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Comment by _-david-_ | Hacker News Reader

I mean, maybe if enough people cry about it? Careful what you wish for?

Those are called explicit and not offensive.

And who is the arbiter of what's "explicit" and not "offensive"? You? Me? Twitter? I totally support Spotify exercising its corporate agenda (whatever it may be), but let's not pretend there's some sort of moral high ground here.

The targets of the slur are the ones who get to decide to co-opt it or not and if they want outsiders to use it not.

The n-word has been co-opted, in a fashion, by the black community. Members of the black community, for the largest part, would still would be offended if I used that word.

Queer has been co-opted by the LGBQT+ community, members of that community have asked me to use queer to describe them. Still feels weird to me to even to type it here. The f-word is out of bounds.

Freedom of speech lets you use any of those words but, like all speech, others may judge you harshly because of those words and how you use them.

Really, this isn't hard to figure out.

>Those are called explicit and not offensive.

The two aren't mutually exclusive.

JRE is also marked as explicit in Spotify

If Eminem released a song with that word, would it be offensive?

Yes, if he was the one using it. This should be obvious at this point.

A lot of people would find _any_ song by Eminem offensive.

In this case, the speaker of the words apologized for their offensiveness. Maybe we should take his word that they were, in fact, offensive.

And? Spotify is apologizing partially because Rogan used the N word. Some people consider it offensive so they apologized. Why not apologize over the others who did the same thing?

Rogan apologized too. No need for the "gotcha" act.

He only apologized after he got in trouble, so I feel less moved by that apology than if he had done so organically.

When have you realized you did a bad thing and then publicly apoligized about it thus drawing more attention to it?

So Spotify is only going apologize if somebody who says the N word also apologizes. Since all those musicians who used it aren't apologizing then Spotify won't?

I don't know what Spotify will do. I am saying that we should take Rogan's word for it when he apologized for being offensive.

Rogan didn't apologize for 'being offensive', he did so for unknowingly causing offense by mentioning the so-called 'N-word' in sensible contexts. It ought to go without saying that taking offense at such mentions, as if someone were somehow inherently complicit with slavery and/or racism for the mere neutral utterance of even the most hateful slur can only be described as irrational, even magical thinking.

Except that isn't what he apologized for at all. It requires "irrational, even magical thinking" to interpret his words that way.

From Rogan [1]:

“the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.”

“horrible, even to me.”

“I was trying to make the story entertaining and I said it was like we got out and we were in Africa. It’s like we were in ‘Planet of the Apes,’” he said, adding that it was an “idiotic” thing to say that “looks terrible even in context.”

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/05/arts/music/joe-rogan-spot...

That's of course one thing he apologized for. And in context it could easily be excused as humor, though of course I would hardly fault anyone for taking offense at such a crass and unbecoming "joke".

What happened to "he did so for unknowingly causing offense by mentioning the so-called 'N-word' in sensible contexts"?

He did both, and the N-word thing was the most direct causal factor (because it had been pointed out in a viral video). The Planet of the Apes/Africa "joke" was something that Rogan chose to also talk about since it made sense to deal with both. (Similarly, he chose to remove a far greater amount of podcasts than those that had explicitly been mentioned as containing the problematic word, to deal with the issue as a whole. This is him taking sincere steps to rectify the offense he may have inadvertently caused. He clearly could have "gotten away" with far less, had he wanted to.)

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