Gun Control 1: Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang

[Deutsche Gopher Fan]

I'm starting to see threads from discussions completely disappear. Anyone else?

Yeah the GQP thread keeps popping up top for me with new posts but it’s empty

[Handyman]

I saw OT...Bernie seemed a bit off. Good god he better not run again.

[ScoobyDoo]

I'm starting to see threads from discussions completely disappear. Anyone else?

[Deutsche Gopher Fan]

Bernie had a book to promote.

The first guest is often fine, it’s the panel where I feel like he really becomes insufferable but yeah I’d probably watch the Bernie segment and then quit

[ScoobyDoo]

Russell Brand has gone Joe Rogan on the bit. I never found him funny but his anti-vaxxer crap makes him pathetic and sad.

Maher is old and is now trying to fit in with the new CNN crowd. That is why he has frauds like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss on so much. I only watch if I can stand the guests...which means I have missed all of this season.

Bernie was on this week. That was good. But, now that Bill Maher has decided he's a CNN Democrat he is practically unwatchable.

[Handyman]

Russell Brand has gone Joe Rogan on the bit. I never found him funny but his anti-vaxxer crap makes him pathetic and sad.

Maher is old and is now trying to fit in with the new CNN crowd. That is why he has frauds like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss on so much. I only watch if I can stand the guests...which means I have missed all of this season.

[Deutsche Gopher Fan]

Russel brand is ****ing awful

So is Bill Maher, which is why I won’t even see awful Russell on his awful show

[Kepler]

Russel brand is ****ing awful

When he did his simple, snarky, self-contained, short stand up pieces what feels like 12 million years go, he was good.

But he metastasized into the Toxic Avenger and he isn't funny at all anymore. He was ruined by fame.

[dxmnkd316]

Russel brand is ****ing awful

[Kepler]

Why is Russell Brand still famous? He is a mediocre comedian who was in a few crappy movies 10-15 years ago.

Leave Tina Fey alone!

[FadeToBlack&Gold]

Why is Russell Brand still famous? He is a mediocre comedian who was in a few crappy movies 10-15 years ago.

[aparch]

Really dissapointed that when I use Google to search "Russell Brand John Heilemann" it pulls up articles from, and in this order: The Post Millenial, Daily Caller, Bit Chute, Economic Job Market Rumors, HBO, Tampa Free Press, Pacific Pundit...


*edit* I also have a coworker who recently found Maher episodes on YouTube and she thinks that he's such a great political voice calling it straight down the middle... *facepalm*

[ScoobyDoo]

Just watched Stewart’s gun episode. Lol

too bad our village idiots are too stupid to understand what he’s saying

It's just another example of a comedian being a better journalist than the journalists. Journalism is in an extremely sad state in America. Oh, And Russel Brand is a moron for what he said on Maher's show last night and I'm glad John Heilemann was there to put him in his place.

[Deutsche Gopher Fan]

Just watched Stewart’s gun episode. Lol

too bad our village idiots are too stupid to understand what he’s saying

[Kepler]

The amazing thing is these people walk away from these interactions thinking they won. They are that stupid.

I read something interesting today which I think helps explain the mental and moral decline of the Right over the last half century. It's from Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies, volume 2. He's talking about the early 20th century Neo-Thomist revival of anti-democratic authoritarianism and the fetishizing of the totalitarian church control of people's lives during the Medieval period. He cites as evidence that it was actually inhumane and terrible for human flourishing, rather than some golden age of unity, the epidemics of "St. Vitus' dance," which was a frenzied dancing mania that became common during that time. He sees it as the only coping mechanism left for a population that is at once oppressed and humiliated but which at the same time, due to its authoritarian ideology, has literally no hope or means of bettering itself:

(T)he dancing manias present none of the characteristics of which we associate with epidemic infectious diseases of the nervous system. They seem, rather, like mass hysteria, brought on by terror and despair, in populations oppressed, famished, and wretched to a degree almost unimaginable today. To the miseries of constant war, political and social disintegration, there was added the dreadful affliction of inescapable, mysterious, and deadly disease. Mankind stood helpless as though trapped in a world of terror and peril against which there was no defense. God and the devil were living conceptions to the men of those days who cowered under the afflictions they believed imposed by supernatural forces. For those who broke down under the strain there was no road of escape except to the inward refuge of mental derangement

Maybe that is what happened to the Right. A population already mentally and morally weak, of slavish devotion to the very forces which have ruined the lives of their families for generations, would either have to accept responsibility and face their culpability for destroying not just their but their children's futures, but paradoxically also without the tools or capacity of critical thought that would provide a way out. Their last resort is flight into the collective hallucination of the Echo Chamber's alternate reality. And any intrusion by actual reality is met with hatred and violence.