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Also, being balanced is overrated. Bill Maher isn't balanced and I find his show totally entertaining.

Do you really? You don't find it awkward and pitiful when he leaves the realm of reality and strays into "drinking milk is more of a health hazard than smoking pot" crazyville?

I find his show mildly amusing, and worth watching, I find him personally to be a bit of a hack as a comedian and a bit of a naif as a political commentator who occasionally espouses some wildly ignorant view seemingly out of nowhere.

Best one was when he did his usual "All religion is dumb!" schtick and it turned out that both the liberals and the token half-conservative on his panel were apparently pretty devoutly religious. The one thing they all agreed on was that he was wrong. I almost felt sad for him as he kept trying, kept getting shut down. He had that deer in the headlights look as he realized that it wasn't working, his voice got quieter and quieter, and then he finally just dropped it and moved on.

/tear

Second best was when he repeated his crazy "Break Iraq into three nations!" bit, which usually worked well, but one particular night basically got spanked by the one foreign policy expert on the panel. Suggestion to Maher: Don't build up your guests as "experts" on a subject without first figuring out whether they agree with your crazy ideas...



It would be much more amusing for me if it wasn't for the realization of just how many liberal voters out there think his ideas are good...

It would be much more amusing for me if it wasn't for the realization of just how many liberal voters out there think his ideas are good...

No that many, I'd wager. He has pretty good writers and the set pieces on the show are funny and cater to a point of view. I can't imagine liberal voters are any more likely to take political cues from Bill Marr than conservative voters are to take political cues from Dennis Miller. Not that Marr doesn't take himself *extremely* seriously, but he's pretty much the only one.

I have and I disagree. Rush is crazy. You've just swallowed the koolaid.

I honestly think that you have difficulty assessing what is "out there." I find it unfortunate, gbaji because I can understand why people hold different political beliefs than me. You can't understand it without thinking they are crazy. That says more about you and your limitations than it does about liberals.

Edited, Jul 13th 2009 11:16pm by Annabella

broken alla is broken

Edited, Jul 14th 2009 3:53am by Omegavegeta

broken alla is broken

Edited, Jul 14th 2009 3:53am by Omegavegeta

Short answer. Not off the fecking telly obviously, D'uh.

Longer answer :

You seem to be implying that people are empty of thought and opinion until a talking head on the TeeVee tells them what to think.....?!


Obviously I can't speak for anyone else, but the thoughts, ideas and tendencies that I have come to lean toward over my 40 odd years of living and paying attention to the world and the people around me have led to my sympathies lying on the 'left' of the politcal spectrum. A position I have reached rightly or wrongly, in my own way.

Of course i have been influenced by everything and everyone I have come into contact with , but to ask 'where liberals get their ideas from' (if its not Maher, Stewart etc) is very revealing more about where you get your ideas from (presenters on the telly) than anything else....

Personaly, i like to think I'm capable of absorbing knowledge from a multitude of sources especially FIRST hand and then reaching my own conclusions (again rightly or wrongly, but at least their mine), rather than waiting for a loudmouth bigot like Limbaugh to tell me what to think.

i think the opinions you express in that post reveal much about you tbh.

This answer may surprise you.

The same places you got your values from.

Unless he replaces his visceral disdain for his own parties' moderates with mock acceptance.

And gets Palin on board with the program.

Getting his followers to go along with might prove challenging, but I honestly think he's the only one who has any chance of changing their outright hatred for anyone who's pro-choice, for any form of gun regulations, & for gay civil rights.

The systematic application of logic. Anything which has influenced me has done so subtly - I do not have a single life defining book or film or news report.

When I was in school, my first economics professor was really right-wing on economics. He believed in the supermacy of the market, in the need for government to shy away from interfering in it, in growth as a means of wealth distribution... And I really believed all of this.

It all changed during University. I studied Law, but that's when I realised that systems should serve the human beings, as opposed to human beings serving the system. That your place in society was pretty much random, especially your "starting place", and that the system neeed to be as equitable as possible, so that children born from poor parents had as much opportunity as children born from rich parents. Political power is not inherited anymore, and I really believe that economical power should not be inherited either. Or at least, as little as possible.

I also believe that society is not necessarily "fair", that people in power (political or economic) don't necessarily "deserve" it, and that the lack of government intervention only serves to perpetuate the "law of the jungle", where those who are already strong get stronger, while those who start off weak get weaker. So you need government intervention to serve the people, especially those who don't have any existing political or economical power.

Fundementally, though, I think it comes down to the fact that I simply don't believe that the "trickle-down" theory works. I think people are far too good at making sure that nothing important actually "trickles-down". And i don't think that scrambling for the crumbs that people at the top spit out is really a decent economic model. Finally, I also think that many of the economic theories on which "trickle-dwwon" are based don't take into account a whole range of factors, the main one being human psyche/behaviour. They are far too simplistic.

As for actual sources, I read the Economist weekly (eventhough it's a bit too right-wing, it's very thorough), the Independent every day, the Financial Times on week-ends, and Prospect once a month. I love reading Robert Fisk for anything to do with the ME.

As for my purely left-wing influences, I quite like Joseph Stiglitz on economics. I really loved reading Howard Zinn on history, and Chomsky on US foreign policy. I think Fareed Zakaria is a really clever bloke. Tariq Ramadan is pretty good as a "Muslim intellectual", and Amos Oz as the "jewish intellectual". I think Ha'aretz is incredibly good when it comes to covering anything to do with Israel/Palestine. I cannot reccomend his book, "The Great War for Civilisation", enough. It is quite simply amazing.

But I'm struggling to think of some guy whose opinion I consistently agree with. I can't think of any left-wing talking head whose opinon I seek. I do think TV is pretty **** for anything that needs depths, so maybe that's why.

We were on the lower side of middle class on the spectrum. Both my parents worked, and we all worked odd jobs as well. We got allowances which we were allowed to spend however we wanted, but at the same time they encouraged us to save, and eventually to invest.

Between taking part in church charity - like many churches ours had a pantry of food and clothes to give to needy families, and a volunteer program - and my parents' stories about growing up dirt poor, I learned pretty early that sometimes people don't have enough. Maybe they've made mistakes or maybe they've just had bad luck; but sometimes people need a hand.

What if they didn't happen across a church that would help them out and maybe take up an extra collection for them? What if they were ill for weeks, or years? What if they didn't happen to meet someone like my grandmother, who even in the midst of raising seven children during the Depression never turned anyone away hungry? And even if they did, it takes a lot of collection plates to get a family back on their feet.

There are good people everywhere. The problem is, they may not have the resources to help those who need help the most. They may not know where needy people are, or who they are. They may not be as charitable toward those who are a different race than themselves, or those whom they judge to be less deserving.

It's almost like the old adage about tipping, isn't it? People who have worked in food service are usually pretty generous tippers. People who have lived in or close to poverty see the virtue in readily available centralized support for those who need it, when they need it.