Bill Maher is the poster child for what no theory does to a motherfucker.
Gotta love how even the lower ranked elder demons like :smurf-cursed: hate the young as much as the rest of the eternal old ones.
:epsteingelion:
yes fuck Bill Maher but am i listening to an "influencer" defending influencers? also yes. The only thing worse than watching Maher is talking about maher.
that maher and vanlife influencers are both terrible. Maher because he's a charlatan, and the influencers because they tend to be white people from well off backgrounds who can do that shit. im probably also tainted by the fact that i know someone who is doing the vanlife thing, and it was so easy to accomplish when her parents bought her a van to travel the country with your dog selling hippy shit at Phish concerts. It's just a gross display of privilege. Do the vanlife thing but don't be vain about it.
vanlife thing but don’t be vain about it.
https://twitter.com/mikurubaeahina
Posting for strangers is the definition of vanity. Her posting about traveling is good to inspire other transfolk but it's still that Twitter/Insta level of vanity to me.
I agree that Bill Maher is a piece of shit, but I feel like these "takedown" videos of his show by lefty youtube people always fail to consider that his show is a product being delivered to a specific market. Maher knows his audience is mostly well-off white liberal boomers, and his show is catered to them. He knows his audience and he's giving them what they want to hear, no different than do the hosts of whatever left podcasts / youtube channels / whatever else people here consume.
IDK, it justs seems kind of masturbatory to point out that the show made for annoying boomers has annoying boomer takes.
I just took a look, videos on the Real Time YouTube channel get from several hundred thousand to a few million videos. I guess they're trying to grab a few of those people.
Yeah, maybe I'm showing my own Terminal Onlineness with this take; I shouldn't discount people trying to break the MSM monopoly on takes and news. It's still an element of critique I wish I saw in more left media.
He knows his audience and he’s giving them what they want to hear, no different than do the hosts of whatever left podcasts / youtube channels / whatever else people here consume.
Seems like you could say this same thing about literally anyone; Ben Shapiro, JBP, Barfsack OCrumbo, V*ush , Rick Wolff, David Graeber, you name it. They're all just playing to their respective audiences, so who cares?
I mean that's kind of my point. The whole idea of "objective" news or journalism has always been farcical, but now even the idea of news being a public service or done for the common good has all but been completely discredited. Like the closest you get are the small-town papers that are basically glorified town criers, putting up videos of the latest city council meetings or whatever. Everything else (and even those small papers sometimes) has been completely commodified; just more products targeted for whatever market they can thrive in. Pointing out how Bad opposing media is without at least acknowledging that element of commodification feels like its leaving out a big part of the conversation.
Pointing out how Bad opposing media is without at least acknowledging that element of commodification feels like its leaving out a big part of the conversation.
Ok, I see your point a bit better now, the video doesn't really diagnose why Bill Maher has a platform, it just dunks on his bad take. It is a bit masturbatory, but hey, sometimes that's what I'm in the mood for
his show is a product being delivered to a specific market
:very-intelligent:
Maher knows his audience is mostly well-off white liberal boomers, and his show is catered to them.
Yeah, but you could say this shit about virtually every corner of premium cable. Declaring everything on cable off-limits because its specifically marked to people who can afford premium media services gives a pass to virtually all modern media.
IDK, it justs seems kind of masturbatory to point out that the show made for annoying boomers has annoying boomer takes.
Every criticism made on the internet by internet people aimed at other internet people is masturbatory. But you're on the internet, in a forum that does take-downs of internet people. You're hip-deep in cum already. Too late to wash your hands of it.
Declaring everything on cable off-limits because its specifically marked to people who can afford premium media services gives a pass to virtually all modern media.
Yes, wanting criticism of mainstream media from the left to have more substance than "the guy who gets paid to say boomer shit said some boomer shit, can you believe it?" is declaring all cable shows off-limits for criticism. This is exactly what I said.
It was a very particular critique of a very particularly tasteless segment.
Maher managed to hit the trifecta of:
- Shamelessly denigrating the dead
- Feeding the Missing White Woman Hysteria
- Kicking Millennials for the crime of being not-rich and not-old
inside a handful of minutes, to no real purpose. It is an exceptionally bad take for a litany of reasons, and if you're in the business of bagging on shit takes Bill may as well have painted a bullseye on the segment for you.
And my critique of that was, "is anyone surprised?" People on here talk sometimes about how frustrating it is that we have no politics left except the politics of greivance and cyclical outrage, but then stan lefty owns of liberal media that are basically just recreating that same pattern.
If you're in the business of bagging on shit takes, I don't think it's such a hard thing to ask that the bagger contextualize why this person gets to make shit takes in the first place, not just offering a critique of the shit take itself. And if we're saying that this is a video aimed at peeling off libs from Maher's audiance, then that critique goes double. Is is better to foster a new understanding of media that gets into the material motivations behind Maher's shit-take industry? Or just to create a competing market of consumption - one which, frankly, needs Maher (and others like him) around making shit takes to sustain itself?
I enjoyed the bit. But I hate that I have to keep hearing how Missing White Woman Story continues to leak into every corner of media discourse.
