Bill Maher: Stop Shoving Shit Into My Brain

[Magical Realist]

Totally agree with this. The hyped and pretentious "neologization" (there's a new word for ya!) of our modern language. We have to learn to say no to the most recent and overused "buzzword" everybody is repeating. It only makes people think they are smarter and "more in the know" than they really are. Quit pretending everyone and just speak your mind! And make people define their new "hip" word for you!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyOhf7SxVHY

[Syne]

LOL!

You and Bill Maher actually think the Overton Window is a new or "buzzword" term. How can you be politically active or knowledgeable and not know that?
Goes to show two people who "think they are smarter... than they really are."

From the comments: "gay" didn't always mean homosexual either. There's another neologization for ya.

[confused2]

Not being politically active and with no particular interest in deception .. the Overton Window isn't something I'd ever thought about.. until now.
A fickle beast.
As it becomes acceptable to ask if Jews should have special protection .. it also becomes acceptable to suggest that they shouldn't.
Fill the window with enough bullshit and anything becomes acceptable.

[Yazata]

If Bill Maher (one of the few Democrats whose opinions I respect) thinks that his brain-disk is full, then maybe he needs to start deleting files that are bullshit.

The Overton Window isn't one of those files. It's just a useful shorthand name for a valuable concept. It isn't even all that new, it dates back to the 1990's I think. What's new is its more recent popularity in political commentary.

The Overton window is what a particular society accepts as good, normal and acceptable. As opposed to ideas that it condemns as bad, radical or extreme. That window can move over time, and the more intellectual sort of political activists see it as their mission to move it in a direction that they favor.

In fact, the very idea that peoples and often nation states even have cultures, that they embody a set of assumptions that the population generally hold in common, is being pushed out of the window and redefined as "racism". Which is self-contradictory, since why should we reject 'racism' unless we embraced a cultural proscription against it?

Homosexuals are normalized (moved into the window) while the American founding fathers or Winston Churchill are shifted out of the window ("racists"!). Socialism and even Karl Marx are moved into the window while entrepreneurial capitalism is pushed out. The Columbus day holiday was shoved out of the window and replaced with "Indigenous Peoples day". The recent "transgender" craziness has been a textbook example, as has the attack on the whole concept of biological sex (by people who loudly proclaim that they "believe in science!").

Countless examples of conscious motivated attempts can be provided of people, almost always on the left, trying to shift the window in what they would define as a "progressive" direction by normalizing hitherto controversial or extreme concepts. In fact what defines conservatives as "conservatives" is their unwillingness to move the window in the ways that their opponents demand.

[Syne]

The Overton Window is very inconvenient for the left. It requires them to understand that Obama, in his first term, was closer to your average Republican than the entire Democrat Party is today. It proves that the left has sprinted to their extremist views while conservatives remain largely unmoved for decades. And then they project that the right has become more extreme, failing or intending to ignore the fact that their extremists have dragged the Overton Window very far to the left.

I can see why Democrats would want to forget it, but it just makes a political commentator, like Maher, look stupid.