Baiting

A few days ago, I was listening to Bill Maher's Club Random podcast and he was talking to the comedian Bill Burr. I like Burr and Maher and the two seemed to be having an amusing back and forth with a little ribbing. I didn't have time to finish listening to the whole thing but then a few days later I started seeing on X all these messages about how Burr had totally owned Maher. A few other quotes thrown about suggested that things had gotten really nasty. Burr evidently likened Maher to a fantasy football enthusiast on the topic of the Israel/Palastine conflict and insisted Maher had no right to talk about the subject because he had no practical experience. Which is certainly a funny view for anyone on X to champion.

I suspected the "fight" was blown out of proportion so I watched the whole thing and, yes, it was. The two never even entered a proper argument, the most that could be said is that each occasionally seems to misread the other's comedic insult as a genuine one.

Now there are a lot of digest videos of the original with titles like "Bill Burr Ruthlessly Mocks Bill Maher in Incredibly Satisfying Watch" and "Bill Burr MANHANDLES Bill Maher on Club Random". These videos have hundreds of thousands of views. It's really amazing.

When something like this happens, like when there were suddenly a bunch of insubstantial but rigorous articles trashing Russell Brand, it really creeps me out. It clearly indicates a malevolent manipulation of media, whether it's at the behest of a government or just a bunch of resentful assholes in the business, I don't know. I have come to the opinion that Brand is taking money from Russia somehow. In one of his videos, Brand casually brushed aside the very idea that Alexei Navalny's death, when he was imprisoned for criticising Putin, might have been murder. Which was a depressing moment. But it got me thinking, does the opposing government psy-op force look at this and say, "Okay, we can't just present this clear evidence to people. We have to manipulate them with salacious headlines into coming to the right opinion."

I've known people who do that and I've always hated it. You know, when someone has a strong opinion about something they don't think you will agree with or understand so they tell you a lie to inspire an equivalent level of hatred. Of course a government agency would do something like that. But it's hard to believe they'd be so ham-fisted. Or maybe I'm just too conceited.

It was weird hearing Burr criticise Maher for knowing big words, for being familiar with My Fair Lady. I know they were doing a comedy bit, but there are people who have real resentment about that stuff. I think it's a side-effect of lousy higher education. People get a liberal arts degree and feel a sense of accomplishment--then they meet someone who's actually read Moby Dick and the cognitive dissonance is painful. They feel that if they, with their expensive degrees, don't have that level of accomplishment, then no-one should.

Is Bill Maher arrogant, sometimes obnoxious? Yes. These are his faults. Oddly, it's one of the reasons I always preferred him to Jon Stewart. Stewart always presented a neat, clean package and often enough I, too, ate up his carefully edited clips from various news channels. But Maher is like Fred Astaire, dancing without the edits. His faults are one of the reasons you know what you're seeing is real. And that's too rare a commodity these days.