Bill Maher, rebuking the Democrats for losing the election, knocks it out of the park in this week’s 8-minute comedy/news bit. Although many people (viz., Laura Helmuth) are calling Republicans “stupid” for voting for Trump, Maher shows that there’s no shortage of stupidity among Democrats, either—especially in the “progressives.” As he says, “What good is liberalism if you don’t win elections?” According to Maher, the entire Democratic party has become “a Portlandia sketch.”
Maher excoriates Trump, of course, but I agree with him: if we’re going to win future elections, Democrats need to figure out why they lost an election that should have been a walk in the park. (I have to mention, because readers will bring it up, that Maher also implies that science showed that the covid virus spread because it escaped from the Wuhan lab, something that now seems improbable.)
Maher’s lesson is now familiar: make Democrats more centrist than progressive, and find out what’s going on with the other side. As he says, “Stop screaming at people to ‘get with the program’ and instead make a program worth getting with.” At the end he expresses his own disaffection at losing the chance of fixing the two things he cares most about: the environment and democracy.
I agree with Jerry: Maher hit the bull’s eye with his monologue.
Adam Jentleson: When Will Democrats Learn to Say No [to far-left interest groups that represent hardly any voters] ? New York Times, Nov 16, 2024
https://archive.ph/nRRtZ
+1
Libs weren’t being too liberal in Kamala’s run for president. Kamala was practically running as a Republican for her last couple months. She didn’t mention her identity as a black woman or asian and she didn’t bring up genders or trans people, that was -all- Trump and his attack ads. And she didn’t go out of her way to welcome illegal immigrants, she simply pointed out that the reason they were so much a problem was Trump and Republican’s refusal to sign off on multiple bills.
In short, Maher is dead wrong.
Most countries are currently having their incumbents unseated as a reaction to inflation. Inflation is something that right wing propaganda seized on and exaggerated and Kamala didn’t have a compelling counter narrative that most people were aware of (even though facts and truth were on her side). I think it was that simple.
Sorry, but the whole party was progressive until Kamala started running. She walked back some of her positions, but then said she wouldn’t change anythinbg from the Biden administration. Plenty of Dems brought up her identity and she DID say that trans people in prison should get government-funded gender surgery, and she did not walk that back. Trump used that in his ads.
In short, you are dead wrong. Look at James Carville’s postmortem posted today, Monday, (or almost any postmortem) and see how the wokeness hurt Dems. As for Harris running as a Republican-clone, don’t make me laugh. Put her views up against those of the real Republican party!
You REALLY DO believe voters, especially non-elite working folks, are stupid! Do you really NOT grasp that Kamala running by pretending as a Republican for 3 months caused every non-stupid voter to fully realize Kamala was an uncredible phony. Aka a prevaricator, or at best an amoral opportunist. And rest assured, the average voter, especially amongst the working class and “the right” are very much non-stupid (the right now being defined as those who roll their eyes at politicians who want to criminalize or fire anyone who won’t refer to a singular man wearing woman-face in the plural.)
(Do YOU now believe Kamala is a Republican at heart? If so, is that due to her campaign ads? Do you also pick your car insurance based on what Flo says?)
This is a remark that is rude towards another reader, and it’s snarky, too. Read the posting roolz and if I see you put up one more comment this impolite, you’re out of here.
You didn’t read the Roolz before bulling your way in here, did you?
You are right.Do let me clarify that my reference to “stupid” was inspired by the comment that Bill Maher was “dead wrong” in saying that voters do notice and do not react well to politicians or partisans assuming the problem is that voters are stupid (or too stupid to know what’s good for them.) I did not clearly connect those dots and my comment comes across more serious and personal than intended. (I do appreciate you standing up for your readers, very cool).
I watched it over on YouTube, then saw a Jon Stewart analysis of the election and watched that. Unlike Maher, Stewart thought “wokeness” had nothing to do with the fact that the Democrats got definitively trounced. Why? Because their political ads never showed any politicians supporting it. Instead he showed candidate after candidate talking about strengthening the border, fixing the economy, supporting gun rights, etc. With one or two exceptions at the end — hell, they never even mentioned anything woke. So not that, obviously.*
But that’s the problem. Democratic candidates in general, and Harris in particular, stayed away from those issues like the plague. They couldn’t or wouldn’t repudiate any of them, so let’s ignore them and the public won’t catch on. They’ll look where we want them to. That’ll work.
Maher is more perceptive.
* I’d have to watch Stewart’s video again to see exactly where he thought the problem lie (he cycled through a montage of talking heads listing things like Biden hanging on too long) but his main complaint seemed to be too much emphasis on people going door to door and interrupting potential voters with Democratic campaign messaging. Yeah, I’m sure that was why Trump won. I had to get out of the chair and now my dinner is cold.
Open borders is a woke position. We also know that the ad with the tagline “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.”, that ad was effective (people measured its effectiveness). And, of course, the idea that a man can become a woman by identifying as such is a woke position, like the idea that transgender youth medicine is evidence-based (the second idea is evoked by that ad as well via the subject’s ad: surgery to modify secondary sex characteristics).
It is amazing how someone like John Oliver can still (this week) claim that allowing high-school boys to compete against high-school girls is not unfair to the latter. He really is doubling down on the supremely idiotic claim that sex doesn’t affect sport. I imagine that John Stewart has become a similar blowhard (I haven’t watched him for a long time).
Maher is right: The Dems’ reaction to Democratic House member Seth Molton’s campaign manager quitting (because his boss, Molton, didn’t, after the election, toe the radical trans line) has to be: Good riddance.
There’s a change.org petition to “Demand Seth Moulton’s Removal from Equality Caucus for Transphobic Remarks”
But it’s only got 76 signatures. This is a fringe viewpoint. Dems need to ignore these people.
“It is amazing how someone like John Oliver can still (this week) claim that allowing high-school boys to compete against high-school girls is not unfair to the latter.”
It’s an actual fact that the best high school boys can outperform the best women (of any age) in virtually all sports. As in, teenage boys can outperform female Olympic record holders. People like Oliver can spend 30 minutes researching this and educate themselves. They really do live in a bubble.
It is always possible to find a man who is weaker, slower, and clumsier than a talented middle-school girl. I would, today, be one of those men. I’m not nearly as fast now as I used to think I was. If you ran me against those girls I would lose, “proving” men “don’t necessarily” have an advantage. Believe it or not there is a trans-identifying male Ontario college professor in his 50s, registered with Swim Canada as female, who swims competitively against nine-year-old girls. The teenaged girls beat him. (Of course they do!)
This is not facetious. In his 30 minutes of research John Oliver would find physiologic studies promoted by Egale Canada claiming the trans-identified male athletes aren’t (much) stronger than women. The performance numbers show these men are not particularly strong or aerobically well trained, with MVO2’s equivalent to weekend-warrior cyclists. (MVO2 may or may not be effort-dependant depending on how it is estimated, “to exhaustion” or not. Tests of jump height, grip strength, and number of pushups/pull-ups obviously are. A trans athlete recruited for a study like this will be perfectly aware of the study’s hypothesis and how the (favourable) results will be used.)
Your last paragraph needs to be emphasized to anyone who agrees with Oliver. Two pieces of evidence off the top of my head:
1) No woman has ever run a 4 minute mile. 23 high school boys have.
2) The US Women’s Soccer team, who are quite good against their competition, scrimmage against the boys under 15s for practice. They lose.
Suggesting that it’s fair for someone who has gone through puberty as a male to compete with a biological woman is as delusional as the worst of the creationists.
To wit: https://boysvswomen.com/#/
Like it!
For me … probably accurate but sanctimonious.
Maher’s clip made me look up the show Portlandia. Glad I didn’t know it!?
In other news (and Coyne was a great supporter and shared my case in his ideological subversion of biology article!) THIS press release on my “two sex” scandal was just sent yesterday to the 18 media sources that covered it originally:
In October 2022, Professor Christy Hammer was in the news after some of her graduate students at the University of Southern Maine walked out of class and demanded she be replaced as their instructor because they took offense to her statement that there are only two biological sexes.
Three separate investigations into Professor Hammer’s conduct were initiated by a student who identifies as trans and nonbinary and who repeatedly requested that the university punish or even fire Hammer for her ‘out of date’ views on sex, and that she be required to admit that humans come in more than two sexes.
The Maine Human Rights Commission (MRHC) has now vindicated Professor Hammer, ruling that her statement that there are “two sexes with variation” was not inherently discriminatory. The MRHC agreed that sex realism is a valid viewpoint, and that educators must be permitted to express controversial opinions in the classroom. The MRHC also found that Hammer’s accidental misgendering of the student did not violate Civil Rights law or EEO policy.
A petition that was started on change.org asking university administrators to support Professor Hammer garnered nearly 4000 signatures, but received no response. Professor Hammer is now considering her legal options against USM for ruling, in opposition to the MHRC finding, that she violated civil rights EEO protections by accidentally misgendering the complaining student, for which USM has informed her she will receive an as-yet undetermined punishment. Professor Hammer is working with legal advice from both FIRE (Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression) and AFA (Academic Freedom Alliance) to protest demands for compelled speech placed on her by faculty and administrators, including that she state there are more than two sexes and that she should declare her own pronouns.
Professor Hammer was not asked by the university administration what had happened in the class in question before they spoke to the media and suggested that students would need to be protected from her. In addition, they separated her from her class against their own policy, subjected her to a biased and degrading ‘restorative justice’ event, and quickly opened a separate section of her class with a different instructor, as an option for her students. (Of note, two-thirds of the students chose to stay with Professor Hammer’s class, although the Dean is on record stating that she believed the entire class was demanding an alternate class).
Professor Hammer can be reached at chammer@maine.edu or by phone at (207) 883-3484 for a copy of the Maine Human Rights Commission investigator’s report or to request an interview. Professor Hammer was not free to speak to the media until now due to ongoing investigations, which prevented her from defending her 40-year career as an educator. Please consider revisiting this story and updating it with current information.
I came across Portlandia via my (very woke) sister, who lives just outside Portland, OR but found the series hilarious. (Perhaps that predates her wokeness, I’m not sure.)
So sorry to hear about the ridiculous “investigations” that you are having to endure. Attempts to besmirch a forty-year career? Unforgivable!
Dreadful. Two sex scandal indeed.
I’m so glad I retired before this stuff started up.
Sorry you had to endure that. Crazy shit.
Some higher ed institutions have plummeted down the woke rabbit hole and become infected by a hate virus that causes the institution to ruthlessly pursue and punish anyone who expresses heterodox views in areas sacred to some privileged institutional employees and members of approved intersectional groups. I’m sorry that you have been injured by your institution’s infection and I hope the people of Maine require your university to generously compensate you for any time, money, and emotional stress this episode has cost you. Living well is the best revenge.
That was good. I particularly liked his observation, against the claim of irredeemable misogyny, that Hilary Clinton outpolled Donald Trump by 3 million votes in 2016. This is all the more remarkable an achievement given that she wasn’t even trying. Like her opponent, she was focussing her campaign efforts in the battleground states she had to win by a few thousand so as to win the Electoral College, as all candidates must. So without even having to ask them to, she won all those votes from both women and men all across the country even when they didn’t matter. Millions of misogynistic voters in Illinois, California, and New York could have stayed home to spite her, plus all the close states she won where their votes counted, but they didn’t. (Not enough came out in Detroit but that’s politics.)
Maher sounds right to me. I hope the Dems learn the necessary lessons.
A poster on Mumsnet made two interesting points that I hadn’t considered before, namely that the US political system is weaker because, unlike our UK parliament: a) there’s no equivalent of Prime Minister’s Questions or b) of the Leader of the Opposition.
Every week, the British PM has to attend the House of Commons and answer questions from MPs. There’s no hiding away and not facing scrutiny. Although I accept that questions rarely get a direct answer because the PM’s replies often follow a script, nevertheless Biden would have found it harder to hide his cognitive weakness (if any) under our system.
Also, by having an official leader of the opposition party, the public get to see them in action, learn about their policies, and have a better idea of what they will be like as prime minister if the party that they represent wins. (The same applies to the leaders of the other parliamentary parties, too, of course.) Current prime minister Keir Starmer was leader of the opposition for about four years before getting the top job.
As a non-USian, introducing regular scrutiny of the president by Congress in a regular live Q&A session and having party leaders so you know what possible prime minister you’re getting in a general election makes sense. But I’m very happy to learn why this wouldn’t work on the other side of the Atlantic.
Quick answer from another royalist and non-USAian is that the doctrine of Separation of Powers protects the elected executive President from being badgered by elected legislators to whom he is not responsible. “You didn’t install me in the Oval Office. The voters did.”
But yes, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Donald Trump being grilled by opposition politicians would be a sight to see. (Question Period — Time in UK? — is regularly attended by busloads of schoolchildren to see their elected servants in action.)
The aspect of this of which the Democratic Party is currently most in need is an equivalent to the Leader of the Opposition. The party needs a leader who can reform and articulate new policy positions starting *now*. Instead, no one has the formal (or even de facto) authority to do so until the winning candidate emerges in the next presidential cycle in three and a half years’ time. That’s too long in limbo, and leaves too little time for that person to be able to turn the ship around.
I lived in England for a few years and loved Prime Minister’s question time. It requires politicians to think on their feet, and was often hilarious.
“I have to mention, because readers will bring it up, that Maher also implies that science showed that the covid virus spread because it escaped from the Wuhan lab, something that now seems improbable.”
Damn straight, we’ll bring it up! Maher is consistently and virulently wrong about this. I would expect a stronger statement. This is an important issue.
“Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic” Cell Volume 187, Issue 19P5468-5482.E11September 19, 2024
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867424009012%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
I’mm sure there are references therein. Don’t forget the many years of previous work on issues of zoonotic spillover from Coronavirus and other virus. This is a very important ecological and evolutionary issue and central to public health in our crowded planet. I hope for more serious learned interest and treatment of this topic, of it comes up, in the future.
The kinds of ghastly errors of the “heterodox” “independent thinkers” (c.f, Feeman Dyson & Alexander Cockburn on climate) weaken serious discourse on important topics.
This is why a lot of us can’t take Maher seriously. He’s terminally weak on infectious disease. Harris has erred re SARS-CoV-2 origins as well, don’t know if he’s had the wit to correct himself. Spillover at the Wuhan market almost certainly the circumstance. It’s a settled question, despite people JAQing off over it. Jon Stewart, when he showed up on Colbert a couple years ago & did his thing — best impression of a crackhead I’ve seen.
Thanks for that link.
Interesting reading.
On every popular site I’ve seen since the RFK appointment came down I’ve surprisingly little pushback on his crazy ideas.
Even lots of NYT readers aren’t convinced that vaccines don’t cause autism.
At the Free Press there was an article by a woman with two profoundly autistic children. She rejected the vaccine theory because vaccines long predate the start of a big rise in autism staring about 1980. She says there’s also a genetic component in some cases.
But the reader comments were full of the vaccine theory and demands that RFK investigate it.
One person suggested stopping all vaccinations for several years for a test. Many agreed.
The Free Press is an awkward place: most of its contributors (such as founder Bari Weiss) are probably classical liberals, but because of the site’s anti-woke stance and coverage it attracts a commentariat from the libertarian hard right.
I’ve seen the reaction elsewhere too. It seems that we’re not countering the anti-vax crowd very well.
A lot of them say that no vaccines were tested. That can’t be true. Couldn’t the tests be better publicized?
I’m just throwing ideas out. Here’s a sample of the comments from Dr Paul Offit’s free to read Substack:
https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/my-conversation-with-robert-f-kennedy
Maher is a comic. He’s not meant to be taken seriously. Or literally. Only notoriously.
He didn’t say science shows the virus came from a lab leak. He said it was wrong to smack down people as racist who dared to suggest the virus could have come from a lab located in the city where the infections were first detected. Like his piece on plastic, he just left us hanging there, inviting us to jump to a conclusion that we wouldn’t jump to if he’d presented more information, such as what you do.
I don’t think Maher cares about truth. If he says something true, fine.
You nailed it, per usual. He’s a freaking comedian and never claimed to be a scientist.
Is there dispositive evidence that COVID arose from spillover? If not then this is simply hot air.
Here is a good summary of that evidence from Matt Ridley. Certainly worth a read
https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/09/10/there-is-now-no-doubt-that-covid-leaked-from-a-lab/
I’m aware of this. And yet, I would still say that dishonest scientists declare discovery on the basis of circumstantial evidence. That goes both ways and I continue to be amazed how otherwise intelligent and decent people make this basic error.
(My question above was rhetorical; anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the evidence either way is purely circumstantial, not definitive, and so the answer to the question of COVID’s origin remains in a cat state. So declarations that it is settled are at least to me self-discrediting.)
Two paws up for using “cat state” in a general discussion!
No animal samples were positive for SARS-CoV-2.
I quote from the paper:
“Limitations of the study
Because the environmental metagenomic data used in this work cannot directly link viruses to their hosts in samples that contain DNA or RNA from multiple plausible host species (including humans), our analysis cannot conclusively identify which species may have shed SARS-CoV-2 in different samples from the Huanan market.”
We know that humans were infected and were shedding in the market.
We don’t know if any animals were infected.
I think this will all be a disaster, and I have all the fears everyone else has, and not being American, I’m more concerned with how much Trump (and Tulsi Gabbard!!!! and RFK!!!!) will mess up the world, especially Ukraine.
But in seeing the reactions of left-wing commenters over this, I’m noticing that there’s the same total incapacity to self-reflect or understand.
Maybe we need a generation of self-correction in which the woke are pushed out of positions of influence. Everything about their politics is utterly toxic to the core, and erodes the social fabric, so maybe what we need is for them to spend a generation in the wilderness.
Agree!
Re Maher and vaccine mandates, his live-and-let-live approach against mandates would result in more deaths. Quarantining the infectious has always been a cornerstone of public health infectious disease control, even before germs were discovered. Yes it restricts the liberties of the plausibly infectious, sometimes inappropriately, but the alternative of a plague is far worse.
Have a stroll through an old cemetery and read some headstones from the 1819 flu pandemic, where (e.g.) entire large families except one surviving parent were wiped out. Try to imagine what that must have been like. AIUI we got rather lucky with CoViD 19; we might easily not be so lucky with the next potential plague.
(1918)
Quarantine works best for its original purpose: refuse to let an arriving ship dock and make it anchor out in the roads for forty days by which time everyone infected aboard is either recovered and non-infectious, or dead. Some port cities such as Quebec City have offshore islands (then inaccessible by bridge) that were used as quarantine stations where the sick could be ministered to by selfless nuns and the dead could be buried as the pestilence on the ship gradually burned its way through the souls on board.
While individual uncooperative contagious people can be incarcerated, mass quarantine of an entire population against a highly contagious respiratory disease is not practical. People would starve if farmers couldn’t get their harvest to market (wet or otherwise), or if trucking was embargoed. People need to earn money to buy the necessities of life. You quarantine foreigners before they reach your shores, not your own people. Keeping your distance of just greater than a flea can jump was the basis of the six-foot rule once you’ve got plague in town.
Public health officials have the authority to placard dwellings, prohibiting anyone inside from leaving. This only works if people don’t become contagious until after they show clinical disease and you have only a few early cases. (We now know that most respiratory diseases are most contagious during a prodrome.) This would probably be resorted to if a case of smallpox turned up in our now highly susceptible population. An armed society would not submit to large-scale placarding.
To my knowledge no legally enforceable vaccine mandate on the general adult civilian non-healthcare population has ever been attempted, other than early historical ad hoc smallpox campaigns which were often violently resisted. It didn’t help that the older variolation often killed people. Nursing unions have usually grieved (successfully) attempts by employers to make them get annual influenza vaccine. Health employers can require new hires to get vaccinated against rubella and hepatitis B — one and done — as a condition of the job offer, if not already immune. But that’s about it.
Even if a pandemic control measure that violated civil liberties were objectively known to be beneficial and legally permissible, it would likely require a large commitment of the state’s monopoly on violence to suppress opposition coming from a stroppy population that didn’t take kindly to being told what to do. I don’t think we can know what would be possible or effective. The silver lining is that even if an uncontrollable plague killed a third of the population, you would need these irrepressible independent contrarian thinkers to rebuild society. Sheep wouldn’t know what to do. That’s a bit tongue in cheek but you get the idea.
Of course, only right-wing sources have covered this Civil Rights decision over sex realism, with this immediate interview with Maine Wire (conservative mag) and just off live AM radio show of Bob Franz (huge midwest/national conservative following) and kept shifting the convo from bathrooms to sex erasure/denialism in even biomedical research with selfID protocols and sex not reported in crime stats. I agreed with him on social contagion in schools, and he agreed with me that transpeople do exist, even if gender ideology has made it crazy. We’ll see if any mainstream (center-left) sources revisit the story.
https://www.themainewire.com/2024/11/umaine-professor-vindicated-after-backlash-for-saying-there-are-only-two-sexes/