He’s like your clueless relative who’s passing along some dumbshit thing he read on social media without checking if it’s real. Except he’s doing it on a national TV show.
Ah it seems wolfpup linked the video of how the left was lost? I can’t watch it right now, but as I say from the extracts I’ve seen, he rants a lot about the Left, mostly not making any specific claims. The only things I have read so far is:
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San Francisco has “basically” legalized shoplifting. – Nope.
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Covid rules were too onerous – that wasn’t a partisan thing, until republicans made it eg Florida was among the first to implement lockdowns.
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Too much regulation – (I’m generously calling this a specific claim): oh yeah because the US is so over regulated. You can barely pollute the drinking water or run trains with inadequate brakes or price-gouge prescription meds. America used to be great, you used to be able to employ children.
He’s a comedian. He engages in hyperbole for comedic effect. Does San Francisco have a shoplifting problem of epidemic proportions? Yep. Is government policy to blame? At least in part, for sure.
Yes, Maher believes that, and made that annoyingly clear in his overy sycophantic interview with Ron DeSantis. It’s part of his schtick of trashing medical science. I have zero defense for him there.
The US is generally under-regulated due to essentially being run by a corporate plutocracy. But there are certainly some aspects of over-regulation in the State of California, where just about every substance known to man is “known to the State of California to cause cancer”, including garden sheds (as Maher duly noted, he wasn’t planning to snort his shed). Maher also famously tracked the regulatory approval process he had to go through to install solar panels on his home. OK, sure, the first-world problems of a rich guy, but it took more than three years to get all the necessary approvals.
I see unrelated but similar sorts of things going on in the city where I used to live, where bylaws governing property standards are sometimes both ridiculous and have been known to be enforced to an oppressive degree.
And his repetitions of the grief he endured solving his first-world problems only made me less sympathetic to his plight, and to vote for more onerous regulations on smug rich twits in the future.
Do you make decisions based on the same kind of vindictiveness and rancor towards everybody else, or do you reserve it just for Maher? Because if a rich guy is going to be faced with massive regulatory obstacles over a home improvement project, then likely so will anybody else.
There’s hyperbole and there’s lying. Which other satirical comedians have to resort to the latter?
What he said was: “Democrats no longer possess the common sense that not every problem in the world can be fixed with a regulation”.
That’s very misleading when, as you agree, the US is way, way over at the other extreme right now.
And who is being unreasonable here? People can disagree about particular pieces of regulation, I’ve seen debates among those on the left about some California laws. Why can’t he just have a different view on some issues why is it something that requires writing off the whole Left?
Yeah, this. He’s smart enough to understand that there are some virtues in regulation, particularly protecting poor folks, and if he needs to bitch about his particular personal inconveniences in dealing with them, he needn’t pretend that they exist purely to vex him and that the entire Democratic party’s insistence of having them in place is corrupt and wrong.
San Francisco legalized shoplifting. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Okay, when you put it like that, I definitely see how it’s hilarious.
Re solar panels: Were these State of California regulations, or locally imposed? I just had solar panels installed in April, in CA, and installation took a couple of weeks. BUT before the very last inspection a man from the solar company showed up with a can of paint and said that it is a city requirement that the conduit holding the solar panel wiring be painted to match the house. He said it was a pet peeve of the guy who runs the Building Department and totally useless. When I wanted to put up a simple carport in the driveway, it took several months to approve it, and city regulations required it to be expensively over-engineered (my contractor told me if we ever have an earthquake – extremely rare around here – that I should leave the house and go stand under the carport). Again, nothing to do with the state, strictly local bureaucrats with not a whole lot to do but think up extra regs.
And they aren’t “liberals” either – I live in a very Red suburb – our City Council members are all Republicans and our Congressional Rep is Kevin Kiley.
And this is clearly hyperbole. No one is going to come away from that believing that San Francisco literally legalized shoplifting, especially when he qualified the hyperbole with the word “basically”. To say otherwise is totally disingenuous. The real question is, is it fair to blame liberal government policy for the shoplifting epidemic? And the answer is yes, at least in part. Under California Proposition 47, in 2014, property thefts valued at less than $950 became an automatic misdemeanor, prompting similar shoplifting sprees in other big cities, particularly Los Angeles. As shoplifting became more common, enforcement failed to keep up and instead of a crackdown, enforcement was actually scaled back.
I think because, rightly or wrongly, he associates California’s regulatory burden with its generally liberal politics. Also, ascribing nuttiness to general traits of the far left and the far right creates humour and controversy. The worst thing a comedian could possibly be is boring.
Maher made it sound like most of the issues were from the state. Maher lives in a particularly upscale part of Beverly Hills so there may have been some municipal issues as well, but probably the bulk of the issues came from the scope of his installation – for instance, it sounds like the outdoor battery system and the housing for it caused a lot of regulatory headaches.
Ha! I built a deck like that once, just due to my own construction conservatism. Grossly over-engineered, with twice as many supporting pillars as necessary and a vast structure of beams. You could have had a whole company of sumo wrestlers jumping up and down on it and it probably wouldn’t even vibrate! 
I’d say the worst thing a comedian could possibly be is a war criminal, but you do you.
Clearly you’ve never seen Idi Amin’s Live at the Apollo special.
hashtag canceled
King of Scotland, and King of Comedy!
I heard the audience just ate him up, although I could be misremembering.
Huh. I heard he killed.
Uh, not so sure.
Snopes conclusion: FALSE.
So not only is Maher a liar, but wolfpup is falling for his lies.
Oh, I get the joke now! Maher is so funny.
Did you actually read your own cite? No, Prop 47 did not “legalize” theft under $950, no it did not mean such thefts would not be prosecuted. I never said any of those things. I said government policy is at least in part to blame for the rash of shoplifting, and cited Prop 47 and lack of enforcement as contributing factors. There is evidence to back that up:
In 2014, a ballot referendum passed that downgraded the theft of property less than $950 in value from a felony charge to a misdemeanor. In the years since, enforcement of shoplifting charges has waned significantly …
… One study found that in Santa Monica, California, crimes unaffected by the ballot referendum fell by 9 percent but those that were downgraded increased 15 percent. Another analysis found that statewide, larceny thefts increased 9 percent after the 2014 change.