I guess it's possible that Maher is just a much more sophisticated liar in that he's not easily unverifiable and sounds sincere, but he seems to me just not to understand in any depth a lot of the topics he discusses. Whereas on the subject of Islam, Reza Aslan clearly knows what he's talking about. He knows what he's saying is either misleading or outright false, yet he says it anyway, on the apparent view that the audience will take him at his word and any fact-checking will be confined to youtube-folk who no one listens to anyway. If that's true of Maher, he's a good actor, or good enough to fool me.
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"The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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