Maher serves a useful purpose: He’s a contrarian. He’ll oppose the Democrats on something, then when Republicans cheer he’ll turn to them and say, “Shut up. You’re next, assholes.”
We need more contrarians and fewer people who can be counted on to endlessly parrot the political talking points of their side. Those are the tedious ones.
And he’s funny. The first rule of cimedy is that you’d better be funny. Comedians who forget that in favor of making political statements are the ones I can’t stand, on either the left or the right. I don’t care how shocking or edgy they are if they are also funny.
Now that @wolfpup has fallen off my ignore list (I set it only until the new year.), I think I may be able to finally address the underlying issue without being quite so pissed off at him. He pissed me off so much that I forgot why I started replying to him in the first place.
I knew going in that convincing him of my point of view was a long shot. My goal was to prove to him that people who disagree with him are not being dishonest. That’s what pissed me off—his claim that all of us were lying about Maher because we didn’t agree with his interpretation.
Even if we stick to only the things that all of us agree that Maher has done, that alone is enough for people to validly disapprove of Maher. There is no moral obligation to try and find all the bits that are good. There is no reason that we can’t weigh the bad as worse than the good.
I (and many others) have additional criteria that anyone who cites freedom of speech to justify having on someone with odious views has a requirement to debunk them. Otherwise, they are effectively endorsing them. I also do not tolerate those who repeat stuff from right wing rage-bait articles, like most of his “anti woke” stuff.
It’s not that you, @wolfpup, have to have the same criteria. It’s that our criteria is legitimate, and a legitimate reason to “hate” Maher. We can genuinely look at this and think he causes more harm than good. We can think he’s actually empowering the right and actively making everything worse.
I don’t agree at all. Being a contrarian is not a good thing, and doesn’t have much value. Because they are always disagreeable, their arguments are easy to dismiss. They disagree with what is popular, not what is actually bad.
The only exception is the occasional “devil’s advocate”. But that requires you to actually make arguments. But that’s not what Maher does. He uses rhetoric. He attacks rather than argue. He uses sarcasm and snark to dismiss rather than actually rebutting. (Which, to be fair, is what comedians do.)
Is he all that funny, though? I’m not basing this on my sense of humor, either. What I mean is that I tend to hear a lot more applause than laughter in the clips I’ve seen. And the comments of those who like him seem to always be about his point of view, not laughing at a joke.
He himself does seem to prioritize making a political point over the humor—at least, in all of those “New Rule” segments.
Sorry folks, accept my apologies.
I thought you would recognize that I was being sarcastic and using hyperbole.
I blew it. Big time.
Again, I.m sorry for scaring everybody.
But Maher has a point that the progressive branch of the Dem party is scaring people away from voting for Biden.
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist conservative in such a way that someone won’t mistake for the genuine article. ~ Nathan Poe
One issue is that X and Y are very often related. For example, his take on trans issues is one of the arguments he uses to attack progressives as harming the Democratic party. In fact, I’d say that pretty much all of his anti-woke stuff is based on things he is wrong about. He believes the right-wing outrage bait articles.
Also, there’s the issue that making you laugh can get around some of your mental defenses against bullshit. That’s what makes comedy so powerful as a tool of persuasion. It can get around the issue that you “cannot reason a person out of a position he did not reason himself into in the first place.” It thus makes sense to be more careful with the comedians you watch.
There are things Maher is right about. But he’s also not the only one who is saying them. I don’t really see any reason to listen to him. I did give the occasional listen before he started the anti-woke and anti-trans stuff that would have been right at home on Fox (and before his anti-union BS during the strike) but now I see no point in doing so.
I’m not saying you have to agree with me on that, but I do think it makes sense that people would be surprised you’d listen to him. I would in fact argue that his positions on those things make him less entertaining, as those positions are so evil.
Again this is the difference: when we criticize the modern American right, we can point to the actual words, policies and actions of leaders of the GOP, including their likely nominee for president, as well as the most popular conservative channels and leaders.
When it comes to the “madness” of the left it’s necessary to just make shit up or wildly exaggerate.
It began and continues with deplorables.
Bud light had one commercial, once, where a trans woman drank a beer. The response was fuckdumb on day 1 and is still fuckdumb on day 100 (or whatever). What exactly is the problem here, you think Bud is trying to force you to be trans?
If you’re talking about Dylan Mulvaney . . . there wasn’t even an actual commercial,
The controversy began on April 1, when Ms. Mulvaney posted a video on her Instagram account, where she has 1.8 million followers, to promote a Bud Light contest.
…
Her Bud Light promotional post was less than a minute long and was mostly about a $15,000 giveaway that the company sponsored during March Madness. She mentions that the company sent her a tallboy can with her face on it to celebrate a full year of her “Days of Girlhood” series. https://www.nytimes.com/article/bud-light-boycott.html
On the matter of Maher’s quip that “San Franciscso has basically legalized shoplifting”, I fully addressed this in post #229, including appropriate due criticism of Maher. This thread is getting pretty long and I’m thinking you probably missed that post. In case I wasn’t clear enough, let me re-iterate:
San Francisco (and also LA) indisputably has significant problems with crime and homelessness, including an epidemic of shoplifting.
Both those cities have liberal municipal governments and are in a left-leaning state.
The attribution of fact #1 to fact #2 is wrong.
The problem with what Maher said is not in the casual hyperbole of the specific words he used, which you seem obsessed about, but in his attribution to excessive “liberalism”, whatever the hell that’s even supposed to mean, and yes, that aligns with a persistent right-wing talking point.
I’m particularly conscious of why this is mistaken because I live in a city and in a country that is extremely liberal by US standards, and although shoplifting certainly does occur in this city, it’s not nearly at the epidemic levels that Maher is talking about. And while it’s generally not wise to offer simple explanations for complex problems, there is one important difference here that is important enough that I’m going to put it in bold:
The difference here is that shoplifters get charged and prosecuted.
I’m aware of various pilot programs here that seek to minimize the involvement of police resources for minor shoplifting offenses, but the bolded statement is generally true nonetheless, certainly to a far greater extent than seems to be the case in SF. Even if police don’t attend the scene for a minor shoplifting incident, the policy of one recent pilot program is nevertheless for store security to identify and report the accused to police, and police reserve the right to lay charges afterward, for instance if they determine that it’s not a first offense. The maximum penalty for the lowest level of offense – theft under $5000 – is two years in prison. And any conviction at all results in a criminal record.
What Maher is talking about is the almost complete lack of consequences in SF. This is not about “the loony left”, but it is ultimately about bad governance.
I used to like him, but I stopped HBO, and couldn’t watch anymore. I disagreed with his food/medicine views, and he’s a member of PETA. Then I was not cool with his Muslim views. I am an Atheist, but I don’t hate any particular religion. So I was never a devote, and from the sounds of things, I would surely have stopped watching him by now anyway.
Or (as in Maher’s case) contrarians express contrariness because it makes them popular, at least among people who imagine themselves as being Courageous Rebels Defying The System. The pandemic has spawned lots of these types.
Fans readily overlook his idiotic, destructive rants on science and medicine and excuse his advice to distrust medical professionals, because they don’t care, or find him “entertaining” and “funny”.
Sorry, I’ll get my entertainment from those I respect.
That’s likely in there somewhere, but having watched the guy (and more or less every other comedian in the English speaking world) for decades, my honest impression of Maher is that he genuinely places an enormous amount of value in speaking honestly. That is really a central part of his character. It’s not an act.
Repeating that reflects the way the issue is framed by the right in the USA. Even the item about “bad governance” is the way the right pushes this wedge in.
Over the last couple of years, it seemed that America was experiencing a shoplifting epidemic. Videos of people brazenly stealing merchandise from retailers often went viral; chains closed some of their stores and cited a rise in theft as the primary reason; and drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens started locking up more of their inventory, including everyday items like toothpaste, soaps, and snacks. Lawmakers from both major parties called for, and in some cases even implemented, more punitive law enforcement policies aimed at bucking the apparent trend.
But evidence of a spike in shoplifting, it turns out, was mostly anecdotal. In fact, there’s little data to suggest that there’s a nationwide problem in need of an immediate response from city councils or state legislatures. Instead, what America seems to be experiencing is less of a shoplifting wave and more of a moral panic.
For some time, retailers had indeed been complaining about a rise in theft. In April, the National Retail Federation, a lobbying group for retailers, published a report to back up that claim. It said that nearly half of all inventory loss in 2021, which amounted to roughly $94 billion, was driven by “organized retail crime” — that is, coordinated shoplifting for the purpose of reselling goods on the black market. As it turned out, organized shoplifting didn’t come close to costing businesses that much: With a few exceptions, major US cities actually saw lower shoplifting rates in 2022 than in 2019, and in December, the National Retail Federation retracted its alarming claim.
That’s not to say that shoplifting ought to be ignored. Particularly concerning are reports of organized rings stealing merchandise to turn a profit, rather than people who steal products they need but can’t afford, like baby formula. One expert told the New York Times that organized retail theft accounts for roughly 5 percent of total inventory loss — a far more modest estimate than the National Retail Federation’s original erroneous claim, but one that still amounts to billions of dollars a year. While that’s a minuscule problem for big retailers, small businesses that are targeted can feel the pinch. Added security measures also mean a more unpleasant experience for consumers, as well as a potentially more expensive one because, as some analysts say, the added costs for retailers are reflected in higher prices.
In the years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, progressive prosecutors, who pushed for a more lenient and less punitive criminal justice system, had been gaining ground. But their critics have pounced on faulty statistics like the one put out by the National Retail Federation as evidence that America needs to expand policing and once again impose harsher penalties for petty crimes, reversing reforms that have sought to reduce incarceration rates, including looser enforcement of laws around things like drug possession, loitering, or, in some cases, shoplifting low-cost goods.
Now, those more forgiving criminal justice policies are at risk, in part because of a perceived trend that appears to have been overblown.
Even back in October I posted about how the numbers don’t back up the right wing bullshit being pushed by conservative pundits and Maher. So that’s no surprise.
Looking through the article, I’m struck by how entirely irrelevant it is to the conversation we’re having. For more reasons than I can probably even remember to list:
It talks about national averages; we’re talking here about San Francisco
It talks about recent changes in incident reports, including decreases in certain places, which is entirely irrelevant to persistently high absolute numbers
It talks about political pressure to increase penalties for shoplifting, which has absolutely nothing to do with the problem of lack of enforcement and is not something that either Maher or anyone here has even mentioned. Indeed by increasing rates of incarceration – something that Republicans think is the answer to everything – it would likely make the problem worse by creating a more entrenched criminal class less amenable to rehabilitation.
It complains that (in one case, at least) the retailers’ association was shown to have exaggerated the problem. So what? If I say I have three feet of water in my basement and it’s actually just two feet, I still have a problem, no?
Most damning of all, it once again talks about reported incidents, which is not only irrelevant but hugely misleading when the whole entire problem is about how few incidents are actually being reported, and the relatively small fraction of shoplifters who are being apprehended to face consequences. It whines that so much of the data is “anecdotal”. Well of course it’s fucking anecdotal – if it’s not being accurately reported and systematically tracked, anecdotes are all you have, but they need to be taken seriously if the anecdotes are numerous and overwhelmingly persistent and you see retailers being robbed blind right before your eyes (as our poster from SF recently described) and see retailers literally giving up and closing their stores.
Getting back to Maher, he’s never claimed to have better data than anyone else. He’s saying that here are all these pervasive media reports, and here’s what I think the cause is. As I’ve acknowledged at least twice now, I think his attribution of cause to “the loony left” is quite wrong, or at best misguided and simplistic, and yes, it does play into the hands of the right-wing lunatics. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real problem. And lack of enforcement of rampant shoplifting appears to be a significant contributing factor.
You’re probably misunderstanding what I mean by “bad governance”. As I previously said, if a comparable different area – like my example of a big Canadian city – has a much lesser problem than the apparently rampant epidemic of shoplifting in LA and SF, then one pretty much has to conclude that it’s an issue of governance. Probably for many reasons and probably at every level of government, creating problems like social inequalities, inadequate social services, poor priorities, inadequate policing, and counterproductive approaches to crime, or as the humourist Dave Barry once said (paraphrased) there is no problem in society that a politician, dedicated to the cause and working diligently, cannot make worse. If governance isn’t the core issue, then one has to conclude that human beings living in these different places must somehow be constructed differently.