Those are the books I read previously as well.
That’s the book I have received out of nowhere, twice, in the past couple of weeks.
I haven’t even started reading it yet. Apparently, he has written or cowritten 15 books, at least on Amazon. But I am pretty sure I’ve only read the two books previously.
Not on board with you here, Bill.
Yeah? Aug. 9? Really?
Got a placard put together?
I honestly think Bill was making a joke here. Whether or not one finds him funny, it’s important to remember that he is a comedian.
Aw, did someone stop paying attention to Bill for 5 seconds?
I have to say that one thing I’m getting increasingly annoyed with is that for some reason Maher’s show attracts more “hooters” in the audience than any other I watch. Almost every time Maher tells a joke, one or two assholes feel the need to screech “hoo!!!”. It’s like having a couple of very large and obnoxious owls in the audience. You’d think the show would have guidelines about “no owls or other noisy zoo creatures in the audience”.
I was more annoyed by his failure to push back on some of Byron Donald’s more transparent hackery. Bill argued about religion because that hits him personally, but was mum on other bizarre claims like Jill Biden pushing Joe to run for a second term because she (paraphrasing from memory) “doesn’t want to give up Air Force One.”
It’s all part of the ‘They’re all the same’ narrative.
Biden/the Bidens won’t do the right thing and resign the Presidency because he/they are so attached to keeping his/their power as President and Trump has made it clear he wants to be the country’s first dictator.
So, can’t you see they’re exactly the same?
Yes to all of this. But this latest episode shows what Maher’s show COULD be if he had the smarts and skills of Larry Wilmore, who countered every talking point Byron Donald spewed, and did it without heat. (I will give Maher credit for not interrupting during that longish exchange.)
It was really well done. Wilmore’s best known for his years at The Daily Show; he did have his own show on Comedy Central in 2015 and 2016 (per wikipedia). And he’s been busy producing in the years since.
But I wish he’d get his own show, again.
This is a “New Rules” segment from a couple of years ago, but I’m going to throw it in here FWIW because I think it’s timely as election season really gets underway. It’s an excellent if necessarily cynical analysis of American politics, right-wing politicians, and the clueless morons who elect them. For anyone looking to answer the question, “how is it possible that a lifelong conman, serial liar, convicted felon, and blatantly self-serving unhinged narcissist could be running for president of the United States with a good chance of actually winning?”, then look no further than this clip.
I was sure this was going to be a video where I’d be on Maher’s side, but, no.
I think he is describing real problems but not the most pertinent ones, and leaning us towards the wrong conclusions:
Thanks for your comments, but I have to say that I mostly disagree …
But the questions were rock-bottom basic. How much general knowledge does it take to answer a question about the first human to walk on the Sun (thinking deeply about who it was that first walked on the Sun and finally coming up with “Lance Armstrong” is not indicative of a well-informed human being). Or being offered $100 to tell the reporter what country Venice, Italy, is in, and drawing a blank Or two geniuses naming Asia and Europe, respectively, as “the world’s largest city”. Remember, these people are adults, and they vote.
Jay Leno was doing this for years with hilarious results time after time, and there have been a great many video clips of Trumpists being asked by many reporters to justify their positions. I think I can safely say that I’ve never yet seen even one give a coherent or factual answer.
There is no explanation for how an unhinged lunatic like Trump could be on the threshold of re-election to the US presidency without acknowledging a vast population of low-information dumbasses. I can’t see anyone this obviously unfit for any kind of political office getting political traction in any other advanced democracy on the planet. Nor do I see democracy being literally undermined by such an individual’s organized thugs in any civilized democracy anywhere.
I must have missed that, so it couldn’t have been a major point. I do agree that MAGA support exists across all age groups. Social media bubbles exacerbate the problem, but the major root cause has long been low-quality and often biased media. When there’s a shortage of quality news programming, and vast swaths of the population are far more interested in watching “The Apprentice” than in the major events happening in their own country, you’re going to get vast swaths of the population unfit to vote.
Political ads don’t have to be dumb to be short and impactful. The only political ads I have to compare them to are those in my own country, and they’re generally substantive and certainly never feature someone shooting at objects as a campaign theme!
And yet he’s not entirely wrong. Conservatives do like to emphasize their degree of conservatism as a selling point, and liberals don’t. This is partly because conservatives are master manipulators of language and have managed to demonize the labels “liberal” and “progressive”. They’ve historically done this through outright lies, like associating liberalism with high taxes, a welfare state, and a drag on free markets. But lately, with extremists like “the Squad” who have literally called for defunding the police and cancelling mortgages, and the pro-Palestinian and vehemently anti-Israel college encampments, Republicans have actual factual negativity to latch onto in slamming liberalism.
If that college-protest crowd succeeds in mounting large protests at the DNC convention as they are planning to do, it could be a significant setback for the Harris campaign, especially if it results in violence. Maher may sometimes be over the top in his excessive criticism of “wokeism”, but overall I think he makes good and valid points throughout that video.
You just completely skated over all of my points and responded as if I had said “But they were really hard questions!”
Some people panic when suddenly being filmed. Or maybe some people just give a joke answer because they think it’s dumb. What happened before and after the few seconds snippets we see?
I don’t doubt that many people are poorly-educated, I am simply saying this isn’t a good source to draw that conclusion.
Again you ignore what I just said, but at least you’re agreeing with me.
They’ve managed to paint them that way, sure. Thanks to most of US media – left and right – being vehemently pro-Israel, no matter what. e.g. 5 schools have been bombed in the last 10 days, and in areas that Israel had designated “safe zones”…none of this gets much play on US media. The extremists are not those protesting this.
If you were to stick a camera in my face and ask me that question point blank, I might blurt out “Neil Armstrong” because I’m caught off-guard, I don’t want to look stupid by not giving an answer right away, and I’d assume you meant to say “Moon” and misspoke. From there it’s not hard to confuse Neil for Lance if you haven’t thought about the Apollo missions in a long time.
Or maybe I realize you’re trying to get a wrong answer for comedy’s sake, so I play along. Or maybe I can tell you’re trolling me and I decide to troll you right back. Or maybe your producer approached me beforehand and offered me $500 cash to play along, like Bobby Heenan did back in the day when they needed Ted Dibiase to grab a kid’s autograph book and rip it up for heel heat. You can’t assume that a highly produced vox pops segment like that is proof of anything other than that the people making it have a point to demonstrate.
IMO, the only time that segment actually made me laugh is when they were asking people if they’ d ever posed nude on camera, and one of the people they asked was a legit pornstar who reached into her purse and pulled out a magazine she was in.
At the very least you interview a few dozen people and only televise the people who look moronic so you can say its endemic. Its a cheap way to make the audience feel to good because and want to come back it gives them a jolt of self esteem that they are way smarter than the average Joe.
Also our schools don’t teach our kids like they used to is a refrain that is as old as the country itself, but there is no basis to this. In fact except for a sharp drop forthe last few years of the pandemic, students proficiency in math and reading has been generally increasing.
So your argument is that these interviews are all misdirection, and that in fact a substantial portion of American adults eligible to vote are not low-information dumbasses. If so, please explain how there’s around a 50% chance that Donald J. Trump might be the next president of the United States (down from a former 75% or so chance, now neck and neck with an obviously intelligent and charismatic candidate who is not a convicted felon and not a serial liar and not a pathological sociopath).
Average performance of US grade school students is not terrific but not terrible, either – according to the Program for International Student Assessment administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) American 15-year-olds placed 16th out of 81 countries in general science knowledge, but 34th in math. However – and we’re starting to get really far off topic here but this is important – what is unsurprising is the large gap between the best and the worst students, reflecting a major problem in inequality and accessibility to good education. But all of them grow up into adults eligible to vote.
If I could explain why the American people vote the way they do, I’d deserve a Nobel Prize, but that really doesn’t have anything to do with Maher’s show. A vox pops segment is not a scientific study of the population or an accurate way of gauging anything about the intelligence of the American people. Give me a camera and a crew and a budget and I could produce a vox pops that suggests the average American believes Santa Claus is real and he’s Superman’s boyfriend.
Does anyone remember Tom Green? That’s the kind of lowbrow shock/prank stuff he would do. I would not watch his show to get a good gauge of how intelligent the public is, and Maher isn’t any better.
But it’s not totally Maher’s fault, it’s also the fault of anyone who tries to take it seriously and consider it journalism. It’s like when Tucker Carlson argued in court that no reasonable person should actually believe anything he says on his show.
Really? Even though a major corollary of Hanlon’s Razor is that almost everything in collective human behaviour, when impaired by a chronic absence of good information, is explained by stupidity? Even though nobody in his right mind would ever vote for a self-serving traitorous imbecile like Trump except a small number of equally traitorous super-wealthy who are just looking for tax cuts and deregulation? If you were right that would be the easiest Nobel Prize anyone’s ever won.
Let me put it this way. These geniuses who you think were just flustered by being in front of a camera; how much do you think they could articulate about the policies advocated by their Congressional representatives or their state Senators? How well could they defend Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022)? How well do they understand health care in other advanced democracies? Could they even name the three branches of government? Are these dumbfucks who are currently threatening global stability by electing an unhinged lunatic to the US presidency even capable of tying their own shoelaces?
Maher isn’t doing these interviews; he’s just reporting on them, and there’s ample evidence that the dumbass demographic is very widespread (cite: hundreds of interviews with Trump supporters, including some who have been elected to state or national office).
For someone who claims to believe in democracy, you certainly have a godawful opinion of the American voter.
Yup.
I absolutely believe in democracy. Democracy requires an informed and engaged populace. Voters have to know what they’re voting for and be motivated to go out and vote for it. Ignorance, misinformation, and complacency are deadly threats to democracy.
That was precisely the point of my posting Maher’s insight into the dumbasses who vote in America and who might yet again re-elect Trump, possibly putting an end to the noble experiment in democracy that lasted nearly two and a half centuries. And even if the Orange Felon loses, it will be by a narrow margin, and it will be despite vigorous efforts to cheat.