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

[theartistprince]

I would side with anyone over a Jay Leno audience, tbh.

I'm not really a fan and haven't watched the video yet, but Team Maher out of principle.

[neurotic]

I would side with anyone over a Jay Leno audience, tbh.

haha, me too.

[lightbird777]

Same.

[miss_padfoot]

haha, me too, on all counts. I don't even like Bill Maher all that much but it sounds like the Leno audience were just being dumb.

[i_hate_music]

He's probably the only person I know that I almost always agree with and yet everything he says makes me feel uncomfortable.

[xforge]

Well you could say if you're not uncomfortable with it then... well it may as well just be a Leno joke. Y'know?

[i_hate_music]

not really... you could also be Bill Hicks, be funny, different, and trouble-making without being so hostile. It's hostility against each and everything that makes him so weird. I think that's what I disliked about religulous. I'm a very firm atheist and I agreed with every statement he made but attacking every one personally is not the way to go, I think.
Not everyone can be Louis Theroux and be friendly even to the people he hates but he could at least try a tiny bit.

[xforge]

However **no one else** is Bill Hicks or ever will be.

[condenast]

Well, that just shows you Leno's audience. That was actually quite enlightening to hear them yell no.

[homasse]

Fox News chief Roger Ailes‘ reported instructions to his staff to tone down language after Tucson,

The cynic in me thinks that this happened, but the instructions carried an implicit "for now" at the end--the nation is not in a place right now to hear gun and shooting rhetoric because what happened is too recent in raw, but that rawness is not going to last forever, and the allure of ratings is one Fox is not going to ignore.

[antiotter]

Strange. I've been repeatedly assured that there hasn't been even the faintest hint of inappropriate rhetoric from the Right, or from the Fair & Balanced crew at Fox News.

How does one "tone it down" from zero?

[archanglrobriel]

"You know that thing that we never do, ever, and that we'd swear on a stack of Bibles wasn't us? I want y'all to tone that down."

Or as Yosemite Sam would say "Alright! Alright! Shut up that shuttin' up.."

[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.