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I'm with the compass people...

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Bill Maher was on CNN's Larry King Live last night. He had some great points, as usual. But I particularly liked this quote. His percentages may be a bit off, but the sentiment is dead on.


"Half this country wants to guide our ship of state with a compass, something that works by science and rationality and empirical wisdom. And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire. And I'm with the compass people." - Bill Maher


I'm with the compass people, too.

Mike
 
I saw that and it pissed me off because Bill Maher is not with the compass people, he is with the people reading chicken entrails. He is into astrology and ghosts and all manner of nonsense.

Bill always rips religion, saying he doesn't like it and all, and it bugs me because he should say he's against _conventional_ religion. That would be more accurate. He doesn't seem to have much problem with unconventional religion.

I like much of what Maher says but some of what he says really annoys me.
 
I tried to watch his show a few years ago, and noticed the same trait..he would blithely announce that he, himself was of such and such a character, and then turn around and let rip some amazingly jingoistic stereotype, or some piece of woo-woo that completly contradicted his self evaluation.
 
thread on bm and astrology

It amazes me that astrology is even still around...
I just looked up the description of my sign and it seems pretty accurate. Well, most of it does. Er, some of it, if I pick out what matches. Hmm.
 
Wow, that's somewhat scary/depressing. It has been a long time since I've discussed (or read a discussion) with a True Astrology Believer and I had forgotten how well they can rationalize. And they always bring out the "A" word...if you disagree with them then you're "Arrogant."

Props to whoever it was in that thread that tried to set them straight a bit.
 
I've always liked Bill Maher. His book "When You Ride Alone", really gives a good liberal viewpoint and defense of post-911.

His astrology stance though keeps my skeptic hackles on high. It is pretty amazing how many people believe and buy into this horse-pucky.

Charlie (if it ends in "logy", it MUST be a science) Monoxide
 
In Maher's defense...

...saying "there might be something to Astrology."

&

'actaually subscribing to Astrology',

...are 2 very different things
 
Charlie Monoxide said:
I've always liked Bill Maher. His book "When You Ride Alone", really gives a good liberal viewpoint and defense of post-911.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure I'd call this book "liberal." There was a lot of "things were better in the old days" discussion, especially the mindset of the public during WWII. (But then again, I'm starting to think that "liberal" and "conservative" don't have much meaning in today's political climate. There are many times I thought an idea was "conservative," and heard others describe it as "liberal," and vice versa. Go figure.)

Maher seems to be pretty much opposed to superstition, whether it is encompassed in religious belief or not. But, as Penn Jillette says, "Everybody got a greegree."
 
Brown said:
I'm not sure I'd call this book "liberal." There was a lot of "things were better in the old days" discussion, especially the mindset of the public during WWII. ...
Click to expand...
This was an interesting point Maher brought up last night. He said that Bush calls himself a wartime president, but doesn't ask the people of this country to make sacrifices, which characterized previous wartime presidents.

For instance he isn't asking the richest tax-cut recipients to sacrifice their tax-cuts (that's me speaking, not Maher).
 
Aside from astrology I've heard Maher say good things about people that claim to talk to the dead and I've heard him say he believes in ghosts because he was once in a place with a pool table and a ball on it moved even though nobody touched it and there were no open windows nearby so what else could it have been? He's certainly good at sniffing out certain kinds of BS but I think he's susceptible to being taken in by other kinds of it.
 
mfeldman said:
"Half this country wants to guide our ship of state with a compass, something that works by science and rationality and empirical wisdom. And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire. And I'm with the compass people." - Bill Maher
Click to expand...

unfortunately, zero (edit scratch zero/replace with 'very small')percent of the people vote for candidate that actually use a compass. All electable candidates of late almost exclusively use entrails of chickens to guide the nation (polls, surveys, et al).

Like it or not, that's the democratic system in a chicken-butt.


Edit: compass oriented candidates exist in every election but too few like the direction/understand the message/dump propaganda to make them electable.
 
"I think there's something to astrology, although I'm not sure what. But if there is, it can only be found in going deeply into it, not just going by a blurb in the paper based on only what your sun sign is. If it were that simple, all the people of a certain sun sign would act alike, and that's not the case.

As for me, I was born, according to astrologers, on the cusp of Capricorn and Aquarius, not just that day, but down to the minute, for astrology is a map of the planets at the precise moment you were born. The moon pulls the tides, so bodies in motion do exert an influence on liquids on earth, and as Thales of Miletus said when he inaugurated philosophy, "everything is water." I know I have plenty of it inside me."

-Bill Maher

He's just saying he believes that astrology might have a scientific basis to it, although he doesn't know what it is. What's the big deal? I'm sure most people have curiosities of the likes, and it's not because we associate astrology with some crazy woman with thick makeup that it necessarily couldn't have any scientific basis.
 
Then why is Bill picking on people that read chicken entrails and calling then non-rational and non-scientific? Just because he associates chicken entrails with the Roman Empire doesn't mean it couldn't have any scientific basis.

Sure, technichally speaking we can never rule anything out completely, but from what we know reading chicken entrails is just as scientific as astrology. But Bill ridicules one and embraces the other.
 
I like Maher (sometimes, not all the time) too but that is why I'm so on his case about this. If it were some crazy nutcase that was constantly spouting nonsense then it'd be another story. But Maher often uses logic and reason to speak sense, making him a trustworthy source to many people (or at least the ones that don't dislike him for his political views) and then he goes and promotes various paranormal-type nonsense and that affects people because they've come to trust him.
 
Originally posted by Number Six he goes and promotes various paranormal-type nonsense and that affects people because they've come to trust him. [/B]
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Really? He promotes "paranormal-type nonsense"? Can you direct me to the sources?
 
I've seen him say positive things about astrology on TV (but it was on TV...I don't have the transcript...although someone else has posted a transcripted of him promoting astrology elsewhere).

And I've seen him say good things about talking to the dead (once on Larry King, which is probably in the Larry King transcript archives...I think it was within the last year...and another time on another show that I can't remember the name of).

And I've seen him talk about ghosts and haunted houses on Politically Incorrect I don't know if the PI transcript archives still exist or not.

And he's won the Randi Pigasus Award that someone detailed above, although it's possible that that was for the same thing that I've described in the previous paragraph.

IIRC I recall an episode of PI where he said that astrology was as good as psychiatry at helping people. I don't know much about psychaitry but astrology is only as good as psychiatry if psychiatry is useless. Again, I don't know if the PI archives still exist.

I'm not making this stuff up. I used to watch PI almost every single night for a period of several years because I liked the show and I generally liked Maher, but now and then he'd say some just downright crazy stuff.
 
Maher's Pigasus Award from JREF

"Category #3, to the media outlet that reported as fact the most outrageous supernatural, paranormal or occult claim,the prize goes to the host of the "Politically Incorrect" TV show, Bill Maher. Despite an Ivy League education and an obviously quick and perceptive mind, Mr. Maher has for some reason cast common sense aside and endorsed a series of "psychics," most of whom say they speak to dead folks. His own experience of the supernatural, he says, includes a "haunted house" and he tells us that only ghosts could account for what he observed there. This widely-watched program satirizes politics, Hollywood, the media, and generally popular subjects -- but apparently takes seriously any hare-brained claim that will catch the public fancy. Mr. Maher squeaked to a win over the Roseanne Show this year; her gushing acceptance of a "flying" demonstration by Transcendental Meditators almost landed her the prize."
 
Again, let us repeat: he does not "embrace" these ideas nor does he preaches about them. He entertains a scientific interest in these things is all, from what I read in this thread. Can we shoot down someone's credibility for that?

Edit to add: And as for psychiatry being as helpful as astrology, I wish I'd seen that tho it's probably a question of context. For some people, astrology IS more helpful than psychiatry, in a placebo-effect kind of way.
 
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