u/AmericanLymie

People who watch Bill Maher's show today know that he has two primary refrains that almost every discussion and almost every closing segment lands on:

1. "Woke is destroying the country and all Democrats are crazy."

2. "Any criticism of Israel's government is inherently antisemitic, and antisemitism is the worst sin anyone can commit."

Lately his attacks on people alleging they are antisemitic have overtaken the "woke" complaints.

And yet, Maher has consistently praised Elon Musk. They agree on anti-wokeness, without ever explaining exactly what that term means to them. Musk is aggressively hateful toward transgender people beginning with his daughter, and Maher seems fine with that.

But Musk is also openly bigoted, and as racist as he is, his most overt bigotry is antisemitism. It has been thoroughly documented and consistent for over a decade.

Musk has cultivated antisemitism on Twitter since he bought it and renamed it. He has intentionally identified and promoted antisemites. He has personally promoted Nazism. He has retweeted Holocaust denials and he has personally commented that "Jewish communities push hatred against whites" is "the actual truth." His words.

After he bought Twitter, it began to selectively promote antisemitic tweets, and IBM contacted Twitter and told them not to place Nazi tweets next to its paid ads. Twitter refused, and IBM discontinued advertising on Twitter.

Musk then introduced his Grok AI chatbot, and soon thereafter it began tweeting Holocaust denials and antisemitic messages, naming itself "MechaHitler." Musk said it was a glitch and nothing more.

Musk then gave two Nazi salutes, and despite his long and bold antisemitic history, people like Maher waved criticisms away as unfounded.

Musk then made Nazi jokes on Twitter in response, mocking those who said he was giving a Nazi salute. And then he began to promote the German Nazi party, the AFD. And then he began to fund the party. Then he went to Germany and gave a speech telling German people that they need to get over their Holocaust guilt and move on with life—and elect far-right AFD leaders to make Germany great again.

An AFD candidate with Musk's backing recently won and he celebrated.

This litany of actual antisemitic and pro-Nazism events is thoroughly documented over many years of time. People don't care. Including Bill Maher. Maher interviewed Musk two years ago, called him a "genius" to his face, complimented his sense of humor, and his only criticism to Musk was that Musk preaches that people need to reproduce as much as possible, and Maher has no children and therefore does not agree.

Yet to Bill Maher, college students who protest what the United Nations and about a dozen global human rights organizations call a genocide, Maher calls those people antisemites. Even when people go out of their ways to specify that they only condemn Benjamin Netanyahu and his current regime, Maher calls them antisemites. When those critics are Jewish themselves, Maher suggests they are self-hating antisemitic Jews who would support another Jewish Holocaust.

And yet he only calls Elon Musk a genius with a sense of humor.

Does anyone know why?

Some people here have said they know people on his staff. Can anyone ask Maher why he supports the most-prominent and wealthiest antisemitic person on Earth unconditionally and condemns anyone who specifies their only criticisms are of Netanyahu and his government?

I'm asking how you, as an individual, observe your own thoughts, not asking "What is the process by which a person hears their own thoughts?"

My family lived in a small condominium when I was ages one through five, and I have a clear memory from inside that condo when I was wondering about something and I noticed that I was wondering. I observed my own thought and it occurred to me that one aspect of me was thinking and another aspect was articulating that I was observing myself thinking. And in order to do that, that meant that I was thinking about one topic while thinking about observing myself thinking simultaneously.

I was fascinated and a little unnerved by realizing that I could hear or view myself in the same way I can hear or observe someone else.

After that realization, my mind sort of spiraled because as I went on about my life and did and thought about other things, I would spontaneously remember that I could "listen" to those thoughts as they occurred and I also could just be having those thoughts without observing them. And at times, I would register that I was simultaneously 1) thinking about whatever I was doing; 2) hearing myself thinking about doing that thing and observing qualities of the language I was using to think; 3) reflecting on what that meant, all simultaneously.

This happened at a very young age and I've never forgotten it because I always talked about it with people. People generally were not interested in discussing it and many told me they've never had any experience like that. My mother could relate and my father never could; he has told me he is sure he only has one conscious thought at any given time. Probably not coincidentally, my mother had highly sophisticated linguistic talents, and my whole academic background and career have been tethered to language. A few people have told me I am the best or favorite editor they've had because I feed back to them a lot of comments that elicit them to reflect on how they think, how others think and what they know and don't know, and to apply those considerations to their revisions. It probably is just due to metacognition.

I've since learned that this is called "metacognition," thinking about thinking, and that some people supposedly do this to a limited degree or not at all while others experience it more often or habitually.

Soooo I just figured I would ask people on this forum how you experience thought. I've read that different people think in different ways but I have never read a collection of people's different explanations of their thought processes.

I can't really imagine being who I am and not observing my own thoughts, but at the same time the idea of that is appealing because it gets quite busy inside my mind and I think that's a major reason I get overwhelmed in social settings. (Yes, I do realize this is a type of neurodivergence, but I am more interested in just hearing other people's perceptions rather than pathologizing and labeling it.) So if you don't really observe your own thoughts in this way, I imagine you probably are more relaxed and less overstimulated much of the time?

The algorithm fed me this video of Ann Coulter interviewing Peter Thiel in 2024, and I am struck that both are professing the same ignorant thoughts Bill Maher rants about on his show. He is basically a Trojan Horse for Coulter's overt bigotry and Thiel's fascism based on nonsense theories.

Thiel has a BA in philosophy and a law degree. Coulter, like Maher, has a BA in history from Cornell University, and like Thiel she has a JD.

So, both could be said to be knowledgeable about philosophy, history and the humanities. In this video, they discuss and agree that universities fail at teaching the sciences. They don't work in the sciences or have scientific educations, but they and Maher confidently know this.

Thiel says here that certain federal institutions have failed and Coulter like her friend Maher emphasizes that "the CDC and NIH" have failed. How have they failed? She says that they study woke nonsense that does not benefit anyone instead of studies "that could really be useful like the benefits of nicotine."

I have a friend whose mother was diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer five years ago, and she is alive today with no visible tumor because of a new experimental gene therapy treatment. A decade ago she would have been dead within months of her diagnosis. I have a disorder called mast cell activation syndrome that is treated well enough to let me live a fairly normal life now that I have been diagnosed—yet this disorder didn't even have a name until 2016. Medical researchers make important new discoveries all the time, and ignorant people like Coulter and Maher say ignorant things about areas in which they have no experience but are informed by political vendettas against Anthony Fauci. It's insane. Coulter says CDC doesn't conduct valuable medical research. No shit, Ann: CDC is not a research agency; it is a public health monitoring and advisory agency.

So much of what these two talk about in this video is deeply ignorant. Yet both have platforms to misinform millions, Thiel has billions of dollars to wage war on the public wellbeing based on his ignorant misinformation, paranoia, vengeance and whims.

And there is a throughline directly from what they discuss here and what Maher says on air, claiming to be liberal while amplifying the thoughts of his fascist friends. In this video, Thiel talks about his time in college in the same terms with which Maher talks about his time in college. Both today question whether people should go to college because both admit they were unpopular while at college and both disagreed with what was taught. Today, they have found people with similar types of bitter ignorance and they're influencing others with their philosophies.

NIH and CDC are essential for protecting public health, even as both are bureaucratic and under the control of political appointees who do a lot of damage to the good science and policy practiced by staff who are not politically appointed and who do their jobs in spite of bad politics and not in service to them. The same goes for the EPA, the FDA and other agencies. As a result of people like Maher, Thiel and Coulter, measles is back, our food supply is contaminated and poisoning people regularly instead of occasionally, our water supplies are being contaminated and are vulnerable to targeting by foreign hackers because DOGE fired people who protect them, airplanes are crashing at unprecedented rates, and on and on.

Ugh.

I am surprised I've never heard any comparisons between this song and Silent All These Years. The repeated descending vocal melodies are strikingly similar. Not the whole songs but certain segments. I know Led Zeppelin is arguably Tori's greatest influence, so I just find it really interesting I have never heard this song compared to Silent All These Years.

"That's woke, and woke is bad."

"Now look, I'm an atheist, but Muslim people are all servants of Satan, Christians are dumb but inherently morally better than Muslims. Israel is the Holy Land and must defended with all the might of YHWH."

"Kids today suck!!!"

That's it. Every single "new rules" rant culminates in a lecture about one of these and at least half of the conversations with panelists end up being steered in the direction of his landing on one of these points.

I can't imagine how many hours he has spent stoned and dwelling on these thoughts.

A good friend of mine retired recently and I have been paying closer attention to my own retirement planning (still 15-plus years off 😭) as a result.

As I do, it's really striking to me that retirement advisers always seem to assume the same conditions for all retirees. Top among these are that everyone who retires is married and that the sole end goal for all retirees is traveling the world and spending time with grandchildren.

I find this so odd. An estimated 40-50% of retired people are single (without a partner) or unmarried. This has major consequences for financial planning, especially in consideration of Social Security, and yet retirement advisers basically ignore that their projected scenarios will not apply to half of all retirees. Why do they do this?

Single people are particularly vulnerable financially because they only have one person's income stream, and also, the reality is that most people who are married will die single because most couples do not die together. One person is likely to die years or even decades before the other, and the one who is left will need to figure out how to manage finances as a retired single person unless they meet a really foxy septuagenarian in their nursing home.

Around 20% of older adults beyond their reproductive years never had children, and this share is going to increase significantly as younger generations age because of choices largely based on finances plus growing reproductive health problems.

And with respect to the last one, I feel like I am in the minority here, but I absolutely do not want to spend the last 20 percent of my life on cruise ships, clattering around airports or looking for a place to park a giant RV. I travel more than I want to for work already so I am sure that is a factor, but still—surely, not all retired people really just want to stop working so they can make traveling the world their job...?! Also, a lot of people are not in great health/physical condition when they do retire and so traveling ks necessarily limited by inconvenience or disability for many. But listening to virtually any retirement adviser makes me imagine that they think every single retired person plans to spend months of every year on a Carnival cruise ship, climbing Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China and cliffside staircases in Italy and Greece.

But it seems like it when I listen to retirement planners. Almost all of them literally tell you that "You'll want to travel" and then tell you to allocate a huge share of your budget for that. I don't get it. I'm into writing, painting, wandering around locally (I live in a major city, so there's a lot to do here.) and other things that don't involve annoying air travel. Again, I do accept that I am likely an oddball on this one, but I also wonder if people "want to travel" constantly in retirement because they have been programmed to want to travel by everyone telling them "you want to travel."

Overall, it just strikes me as odd that these financial planners always seem to default to a few very specific ideas of who all people are and what all people will want to do.

I just saw this video on YouTube. I love Gwendoline Christie, too, but I was struck by this because Guy Oseary texted Gwen and invited her to dance onstage with Madonna because Madonna's "a fan."

But I have always heard Madonna say she doesn't watch any TV at all and she never has. So I wonder how she would have become a fan of Gwen? Gwen has modeled a lot but she was never a major, notable model who even a fan of fashion might have become a fan of. Her Game of Thrones character, I think, is really the only notable enough project she has had to create a fandom.

Does Madonna watch TV after all?

Does Bill Maher have any self-awareness at all? Does anyone know him? I really want to know if he could possibly be as logically incoherent as he presents himself on the show.

At the beginning of the episode, he said that (of course) "the problem with the left" is that they don't engage with ideas, only with identity. He said he welcomes any debate about ideas but that progressive people only care about whose ideas they are. I noted that as a means by which to assess the rest of his show.

Of course, many of his topics were hinged to identity. He discussed transgender people and preferred pronouns in a derogatory way while simultaneously saying that Jewish people are being shot all around the world, substantiating his hatred of Muslim people based on LGBT freedoms and safety, and he talked about what he believes is pervasive anti-white hatred. It's possible that the majority of his stated opinions were about identity, not ideas—exactly what he accused his opponents—liberal people—of doing.

I will note as I write this that what I am observing is his ideas, not his identity.

Then at the end he may have set a new self-ignorance record for himself.

He kicked off his closing rant by criticizing Rand Paul for claiming to be libertarian whose "brand" is personal privacy and keeping the government out of people's bysiness and then securing and publicly exposing Anthony Fauci's personal diary in the Senate. Maher spent a fair amount of time pointing out Rand Paul's hypocrisy and suggesting that it was wrong of Paul to do this to Fauci. And Maher criticized Republicans for demonizing Fauci, who Maher said is both a credible scientist who has saved lives and also an egomaniac, seeming to suggest that Fauci is no better or worse than anyone. He said Fauci does not deserve the public humiliation and scapegoating that the Senate is putting him through.

And then for the remainder of the show, Maher read quotes fron Fauci's diary that he condemned Rand Paul for publicizing. He chose embarrassing quotes to further embarrass Fauci. He mocked Fauci's identity as an 80-year-old man and made jokes about his age, contradicting his early rant.

And then the kicker that made my jaw drop: he said Fauci would do anything to maintain celebrity status, to stay famous.

This is where Bill Maher regularly reveals he has a remarkably similar personality disorder to Donald Trump's. He himself will say and do anything for publicity, for fame, to "stay relevant," and his smugly declared values have no real-world meaning. He plays on identity politics while claiming that he opposes progressives because that is what they do. He never observes that the entire Republican agenda is identity politics—Christian and white male supremacist, and yes, that is identity based politics. In a single five-minute rant he condemned Rand Paul for invading Anthony Fauci's privacy and publicly humiliating and scapegoating him for attention and then he did exactly that himself.