I can’t bear this kind of overwritten, stilted monologue—and the unironic use of “Karens” and putting the worst joke in the fucking headline— but I’m going to ask you to look past all that and watch Bill Maher here. Imperfect as it is, it’s a bit of an “
The man from Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre calls the police on almost everyone. In the piece about Nicola Murray they quote him saying how many times he reports 'hate crimes' but nothing happens. Well, just maybe that's because it's not worthy of action, Mridul. And what he's doing is inflating the 'hate crime' stats so he can then be shocked by the incredibly high number of 'hate' crimes against trans people. Castles in the air.
Took a look at Edinburgh Rape Crisis webpage. In the section titled “What is sexual violence”, it’s noted that violence can take many forms, including sexual harassment. Also, “sexual violence is any kind of unwanted sexual behaviour. It is an abuse of power and a form of control which causes humiliation, pain, fear and intimidation.” Hhhmmmm.
And … “you are not responsible for anyone else’s feelings”. Except — for his of course. Hence, his call for women to re-frame their antediluvian, and oh-so-un-woke rejection, of post-rape counselling with a male.
Also, from the website. “Sometimes it can be hard to name something as sexual violence. We may feel in our gut that it is wrong, or feel deeply unhappy, disturbed and worried by what has happened, but not want to name is as violence or use words associated with sexual violence.”
Another hhhmmmmm.
And sexual violence is further described: “In reality it can be far more subtle, however just because something was verbal, happened online, or was committed by someone you know, doesn’t mean it is any less frightening or violating – nor does it mean that you are any less deserving of support.”
Once again, hhhmmmmm.
If, one of the tenets of Gender Ideology states that “incorrect” pronoun use is literal violence, potentially leading to death, I don’t think it’s overstating the situation to say that a man, masquerading as a woman, heading up and making policy decisions for a woman’s rape crisis centre, gaslighting and attempting to control rape vicitims’ reality, calling police on women repeatedly (as he freely, and almost sighing at the tediousness of it all, admits), well, he just might need to take a good look at some of the key definitions on his website.
He doesn’t care. His name is a male name. He never bothered changing it.
I’m not sure at what point society will wake up and realize that the boundary violation aspect of these men-who-would-be-women is a feature, not a bug.
They like making women feel uncomfortable. They like forcing others to bow down to them. “Not all trans women,” of course. I’m talking about the men leading this charge. They are all the same: narcissistic; entitled; and they enjoy pushing women’s boundaries. These are the exact opposite to the kind of trans woman you’d want to lead this movement. These men are heartless fetishists who deeply resent women. They don’t have an ounce of sympathy for us. They crave our experiences of sexual violation as “validation.” This is the kind of man Wadhwa is.
This has all come out of our society’s refusal to grapple with the depth of depravity of men, denying how deep it goes, while catering to it in every way. We normalize daily use of horrendous pornography, and pretend that its existence doesn’t reflect these men among us. To speak the truth is too painful and embarrassing: “we have given men who hate women the keys to the kingdom. We have been tricked and fooled by these men, and we have handed our daughters, our wives, our sisters and mothers over to them.”
Wadhwa is an absolute monster, and epitomizes a sexual abuser, whether he’s assaulted someone or not. He’s doing this for political reasons, to gain validation, to push an agenda and further a victim narrative; he is *abusing victims of sexual abuse over the fact of their sex.* He is a sexual abuser.
I wrote to them yesterday to ask why their CEO had not been sacked for lying on his application by posing as a woman. I also told them they'd have a job sending the old bill to me as I'm on the other side of Europe and those former communist countries know gaslighting when they see it.
Not related to this ghastly case, but the problem with many societies in Eastern Europe is that they also see gaslighting when there is none. Saying this as someone who spends a lot of time in former Yugoslavia. Western societies, by contrast, seem to be rather gullible.
This is true. After being lied to for nearly 5 decades, people here are suspicious of anything coming from governments or institutions. On the downside, they go for conspiracy theories. Still, what's been great of late is that they're pretty vocal about their disagreements and happy to debate.
One could argue though that how and how much they have been lied to in the past 30 years easily outdoes all they have seen or heard before, with a few exceptions from the really dark days of Stalinism. I mean, I get why people there are so highly suspicious of anything coming from government institutions. It's not very helpful, though.
There are no light Stalinism and dark days of Stalinism, or light Lenin's terror and dark Lenin's terror, i.e. there is no light and dark totalitarianism. No lie told last 30 years could be compared with millions of dead.
I love what Russians say: Everything they told us about our government was a lie, but everything they told us about the U.S. was true. And in the U.S. practically everything our media tells us is a lie, and then they wonder why people didn't believe what they were being told about covid.
As Graham says, ignore the 'Karen' bits etc but FFS can everyone please wake up to the bloody insanity and evil of this Men's Rights Movement!
Call everyone out the minute they say 'Cis woman' or anything related. I am not a 'cis' anything. I am a woman (Adult Human Female). To the 'Trans Rights Activists' who call us Nazis and Racists. Some of the best (and wittiest) women in this fight are black. I'll post a good example later today. Others are the gay men who have not been captured by gender ideology and are standing up for all women and their right to dignity, privacy and safe spaces. They are on the side of their Lesbian friends who are the targets of the growing band of men who claim to be Lesbians. LESBIANS DO NOT HAVE PENISES.
It is important for everyone to know how gay people who are 'same sex attracted' and describe themselves as 'Gay not Queer' have been the subject of horrendous abuse from the LBGTQQI+++ brigade for standing up for their rights. Stonewall abandoned them years ago because they do not believe in Queer Theory and Gender Ideology - you have to be 'same gender attracted' ie accept that Lesbians can have penises - and were happy to have them labelled as 'genital fetishists' and 'sexual racists'. They are accused (like us) of 'hating' Trans people. No one hates Trans people but I think it is very important that we acknowledge we need to be very wary of some of the characters in this Ideological movement.
I am not gay, black or a man. I am a woman who spent years working with vulnerable young people and for almost 3 years now I have been watching this insanity unfold with disbelief and trying to fight against it.
We need a Panorama Special over 5 nights which explains Queer Theory and Gender Identity Ideology and what is going on in different countries throughout the world.
Talking of THE LEFT, according to the Guardian Rosie Duffield is expected to be about to make a decision of whether she leaves The Labour Party, (Apparently Rosie is currently being harassed by Labour Whips.....). Uhmm....Labour Party why would you want to lose one of your most wonderful MPs ? They most surely must enjoy this self destruction?
To be more accurate, The Labour Party whips are being accused of "not protecting Rosie from Harrassment', which in my mind is also a form of harassment.
Not just in your mind. Not to protect employees from harassment makes employers culpable in most progressive jurisdictions. Now, an MP may not be a party employee, but the analogy isn't far fetched.
I believe the police visiting Nicola Murray asked her what her thinking was, she explained, they were OK with it and then agreed with her that it was nonsense. So they've been ordered to go there to tick a box. I also heard that Scottish Police Commission are frustrated at being inundated with these complaints about tweets. Thank goodness it's not quite as bad as it sounds but what a waste of time and money!
Aren't there any regulations against people who arbitrarily make complaints about incidents that are clearly neither criminal nor otherwise punishable on a regular basis?
I think it could be seen as a vexatious complaint bit I'm not sure if it would be the police that would bring that against complainants or if the individual would have to. It should be regulated but I'm not sure if it is.
One of the advantages of living in a relatively rural/small town area is that all calls to the police are published in the newspaper. And some of them make for hilarious reading! such as calling the police to say there is manure in the road (when you live next to a dairy farm).
No. I just gradually build up the vocabulary on my own devices. It's annoying when I want to say 'doon the hoose ye ken nae bother aye' on a new device!! 🤣🤣
I know what you mean, but I think is is not that Maher's monologues are bad, it's the American chat-show audiences who applaud and whistle at EVERYTHING. And I thought the best joke was "snorting your shed". :)
Yes, I'm not fond of Maher but this wasn't too bad and snorting your shed was the best. (Btw, everything in California is declared carcinogenic -- I use a simple toothpaste with few ingredients which cause cancer according to California.)
Remember about U.S. audiences that they are all on some sort of drug, legal, illegal, prescription. You can go to an incredibly trite and boring performance and the audience behaves the exact same way.
You are right to add commentary to this. Maher was somehow given the green light to call out the absurdity but he does so in an oddly obnoxious manner, and he certainly wasn't ahead of any curve. He's just smart enough to know the liberazzi days are numbered.
Don't think Bill Maher needs green light to go on issues. There may be a few issues where his producers can rein him in, that's about it. I guess he's like the vast majority of left leaning liberals, waking up to a nightmare and realizing he's politically homeless. A feeling people from the hard left, such as myself, know all too well, and that's getting worse by the day. I mean, the people we grudginly voted for are now utterly unelectable.
It’s happening to all the best people and they are receiving abuse from their former allies. Step out even a little on from the official narrative and you are banished and abused for wrongthink. I do not believe they have abandoned the left. The left has abandoned us. It’s no longer recognizable. Outstanding levels of hypocrisy.
Oh, there are still pockets of resistance in the left. As a rule of thumb, the further left you go the greater they are. Trans ideology is an outgrowth of neoliberalism and a couple of other things that are about as antileft as it gets. What has succumbed to it is moderate leftwing parties and movement who had continuously moved towards the right in the past decades. Sadly, they represent the bulk of the organized left.
Tbh I thought he did this in a clever way, slip one comment in about an emoji half way through a bunch of other things. See how it's taken.
Moving a boundary in discourse is a really hard thing to do. Discourse isn't just what we talk about, it's what we're allowed to talk about. Slip a tiny joke in here and there to subtly move it over. And repeat.
Until you can talk about it more openly. It's oddly clever. And almost too small to complain about.
Moving boundaries in discourse is not a hard thing to do when you’re a packaged entertainer like Bill Maher. It’s all about timing and who is permitted to go first.
As he - cautiously but rightly - says, there are many other areas where regulation is desparately needed. It's there where we have seen waves of deregulation in the past 40 years. This has been made up for by tons of regulations for ordinary people, from smoking bans to what pronouns to use for rapists in court. And while political factions my fight over some of the many silly regulations, overall this is a project carried by both the parliamentary right and the parliamentary left.
For the first time ever, I’m voting third party or abstaining this year, and in the next presidential election.
All of this stuff is part of the same zeitgeist. What such government is actually accomplishing- the appearance of caring, cooperation, and unification, while actually dividing people into identities and categories, all the while surveilling and controlling the populace, installing a large bureaucracy to do so- is a sleight of hand trick bit of misdirection to distract from terrible economic oppression and absolutely no plan in place for the consequences of climate change, and through said distraction avert any organizing and uprising. The technocapitalist nanny state also paves the way to controlling and upgrading people via tech, which some of them are looking at as a way out.
I read a Chinese woman who left China to escape such leftist utopian social engineering saying it reminded her of the Cultural Revolution in China. I agree. We are getting there fast, and it’s terrifying.
They wish they were. Hate to think what the Red Guards would have done to them. Not just to them trans activists would have been very squeamish counterrevolutionaries.
Maher has been criticising the left for making themselves unelectable and missing massive open goals for years, since well before Trump was elected. But he's barely said a thing about this issue, so this latest comment is the tiniest of nuggets. He's been pussyfooting around trans rights for years, in a way he has never done for other SJ causes, e.g. BLM, Defund the Police. He's also a huge critic of religions, especially the kind that were invented in the 20th century that might be called something rather more derogatory (cults). He must see the mindset/demands/modus operandi of the people professing trans rights has parallels and bears comparison with other dangerous ideologies. Not to mention it's utter, fundamentally ridiculous, anti science basis. And yet nothing. He's had ample avenues to tackle this head on: the WiSpa scandal, stupid liberal guests moaning about the Bathroom Bill, the scandal of that poor father of the raped girl being arrested at the school meeting, Rachel Levine's appointment by Biden. Where was Bill Maher when all this was happening? When the left were doing exactly what he complains about: alienating their own, and pushing the socially conservative middle Americans further into the hands of the politically conservative? Having said that, he professes to hate children and he doesn't seem to like women/feminism much, so maybe it's an issue he decided didn't matter to him. Either that, or he's a coward who's allowed women to do the heavy lifting for him, and now he'll breeze in and claim he thought the whole thing was absurd all along. Well, get on with it then, Bill! I'd like to see him have Dr Bret Weinstein and Dr Heather Heying of Dark Horse Podcasts back on to talk about this - he's had them on to talk about Covid, and was happy to hear them out. They are PhDs in Biology, GC, eminently sensible, measured and non sensationalist, been cancelled ( victims of Evergreen) and widely respected. I find it hard to believe that Maher, having been very complimentary of them when he had them on as guests, has not followed their podcast where they take apart genderism.
Bill Maher is a jack of all trades, and master not of none, but of few. Like roughly 99 per cent of the population he probably underestimated the issue. Unless you really concern yourself with trans ideology, all you'll get to see are a few isolated cases of insanity. It takes a while to realize that this is part of a large issue.
Let's take a step back and look at this from a distance: What sane person thinks that anyone could believe that a man can become a woman or feel compelled to even pretend? Pretend not as in: OK, be nice to that guy while you talk to him and humor him, but pretend in: referring to him as her in public and even supporting that that guy gets to be on a women's team, gets elected on a women's ticket and what have you? And, morever, not just for that individual guy but for every man who claims that he is a woman and not even bothers to shave for appearance's sake?
What sane person believes that unlicensed drugs are tried out on kids for obvious mental health issues by the thousands?
What sane person believes that there is actually a debate over whether men should be housed in women's shelters or women's prisons on a systematic basis?
I'm sure both of us could try and complete that list and not be done for days, but the bottom line is: Unless you start investigating you'll just hear about a handful of very spectacular cases and think: Well, OK, in this case something has gone wrong, something can always go wrong, people make mistakes, can we please talk about something more important?
Remember how long it took for people to take the allegations of systematic child rape against the Catholic Church serious? It took almost 20 years of work my victim organisations, atheist orgs and of course of litigations, and in the end the Irish government - of all governments - with its investigations. And, for a normal person stories about priests sexually assaulting children have always been infinitely more credible than the idea that anyone could think that a man can become a woman or at least feel compelled to pretend.
Of course, I could be wrong and Bill Maher deliberately avoided the issue for whatever reason. But I'll give him the credit of doubt here.
Good point. I was totally unaware of the issue two years ago, and most likely would still be were it not for JKR. But here's a - what is he not so much comedian as satirical political commentator I guess somewhat in the Jon Stewart vein - so he's surely aware of the huge mass of material potentially available for satire in the trans rights car crash. Surely the reason is HBO vets the material closely and decides what he may not put out on their channel. That's a true dilemma - as satirist you must pursue the nothing is sacred line, but if you get silenced then where's the effect of your satire?
There is another point: It is next to impossible to be satirical about issues the public have no idea about. Satire requires some awareness of a topic. If there is none, the joke's lost. True, satire can and does raise awareness, voice protest and is important as a whole - but some basic requirements have to be met in order for it to work.
Great comment! Researching is bad. Researching any of this may lead to clicking on non approved links. The only “good” information is from socially approved people/sources. It is truly terrifying how immersed in tribal thinking the left has become. Everyone not completely going along with everything is Far Right. Craziness.
Not that you are necessarily wrong as such. But you assume that most people don't want to know. I don't think that's the case. The whole thing is so outlandish to a vast majority that they couldn't even imagine that those few cases they hear about are part of an actual political ideology and part of larger political efforts. They don't see a pattern. Yet. So to the best of their knowledge they have no idea that there is something they perhaps wouldn't even want to know about. Sadly, many of those whose job it is to know better subject themselves to exactly what you have described. Not just in this respect, as we'd both agree. Large parts of the left have gone full swing identitarian and they don't even notice. In this, they themselves are just adopting and slightly adapting far right wing discourse.
I have sworn I will not vote for our Democratic governor again and I am waiting to see what my representative and senators have to say about the Equality For All Act replacing the "Equality" Act. The EFAA outlines protections for women, LGB, and all gender-nonconforming individuals. I doubt I will vote for my Democratic representative again -- I am sick of warmongers -- and I didn't vote for either of my senators.
Perfectly right. Never vote for warmongers. And when the only choice is between a bigot who's against ethnic minorities and a bigot who's against women, the only sensible thing may be to stay home.
I actually think my representative just doesn't know much about this issue, but I don't know what's happening in the governor's office. I have now sent them three videos or news stories and have not heard a peep. And this is Maine where you can often get such people on the telephone.
Good clips. Bill Maher quite rightly said the Democrats are going to lose over those boutique issues. The Virginia state elections last year bear that out.
This might make you laugh too… From Hayden’s Twitter:
“ Litigation is very time consuming and emotionally exhausting. Options other than litigation are also being considered. Given, there is evidence of abuse of political connections, my Member of Parliament is becoming involved. Will update when back in UK 👌”
Read an article in the guardian (eye roll) they were talking about men in jail and the state of prisons. They should totally do something about that yes, but then this little gem came to light.
"The state holds on to them just long enough to lose them their jobs or the partner who might have persuaded them to go straight."
I'm assuming that "partner" is Nick Cohen's coy way of saying woman. How the hell is it a woman's job/responsibility to persuade a man not to commit crimes? At the moment, I think we've got our hands full with trying to not have them commit crimes against us.
The man from Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre calls the police on almost everyone. In the piece about Nicola Murray they quote him saying how many times he reports 'hate crimes' but nothing happens. Well, just maybe that's because it's not worthy of action, Mridul. And what he's doing is inflating the 'hate crime' stats so he can then be shocked by the incredibly high number of 'hate' crimes against trans people. Castles in the air.
Apparently it has never crossed his mind that nothing happens because nothing has happened.
Lol, that is so well put
Well apart from a big fat fraud/impersonation scandal on his part.
Took a look at Edinburgh Rape Crisis webpage. In the section titled “What is sexual violence”, it’s noted that violence can take many forms, including sexual harassment. Also, “sexual violence is any kind of unwanted sexual behaviour. It is an abuse of power and a form of control which causes humiliation, pain, fear and intimidation.” Hhhmmmm.
And … “you are not responsible for anyone else’s feelings”. Except — for his of course. Hence, his call for women to re-frame their antediluvian, and oh-so-un-woke rejection, of post-rape counselling with a male.
Also, from the website. “Sometimes it can be hard to name something as sexual violence. We may feel in our gut that it is wrong, or feel deeply unhappy, disturbed and worried by what has happened, but not want to name is as violence or use words associated with sexual violence.”
Another hhhmmmmm.
And sexual violence is further described: “In reality it can be far more subtle, however just because something was verbal, happened online, or was committed by someone you know, doesn’t mean it is any less frightening or violating – nor does it mean that you are any less deserving of support.”
Once again, hhhmmmmm.
If, one of the tenets of Gender Ideology states that “incorrect” pronoun use is literal violence, potentially leading to death, I don’t think it’s overstating the situation to say that a man, masquerading as a woman, heading up and making policy decisions for a woman’s rape crisis centre, gaslighting and attempting to control rape vicitims’ reality, calling police on women repeatedly (as he freely, and almost sighing at the tediousness of it all, admits), well, he just might need to take a good look at some of the key definitions on his website.
He is an abuser.
He doesn’t care. His name is a male name. He never bothered changing it.
I’m not sure at what point society will wake up and realize that the boundary violation aspect of these men-who-would-be-women is a feature, not a bug.
They like making women feel uncomfortable. They like forcing others to bow down to them. “Not all trans women,” of course. I’m talking about the men leading this charge. They are all the same: narcissistic; entitled; and they enjoy pushing women’s boundaries. These are the exact opposite to the kind of trans woman you’d want to lead this movement. These men are heartless fetishists who deeply resent women. They don’t have an ounce of sympathy for us. They crave our experiences of sexual violation as “validation.” This is the kind of man Wadhwa is.
This has all come out of our society’s refusal to grapple with the depth of depravity of men, denying how deep it goes, while catering to it in every way. We normalize daily use of horrendous pornography, and pretend that its existence doesn’t reflect these men among us. To speak the truth is too painful and embarrassing: “we have given men who hate women the keys to the kingdom. We have been tricked and fooled by these men, and we have handed our daughters, our wives, our sisters and mothers over to them.”
Wadhwa is an absolute monster, and epitomizes a sexual abuser, whether he’s assaulted someone or not. He’s doing this for political reasons, to gain validation, to push an agenda and further a victim narrative; he is *abusing victims of sexual abuse over the fact of their sex.* He is a sexual abuser.
I wrote to them yesterday to ask why their CEO had not been sacked for lying on his application by posing as a woman. I also told them they'd have a job sending the old bill to me as I'm on the other side of Europe and those former communist countries know gaslighting when they see it.
Not related to this ghastly case, but the problem with many societies in Eastern Europe is that they also see gaslighting when there is none. Saying this as someone who spends a lot of time in former Yugoslavia. Western societies, by contrast, seem to be rather gullible.
This is true. After being lied to for nearly 5 decades, people here are suspicious of anything coming from governments or institutions. On the downside, they go for conspiracy theories. Still, what's been great of late is that they're pretty vocal about their disagreements and happy to debate.
One could argue though that how and how much they have been lied to in the past 30 years easily outdoes all they have seen or heard before, with a few exceptions from the really dark days of Stalinism. I mean, I get why people there are so highly suspicious of anything coming from government institutions. It's not very helpful, though.
There are no light Stalinism and dark days of Stalinism, or light Lenin's terror and dark Lenin's terror, i.e. there is no light and dark totalitarianism. No lie told last 30 years could be compared with millions of dead.
I love what Russians say: Everything they told us about our government was a lie, but everything they told us about the U.S. was true. And in the U.S. practically everything our media tells us is a lie, and then they wonder why people didn't believe what they were being told about covid.
👏👏👏
I've just posted this comment on my Facebook
As Graham says, ignore the 'Karen' bits etc but FFS can everyone please wake up to the bloody insanity and evil of this Men's Rights Movement!
Call everyone out the minute they say 'Cis woman' or anything related. I am not a 'cis' anything. I am a woman (Adult Human Female). To the 'Trans Rights Activists' who call us Nazis and Racists. Some of the best (and wittiest) women in this fight are black. I'll post a good example later today. Others are the gay men who have not been captured by gender ideology and are standing up for all women and their right to dignity, privacy and safe spaces. They are on the side of their Lesbian friends who are the targets of the growing band of men who claim to be Lesbians. LESBIANS DO NOT HAVE PENISES.
It is important for everyone to know how gay people who are 'same sex attracted' and describe themselves as 'Gay not Queer' have been the subject of horrendous abuse from the LBGTQQI+++ brigade for standing up for their rights. Stonewall abandoned them years ago because they do not believe in Queer Theory and Gender Ideology - you have to be 'same gender attracted' ie accept that Lesbians can have penises - and were happy to have them labelled as 'genital fetishists' and 'sexual racists'. They are accused (like us) of 'hating' Trans people. No one hates Trans people but I think it is very important that we acknowledge we need to be very wary of some of the characters in this Ideological movement.
I am not gay, black or a man. I am a woman who spent years working with vulnerable young people and for almost 3 years now I have been watching this insanity unfold with disbelief and trying to fight against it.
We need a Panorama Special over 5 nights which explains Queer Theory and Gender Identity Ideology and what is going on in different countries throughout the world.
Not sure I really understand Queer Theory?
Talking of THE LEFT, according to the Guardian Rosie Duffield is expected to be about to make a decision of whether she leaves The Labour Party, (Apparently Rosie is currently being harassed by Labour Whips.....). Uhmm....Labour Party why would you want to lose one of your most wonderful MPs ? They most surely must enjoy this self destruction?
To be more accurate, The Labour Party whips are being accused of "not protecting Rosie from Harrassment', which in my mind is also a form of harassment.
Not just in your mind. Not to protect employees from harassment makes employers culpable in most progressive jurisdictions. Now, an MP may not be a party employee, but the analogy isn't far fetched.
I believe the police visiting Nicola Murray asked her what her thinking was, she explained, they were OK with it and then agreed with her that it was nonsense. So they've been ordered to go there to tick a box. I also heard that Scottish Police Commission are frustrated at being inundated with these complaints about tweets. Thank goodness it's not quite as bad as it sounds but what a waste of time and money!
Aren't there any regulations against people who arbitrarily make complaints about incidents that are clearly neither criminal nor otherwise punishable on a regular basis?
I think it could be seen as a vexatious complaint bit I'm not sure if it would be the police that would bring that against complainants or if the individual would have to. It should be regulated but I'm not sure if it is.
One of the advantages of living in a relatively rural/small town area is that all calls to the police are published in the newspaper. And some of them make for hilarious reading! such as calling the police to say there is manure in the road (when you live next to a dairy farm).
Murdo Fraser, MSP, is bringing up problems with the thought police in parliament either today or tomorrow.
Excellent! That'll be their gas doon tae an almost indiscriminate peep!!
That was meant to say indiscernable but auto text was being a thug!
Is there an autocorrect/autosuggest for Scottish spellings? That's something I actually wonder.
No. I just gradually build up the vocabulary on my own devices. It's annoying when I want to say 'doon the hoose ye ken nae bother aye' on a new device!! 🤣🤣
I'm in touch with a few Scottish people in Scotland, and none of them type out their dialect when we correspond. When do you decide to do that vs not?
I know what you mean, but I think is is not that Maher's monologues are bad, it's the American chat-show audiences who applaud and whistle at EVERYTHING. And I thought the best joke was "snorting your shed". :)
Yes, I'm not fond of Maher but this wasn't too bad and snorting your shed was the best. (Btw, everything in California is declared carcinogenic -- I use a simple toothpaste with few ingredients which cause cancer according to California.)
Remember about U.S. audiences that they are all on some sort of drug, legal, illegal, prescription. You can go to an incredibly trite and boring performance and the audience behaves the exact same way.
Yes, I loved that.
You are right to add commentary to this. Maher was somehow given the green light to call out the absurdity but he does so in an oddly obnoxious manner, and he certainly wasn't ahead of any curve. He's just smart enough to know the liberazzi days are numbered.
Don't think Bill Maher needs green light to go on issues. There may be a few issues where his producers can rein him in, that's about it. I guess he's like the vast majority of left leaning liberals, waking up to a nightmare and realizing he's politically homeless. A feeling people from the hard left, such as myself, know all too well, and that's getting worse by the day. I mean, the people we grudginly voted for are now utterly unelectable.
It’s happening to all the best people and they are receiving abuse from their former allies. Step out even a little on from the official narrative and you are banished and abused for wrongthink. I do not believe they have abandoned the left. The left has abandoned us. It’s no longer recognizable. Outstanding levels of hypocrisy.
Oh, there are still pockets of resistance in the left. As a rule of thumb, the further left you go the greater they are. Trans ideology is an outgrowth of neoliberalism and a couple of other things that are about as antileft as it gets. What has succumbed to it is moderate leftwing parties and movement who had continuously moved towards the right in the past decades. Sadly, they represent the bulk of the organized left.
Tbh I thought he did this in a clever way, slip one comment in about an emoji half way through a bunch of other things. See how it's taken.
Moving a boundary in discourse is a really hard thing to do. Discourse isn't just what we talk about, it's what we're allowed to talk about. Slip a tiny joke in here and there to subtly move it over. And repeat.
Until you can talk about it more openly. It's oddly clever. And almost too small to complain about.
Moving boundaries in discourse is not a hard thing to do when you’re a packaged entertainer like Bill Maher. It’s all about timing and who is permitted to go first.
The timing is obviously right then
Imagine how these supposed liberals would react if one of their number were visited by the police for expressing a straightforward view?
Bill Maher people "sick of rules" … yep imperfect people telling others how to to act and think. It has never worked.!
As he - cautiously but rightly - says, there are many other areas where regulation is desparately needed. It's there where we have seen waves of deregulation in the past 40 years. This has been made up for by tons of regulations for ordinary people, from smoking bans to what pronouns to use for rapists in court. And while political factions my fight over some of the many silly regulations, overall this is a project carried by both the parliamentary right and the parliamentary left.
YES, YES, YES!
For the first time ever, I’m voting third party or abstaining this year, and in the next presidential election.
All of this stuff is part of the same zeitgeist. What such government is actually accomplishing- the appearance of caring, cooperation, and unification, while actually dividing people into identities and categories, all the while surveilling and controlling the populace, installing a large bureaucracy to do so- is a sleight of hand trick bit of misdirection to distract from terrible economic oppression and absolutely no plan in place for the consequences of climate change, and through said distraction avert any organizing and uprising. The technocapitalist nanny state also paves the way to controlling and upgrading people via tech, which some of them are looking at as a way out.
I read a Chinese woman who left China to escape such leftist utopian social engineering saying it reminded her of the Cultural Revolution in China. I agree. We are getting there fast, and it’s terrifying.
Your last paragraph is exactly how a friend of mine who is a Social Worker in London describes his job.
Yes! And the perpetually wounded trans are the new Red Guards
They wish they were. Hate to think what the Red Guards would have done to them. Not just to them trans activists would have been very squeamish counterrevolutionaries.
Maher has been criticising the left for making themselves unelectable and missing massive open goals for years, since well before Trump was elected. But he's barely said a thing about this issue, so this latest comment is the tiniest of nuggets. He's been pussyfooting around trans rights for years, in a way he has never done for other SJ causes, e.g. BLM, Defund the Police. He's also a huge critic of religions, especially the kind that were invented in the 20th century that might be called something rather more derogatory (cults). He must see the mindset/demands/modus operandi of the people professing trans rights has parallels and bears comparison with other dangerous ideologies. Not to mention it's utter, fundamentally ridiculous, anti science basis. And yet nothing. He's had ample avenues to tackle this head on: the WiSpa scandal, stupid liberal guests moaning about the Bathroom Bill, the scandal of that poor father of the raped girl being arrested at the school meeting, Rachel Levine's appointment by Biden. Where was Bill Maher when all this was happening? When the left were doing exactly what he complains about: alienating their own, and pushing the socially conservative middle Americans further into the hands of the politically conservative? Having said that, he professes to hate children and he doesn't seem to like women/feminism much, so maybe it's an issue he decided didn't matter to him. Either that, or he's a coward who's allowed women to do the heavy lifting for him, and now he'll breeze in and claim he thought the whole thing was absurd all along. Well, get on with it then, Bill! I'd like to see him have Dr Bret Weinstein and Dr Heather Heying of Dark Horse Podcasts back on to talk about this - he's had them on to talk about Covid, and was happy to hear them out. They are PhDs in Biology, GC, eminently sensible, measured and non sensationalist, been cancelled ( victims of Evergreen) and widely respected. I find it hard to believe that Maher, having been very complimentary of them when he had them on as guests, has not followed their podcast where they take apart genderism.
He's one of the few non republican comedians who spoke in defence of Dave Chappelle so he has now thrown his hat in the ring I think
Bill Maher is a jack of all trades, and master not of none, but of few. Like roughly 99 per cent of the population he probably underestimated the issue. Unless you really concern yourself with trans ideology, all you'll get to see are a few isolated cases of insanity. It takes a while to realize that this is part of a large issue.
Let's take a step back and look at this from a distance: What sane person thinks that anyone could believe that a man can become a woman or feel compelled to even pretend? Pretend not as in: OK, be nice to that guy while you talk to him and humor him, but pretend in: referring to him as her in public and even supporting that that guy gets to be on a women's team, gets elected on a women's ticket and what have you? And, morever, not just for that individual guy but for every man who claims that he is a woman and not even bothers to shave for appearance's sake?
What sane person believes that unlicensed drugs are tried out on kids for obvious mental health issues by the thousands?
What sane person believes that there is actually a debate over whether men should be housed in women's shelters or women's prisons on a systematic basis?
I'm sure both of us could try and complete that list and not be done for days, but the bottom line is: Unless you start investigating you'll just hear about a handful of very spectacular cases and think: Well, OK, in this case something has gone wrong, something can always go wrong, people make mistakes, can we please talk about something more important?
Remember how long it took for people to take the allegations of systematic child rape against the Catholic Church serious? It took almost 20 years of work my victim organisations, atheist orgs and of course of litigations, and in the end the Irish government - of all governments - with its investigations. And, for a normal person stories about priests sexually assaulting children have always been infinitely more credible than the idea that anyone could think that a man can become a woman or at least feel compelled to pretend.
Of course, I could be wrong and Bill Maher deliberately avoided the issue for whatever reason. But I'll give him the credit of doubt here.
Wow! Very well put.
Thank you.
Good point. I was totally unaware of the issue two years ago, and most likely would still be were it not for JKR. But here's a - what is he not so much comedian as satirical political commentator I guess somewhat in the Jon Stewart vein - so he's surely aware of the huge mass of material potentially available for satire in the trans rights car crash. Surely the reason is HBO vets the material closely and decides what he may not put out on their channel. That's a true dilemma - as satirist you must pursue the nothing is sacred line, but if you get silenced then where's the effect of your satire?
There is another point: It is next to impossible to be satirical about issues the public have no idea about. Satire requires some awareness of a topic. If there is none, the joke's lost. True, satire can and does raise awareness, voice protest and is important as a whole - but some basic requirements have to be met in order for it to work.
Great comment! Researching is bad. Researching any of this may lead to clicking on non approved links. The only “good” information is from socially approved people/sources. It is truly terrifying how immersed in tribal thinking the left has become. Everyone not completely going along with everything is Far Right. Craziness.
Not that you are necessarily wrong as such. But you assume that most people don't want to know. I don't think that's the case. The whole thing is so outlandish to a vast majority that they couldn't even imagine that those few cases they hear about are part of an actual political ideology and part of larger political efforts. They don't see a pattern. Yet. So to the best of their knowledge they have no idea that there is something they perhaps wouldn't even want to know about. Sadly, many of those whose job it is to know better subject themselves to exactly what you have described. Not just in this respect, as we'd both agree. Large parts of the left have gone full swing identitarian and they don't even notice. In this, they themselves are just adopting and slightly adapting far right wing discourse.
Completely agree you've made some excellent points
The Democrats are going to get destroyed in the midterms this year.
They deserve it.
They have delivered preciously little and damaged quite a bit.
They are the lesser of two evils that make the greater evil imaginable.
Yes. It’s more than clear.
I have sworn I will not vote for our Democratic governor again and I am waiting to see what my representative and senators have to say about the Equality For All Act replacing the "Equality" Act. The EFAA outlines protections for women, LGB, and all gender-nonconforming individuals. I doubt I will vote for my Democratic representative again -- I am sick of warmongers -- and I didn't vote for either of my senators.
Perfectly right. Never vote for warmongers. And when the only choice is between a bigot who's against ethnic minorities and a bigot who's against women, the only sensible thing may be to stay home.
I actually think my representative just doesn't know much about this issue, but I don't know what's happening in the governor's office. I have now sent them three videos or news stories and have not heard a peep. And this is Maine where you can often get such people on the telephone.
Sorry to hear that.
Good clips. Bill Maher quite rightly said the Democrats are going to lose over those boutique issues. The Virginia state elections last year bear that out.
I've watched more Kyle Dunnigan doing Bill Maher than I've seen Bill Maher. Kyle does him better.
I couldn't possibly agree or disagree, but I like your sense of humor.
This might make you laugh too… From Hayden’s Twitter:
“ Litigation is very time consuming and emotionally exhausting. Options other than litigation are also being considered. Given, there is evidence of abuse of political connections, my Member of Parliament is becoming involved. Will update when back in UK 👌”
Read an article in the guardian (eye roll) they were talking about men in jail and the state of prisons. They should totally do something about that yes, but then this little gem came to light.
"The state holds on to them just long enough to lose them their jobs or the partner who might have persuaded them to go straight."
I'm assuming that "partner" is Nick Cohen's coy way of saying woman. How the hell is it a woman's job/responsibility to persuade a man not to commit crimes? At the moment, I think we've got our hands full with trying to not have them commit crimes against us.
It's next level...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/29/how-many-more-charlie-todds-must-there-be-before-prisons-reformed