Real Time with Bill Maher

The BBQ Pit
741

Sorry, it wasn’t meant as an example of over-sensitivity, it was just the first thing that came to mind when I thought about the various things Maher was complaining about. Personally I’m pretty much neutral on the Israel-Palestine conflict and I agree that Israel has engaged in major human rights violations, but idiot students demonstrating in support of recognized terrorist organizations is still naive and stupid.

Here’s a short transcript of part of the show to give a flavour of it, especially for those who aren’t going to watch it. I hope you do, and tell us what you think. But anyway, here’s a short bit from it:

I think a lot of people are just tired of trying to pretent that things that are crazy, aren’t. Tired of being bullied by the most un-fun people in the country. Tired of walking around on eggshells because of the hyper-fragile and the over-sensitive. These people who have such a sense of entitlement about never having to feel a moment’s discomfort from encountering a thought they don’t already have, or a joke they don’t like. Fuck off, you fucks.

Is there anything more cringe-worthy than the apologies we have to listen to from people so often, that sound like they’re right out of a Soviet re-education camp, where you thank your accusers: “thank you for the opportunity to learn what a repulsive shit-bag I am. I will try to do better”. Oh, fuck off, it’s a Halloween costume, nobody died, OK? So much of this is just posing. Liberalism is supposed to be uplifting. This is just posing.

… I know when people hear the word “woke” it triggers them and I understand that. It started out as a great thing – alert to injustice – we’re all for that. But words migrate. I can’t control that. And now it’s been taken over by stupid white people.

Then he cites the example of the “woke” crowd going after Dr. Seuss (as he put it, author of such controversial works as Green Eggs and Ham) because when he made his drawings back in the 1930s, he drew Chinese people with pigtails. Possibly because many Chinese people then wore pigtails. He then suggests to all cartoonists that if you’re going to draw anybody ethnic, be very very careful!

Right here on this board, in a thread discussing vinyl records and how they’re made, someone was apologetic about having to use the word “master” to describe the metal die that’s used to stamp vinyl LPs, an industry term that’s been in use since records existed. There may be some who have to head to the fainting couch on hearing that the original final mix from which all other recordings are made is called the “master tape”.

It’s in fact very common usage for any object used to make reproductions. It’s also in common use to denote an overall control element, such as the “master drive” in the days of daisy-chained IDE disk drives, or a “master warning” in an airline cockpit. These have been in use for many decades, and as Maher would say, nobody died. Yes, other words can be substituted. There are always other words. The new words are often contrived and ridiculous, and I wouldn’t be surprised if after some period of time they’re declared offensive, too. This is the kind of bullshit Maher talks about.

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And here we have distilled what exactly is wrong with Mehr in that he entirely distorts what was really going on there. Let us enumerate the errors

  1. It wasn’t the woke crowd going after Dr. Suess it was the publishers themselves deciding that certain of his works were already poor sellers also hadn’t aged well and didn’t represent the picture of Dr. Suess they wanted to present.
  2. Green eggs and ham was never controversial, and claiming that it was is a disingenuous as claiming that the Jan 6ers were arrested for doing such controversial things as walking down the halls of congress taking pictures.
  3. It wasn’t just drawing a Chinese person with pigtails it was a racist caricature of a “Chinaman”. Understandable in the historical context where white was the accepted norm and anyone outside of that was an exotic “other” but also not really the best lesson to teach to children in the 21st century.
  4. Cartoonists aren’t going to have to be careful, just don’t make obviously racist caricatures. Its not that hard. Is it that hard for comedians to talk about black people because without using the N-word. Well I guess in Meher’s case maybe it is.
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This is the thing.

I have zero respect for anyone who complains about “woke” because it’s too hard to avoid being explicitly and viciously racist. That’s how you know someone is just an overall loathsome piece of shit.

744

“It wasn’t the woke crowd, it was that the publishers were woke!”

You may need a lesson in “sarcasm appreciation”.

I haven’t seen the drawing so I personally can’t judge whether the venerable Dr. Seuss was “racist”. I can fairly confidently predict, however, that his vaunted books for children did a lot more good than harm. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that they probably never harmed any child or their subsequent world-view in later life.

That sounds like it means “never, ever draw a cartoon depicting a person in a way that is suggestive of their racial identity.” Is that what you mean?

The fact that it seems impossible to even make an innocent post about a Bill Maher standup special without an escalation of random attacks is … well, it’s revealing. Conclusions about what it reveals are left up to the reader.

745

Not the publishers, the owners of the rights to the books, Seuss’ family.

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That you stupidly bumped a thread that was 3 months dead in the fucking Pit?

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So says the one that admits not seeing the image, when it is clear that Maher doesn’t know what took place and (as it is typical with Maher) he did rely on the dishonest frame that the right wing was using. More evidence really that Maher is really, really proud of making arguments from ignorance.

748

This thread was renamed a long time ago to reflect the fact that it was no longer about just one episode of the show and had become an ongoing discussion about Real Time. In that spirit, I made a new post to let folks know that (a) Maher had a new special out, and (b) the show begins its 23rd season on Friday.

The only thing “stupid” here is your persistent, predictable obnoxiousness. Fuck you, you useless dipshit.

749

So maybe you should take a couple of minutes to google it and figure out what the controversy is about before you complain about it.

Nope.

Not racist:
Oliver Wendel Jones
Baldo
Asian Man (although it was surprising how difficult it was to find asian representation is comic strips which is its own issue)

750

What did Maher say that was incorrect? I really want to know how you came to that conclusion. He was complaining about the cultural norms we now have that render these old images from classic old Suess books to be considered no longer acceptable. What part of that is wrong? What part of it is “ignorance”?

If I were producing a children’s book today, sure, I’d probably draw things differently, but only for the same reason that I’d no longer draw a steam locomotive to illustrate “kids traveling across the country to visit grandparents”. I’d draw an airplane instead. But I sure as hell wouldn’t go to any lengths to censor existing classics.

It never ceases to amaze me how these discussions grow from an innocent comment about Maher’s show to a raging argumentative inferno.

751

Glad we can agree on something. I don’t want my posts to be entirely contrary; I am trying to find common ground.

I’ve been in protests in two countries (UK and Spain) and didn’t see any mention at all of Hamas, just protesting the human rights abuses (I would use stronger terms than this though) that you agree are happening. There were some Jewish people in the protests.

Also it was a mix of ages; quite a lot of families were there so not at all a student only thing.

If, in the US, the protests are only happening on college campuses though, it doesn’t surprise me. I’ve been astonished at how the conflict has been covered on American media – both left and right. So it may well be that only people regularly on tiktok hear any different. But I can assure you that outside of the US the picture is very different.

I’ve seen at least one thread where someone was ranting about not being allowed to use master and slave and it turned out the terminology correction was for accuracy’s sake, nothing to do with woke. (Eg like “brown outs”)

However, if it’s the case that some terminology has changed, I don’t care. The only thing I’d care about is that a new term has been chosen so I don’t need to flail about finding a synonym.
It doesn’t matter to anything, but it’s great fodder for the RW press.

752

Come on, man. Let’s not play stupid games. The owners to the rights didn’t “decide” this in a vacuum, or because they had issues personally with the portrayals of Asian people in Dr Seuss’s scribbles. No, they removed the books from publication because they were trying to head off anyone stumbling across those pictures and making viral posts about how racist Dr Seuss is.

Which isn’t to say that those pictures aren’t racist or shouldn’t be removed. But let’s not pretend that the owners woke up one day and said, “good heavens, our book is racist! What are we doing??”.

753

When I was just starting in the IT field, consumer hard drives in a personal computer most commonly used a technology called IDE. And the way IDE worked was that if you had multiple hard drives, you had one hard drive set as “master” and others set as “slave”. That was how the computer knew which one to boot from. (And you would have to move tiny little jumpers on sets of pins in the backs of the hard drives to designate which drive was the master and which ones were slaves, it was a pain, sometimes I had to use tweezers because they were so small.) If you didn’t set them right the computer wouldn’t work.

These days, IDE drives are pretty much obsolete and instead we more commonly use SATA technology, and instead of designating things by jumper, we use software to tell the computer how to handle which drive to boot from. Much easier and elegant. But even prior to that, there was an effort to change the terminology from “master” and “slave” to “primary” and “secondary”.

Not only was it less offensive, but it was just more accurate. There was no real “master/slave” relationship going on between the drives, and it was kind of nonsensical. “Primary/secondary” is far more intuitive.

I’m just backing up your suggestion that many of these changes aren’t just being done because of cultural sensitivity, but also because it just makes more sense. I think this is why the housing industry is also swapping out the word “main” for “master” in terms of things like “bedroom” and “bathroom”; not only does it avoid the racist connotations, it’s just an overall better term to use.

But I can see pushing back against that because you hate “woke” only because some people hate the idea of any kind of change, even if that change is making it better, not just from an emotional perspective but from a pragmatic one as well.

754

A couple of things.

Just as an incidental note from an old fart to a (probably) much younger one, I made a similar comment just upthread earlier and used the same terminology, but it’s not really accurate. “IDE” stands for “Integrated Drive Electronics” and was originally known as “Winchester” technology, where the drive and controller were in one package. It has nothing to do with the drive interface. Modern SATA drives are also IDE. The correct term for the old ones is really “PATA” – “Parallel ATA” as opposed to “Serial ATA”.

That said, I maintain that no one gave (or gives) a shit whether they were called master/slave or primary/secondary. Both terms could be construed in misleading ways – what, the “secondary” drive is a backup for the “primary”? Which is why, in the absence of really compelling practical reasons, I tend to favour leaving well-established terminology the fuck alone.

Who the fuck was ever offended by how old computer drives were designated? Seriously, who, other than maybe someone engaged in performative outrage.

How the hell does “main” bedroom make more sense? Is this the bedroom you always use, but in case of emergency, you have backup bedrooms?

I also mentioned earlier the “master alert” in some airplane cockpits. This is basically a warning light connected to many other systems, and its only purpose is to very clearly say “something is wrong, start checking other status indicators”. What should that alarm be called?

I’m sure a different word could be found, but why? Is it possible that the airline might have a Black pilot with ancestral memories of slavery, and when an engine fails and the “master alert” warning sounds, he will be terribly offended?

755

Gee I don’t know, perhaps because Maher is ignoring how “woke” is being used as a dog whistle by the right?

“They got 40 million people in that state and they vote in these imbeciles in office, and they continue to do it,” he said. “And it’s just a very small part of them in that state that’s doing it. If you go to California, you run into a lot of Republicans, a lot of good people. And I hate it for them. But they are just overwhelmed by these inner city woke policies with the people that vote for them.”

As @crowmanyclouds commented elsewhere, Tuberville and many other right wingers should not hide it anymore, just say “N****” now that you have Trump in power.

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The point I was making is that is wasn’t as if there was a crazy woke mob bashing down the door of the publishing house, or even a active effort to boycott Dr. Seuss books. Sure it was done an environment of heightened racial sensitivity (i.e. wokism), but It wasn’t something that they were forced to do against their will.

757

I’ve been tempted for weeks to start a “Which Republican politician will say the N-word in public first?” poll thread, but it feels like it would be in bad taste.

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Rich Lowry doesn’t count? I guess he’s not a politician himself.

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That’s a ridiculous post, GIGO, and unworthy of you. Tuberville is a completely brain-dead idiot who’s instinctively jumping on the anti-California Trump bandwagon. So he uses the word “woke”? So what? He doesn’t even know what it means. The political gamesmanship during the tragic California wildfires is absolutely disgusting. I thought even Trump’s America was better than that.

This all reflects a deeply serious political divide in America, where even fellow citizens are disparaged and ignored in the midst of widespread tragedy. Even Canada is sending equipment and volunteer firefighters down there to help. But Tuberville doesn’t give a shit, because California has liberal politics.

This is a much bigger problem than extreme “wokeness”. But it’s also a competely different problem.

760

Because it’s the biggest bedroom. The one most likely to be used. Case in point, my wife and I moved into this house we are in, and the main bedroom was initially the only one actually used as a bedroom. The two secondary bedrooms were used as a guest bedroom, and an office. The office also could be used as a bedroom, and in fact it was with an inflatable mattress at one point while someone else used the guest bedroom.

After our daughter was born, she took one of the secondary bedrooms as hers, and the office now doubles as a guest bedroom when necessary.

So literally, yes, we literally had two “backup” bedrooms. It makes a fuck ton more sense than the “master” term you seem to prefer. I mean, we actually, truly used these rooms in the exact same way you seem incredulous about.

:roll_eyes:

People are reacting poorly to you because you are frankly saying things that are stupid here.