posted
Last week he had Bernie Sanders as his featured guest at the beginning, and then on his panel he had an editor for the Daily Caller and, shockingly, Ann Coulter. It was one of the most uncomfortable yet entertaining experiences I had watching his show. Ann Coulter made no attempt to hide her disdain for Bill and his audience. The Daily Caller editor made an idiot of himself trying to imply that the SC shooting was partially motivated against religion. I was extremely disappointed in Bill and the liberal panel members in their attempts to refute Coulter's batshit crazy statements and they almost seemed stumped at times. Did anyone else watch this? If you have HBO GO you can stream it and I think it's worth watching.
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Ann Coulter and Bill Maher consider each other to be old friends. You know that, right? Some people don't. You found it entertaining because you were watching entertainment. It's entertainment. Don't forget it.
If you want to see academic debate, that isn't the place to rest your eyeballs. That's one of the places you go for bread and circuses. There's no point in being disappointed that you didn't see vigorous engagement on the issues there, no more than feeling let down by your cat's review of Fury Road. But understandable if you bought into the premise that it's about the issues, not entertainment.
quote:[Coulter] then addressed Hannity’s complaints, half in jest– “you want me to have no other friends than you, Sean Hannity”– half in earnest. “I obviously don’t believe in [Maher's] politics, I like him, he’s a true and loyal friend, he always has been” she noted.
Plus, she added, “he bought me dinner, so I’m not going to say anything bad about it… I’m easy. I’m a cheap date.”
quote:[Maher] still mixes it up with eclectic panels of guests, many of who can be as abrasive as he is, such as the conservative agitator Ann Coulter, a longtime friend.
“I know the liberals hate it, and I don’t care,” he says. “First of all, I’ve known [Coulter] that long. There’s something about an old friendship. You just have history with somebody. Not romantic history. No. I would never date a Republican. I never have. I wouldn’t. Nor would she be interested in dating me. But she is a fun person if you just don’t get political when you talk. When you know somebody that long, you just know where not to go. And she’s a fun New Yorker type of person. And people like her. They expect to hate her.”
posted
Sometimes I watch political entertainment shows and just go, "I know that person identifies him- or herself as true blue XYZ, but dayumn if they don't come across as some kind of cardboard cutout version of it." Like, the body language is off, or the buzzwords go ding!ding!ding, or whatever. It's like they are presenting this viewpoint with a side-eye to see how the audience is taking it.
Ann Coulter pings that for me. Bill Maher often pings that for me. A lot of political commenters on forums ping that for me. It's performance art: trolling just to see what waters they can muck up. Can you make people dance? Can you pull their strings?
When it's in a corporate venue, it's generally to sell clicks or other measures of eyeballs. The product being sold is the attentive consumer.
When it's a noncorporate venue, I think it's just that some people think shit-disturbing is fun. Whatever.
Just recognize when you are being sold or played, and decide for yourself whether to take the bait.
And remember that Fancy Feast is cat potato chips. That cannot be the basis of a healthy diet, young feline.
Posts: 831 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Fair point. But it's not like I was expecting an academic debate. I just would have liked to see the panel question and force her to elaborate and attempt to rationally justify some of her racist and xenophobic comments. When the only responses to her screeds were punctuated by Bill Maher saying "Well, you didn't actually answer her question..." impressionable viewers might get the idea that she was making hard-to-beat arguments.
I didn't know they were friends, I've only recently started watching Real Time and I've only seen Ann Coulter speak a handful of times and usually just clips of ridiculous statements. When I first saw her I was convinced that she was an undercover liberal trying to play a caricature of racist conservatives. Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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I am absolutely confident that Ann Coulter is a professional troll, and doesn't believe half of what she says in public.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:Originally posted by GaalDornick: I just would have liked to see the panel question and force [someone] to elaborate and attempt to rationally justify ...
Regardless of who "someone" might be, I'd hazard that you are going to be waiting a very long time, since that's not what this panel is there for. Bring chips.
quote: ... impressionable viewers might get the idea that she was making hard-to-beat arguments.
Nah. Well, maybe. If they are that impressionable, they'll believe anything, including the commercials.
Bread and circuses, dude. It's entertainment. It's an element of the commerce model of news & information services that exists to sell advertising dollars. I have faith that my fellow humans with half a brain would come to realize that fact quickly enough.
If you know impressionable viewers with half a brain, steer them toward reliable and less commercially driven news and information sources.
posted
It will surprise nobody that I agree with CT about this. Never watched Maher much. To me he was too much like, well, Coulter or Limbaugh, even though his (stated) politics were closer to mine than theirs are.
The thing about it is when these sorts of people say things like, "You gotta remember this is entertainment!" is that it's useful to hear, "Listen, I am as full of shit as I need to be to make a buck pandering to my audience." For Maher and Coulter to actually be friends, one of two things needs to be true: either they're both hucksters, or they're both just morally bankrupt. Because according to either of them, the other is one of the worst things ever to happen to America and everyone would be better off if the other just left.
On the two occasions I've actually watched Maher, it was on times when actual heavyweight guests were on. Once had Salman Rushdie and the other had Christopher Hitchens. I'll cop to my bias when I admit I think both of em are pretty rad, and I suspect the difference is also striking when other heavyweights appear on the show, but man. The contrast was pretty obvious.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote: The thing about it is when these sorts of people say things like, "You gotta remember this is entertainment!" is that it's useful to hear, "Listen, I am as full of shit as I need to be to make a buck pandering to my audience."
Cynical much?
In my defense, it's not like I was expecting a quality academic debate. But even from an entertainment perspective, it would've much more fun to watch them pin her down on some of her comments and see her try to rationalize an irrational POV, instead of them just making funny faces while she spoke.
Also,
quote: I have faith that my fellow humans with half a brain would come to realize that fact quickly enough.
the thing about that is that there are actually people who do hold the same beliefs as her. Maybe not as radical, but I've seen this shared several times on social media and my self-described 'not Republican at all' coworker expressed a similar sentiment to me before. Those people have a full brain but they still feel that burning indignation when they think about people that live the good life of welfare.
quote:Originally posted by GaalDornick: ... But even from an entertainment perspective, it would've much more fun to watch them pin her down on some of her comments and see her try to rationalize an irrational POV, instead of them just making funny faces while she spoke.
I think you overestimate what will sell best. It's not about what you and I will be interested in, it's about what will keep the most number of people watching. And those should be people invested enough in the issue to be pliable and enticed into buying things.
For some people -- not you and I, of course -- that's about emotion, whether it's righteous outrage at the lack of rebuttal on one side or self-satisfied smirking about the very same lack of rebuttal (to a talking point they respond emotionally to, regardless of whether it is backed up by evidence) on another side.
quote:Those people have a full brain but they still feel that burning indignation when they think about people that live the good life of welfare.
Yep. And that righteous outrage makes for good buyers but poor thinkers. Which of course you know, as you and I are fully aware of the actual data collected by TANF and SNAP programs, etc.
Look, if people are enjoying getting their indignation-boners on, they aren't going to let facts and data kill the mood. Unfortunately for them, this means they are likely to be subsidizing the entertainment industry right and left. That\s okay; that's their choice.
If you ever want to know what the target audience of a show is, look at the commercials. That's one of the big truths, and it is actually backed up by evidence.
posted
Commercials for the Daily Show and the Symphony zprogram are the most egregious examples of this.
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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quote:Originally posted by CT: Look, if people are enjoying getting their indignation-boners on, they aren't going to let facts and data kill the mood. Unfortunately for them, this means they are likely to be subsidizing the entertainment industry right and left. That\s okay; that's their choice.
I'm glad you post here, CT.
There's a whole industry now of click-bait "outrage media" that's entirely built around pandering to one's sense of indignation. Go on Facebook, spend 30 seconds to 2 minutes feeling indignant while reading one shoddy, hastily written article tuned to match your particular political and social values, feel outraged and share it with your friends (along with the plethora of ads festooned on all 5 pages of a 1000 word article), move on to the next one, rinse and repeat.
If you look at the history of any of these new politically charged media sites (like the Huffington Post, for example, and the role Andrew Breitbart played in starting it) you see that, overwhelmingly, they mostly exist as rather blatant attempts at spinning the news for a profit.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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In the case of the Daily Show, I was mostly thinking of the excess of beer commercials and college students.
I wonder if at some level, Daily Show viewers know who the Koch Bros. are, and Koch is trying to counter that.
As for the symphony, there were ads for three things: wealth management firms, elite retirement homes, and private schools.
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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quote:Originally posted by CT: If you ever want to know what the target audience of a show is, look at the commercials. That's one of the big truths, and it is actually backed up by evidence.
There's a subset of ads that I consider to be targeted intently towards extraordinarily gullible people. Gold/silver investment shilling, professionals hate them/one "weird" trick, chemophobic purifiers and toxin removers, really bad political books, really bad self-help books, the infamously ubiquitous Newsmax push polls, PUA strategies, newest miracle cures/X signs of a Health Event most people don't know, here's a way to really for reals learn a new language by this obscure author, evangelical israel aid, etc
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote: There's a whole industry now of click-bait "outrage media" that's entirely built around pandering to one's sense of indignation.
True, but What Happens Next Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity.
GaalDornick:
theamazeeaz: Yes.
Samp: YES.
(Dogbreath: hey, thanks! Mutual.)
---------- Edited to add: There's a theory that Nigerian-prince/fake-bank-site/etc. phishing emails have seemingly deliberate and noticeable errors to weed out the less gullible. If you're trawling, you want the fish that are going to get caught in the net, not the ones that might slip through later. Waste of your time to engage the latter at all.
I always wondered why phishers didn't employ someone better to edit their docs. The plays could look much more real with just one pass by a good editor. But then you'd pick up savvy people who might have the wherewithal and drive to push back, because they would eventually realize what was going on, and they could potentially cause trouble. Better to let (?) them slip the net from the start.
quote:Originally posted by CT: [QUOTE] I always wondered why phishers didn't employ someone better to edit their docs. The plays could look much more real with just one pass by a good editor. But then you'd pick up savvy people who might have the wherewithal and drive to push back, because they would eventually realize what was going on, and they could potentially cause trouble. Better to let (?) them slip the net from the start.
It could also be because some poor cyber security folks installed signature based sensors on ID/PS' guarding a mail server, and the mispellings are an attempt to confuse, disrupt and bypass those sensors - or even perform reconnaissance against them to help with crafting future e-mails.
Or maybe it's just playing off the common stereotype of Nigerian princesses having *atrocious* speling. Who knows? Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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It's the bank ones that I don't get. No bank is going to misspell "your" and "please" in a formal email. They also aren't going to "earnestly" request you "endeavor" to fill in your information properly. I do not want to put ideas in anyone's head, god forbid, but I can't help but think that $500 to an English major at the uni of their choice would go a looooong way.
Though as you said, maybe it's an attempt to bypass other security.
Posts: 831 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
To clarify - I've looked at several hundred absolutely beautiful phishing attempts that perfectly mimicked an e-mail from a bank... that never got delivered to their recipient because they were rather effortlessly filtered and disposed of.
Think about it this way - it's not hard to find out what official correspondence from a bank looks like. At worst, you just have to get an account with that bank and receive some of it and then mimic it, but you can probably just find a screenshot and do it yourself. Which means it's also pretty easy for someone filtering e-mail traffic to find out as well. Which makes filtering out "good" fakes easy - you create a rule that checks for all the attributes of legitimate correspondence from a given bank and then you check to see if the message's digital signature matches that of the bank and what IP the e-mail is coming from (if it's spoofed you'll know pretty quickly because the IP won't match the domain on the e-mail address) and then filter non-legitimate e-mails.
Basically, e-mail correspondence from Bank of Hatrack always has the same attributes - let's call them "image.jpg" and string "abcde." It's highly unlikely that *any* e-mail that's *not* from Bank of Hatrack that has "image.jpg" and "abcde" is a good e-mail. I.e, you're not running the risk of accidentally blocking Bank of Ornery or something.
You set a rule that automatically blocks any e-mail with "image.jpg" and "abcde" unless it also is from Bank of Hatrack's mail server and has a valid Bank of Hatrack digital signature.
What that basically means is "very close" imitations that are hard for unwary humans to detect are actually pretty easy for machines to detect and block.
On the other hand, the "obvious fakes" with lots of mispellings. bad grammer, unwieldy syntax that is strange not normal, etc. are fairly difficult for machines to detect (since they don't match any attributes (or "signatures", not to be confused with digital signatures)) from legitimate traffic) but easy for humans to detect.
The ultimate goal of the attacker of course is to create a phishing e-mail that both fools the machines and the people. The truth of the matter, though, is if you send it to a *lot* of people you only need to fool a small handful of them to be successful. Thus the really weird phishing e-mails you see are probably a mixture of the people who are really, really bad at what they do and are getting through by accident, more or less, and the people who are actually pretty good at what they do and are experimenting to see what they can get through, what garners responses, what gets blocked.
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