S20.E35: Matthew Perry; Laura Coates; Jonathan Haidt

[tessaray]

Air Date: November 18, 2022

Bill's guests include Matthew Perry, Laura Coates and Jonathan Haidt.

Final show of the season.

[tessaray]

Quite a thorough recap:

https://deadline.com/2022/11/bill-maher-real-time-celebration-matthew-perrys-recovery-everyone-is-on-your-side-1235176739/ 

[aghst]

I don’t know this Jonathan Haidt guy but I doubt “structural stupidity“ is a term social scientist use.

He seemed to be pulling the “both sides” thing but only cited the Jan 6 insurrection, didn’t give an example of leftists resorting to violence.

Seems like Bill liked this guy because he’s also anti woke, agreeing with Bill that academia is a source of “rot” when it comes to intellectual honesty.

Haidt said there was a correlation in the rise of depression in young teen girls — 11-15 years of age from 2012, when the iPhones first had selfie cameras and IG took off.

Except it’s doubtful many parents were giving their 11 and 12 year olds the latest iPhone.  Don’t they usually get hand me downs?

And it’s not like teen girls and even young women well into their 20s didn’t have self-esteem issues long before social media and smart phones.  Instead of scrolling through IG, young teens were immersed in magazines targeted at them.  They could feel just as bad looking at celebrities and models with Impossible to attain levels of beauty in magazines and other media as girls today looking at IG models.

In New Rules Bill continued his hostility to the younger generations, touting instead that independents swung to Democrats yet 4 points.

Well Gen Z voters swung to Democrats by mid double digits.  In the PA governor race, the 18-29 Year old voters voted for Shapiro by a margin of 44 points.

Overall, young voters canceled the votes of the over 65 voters who went for Republicans.

Quote

votPointing to these numbers, Harvard Public Opinion Project student chair Alan Zhang told ABC News: "Young voters cancel out every single vote of those over 65. Under 30 and under 40 were the only age group to go to the Democrats and they went overwhelmingly to the Democrats. Without the youth vote, there was no firewall that stopped the red wave from taking over."

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/gen-millennials-voters-2022-midterms-favored-democrats-stopping/story?id=93338313

So he should have thanked the youngest voter blocs.  Instead he showed some picture of a headline from some dodgy paper claiming 1/3 of young voters suported communism.

[film noire]

RE: phones/2012:  Girls have long suffered horrific turnarounds at near-puberty. Back in 1994, "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Lives of Teenage Girls" noted the sudden onset of eating disoders, body dysmorphia, depression, etc in girls turning that age (but that book was written by some chick doctor of philosophy - who literally got there twenty-five years before the dude mansplaining a topic wth decades of research already in place, pre-2012 -  so of course, Maher don't give a shit.) 

RE: Maher's use of a cheap pull-quote to turn Barbara Fried's philosophically-minded essay into a witless anti-responsiblity tract: No surprise there  (given how lazy-minded Maher has become, his once-sharp insights dulled by anti-woke-rage and inordinate self-satisfaction)  but the essay actually deals with failed mass incarceration policies in the U.S., and how differently people are treated in the justice system based on their circumstances (so of course, Maher don't give a shit about that, either -  let the little people rot in jail under "three strikes out"). Here's a quote that makes her core position clear VS the crap Maher peddled last night:

"There are tools of social control that are directed specifically at harm reduction. The point of such tools is not to coddle criminals, or to deny their accountability or volitional capacities. It is to reduce future harm at a tolerable cost to all of us, wrongdoers included, by influencing wrongdoers’ future choices through rehabilitation, more carefully calibrated deterrence, and, when necessary, isolation from society."

And in this Fried quote,  I'm hard-pressed to differentiate between Fried's words, and dozens of Maher's drug rants over the years:

"Our schools are broken, a new generation of kids has been lost, our prisons are crammed with petty offenders whose lives we have ruined in the name of a war on drugs that has been a total failure."

It's a festival of petard-hoisting! Maher mocked a legal scholar calling for harm reduction in drug laws back in 2013  - one of his longest standing pet causes -  proving himself to be completely out of touch with even his own agenda (but of course, Maher don't give a shit about that, either: he'll just get legally stoned, courtesy of legal minds like Fried arguing in defense of harm reduction laws). Fried's full article here: 

https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/

Edited November 19, 2022 by film noire

[film noire]

9 hours ago, aghst said:

And it’s not like teen girls and even young women well into their 20s didn’t have self-esteem issues long before social media and smart phones.  Instead of scrolling through IG, young teens were immersed in magazines targeted at them.  They could feel just as bad looking at celebrities and models with Impossible to attain levels of beauty in magazines and other media as girls today looking at IG models.

Exactly - and overall, I'm sure phones have had an impact as 'delivery systems' for what used to be pushed by fashion magazines/television/movies/music videos (I think the updated version of Saving Ophelia addresses phones) but it's not The One Big Truth I Discovered! dude thought it was.   There's years of research showing that same dynamic, pre-phones.

Edited November 19, 2022 by film noire

[Hedgehog2022]

Honestly, Bill Maher's opinions are irrelevant and boring. He's irrelevent and boring...he sounds like an angry old boomer who complains about everyone under the age of 40. He belongs on Fox News Nation not HBO.