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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that both Neil Young and Joe Rogan are good people that are doing what they think is right.

But, in my judgement, they're both making serious mistakes.

Young is making the mistake of trying to summon and/or join a mob to silence someone. And Rogan is making the mistake of not handling his Covid-related conversations with the diligence a pandemic ethically requires.

In neither case do they deserve hatred. The best outcome would be for them, or at least others, to learn from their mistakes.

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How is Young trying to silence anyone? He clearly knew the answer to the question of "it's me or Rogan" before he posed it.

He's just making it very clear what his position is on Spotify's tacit support of misinformation and he's taking a financial hit to boot.

Comparing Young to Rogan in this instance is a bit of a stretch. Young might force people to think a bit, Rogan either directly or indirectly, is causing people to distrust the vast majority of experts with some sort of dudebro contrarian outlook - and people will die due to it

That's doesn't seem like an accurate take on what he's doing.

Young is either hoping that other people will follow his lead or knows that it could happen. That's why he made it a big public announcement. Young is very openly trying to pressure Spotify into cancelling Rogan.

Whether Young's mistake here is as big as Rogan's is a very complex question.

What we can know for sure is that trying to cancel people because you disagree with them is an extremely corrosive thing to do in a free and open society. It's a very big mistake.

> Young is making the mistake of trying to summon and/or join a mob to silence someone.

Ironically, Rogan’s career in comedy was launched through doing exactly this (cancelling Carlos Mencia).

Rogan outed Mencia as a serial joke thief, which undoubtedly hurt Mencia's career, but I'm not sure that counts as cancellation.

For example, one would not fairly characterize Hannibal Burris as "cancelling" Bill Cosby's career by outing him as a serial rapist.

If Young was outing Rogan I would have no objection. But all of the behavior by Rogan that Young disagrees with happened in public, for anyone to see. Young is not exposing any new information.

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