A Mauling by Maher

Nerdrotic discusses some Bill Maher clips where Maher takes the "Cancel Culture" Left to task for acting like the people they are -- and does it to great comic effect.

I first heard of "hate speech" as a political construct in the 1980s when in a bar talking to an admirer of the Communist dictator, Joseph Stalin. We'd been friends since childhood and I hoped that, after the revolution, he might help me get an exit permit. We discussed free speech and I said that the left often equates it with pornography, which the libertine left legally defends while the feminist left puritanically condemns. At the same time, both wings try to suppress political speech. He said, "You can't just let people say anything!" and went on to talk about hate speech. This came from a self-identified Stalinist who thought slave labor camps a necessary, if regrettable, phase -- which made me wonder about the enforcement mechanism he envisioned for his speech codes.

At the time I had a communist roommate who was in graduate school. He borrowed my car, got a flat, and drove it back to the apartment, shredding the tire in the process. He then used a can of fix-a-flat I had in the trunk. A short time later, I stared at the rubbery remains with the specs of foam clinging to the edges and marveled at the magical thinking involved. The fellow thought the contents of that can could knit that tire back together at the atomic level. He seemed confused that it hadn't worked. I joked that, come the revolution, he'd be the Minister of Science and Industry. Seeing the new direction that Science and Industry have taken, I'm thinking the revolution occurred when I wasn't looking.