonsense stuff like this:
(I would cut and paste the text, but his 1998 website does not allow it.)
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As an alternative to Spotify he suggests that listeners can find his music on Amazon.
Maybe one day he will type in google.com in his browser window, search for Amazon in the search box, click it, and discover that it's possible to find misinformation there.
Replying to
His website has "contrarian" in the title. Of course Joe Rogan is a contrarian. Neil Young is "the man", wanting to try and use his power to silence the contrarian voices.
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Somewhat ironically (but expected) he has himself fallen for soft misinformation, in thinking the dumbass letter by 270 doctors represent some kind of authoritative take.
But of course it's possible to find 270 health professionals to support many odd things.
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Without going into the weeds about the letter, it is clearly rather dumb, complaining that:
"He has discouraged vaccination in young people and children, incorrectly claimed that mRNA vaccines are “gene therapy,” "
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As a society we have a debate about whether children should be vaccinated. There are instituions, experts, and epidemiologists on both sides, and it's of course a debate we should have, not silence.
You can find countless peer-reviewed papers calling the mRNA tech "gene therapy"
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But let's set that aside for now, and make the assumption that this petition is correct.
Still, it's worth thinking about at a more meta-level what kind of world actions like Neil Young's will lead to.
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Do we want a world in which powerful artists or even corporations habitually use their push to try and silence individual voices? What if this power is used against someone who Neil Young thinks is not wrong?
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Do we want a world in which people or entities with different political views cannot coexist on any platform, even if that platform doesn't have any views itself, but just offers portal of access?
Is the information siloing of our current world not bad enough?
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