I happen to be fan of Bill Maher, even though we may have different political viewpoints. He gave a thoughtful case why we should be more outraged at Donald Sterling being bugged by his girlfriend than the horrible things he actually said. Maher went on take issue with Washington Post Kathleen Parker who said “‘If you don’t want your words broadcast in the public square, don’t say them.’ Maher responded “Really? Even at home? We have to talk like a White House press spokesman”.
Parker went on to say that the bright side of the Sterling episode is that we would be more careful in our words and edit our thoughts which provoked Maher to say “I’d rather be a Mormon” and equating that type of thinking to what the East Germans had to deal with while under the Iron Curtain.
Bill Maher summed up the segment by saying “We’re not ready to live in a world where everything has to come out perfectly in the first take. There’s a reason houses have doors on them and windows have shades. And 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 it makes me an asshole. Now, do I really believe those things? I’m not telling you because you’re not in my living room! (HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, May 9, 2014)”
I would suggest the bugging of Mr. Sterling was elder abuse and the girlfriend should be brought up on charges. Thank you Bill Maher for defending and protecting the Fourth Amendment.
…and like the first amendment the fourth is only applicable against the government. The law in question would be whether the state in which it was recorded allows for recordings without the knowledge of all involved. You may recall it came up regarding Linda Tripp’s recordings of Monica Lewinsky which turned out to be illegal in Maryland. That said, this always struck me as an old-white-guy-says-something-stupid story – not sure why it was such a thing.
Viva La Differance!
Since you asked.
because you are the head of a household that contains kids, and based on other diaries, I am assuming you have 3 youngsters. As such, with 3 children, the odds that at least one of them will be gay is 1 minus the odds that all three of them are hetero.
This means that the odds of at least one child being gay out of three is 100% – 73% = 27%.
Ergo, if you do have 3 children, the odds that at least one of them will be gay is approximately 27%.
And yet, with more than a 1 in 4 chance that one out of three children will be gay, you are creating an environment in which they may consider taking drastic steps to hide this information from you out of fear of your reaction. Because you are letting it be known, that in your house, you don’t want to see two guys kissing.
Unfortunately, many parents will loose their children to teen suicides, because of bigotted crap like this, and not even realize their involvement in it until it is too late.
So you want to be a bigot in the privacy of your own home, you just may want to consider the other people with whom you share that space. Which, in summary, is a heavy handed way to say, there is nothing wrong with joining the rest of us in the 21st century.
…that word used here is part of the quote from Bill Maher, not a self-reference on DFW’s part.
I should of realized that “banging the little mermaid” was just too clever a concept not to be a quote. D’OH!
I don’t disagree entirely with Maher, who’s more of a libertarian in many ways that a progressive, from what I can tell. However, Maher glosses over something significant. Sterling is not in trouble for what he said at home. He’s in trouble for being a racist. And by “in trouble” I mean that Sterling has become someone nobody wants to do business with. That includes his fellow owners, who have the right to remove him according to the rules he agreed to obey when he became an NBA owner. If he didn’t want that to happen, he shouldn’t have agreed to the rules of the NBA.
People complaining about Sterling losing his franchise aren’t too far from people complaining about losing their houses if they violate the development agreement they signed when buying a house. Don’t believe in it? Don’t sign it, or try to change it after you have.
A final note: I’ve heard a couple times that Sterling was aware he was being recorded. The fact that he said what he said knowing he was on tape, to a woman of, hm, complex background, would make me uneasy to have him as a business partner.
It would be nice, though, to remove the guy who’s helping prop up a suppressive regime that’s invading its neighbor. But Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is too smart to be caught saying something that incendiary on tape.
Please Dan, why do you always have to resort to lying to making your point. There is no evidence that racist a-hole Sterling was “bugged” or that the recordings were made without his knowledge or consent. No doubt they were released without his consent, but that is a different story.
Here is another way to think about it. Let’s say that instead of a recording, that “V” had written everything he said in a diary and published it. Would that be the same thing as “bugging”? I guess the difference is that then Sterling could more easily have lied his way out of it, by claiming that V herself lied. But there isn’t really any difference in terms of the release of information. Unless you are talking to your priest under the seal of confession or your lawyer, or your therapist, you don’t have any expectation that what you say will be kept confidential.
Anyway Dan, I welcome you to dig yourself a nice hole by continuing to attempt to defend a totally unlikeable narcissistic, racist jerk such as Donald Sterling.
This is silly. A man’s home is his castle, but if you want your foolish comments to stay within castle walls, don’t invite your social-media-savvy “companion” into the castle. Normal people with more, ah, typical domestic arrangements can be a racist as they want to be in the privacy of their own homes without fear, I think. And obviously there are no Fourth Amendment implications here.
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But it’s often marginal cases involving marginal people (like Mr. Miranda) that end up having larger effects.
(I haven’t watched the Maher clip, so I’m not commenting on that. It is somewhat concerning that a private conversation cost someone millions, but certainly Sterling has only affirmed the justice of the decision since it came down.)
Though I doubt that the “marginal people” you have in mind are more likely to surreptitiously record and then leak private conversations than anyone else.