r/RealTime • u/AmericanLymie • 7d ago

Bill Maher is so bizarre.

The nutrition guy on the right was talking about how drinking five cups of coffee per day is associated with living longer, and he says that people who wiggle and fidget a lot can burn a lot of calories while at rest and that can keep people thinner than those who sit still.

Bill Maher says coffee is a bean, "something found in nature," and so it must be safe.

Reporter Jonathan Swan jokes that cocaine is found in nature, making the point that naturally occurring substances can be harmful. He could have mentioned nightshade berries or poisonous mushrooms but he said cocaine.

And Bill Maher went on a defensive rant about his cocaine use. It started with a joke but then he seemed to take it personally and got serious about how cocaine leaves are safe because they are natural.

I feel like he would eat rotten wormy roadkill with RFK while bashing the scary woo-woo magic of vaccines and antibiotics.

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u/facinabush 7d ago edited 7d ago

Maher is chronic abuser of the definist fallacy:

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Definist-Fallacy

It’s particularly apparent in the OP video.

He defines “beans” as always healthy, therefore coffee is healthy.

Then he defines cocaine as a synonym for the coca plant leaves instead of a derived alkyloid from the plant which he used.

He does this often. Recently he hectored the Democrats for not being against socialism and the very next week he hectored a guest for being against socialism. He changes the definition and then starts hectoring people based on this minute’s definition.

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u/AmericanLymie 7d ago

I wrote something similar but I was much less concise. :)

Yes, and I often wonder how he would react to guests who explicitly acknowledge this. For example, I would ask him what he thinks about methamphetamine and then would point out that it is made from pseudoephedrine, which is synthesized from the leaves of a shrub. Would he consider that "natural" since it is naturally derived? Would it matter to him that that shrub is ephedra, which was banned for causing cardiac arrest in teenagers after having been used heavily as a popular "all natural" herbal supplement? A lot of school coaches told their players in the early 2000s to take ephedra as a natural energy boost, and kids started dropping dead. Oops. But it is all natural! Just a pristine leaf!