I don’t think I’m “obsessed”, but there’s a simple answer to explain the position I’ve staked out here. For at least the past decade and a half, I’ve been a regular viewer of Real Time and found it entertaining and frequently informative. The gentle drone of congenial late-night conversation with interesting people is more or less a Friday night fixture around here.
Those who expend a great deal of energy vilifying Maher are welcome to not watch the show – I won’t criticize anyone for that. But I think that most of the haters either have a particular axe to grind, like about his regrettable views on medical science, or else, like one of the characters in the story of the blind men and the elephant, they have an incomplete and inaccurate impression of the subject.
That said, Maher’s dismissal of medical science in favour of “doing your own research” regarding vaccines and other science-based medical guidance is idiotic and I share people’s annoyance with it. If I had Maher’s email address I’d send him this picture:
Repeatedly giving a platform to cranks and quacks who gain notoriety and further opportunities to profit is the issue, beyond feebleness or lack of efforts to “push back” on these grifters. Maher is harvesting the consequences of having his moral compass governed by what gets him higher ratings.
Professed disapproval of Maher’s anti-science nonsense is a bit difficult to swallow when it comes from a poster who referred to his antivax rants as merely being “cynical” about vaccines.
My particular choice of words notwithstanding, I’ve been extremely clear about what I do and do not believe in relation to vaccines in general and the COVID vaccines in particular. You know what’s actually difficult to swallow? An internet poster telling me what I actually believe. Especially after what I clearly stated. Incidentally, I just got a reminder from the Ministry of Health that I’m due for yet another COVID booster, and of course I’m scheduling an appointment.
Apparently if I wanted to get your approval, the only way to do it is to unconditionally condemn Bill Maher and everything he’s ever said or done, petition HBO to cancel his show, and curse his mother for ever giving birth to him. It’s unfortunate that you’re taking such a stridently confrontational attitude over this. I can appreciate your strong feelings as a medical professional, but there is such a thing as nuance.
I haven’t watched or listened to Maher’s show for years. He used to put together some excellent panels with truly diverse viewpoints, and then inevitably derail the fascinating discussions in progress with some asinine quip. When you’re the worst part of your own show, it’s not a good sign (see also: Chevy Chase).
My take on Maher remains unchanged: sometimes he is right on point. Sometimes he is spectacularly wrong. But he is never not an asshole.
Maher was in an episode of Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. At one point they went to Maher’s house in Trousdale Estates, an elite community within Beverly Hills. Maher made Seinfeld some sort of snack which featured organic butter or organic bread or something – I now like to think that it was butter made from the milk of arthritic goats.
Anyway, at one point Seinfeld saw a picture of Maher’s father, in uniform during his service in WW2. “He was very handsome”, Seinfeld says. “Yes”, Maher replies, “I don’t know what happened to me.”
Back in my younger days, “woke” was called morals.
When one sees the anti woke warriors banning books, banning the teaching of history, banning equity, banning research, etc, in a way that minorities are more affected by those bans, it points to what I noticed early:
Declaring something “woke” is the new way to tell businesses and institutions (specially the ones with a lot of white people involved who have any progressive leanings), to stop being “Ni**** lovers”.
I was a big fan of Maher and Real Time for many years, even attending a taping of an episode at one point. But over time he seemed to become more and more of a smug, self-righteous asshole. After Stan Lee passed away and Maher went on a tirade insulting not only him and his entire legacy, but all of us fans as well, I was done with him.
I am certainly glad I stopped watching at that point, because he has been going further and further down a right-wing path. He reminds me of Dennis Miller’s decent into conservatism after 9/11. His transphobia alone is enough to make me tell him to go fuck himself, but his fans and supporters don’t seem to care about that.
I chose to highlight guests from the current season. I made no representation that those four typified Maher’s guests over the decades.
I mentioned them to illustrate why I sometimes find his show to be not worth my time: he’ll have on guests who merely repeat their standard talking points and who get no effective pushback against them. Other times there will be some actual back-and-forth that’s substantive. Those particular episodes are worth my time.
Everyone is going to have their own dividing line, and their own characterizations of what’s going on in the show, on this point.
I sometimes wonder who might occupy the time Maher’s show takes up in the HBO schedule (and of course the money it costs them), and provide not only more laughs but better information. I’d love to see Al Franken or John Mulaney try out a show with a monologue and panel and assorted comedy bits, for example. (I doubt that Franken’s alleged violations are any worse than what Maher may have hidden in his closet, but I’ll concede that this may be a minority view.)
Or maybe Seth Meyers might tire of the five-nights-a-week grind. Given the chance, I think he’d give us a show that would be funnier, more thought-provoking, and less annoying than Maher’s.
A show that spreads dangerous anti-vax nonsense. The overall value is dangerous to the public health. Measles are making a comeback. We just had a pandemic where antivax bullshit killed thousands, if not millions of people. Anyone with a public forum spreading it wider deserves cancellation ASAP. But go ahead and keep defending this deadly asshole.
Right. I’m not spewing racist/homophobic/transphobic/misogynistic bullshit. If someone can’t manage to express themselves without this, then cancel away. If you’re worried about being cancelled, maybe your views need to be reexamined.
I’d think so yes, since moral relativism can excuse any kind of evil behavior.
Of course, if you subscribe to the idea that nothing is truly really evil or bad because it’s all just someone’s opinion and will vary from person to person, then that shouldn’t be a problem for you.
Ironically, if you truly believe that garbage, then surely being “woke” isn’t objectively any worse than anything else, is it? Because people who object to it are only judging it by their own perspective.
(I mean, honestly moral relativism so nonsensical that it pretty much transcends being bad.)
Last time I heard that, the white majorities decided that instead of running the community pools, they decided to close them, when desegregation came knocking in. Never mind that white business were affected by that, they needed to keep their “virtue”.
So fie to that argument of yours. What the right wing is doing now is to dismiss any economic benefits in the name of a new way to discriminate (in the educational front, the banning of teaching of history that is inconvenient to conservative whites is what leads to more injustice and ignorance).
