# Real Time with Bill Maher **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [October 10, 2023, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367 "2023-10-10T21:03:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 40
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/781 "2025-01-15T01:24:40Z")
> **[Opinion | Bill Maher serves up old, warmed-over beefs in new special](https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/bill-maher-special-is-anybody-else-seeing-this-rcna187017)** > > Maher isn’t going to ask whether there’s anything ironic about how much speech he devotes to the subject of freedom of speech. > [@](#): > > Louis C.K. could famously use a “Saturday Night Live” bit to confess he was mildly racist. Shane Gillis could fret that, politically speaking, he was becoming his Fox News dad. But Maher doesn’t use this opportunity to address an equally obvious critique of his recent work: Namely, that he seems to have transmogrified into an old, conservative white guy shaking his fist at Gen Z, new gender categories, EpiPens and anything else that didn’t exist in 1964… > > If Maher wants to convince his audience that free speech is under assault, he’d win over more listeners — and probably arrive at considerably more nuance — by continuing to dialogue with people who disagree with him. When he’s up there on his own in “Is Anyone Else Seeing This?” however, he merely celebrates his own positions, confusing smug certainty for a punchline and rendering his monologue monotonous. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/782 "2025-01-15T01:47:50Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > But fuck this bullshit with reforming the language. To some extent I can sympathize with you. We start with a situation or condition that has negative connotations. People use any descriptor of that condition in a negative way. Someone tries to create a neutral descriptor, but then that term gets the same corruption treatment. Rinse and repeat. Part of the problem is the perceived negative of the condition. But the larger part of the problem is the tendency for people to use labels in a derogatory manner. I don’t care what term you come up with, it will be misused and corrupted by people using the condition itself as a derogatory status, whatever label you use. For example, just look at “retarded”. It originally meant retarded development, slowed or limited mental capability. But it just became a way to call people stupid, by likening them to people with mental deficient conditions. So change the term to “special education”. Now those same wits use “special” with an ironic tone. Still used as a snarky way to call someone stupid. The problem isn’t the word, it’s human nature. At the same time, words morph. I grew up describing a certain kind of shoes as “thongs”. I can no longer refer to “thongs” for shoes a people will think I mean sexy underwear. I have to call them “flip-flops”. But I’m fuzzy on what you think of “woke”, as the stupid white people taking it over aren’t the ones trying to make reforms, they’re the same old assholes that corrupt those other words’ uses. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 2:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/783 "2025-01-15T02:11:04Z")
The phenomenon you’re describing is called the euphemism treadmill. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism\_treadmill](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euphemism#Euphemism_treadmill) Of course, it seems to me that if a word that was acceptable 50 years ago is no longer seen as such, the mature thing to do would be to stop using that word instead of raging against society and being a massive shithead about it, but then again I’m not a megamillionaire MLB owner, so what do I know? ---
**Author:** ![Odesio](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/odesio/32/20003_2.png) [@Odesio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Odesio)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/784 "2025-01-15T03:37:30Z")
> [@crowmanyclouds](#): > > We weren’t at war with China in 1937. In fact, they were allies. One of the reasons the Chinese Exclusionary Acts were repealed was because it was embarrassing for the United States to have a law treating their allies in such a manner. ---
**Author:** ![WOOKINPANUBv.2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wookinpanubv.2/32/3260_2.png) [@WOOKINPANUBv.2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WOOKINPANUBv.2)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 4:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/785 "2025-01-15T04:13:57Z")
I watched the special and think it’s ok. I mostly like Bill, but _that’s_ mostly holdover affection from Politically Incorrect days. Some things I agree with (though I wouldn’t phrase it the same) and some do make him sound like a cranky old man. Speaking of which, at this point I could really do without him talking about his dick and/or anything he does, or wants to do, with it. I’m not usually bothered by sex jokes at all but for some reason, coming out of his mouth it’s particularly repulsive. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/786 "2025-01-15T14:31:44Z")
> [@Irishman](#): > > Regarding the Dr. Seuss book, that particular book treated certain ethnic groups as animals in their zoo, including said “Chinaman”, and the wollygog Black Africans, also shown in the image posted by @crowmanyclouds in post 745. Maybe putting _people in zoos_ isn’t the best image to convey in 2025. Nitpick: If you’re talking about “If I Ran The Zoo”, the people weren’t being put into zoos; they were shown carrying the animals to be added to the zoo. They’re still horrifically racist portrayals (and I tended to skip those page when reading the book to my daughter when she was younger), but they’re not being presented as zoo animals. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/787 "2025-01-15T15:24:07Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > You can no longer be “crippled”. You can no longer even be “disabled”. I don’t even know any more what the fuck you’re supposed to be called “People with disabilities” is the preferred language in Canada. It’s one of the acceptable terms in the U.S. along with “disabled person”. It may be of interest to note that the National Institutes of Health is under fire for the portion of its [mission statement](https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/mission-goals) that says “NIH’s mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” - specifically, the part about reducing disability, which [critics complain\*](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2810963#:~:text=about%20reducing%20disability%3A-,“To%20seek%20fundamental%20knowledge%20about%20the%20nature%20and%20behavior%20of,reduce%20illness%20for%20all%20people.”) is an ableist statement. Maher would have a party with that one, though he’d likely turn it into a typical Maher jerk-fest. \*“The current NIH mission statement suggests erasure, devaluation of an identity and existence that disabled people value and many view with pride.” ---
**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:** [January 15, 2025, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/788 "2025-01-15T16:01:42Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > It may be of interest to note that the National Institutes of Health is under fire for the portion of its [mission statement](https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/mission-goals) that says “NIH’s mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” - specifically, the part about reducing disability, which [critics complain\*](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2810963#:~:text=about%20reducing%20disability%3A-,%E2%80%9CTo%20seek%20fundamental%20knowledge%20about%20the%20nature%20and%20behavior%20of,reduce%20illness%20for%20all%20people.%E2%80%9D) is an ableist statement. Thank you for that note. That is indeed the kind of thing Maher talks about, and the kind of thing that drives me nuts, too, as should be obvious from my other comments. I can’t even imagine what the author of that bullshit commentary is thinking, except that it’s somehow insulting to people with disabilities to view a disability as an adversity, and to consider it to be something that medical science should strive to fix. This is such utter bullshit that I’m practically speechless. I’m surprised to see it in a reputable journal like JAMA. But then, the AMA were part of the contingent of American assholes who invaded Saskatchewan in 1962, along with American health insurance lobbyists, to try to block the enactment of single-payer universal health care. The moral imperative here is that we not discriminate against people with disabilities, including being willing to hire them for jobs that they’re perfectly capable of doing because their particular disability is irrelevant to the job function. But the point that Maher is making about woke extremists – and exemplified in that article – is that part of their dogma is that disability should never be acknowledged, or even that it should be celebrated (implicit in the ridiculous moniker “differently-abled”). It’s possible to respect the rights and dignity of disabled people without going through linguistic contortions to pretend that their disabilities don’t exist. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/789 "2025-01-15T17:06:22Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > the kind of thing that drives me nuts, too, as should be obvious from my other comments. I can’t even imagine what the author of that bullshit commentary […] > This is such utter bullshit that I’m practically speechless Do you think your level of outrage is proportionate here? In some cases yeah, I don’t see much point in changing the terminology but I also don’t care. If someone actually gets called a bigot or whatever when they just didn’t know, I think that’s unfair. But I see no evidence of that here, just a request and then people losing their minds. Earlier you said you were “neutral” about the conflict in Gaza, even while acknowledging human rights abuses. Right way round? ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/790 "2025-01-15T17:17:01Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > I can’t even imagine what the author of that bullshit commentary is thinking, except that it’s somehow insulting to people with disabilities to view a disability as an adversity, and to consider it to be something that medical science should strive to fix. Yep, that’s gotta be the stupidest thing I’ve heard all day. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/791 "2025-01-15T17:21:23Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > It’s possible to respect the rights and dignity of disabled people without going through linguistic contortions to pretend that their disabilities don’t exist. It’s much worse than linguistic silliness. It also betrays an ideological reluctance to do anything to fix these issues. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/792 "2025-01-15T17:23:27Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > It’s much worse than linguistic silliness. It also betrays an ideological reluctance to do anything to fix these issues. Sorry - which issues are we fixing? ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/793 "2025-01-15T17:35:42Z")
> [@Gyrate](#): > > which issues are we fixing? Well, if you read the posts being quoted, it’s pretty clear: > [@Jackmannii](#): > > It may be of interest to note that the National Institutes of Health is under fire for the portion of its [mission statement](https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/what-we-do/mission-goals) that says “NIH’s mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” - specifically, the part about reducing disability, which [critics complain\*](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2810963#:~:text=about%20reducing%20disability%3A-,%E2%80%9CTo%20seek%20fundamental%20knowledge%20about%20the%20nature%20and%20behavior%20of,reduce%20illness%20for%20all%20people.%E2%80%9D) is an ableist statement. Reducing disability is a good thing. It’s an AMAZING thing. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/794 "2025-01-15T17:44:09Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > Well, if you read the posts being quoted, it’s pretty clear: In the context of the back-and-forth in this thread, it wasn’t. But I got it now. > [@Babale](#): > > Reducing disability is a good thing. It’s an AMAZING thing. You’d be surprised how some people feel. Tell the deaf community that they need to be “fixed”, for example, and you’ll be lucky to get out with all your limbs intact. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/795 "2025-01-15T17:47:59Z")
> [@Gyrate](#): > > You’d be surprised how some people feel Oh, I’m not _surprised_ at all. > [@Gyrate](#): > > Tell the deaf community that they need to be “fixed”, for example, and you’ll be lucky to get out with all your limbs intact. It’s one (wrong) thing to tell a disabled person that they need to be “fixed”; it’s a whole other thing to subject future generations to disability to respect people’s feelings. A person who was crippled by Polio is a valuable human being, a respected member of the community, and a unique voice that we should listen to. But we sure as fuck shouldn’t be ensuring that some portion of future kids continue to be ravaged by Polio so the rest of us can grow from their valuable experiences. ---
**Author:** ![Zoobi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/13edae/32.png) [@Zoobi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoobi)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/796 "2025-01-15T17:48:42Z")
Isn’t this classic nutpicking? I suppose that is the basis for this kind of comedy, but I think you anti-woke warriors are letting yourselves get radicalized by it. ---
**Author:** ![Babale](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/babale/32/15666_2.png) [@Babale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Babale)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/797 "2025-01-15T17:50:04Z")
> [@Zoobi](#): > > Isn’t this classic nutpicking? I don’t know; is it? If we all agreed that this idea was nuts, maybe it would be nutpicking. But it seems like there are plenty of people willing to defend criticism of the NIH on the grounds that it is “ableist”. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 5:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/798 "2025-01-15T17:54:09Z")
There’s a difference between telling deaf people they should have surgery, and having as part of your mission preventing measles, mumps, meningitis and other ailments causing deafness. ---
**Author:** ![Zoobi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/13edae/32.png) [@Zoobi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoobi)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/799 "2025-01-15T18:00:29Z")
> [@Babale](#): > > I don’t know; is it? I think so. But if you think this is representative of your enemy, “wokeism”, then there’s not much I can argue with you about. You think what you think ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [January 15, 2025, 6:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367/800 "2025-01-15T18:04:54Z")
I totally agree. But this is why the wording is so important and may raise hackles. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367.md?page=39) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/real-time-with-bill-maher/991367.md?page=41)