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minitrr t1_j4d8hzu wrote

Bill is a smug sob for sure but I’ll be damned if I don’t tune in on Fridays.

The format and guests are incredible - where else can you see Killer Mike and Tom Morello duke it out with journalists and politicians? Ben Affleck and Sam Harris getting in a slap fight? Salman Rushdie scolding Mos Def?

People bitching about Bill getting too chummy with right wing folks are beyond daft. The whole point of the show is having conversations no matter how different the personalities, beliefs, and backgrounds of the guests might be. Bill has some terribly stupid and uninformed gripes about millennials and Gen z, but he’s never trying to silence them - he usually has at least one millennial or Gen z-aged guest on his panels.

There’s nothing interesting about watching likeminded people jerk each other off in an echo chamber or the same pundits spewing their party’s talking points on “debate” shows.

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PPQue6 t1_j4dak9f wrote

Yep, I've been watching him since his politically incorrect days, and I still watch now. There's a few things about him that annoy me, but he's usually right.

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hour_of_the_rat t1_j4evigu wrote

Agree with everything you said. No comedian can satisfy every particular audience member all the time--nor should they try, or it is even possible.

Colbert was brilliant on the TCR, skewering conservatives while pretending to be a conservative, even getting invited to the Whitehouse Correspondents' Dinner to roast Bush in 2006. But now? His monologues are decent, but usually not anywhere as good as his stuff from 15 years ago.

Trevor's best work were his editorials on race, but I skipped almost every celebrity interview where the guest was just oozing "I'm so happy to be me".

Anybody who watches Maher, or any other comedian who does political satire is going to find things to disagree with. As you said, he is generally right ("But I'm Not Wrong") on most issues, but it's fine to disagree with each other, but so many comments here, and elsewhere, want lockstep agreement.

The hate he gets from people is really astounding. It's like they want him to check every single one of their own particular 100 boxes, or he is the worst ever, but most attacks against him are ad hominem ("He's just a cranky old man"), and not specific criticisms of his views--which I have, certainly--but just goes to show that most people hate him without even knowing what he says. It's the whole, "I didn't read the article, but let me tell you what the author gets wrong".

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PPQue6 t1_j4f380x wrote

Exactly. I think people forget that you can disagree occasionally and still like someone.

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MissDiem t1_j4frp74 wrote

> There’s nothing interesting about watching likeminded people jerk each other off in an echo chamber or the same pundits

Yeah! Like Bill Maher would never do that. /s

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Lightsides t1_j4hghcp wrote

Yeah, he's smug. And he can be very reductive, especially when going for his punch lines. But I don't think the "he hates young people" thing really works.

He's a liberal, grounded in enlightenment values. He isn't is a progressive, grounded in oppressed/oppressor dialectic of critical theory that has trickled down the youthful online crowd.

And that's okay. It may not be "right," as if something is right in that way, but it is a legitimate intellectual position. Pretending that it isn't is pure close-mindedness. We live in a world profoundly shaped by enlightenment thinking that has given us some bad shit but also some very good stuff.

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hour_of_the_rat t1_j4ew67r wrote

>Bill has some terribly stupid and uninformed gripes about millennials and Gen z

Very strongly agree with most of what you said, but I will disagree with this.

Bill cites Millennials' desire to complain about everything, but their voter participation is about 25%, which is abysmal, and so many issues would improve if they would just fucking vote.

Also, every generation finds fault with the ones that come after it. Just wait until Millennials are parents, and grandparents and watch them complain about the younger generations.

Every generation makes some things better, and some things worse.

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BlackKnight2000 t1_j4f2rp7 wrote

> Just wait until Millennials are parents

Most Millennials are in their thirties now.

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hour_of_the_rat t1_j4f58ca wrote

Okay, so their kids are, at most, 8 or 9 but probably younger? They are still mostly cute. Wait until they are teenagers, and watch Millennials complain about the younger generation.

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onlypham t1_j4fkcwq wrote

When I’m 63 do you know how much shit I’m gonna hate? I don’t because it hasn’t been invented yet, and my social world view hasn’t been shook yet but I’m sure there’s gonna be some stuff.

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hour_of_the_rat t1_j4fm2bn wrote

>I’m sure there’s gonna be some stuff.

Self-entitlement is something that has existed for probably 50,000 years.

Imagine being of the first few generations that learned to make fire. Their kids grew up thinking fire was just an everyday thing, and probably let the embers go out on too many occasions, only to have Mom & Dad come home and be like WTF, why did you let the coals go out?

Because we can just get them going again.

I wasn't gone all day hunting wooly mammoth just so that you could let the coals go out. Back in my day keeping the coals going was the most important thing.

--

When a generation introduces a technology or a better implementation of an older tech, the next generation grows up not understanding the importance of the technological leap that was made. It has always existed for them, so they don't value it as much as the people who mainstreamed it.

Whatever tech people born in the past 20 years mainline is going to be taken for granted by their kids, and in 2060 the people born in 2000 are going to look at kids born in 2030 as being entitled asshats.

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