Here’s the comedy bit from Bill Maher’s latest “Real Time”, and it’s called “New Rule: Don’t be a hypocrite.”
A few examples:
Trump touting electric cars (Teslas) after he appropriated Elon Musk.
Republicans buying Tesla cybertrucks after most saying they’d never buy an electric truck
The American Academy of Pediatrics reversing its position on getting kids into schools after Trump agreed with them
Republicans denigrated Michelle Obama’s program, “Let’s get American healthy again”, simply because it was from Michelle Obama.
Republicans now love Russia (so Maher said) when it was previous their nightmare country.
There are lots of examples of people accepting or rejecting programs or propositions simply because of who advocated them, and that is a form of hypocrisy. Most of his examples are anti-Republican, so take that, those people who consigned Maher to hell because he had dinner with Trump and found him a gracious host. (That denigration of Maher by those who dislike Trump—and those people include Maher—is itself a form of hypocrisy. If you dislike Trump, it’s impossible to ever find him gracious.)
As he says, we should “not to automatically rush to the opposite viewpoint based solely on who said it. But until we get to where we can do that, and I just hope the Democrats come out strongly next week for a dictatorship, coal mining, and making pot illegal.”
It’s a plea for comity, but nobody seems to be in that mood these days.
Woven into hypocrisy (… hypo .. crisy.. from the Greek word “hypokrites” meaning “stage actor, pretender, dissembler,” hmm, never actually wrote it out before..) is a deliberate appropriation of thought from the political opponent to wear as a sort of badge of honor…. there must be a word for this…
I do not have the precise source, but The Queer Gnostic cult capitalized on the word “queer” – in earlier times sometimes used as a slur of homosexuals – applying dialectical inversion to the word to advance – successfully – the cult’s own power, while negating any competing political power.
The short bit I refer to might have been by Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, David M. Halperin, or Gayle Rubin – but my guess is Rubin. It’s just a sentence or two though.
Maher makes some great points, as always. Unfortunately, the nonsense about only agreeing with a statement or sentiment if it is expressed by someone who you approve of is all too common.
When Labour member of parliament Rosie Duffield said that only women have a cervix, her party leader (now prime minister) Keir Starmer rebuked her. He said that this was “not right” and “something that should not be said”. When former prime minister Tony Blair later stated that “a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis” Starmer instantly agreed with him. FWIW, Rosie Duffield has never received an apology and now sits in parliament as an independent.
Because Tony Blair knows what it takes to get elected and keep the job of PM. Of course, Starmer owes women like Duffield an apology, but he won’t apologize.
Sorry, I disagree with your premise that protesting has to follow some sort of rules. The whole aspect of dissent and active protesting is to put yourself against those rules, whether or not those “rules” are germaine to the protest or to the act of protesting, or not.
So, let’s say the U of Chi has a rule saying, you can only protest in Quadrangle B between the hours of 5 and 7pm. So the admin of the U is now controlling where and when people who have a gripe and seemingly no other avenue of adjudication of whatever matter they are protesting, which seems counterproductive to the act of protesting.
Listen, if I have a gripe with you and you won’t let me adjudicate or even discuss the matter with you personally (like the students at U of Chi have gone through), then I want to use every means available to me to garner some attention and notoriety to my cause. You putting roadblocks up in front of me is designed to control me and (hopefully for you), to discourage or dissuade me from continuing to protest.
As long as I don’t destroy property or harm anyone in the process (or break other statutes regarding personal harm, theft and destruction…and maybe some tenets of safety), then I should be free to protest.
And, you can be free to do whatever you want to me, as long as you don’t violate my right of free speech. Putting up de facto “guardrail rules” to supposedly protect your self-enabled right to arrest me, suspend me or expel me is something third world countries do, which we are well on the path to now, if we’re not already there.
Well, the courts disagree with you, allowing TPM violations. If protesting interferes with the mission of a college, it can be subject to restrictions, so long as those restrictions are applied equally to all protestors. Most colleges allow REASONABLE protests. And, in fact, at the U of C, the encampers did meet with the administration, so you don’t know what you’re talking about. If your rules were followed, protestors could go into every class and disrupt it. That’s not violating the students’ right of free speech, by the eway.
Your comment is obtuse; you clearly haven’t thought the issue through carefully and how protests can clash with the rights of faculty and students.