With Real Time With Bill Maher set to start airing again tomorrow, one thing that came to mind was a bit of a double standard within his own fandom, toward his own statements, about the "pattern of being wrong" standard of assessing credibility.
In 2006, he called the Heritage Foundation and Project For A New American Century out on their pattern of being wrong, all the time, about everything, and extrapolated this to why pulling out of Iraq would be a good idea. I don't recall anyone objecting at the time to this line of reasoning.
However, this past season, he has made an unmistakably recurring theme of making reference to how much the World Health Organization was wrong about and extrapolated this to why it's a good case for the lab leak hypothesis. It isn't even his only reasoning for this particular claim, of course, but just the fact that he even invokes that line of reasoning as part of it is not quite as popular in that context as in the context of the Iraq War. Why do you suppose that is?
Is it because they agree with him more on wanting to pull out of Iraq than on the lab leak hypothesis? If so, why aren't they calling his "pattern of being wrong" argument a more poor argument for a policy they otherwise support? If not, what else is their reasoning? More generally, by what standard do we decide when "pattern of being wrong" reasoning is justified and when it isn't?
