Bill Maher versus David Mamet

About six minutes long. Topics: 2020 election and Jan 6. Tell me who you think 'won' and why.

Related: Three Notes on David Mamet.  From 2023. Vito Caiati and Dmitri Dain offer their typically astute comments.

Comments

[jim reibel]

BV
Thanks for your link to the 2023 post and comments. Well worth the time to read and seriously consider. Hope you may add some current reflections in this regard.

Best

Jim Reibel

[Tom T.]

>>Related: Three Notes on David Mamet. From 2023. Vito Caiati and Dmitri Dain offer their typically astute comments.<<

I missed that 2023 post, but you are correct about Vito's & Dmitri's comments. But as for the source of antisemitism, you mentioned envy. In that context, I give you Mark Twain's article, “Concerning The Jews,” (Harper’s Magazine, 1899; The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, Doubleday [1963] pg. 249):

"If statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.

"His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him.

"He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed; and made a vast noise, and they are gone. Other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

"The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind.
"All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

On such an account, which I fully endorse, what is there not to envy? But I would suggest that such envy seems to rise to the virulent and violent levels of antisemitism when a culture becomes aware, however dimly, that it is decadent and in a precipitous decline.

On this reading, antisemitism is a sign of existential desperation. German society in the 1930's would be one example. Another would be the decline of Muslim contributions to high culture you noted and the more recent collapse of the Ottoman Empire. And our current state of affairs is hard to distinguish from decadence, which accounts for the growing antisemitism of our times.

But that is a rather complicated historical argument for which I am not presently equipped, so I will leave it as just a suggestion.

[Dmitri]

Apologies for the seemingly unrelated post but I think that Musk-Trump feud is much more substantial than Maher-Mamet polite disagreement. I posted a prediction somewhere here - not that it was a difficult task given the supersized egos of both.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1930703865801810022

[BV]

Dmitri,

Batya Ungar-Sargon provides context: https://www.thefp.com/p/elon-trump-bromance-is-over

[BV]

VDH, as usual, has wise things to say.

>>Musk, on the other hand, as the richest man in the world and CEO of his companies, can rule by directives, in a way a president, the most powerful man in the world, simply cannot. What the White House may have wanted in the bill, and what they could reasonably achieve were not synonymous.<<

Important point. The CEO of a company can play the dictator, but not the CEO of a republican gov't. Musk doesn't understand how our gov't works. Trump is no dictator -- leastways, not yet as a lefty might say -- and so he has to go along with the messy 'sausage-making' process. It is precisely because of this talk, talk, talk parliamentary bullshit and endless nitpicking that Schmitt and the boys want to go full-on dictatorial.

The shitheads of the Left need to study real dictatorships to see how far the Trump regime is from being one.

And let me point out one more time that it is utter folly in practical politics -- and politics is a practical game as I have said a hundred times -- to let the best become the enemy of the good.

Elon 0 - Trump 1.

https://x.com/VDHanson/status/1931017230483099801

[Dmitri]

Thanks Bill. Read both VDH and BUS. I think that Trump doesn't understand yet that business methods such as constructive chaos and "art of the deal" style of negotiations do not transfer well to politics in general and especially to diplomacy. Sadly robber baron Musk understands this even less.

Musk is definitely a disappointment.

[Vito B. Caiati]

Bill,

This little scene from the film Lincoln (2012), in which Lincoln speaks of what he has learned from surveying, captures the truth of VDH's observation of the president's inability to simply rule, like a CEO, by directive, however much he might wish to do so: https://youtu.be/nPfihz9-Ls0

[BV]

That's great, Vito. Apropos.

One quibble: Lincoln (as portrayed) confuses true with magnetic North.

[BV]

Dmitri.

I take your point. But Trump is the Unpolitician (7-Up was billed as the Uncola back in the '70s).

How far has diplomacy got us? Time to try the Art of the Deal.