Bill Maher is Problematic

Bill Maher is a weird ally because he fucks up in oh so many ways. I think he's a little bit condescending regarding gender and race, and he thinks he's "down" enough to say something like "house-nigger" when that actually is not a thing for white people to say--so where is the good thing he's doing? It's hard to say--after all, he puts Ann Coulter, and Darrell Issa, and Dana Rohrbacher. and Jack Kingston, and so on and so on, on his show. They aren't there to present real conversation--forget that. They are presented to normalize pretty fringe RW tropes. Jack Kingston, Darrell Issa, and Dana Rohrbacher and Ann Coulter, are all right now exactly the people who support Trump. They are and have been, clowns. Maher does not clown them, or let them clown themselves. He gives them a platform, and caters to their normalization.

In one way, Maher is supposed to be my people: atheist, mostly science-minded, rational potty-mouthed comedy folks. And I do agree with some of the things he stands for--I've got a libertarian (socially) streak, after all. I stand for science, and I want to think there are avenues of conversation with people who don't 100% share my viewpoint.

But while I try to respect folks like SE Cupp and Ana Navarro and Rick Wilson who seem like people with whom a lefty like me can speak, largely because Bill Maher put them forward as reasonable folks (I follow them on Twitter, though), Ben Sasse,  as was discussed on the show--is dangerous: he looks sane and nice, but his language isn't left-language and his outlook isn't compatible with ours. He may not love Trump, but he doesn't have a political overlap with us. And while Sasse sorted out how to make a public response via social media and even Bill Maher apologized after a fashion for his fuckup, we still might want to look at how a real left critique of Maher's use of this phrase might work, not forgiving Maher on free-speech grounds, and not excoriating him on the grounds he would dismiss as "politically correct". I mean to address the harm. Not the correctness, the framing we so often lack as uptighty whities. The harm that this language does to descendants of slavery in the US.

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Milo Yiannopoulos to Keynote CPAC

Oddball Breitbartian queer fetish-object Milo Yiannopoulos, recently seen on Real Time with Bill Maher, has been selected to be the keynote speaker at CPAC, a conservative shindig that pretty recently wasn't even cool with the Log Closet Cabin Republicans a mere two years ago. But after the reputed "smooth sailing" experienced by even the LCR last year, it's really quite something to have a very out British non-straight person actually as a feature, and not some weird kind of bug. Right? Progress! Big-ass tent. Room for Caitlin Jenner and all that.

I don't even know what to think about this. I actually think I should think nothing about it at all, and just make sure I have ample popcorn handy while viewing YouTube videos of what he has to say.

Now, there has been some question about whether Yiannopoulos is a supporter of pedophilia based on a certain video. . If Milo Yiannopoulos was a victim of pedophilia as a minor as he infers in that exchange (by a cleric in particular), and also in his Facebook disavowal of any support of pedophilia, I am prepared to support him in that disavowal as a supporter of victims' rights--

But he's proven over time that he has a slippery set of ethics in his reporting about various things. He mostly seems to be stunting, rather than having an actual intellectual point. His mishpacha refer to people being pedos either for the lulz or for great justice with no apparent commitment either way.  It's like "Jackass", but for Right-Wing ideology.

Thinking it Over, I'm With Affleck and Kristoff

It's not like me to mull something like this over so long. For a long while I had a leaning in the direction that Maher and Harris are displaying, although to help their argument, I think what they are looking for is the word "fundamentalism". Unwavering fundamentalism in religion, a hard-core unwavering ideological belief system, is pretty basically pernicious and unhelpful and impedes dialog. And I will allow that it is true that majority Islamic nations have a high percentage of people who have fundamentalist Islamic views and that people who are professed Muslims tend to agree with those fundamentalist views, wherever they happen to be--although I kind of think this might be "more in theory than in practice."

I've done a bit of evolving myself over the religious question. I used to have a scarlet "A" from Dawkins' Out Atheism project on my sidebar, but I just don't care--atheism isn't an organized thing. And as my atheism might suggest, I ain't so much of a joiner anyways. I was skeptical of the idea that the US had to recognize the variety and specific understandings of people of faith in the areas we diplomatically dealt with, but think I got even then that we are dealing with a problem of multiple viewpoints. And now, considering a group like ISIL, it makes even more sense to embrace the Islam that mostly is practiced by moderate and peace-loving folks, to alienate the abhorrent chaotic nightmare these extremists want to wage, and share a common viewpoint that random violence and beheadings and all that are not acceptable.