Bill Maher goes full MAGA - says Dems party of slavery and he needs to be harder on left than right

[Sympthsical]

44. If Maher is MAGA, that term literally has no meaning at all

Calling someone as anti-Trump as he is MAGA is ridiculous. He was the one ringing the alarm bells that he didn't think Trump would leave office if he lost the election. He'd ask politicians on his show what they would do if that happened. They brushed him off.

He was right. The politicians who thought it would never happen were wrong.

I think Maher is a good barometer of partisanship. The less people can tolerate dissension or criticism of party or ideology, the more they hate him. It's not 1:1 or the sole cause to dislike him, but it lines up well pretty regularly.

I don't agree with everything he says - not by a long mile. I think sometimes he goes far afield on some topics, and he kind of has a streak of health-nuttery/medical suspicion that I find common in a very specific subset of Californians. Rich, white, and liberal. Think your Berkeleys and your Marin counties. For ten years navigating various medical systems and organizations for patients, I ran into a lot of medical woo in these quarters.

However, he is a thinker. He's making up his own mind. He's giving thought to topics. He has conversations with all kinds of people, whether he agrees with them or not. He's the opposite of closed, insulated thinking. And he's saying what he thinks regardless of whether or not it plays well with the team.

And team people hate him for it.

Bill Maher is MAGA? We just use terms for anything nowadays. Not because they mean things, but because they signal who's in-group and out-group. I trust, given its constant use the last six months, Maher's about to be accused of stochastic terrorism in some way - gotta get those vocabulary terms out there to signal who's the heretic.

And he's dead right about freedom of speech. 100% right. It's my greatest dissension with my side. I think the principle of free expression is under constant daily attack. "You can say this. You can't say this. If you say this, we're going to try to get you shut down in some way. We'll let you know what thoughts you're allowed to have." Navigating social media (or hell, just regular media) is a constant endeavor of trying to maneuver through speech and thought codes an increasingly authoritarian mindset is trying to impose on everyone else.

Whether or not I agree with what he says about something, he at least seems like he'd be crazy interesting to have a conversation with. As opposed to people who constantly wander this earth, "You have to think or say what I want you to think and say, or else you're a heretic and must be cleansed." Those people are the fucking worst. And so endlessly dull. And dangerous to free expression.

At least Maher ain't that. When it comes to free expression, I think he has it right and his opponents are completely wrong. From upthread I saw, "I can't wait until he's banned from here for being RW talking points."

Nailed Maher's point for him in one.