One of the things I remember fondly was a little show on ABC called as Politically Incorrect.  It came on late night, but had a insightful host and always entertaining and thought provoking guests.

But what seems to be a general rule of celebrity status in this country, is that once you get large enough to have thousands of individual “yes” men running around claiming you’re a genius, it seems inevitable that for you to begin to believe it and slowly, but surely, remove rational thought.

Enter Bill Maher as a perfect example of just such a person.  Just less than a decade ago, he went from a thoughtful individual, to a guy who not only believes the absurd, but is completely certain that his beliefs are truly righteous.  For someone who supposedly disdains religious folks for believing in such nonsense, he certainly has a lot of faith in ideas with no basis in reality.

To demonstrate this, look no further than his numerous writing on Huffington Post. He uses such flawless logic as guilt by association.  Since Sarah Palin & Karl Rove are very polarizing figures, might as well lump them in with Mitt Romney.  Since Bill doesn’t like their politics, they must all be the same:

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn’t make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn’t put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing – in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!!

Apparently he’s just too busy to understand that if the President is this great genius and wonderful communicator, he might be doing a whole lot better in this health care thing… but that might cause cognitive dissonance.  So instead of having to contemplate the opposition, it’s just easier to think of all of them as stupid.

Further showing his stupidity, he decides to bash the freest economic system mankind has ever seen:

How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn’t do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn’t used to define us. But now it’s becoming all that we are.

Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a “war profiteer” was a bad thing?

Yeah, there was a time when that happened and the eminent Milton Friedman proved how stupid this thinking was.  Recounting the debate in his book titled Two Lucky People:

“In the course of his [General Westmoreland's] testimony, he made the statement that he did not want to command an army of mercenaries. I [Milton Friedman] stopped him and said, ‘General, would you rather command an army of slaves?’ He drew himself up and said, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves.’ I replied, ‘I don’t like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries.’ But I went on to say, ‘If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general; we are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher.’ That was the last that we heard from the general about mercenaries.”

On Bill’s list of priorities however, rational thought and actual logic don’t seem that high.  Dissing anyone more interested than he is with one of the greatest advancements to human kind, he opines:

New Rule: if you’re excited about a new search engine, then the thing you should be searching for is a life…

It seems as if Bill just can’t understand why people might be interested in the easy distribution of knowledge throughout the world.  Yep, the internet, the greatest advancement to human knowledge since Gutenberg would be about as useful as all of Bill’s knowledge combined if the search results return junk, but discussing that makes you a nerd.

But why would he stop there?  As with most self absorbed and arrogant people, not only is he right, but his dissenters must be wrong for nefarious reasons.  In an attempt to marginalize those who disagree with King Maher:

New Rule: The Republican Party needs to just get it over with and tell the entire Hispanic community to go f*&$k themselves…

The point?  Well, it’s not really to bash Bill.  First, it’s really not worth it to continue to concern yourself with the rantings from the insane.  Even allowing anger at his arrogance gives him power over you he doesn’t deserve.  Additionally, it’s really too easy pointing flaws into Bill rantings… it’s about as difficult to do this as it is do simple addition with the help of a calculator.

No, he is just another crackpot, but he can serve an excellent example of what arrogance and self built echo chambers inevitably achieve.

& It’s truly sad to contemplate… In a world with the internet with all it’s free content, differing view points, ability to look at multiple sources instantly (thanks to search engines), and really, the ability for people to truly become informed, it appears that most of us, like Bill, only seek out people who agree with us and help us prove our own presumptions.

According to recent research:

We show that the demand for news varies with the perceived affinity of the news organization to the consumer’s political preferences. In an experimental setting, conservatives and Republicans preferred to read news reports attributed to Fox News and to avoid news from CNN and NPR. Democrats and liberals exhibited exactly the opposite syndrome – dividing their attention equally between CNN and NPR, but avoiding Fox News.

Just as a reporter from the NY Times once candidly said “I don’t know anyone who voted for Reagan”, we seem to be a world population motivated only to prove ourselves correct.

If we continue down the Road to Serfdom, I can see a future where historians will write about this time as one of squandered opportunities and deliberate ignorance.

Let’s hope some day soon, facts become required for evidence and emotional appeals using faulty logic are rightfully laughed at.

Let’s hope before we make too many very large mistakes, we start learning how to think, instead of just working on how to score political points.

Yeah… let’s hope.