I agree. BUT...

I just read the transcript of the "Grab them by the pussy" tape. Oof. Bush comes off as a bigger creep than Trump.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/08/u...ranscript.html

So I think the lecturing was overboard, AND I think Bush was out of line.

Meh. He seemed smart, and brought some energy. That's good enough for me.

Maher complains about interviewers letting interviewees skirt questions all the time. Even though he pressed Geraldo, he still let Geraldo off without answers on multiple questions.

Bill’s hot contrarian take defending Laura Ingram was so cringeworthy. This isn’t the first time he’s called liberals bullies for boycotting. Really awful logic. Glad the panel took him to task.

He's still butthurt politically correct got cancelled because he called the 911 hijackers not cowards.

Pretty funny this week: he scolds Geraldo for defending Trump because he can't set aside his personal feelings for the man; two minutes later, he's defending Laura Ingraham because he suffered a boycott himself, and can't set aside his personal feelings on the matter!

Prison rape and/or gay sex jokes - hilarious, edgy stuff Bill.

Terrific podcast here about Bill and the rest of the New Atheist gang: https://soundcloud.com/citationsneed...ers-for-empire

Kinda weird they started a podcast 3 months after one almost identically named (Citation needed) hosted by 5 pretty well known names in atheist podcast circles.

Bro, you obviously don't know he smokes weed. He's on your side.

Grad student level conversation talking about geopolitics and religion. Gun to head.

Imagine how proudly clueless you have to be to think Nima Shirazi/Adam Johnson suck while the Bill Maher/Sam Harris crew are brain geniuses.

What is a "brain genius" as opposed to just a garden variety genius?

It's internet slang, usually used ironically or to mock. Related to or an offshoot of this, I think: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/expanding-brain

Thanks. That explains why it seemed to be a bit of an odd phrase to me. I always seem to be the last one onboard with current jargon and pop culture references (a source of amusement to my friends).

I disagree with Harris on quite a few things but I find him to a pretty brilliant intellectual mind, personally. My biggest criticism is that he spends way too much time talking about the rise of PC college kids instead of actual issues that matter.

I like Maher but he's not an especially intelligent guy either. He does understand politics very well, though, and is pretty good at parsing through the BS on both sides. I'm not sure there's anybody who's a better fit for this kind of show than he is.

Maher doesn't understand politics well, he thinks Trump got elected because of gender-neutral bathrooms and he thinks people on the left should love John McCain.

His humor is such cringe, not because it's "offensive" but because it's 1980s jokes ("we'll see how he feels with a dick in his ass in prison am I right!") and is just generally awful.

He gives a platform to monsters and doesn't challenge them on anything.

Harris brilliant? To the extent that you care about theory of philosophy, maybe? (I have no idea because that has never interested me, and FWIW if you go on philosophy message boards they seem to be embarrassed that somebody like Harris represents them as a top tier philosophical thinker.)

He's the same as Jordan Peterson; they're "good" at philosophical/mytho babble that sounds smart, while twisting and obfuscating enough such that alt-right is the obvious end point. Harris didn't challenge Charles Murray at all on his original podcast with him; I was temporarily on his side when I listened, until I actually looked into the issues for myself that Harris ignored.

I think Maher is an idiot because of his thoughts on food and energy, I don't know enough about the other people to have an opinion. I would still kill myself, rather than listen to that podcast.

My wife hadn't heard of Jordan Peterson before this episode, so when I was huffing and puffing about what a goddamn bull**** artist he is, she didn't get it. I told her he can sound like a reasonable human being if he only has to talk for ten minutes to someone who metaphorically fellates him for calling out the snowflake generation.

I showed her the stuff he has on YouTube and explained exactly how he makes 60K a month by explicitly lying about what C16 does, and she got it.

This is an absurdly bad take (Harris alt-right lool). After the Modern Seinfeld debacle I'm going to give this discussion a hard pass though.

damn, beat me to it. i was going to suggest that baltimore just mentally add the words 'jery get' to the front of maher jokes to make them super hilarious.

"Islam is a potentially world-ending threat that nobody is taking seriously. Of course we should not be racist, and of course I'm not advocating for genocide, but just bear with me for a moment while we do a thought experiment about, let's say, wiping out all Muslims with a preemptive nuclear strike..."

"Blacks are born dumber, now I'm not saying this should have any policy implications, that would be a mischaracterization of my argument."

"The Bell Curve is scientifically air-tight and has never been debunked."

"While it's unfortunate that American wars in the Middle East kill hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians plus generally destroying the lives of millions more, you have to acknowledge that when you look at human history as a whole, those of us in the West are quite peaceful at the moment. I'm not saying we should keep doing it, but it's something that it would behoove us to keep in mind."

(Not direct quotes.)

He's scum, so is Maher, and nobody on the left with a pulse thinks otherwise.

Those quotes are great



Seriously though, nice summary.


¹Hat tip to LFS

Sam Harris should have stuck to making fun of dumb religions like Christianity. Instead he became a biggot. What a fool.

The big bucks are in aiding and abetting the war lobby.

So what is that dude who looks like he cannot lift a microphone (seriously wtf at the circumference if his arms?!) saying exactly? Sam Harris is not being honest about how he feels when he details these “thought experiments”? At one point he seemed to highlight Harris saying “I’m against bad ideas” as some kind of gotcha? I didn’t hear anything objectionable in the Harris podcast excerpt.

Jery confused.

I bet that bro doesn't even lift