# Bill Maher: "We SHOULD blame China." **URL:** \ **Category:** The Quarantine Zone\ **Tags:** covid-quarantine\ **Created:** [April 11, 2020, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550 "2020-04-11T05:15:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 7
**Author:** ![bobot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bobot/32/21622_2.png) [@bobot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bobot)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550/121 "2020-04-13T22:37:01Z")
> [@Bijou\_Drains](#): > > Surprised nobody claims Maher eats dead babies for breakfast. He’s been accused of almost everything else bad. Oooh, hyperbole fever! Catch it! ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550/122 "2020-04-13T23:07:14Z")
Who cares what Bill Maher thinks about China. Is he an epidemiologist? Does he work for the State Department? DoD? Has he lived in China? Has he studied Chinese politics? Can he read Mandarin? Does he bring any expertise greater than someone who more or less follows the news? Why Bill Maher: “We should blame China.” Why not Random guy at the bar: “We should blame China.” What extra weight does the proposition get by attaching Bill Maher’s name to it? He’s just some dude with no particular expertise. I haven’t follwed Maher since the 90s, when I realized I had better things to do with my time than to hate watch Politically Incorrect. But he was an utter colossal fool. He really believed that charlatans like john Edward and Williamson could speak to the dead. He defended them passionately and had them on the show multiple times. He talked about his own story involving a ghost moving pool balls around, and when Penn pointed out the many plausible explanations how a set of pool balls may have changed position he got insulting and condescending. He was an early anti-vaxxer and a big fan of PETA. Time has mercifully erased most of his BS poitical opinions from my memory, but one sticks out: his defense of the Vietnam War. His defense literally amounted to “We had to fight them somewhere.” (This got Ann Coulter nodding vigorously. I don’t understand why people are baffled they are friends. They overlap on many issues.) That was all he had to say and he repeated it without expanding. I mean if this had been your something Uncle Bob–the one who fought at Ia Drang and passed away from agent orange related cancer ten years ago–used to say at the VFW bar, OK. But from some guy with intellectual pretensions, come on. It was arguably the worst foreign policy disaster in US history (We could debate it versus Iraq, but this isn’t the thread.) with 55,000 dead American soldiers and Millions of dead Vietnamese, and all he could say was “We had to fight them somewhere?” Why, Bill, why did we have to fight “them” “somewhere?” No answer was forthcoming. ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 11:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550/123 "2020-04-13T23:15:11Z")
> [@Larry\_Borgia](#): > > I mean if this had been **your something** Uncle Bob GAH ! Something your. Shouldn’t type angry. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [April 13, 2020, 11:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550/124 "2020-04-13T23:38:21Z")
> [@Bijou\_Drains](#): > > Surprised nobody claims Maher eats dead babies for breakfast. He’s been accused of almost everything else bad. Because he’s a vegetarian. As he reminds everyone, ad nauseam. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550/125 "2020-04-14T00:46:59Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > I don’t want to go off-topic on this beyond responding to this one comment, but I do have to object. Is being “an obvious idiot” why his shows have garnered [41 Emmy nominations](https://www.emmys.com/bios/bill-maher)? Game of Thrones has over a hundred and twenty. Donald Trump personally has two. I don’t think “How many Emmy noms do they have?” is evidence of anything other than being entertaining on the TV. It certainly doesn’t speak to any particular insight or intelligence. ---
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550/126 "2020-04-14T04:14:17Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > Game of Thrones has over a hundred and twenty. Donald Trump personally has two. I don’t think “How many Emmy noms do they have?” is evidence of anything other than being entertaining on the TV. It certainly doesn’t speak to any particular insight or intelligence. I don’t know if you read through the whole thread but this and some related matters have already been addressed. But let me try to clarify and amplify. First of all, this thread is about the merit of whether “China” is to blame for the pandemic, and I’ll get to that in a moment. I just felt obliged to defend Maher against what I thought were unfair criticisms. But to address your immediate objection, in some cases you’d be right – it depends on what the Emmy is for. The Television Academy unfortunately created a category for “reality shows”, so the two that Trump was nominated for were essentially for “best show in the category of ‘worst drivel on television’”. Maher was nominated under a variety of different titles which sometimes changed from year to year, but they were mostly similar to the most recent, “Outstanding Variety Talk Series”. One would assume that the “talk” part would imply a meritorious level of “insight or intelligence”. Hannity’s show, for instance, and all its precessors, have, AFAIK, exactly zero nominations. It’s also worth mentioning that Maher’s work as executive producer on the HBO series _VICE_ has garnered him many nominations in the category of “Outstanding Informational Series or Special”, and that another category in which _Real Time_ gets a lot of nominations is outstanding writing. All subject to interpretation, of course, and if you don’t like Bill Maher, you’re entitled to your opinion, just don’t change the channel on Friday nights when I’m watching. 🙂 But perhaps a better insight could be had by taking a quick skim of [Bill Maher’s guest list on _Real Time_ over the years](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Real_Time_with_Bill_Maher_episodes). It’s an eclectic list, to be sure, and critics will inevitably zero in on the occasional crackpot (Ann Coulter was on too often in the early years, because Bill apparently enjoys sparring with her and it’s probably good for ratings). But notice the large number of serious thinkers, writers, journalists, and influential politicians who are the more typical guests, and often multiple times. Joe Biden has been on four times, Bernie Sanders several times, Barack Obama once while still president, Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren several times, Noam Chomsky at least once, and a great many others. Now back to the topic of China. I put “China” in quotes above because it can only be rationally interpreted to mean the Communist Party of China, and its leadership and policies, not any particular individual people either here or anywhere else in the world. They’ve allowed unhygienic dangerous practices and engaged in false information, deception, and coverups. This does not in any way absolve the US federal government or various incompetent state administrations for their own culpability and lack of preparedness, particularly the federal dismantling of pandemic monitoring and response teams. Finally, turning to the most recent developments, I’d like to juxtapose two posts I made recently; the bolding here has been added for emphasis: > [@wolfpup](#): > > … I agree that “Chinese virus” as a name is both useless and tinged with racism. **It is, however, both appropriate and vitally important to understand the origin of the COVID-19 virus** … the wet markets in question consist primarily or entirely of live animals in filthy conditions, stacked in cages on top of one another, many of them exotic and in this case, likely infected with the virus, possibly from bats – conditions that have been described by virologists as a “time bomb” for a pandemic. > [@wolfpup](#): > > Oh, isn’t this lovely: China begins to censor coronavirus research papers: > **China has imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of the novel coronavirus** , according to a central government directive and online notices published by two Chinese universities, that have since been removed from the web. > > Under the new policy, all academic papers on Covid-19 will be subject to extra vetting before being submitted for publication. Studies on the origin of the virus will receive extra scrutiny and must be approved by central government officials, according to the now-deleted posts. > [https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/12/asia/china-coronavirus-research-restrictions-intl-hnk/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/12/asia/china-coronavirus-research-restrictions-intl-hnk/index.html) ---
**Author:** ![Larry\_Borgia](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/larry_borgia/32/156_2.png) [@Larry\_Borgia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Borgia)\ **Post date:** [April 14, 2020, 4:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550/127 "2020-04-14T04:39:13Z")
Jesus fucking christ. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/bill-maher-we-should-blame-china/851550.md?page=6)