Bill Maher on the Arizona Shootings

[perfectisafault]

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The folks in the audience for Jay Leno’s safe-for-all-audiences Tonight Show clearly would’ve rather had a visit from some cuddly zoo animals than what they got: an extended and at times awkwardly tense visit from HBO’s Bill Maher.

Talking about the shootings in Arizona and Fox News chief Roger Ailes‘ reported instructions to his staff to tone down

Comments

[salienne]

I wish Maher weren't such a misogynistic Islamophobic dick, because he tends to be right quite often. Such as here, repeatedly.

(Really wishing people would stop saying "crazy" so casually though. :/)

[miss_padfoot]

he's also an anti-vaxxer. :\

[salienne]

...really?

[miss_padfoot]

Yeah. He's not at the level of Andrew Wakefield or Jenny McCarthy, but he's pretty clueless. The best supporting links I have right now are blog posts, unfortunately, but here you go anyway. (Warning: this is all tl;dr) When Maher was selected to receive an award from a nationwide atheist group, there was a big kerfuffle in the atheist/skeptic blog community about his views, since he's an antitheist (yay!) but also an antivaxxer (boo!).

Sometimes he seems to be denying germ theory (though he seems to have relented on that one) and other times he's just making noise about how Western medicine shuts down debate and is bad in some nebulous sense. It's hard to tell how much of an antivaxxer he is.

Bill Frist, of all people, schooled him on vaccines in late 2009... it's kind of entertaining to watch.

[i_hate_music]

But how is being against vaccine not being skeptical? And how has it anything to do with being atheist or not?

I'm not an anti-vaxxer (actually right now it took me some time to understand what that's actually supposed to be) but questioning something like that hardly makes you less of a critical thinker.

[miss_padfoot]

Well, in his more extreme moments ("Louis Pasteur recanted on his deathbed", for example), I'd say it does make you less of a critical thinker. In general, "[famous thinker who thought things that I don't like] recanted on hir deathbed" memes are pretty much always false, and if someone said that about Darwin -- as creationists often do -- Maher would rightly scoff at them.

The rest of the time he's just being obstinate -- people have tried to explain the science to him, but he can't seem to get over the fact that he is healthy and eats well, and he's never gotten the flu despite never being vaccinated. That, and his perception that Americans don't eat that healthily (which I'll grant), seem to be the main two pieces of evidence that he brings up on his show. When someone comes to him and says, "Well, this person X died of Y despite being completely healthy," he'll sidestep by saying "well that's just your anecdotal evidence" (which would be fair except for his equally anecdotal "I've never gotten the flu" shtick) or making some smug

[salienne]

...

I don't even know what to say to this, just, wat. (Also don't really see how he deserves an award, but that's more me and less the award, I'm sure.)

I'm gonna watch the Frist vid, though, because anyone schooling Maher makes me happy.

[___closetome]

I emphatically agree.

[akashasheiress]

Co-signed, particularly on the ''crazy'' thing.

[doverz]

I wish people would stop saying crazy too.

[anyone625]

Yeah, I know. He's a smarmy prick, but he's also right sometimes.