Unnerving to hear the halfhearted titters from his audience. Thought police okay with them, evidently. Do you think many of them don't get it that dumb people, mean people, racists, homophobes -- people who disagree with you -- get to express their opinions? Listen to that audience and see if you don't think they are looking from side to side waiting to be clued in on how they should react.
Maher was connecting it to the Fourth Amendment but I don't see that. I just see a sort of self-censorship we are dancing into by trying to outdo each other with the Approved Goodness of Our Thoughts and Intentions.
Last week, when President Obama was asked about the Sterling episode, he said, “when ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance, just let them talk.” But Sterling didn’t advertise. He was bugged…Even at home, we have to talk like a White House press spokesman? … I would listen to a hundred horrific Cliven Bundy rants if that was the price of living in the world where I could also hear interesting and funny people talk without a filter…So let me get this straight: We should concede that there’s no such thing anymore as a private conversation, so therefore remember to ‘lawyer’ everything you say before you say it, and hey, speaking your mind is overrated anyway, so you won’t miss it. Well, I’ll miss it. I’ll miss it a lot … Does anyone really want there to be no place where we can let our hair down and not worry if the bad angel in our head occasionally grabs the mic? … Who wants to live in a world where the only privacy you have is inside your head? That’s what life in East Germany was like. That’s why we fought the Cold War, remember? So we’d never have to live in some awful limbo where you never knew who — even among your friends — was an informer. And now we’re doing it to ourselves. Well, don’t … If I want to sit in the privacy of my living room and say, ‘I think the Little Mermaid is hot and I want to bang her, or I don’t like watching two men kiss, or I think tattoos look terrible on black people, I should be able to. Even if you think that makes me an a–hole. Now, do I really believe those things? I’m not telling you, ’cause you’re not in my living room.”