43 episodes
Wait... What? Howard Siegel
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- Society & Culture
Wait... What!? is an often humorous, sometimes ferocious, but always entertaining romp through the bizarre memes that inspire mass lunacy, religious fanaticism, and ideological intransigency where basic reasoning is overwhelmed by willful ignorance. Why do people believe and refuse to ask simple questions about the nonsense they are fed by corrupt politicians, unscrupulous religious predators, and ordinary scam artists? What is the psychological mechanism that makes masses of people behave in ways that would make lemmings point and chortle? When X-files hero Fox Mulder said, "I want to believe" he was unknowingly speaking for religious fundamentalists, conspiracy theorists, UFO true believers, nut-case truthers, and ideologues who run the gamut from skin heads to Antifa -- people for whom there can be no other side of a complicated issue. What causes these people to willingly embrace nonsense -- ideas and claims that make little or no sense -- and shut out facts and reason as if they repositories of the Corona virus? What strange predisposition keeps them from putting both hands in the stop gesture and saying, Wait... What? Howard Siegel takes us on a voyage to a world where objective, reasoned thinking has been replaced with the powerful appeal of irrationally simple answers. Howard Siegel is an attorney, author, former MSNBC legal analyst, and hapless, sysphysian golfer. He has appeared on 60 Minuets, Larry King Live, The Today Show, NPR, and PBS. He lives in South Carolina where he is a practicing heathen, heretic, and herbivore.
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Episode 43: Killing Santa Claus and The New Paradym Driver
This episode explores why Santa Clause deserves to die and why I will never be able to hit a 300-yard drive. None of which has much to do with why you should immediately go to my website www.howardsiegel.com or Amazon and buy my new book Everything that Lives and Moves but I decided that this was a good place to plug it. The podcast, as you know, is free. The book is almost free ($.99 for the e-book) and will change your life. Mine too if enough of you buy it. EVERYTHING THAT LIVES AND MOVES: A Confrontation with the Origin of Natural Evil - Kindle edition by Siegel, Howard. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
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Episode 42: The great lemming slaughter, I vs. we, and red covid
My ongoing preoccupation with what makes a moron a moron has led me to explore the great lemming fraud perpetrated by Walt Disney, the Catholic preoccupation with personal pronouns and why the wrong one will land you in hell, the idea of clean coal, and how to get Trumpers to demand vaccinations en mass.
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Episode 41: Paragliding with Bigfoot
You are just going to have to listen if you want to know "what's in that" (podcast) which happens to be the unanswered question going through every MAGA antivaxxer's mind when they reach the conclusion that they are part of an elite "in the know" group of Facebook and YouTube warriors who know "what's in that" and conclude that it ain't good. These people are definitely not sheeple. They are morons.
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Episode 40: It's just a mask, you morons.
Welcome to part 2 of a journey into the minds of the dumbest people in America. The anti-vaxxers (ANTIVA) and the anti-maskers (ANTIMA). In this episode, I will attempt to abandon my immature use of the ad hominem "stupid" and show you that I believe everyone is entitled to their own opinion. "They got rights." I will fail miserably.
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Episode 39: Kayfabe - professional wrestling is real and the election was fake
Welcome to the world of hardcore Trumpers where mysterious disappearing bamboo fiber remnants are the accepted explanation for why Trump-supporting investigators cannot find any Chinese bamboo in the Maricopa County Biden ballots. If you want to understand how any thinking human could believe the utter nonsense put out there by Trump regarding a stolen election and his legions who claim that we have nothing to fear from COVID 19 and that the vaccines are part of a plot by the government to insert chips into us for mind control... all you have to do is go to a professional wrestling match, ignore the wrestlers and watch the crowd. Once you grasp the attraction and success of the wrestling concept of "kayfabe" you understand exactly what makes masses of idiots believe in imaginary bad guys, conspiracies, and satanic pedophile cannibals.
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Episode 38: Reasoning. A primer for morons and the 70% of Republicans who think Trump won.
A person who claims that something happened has the burden of proving that it actually happened. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The absence of any evidence is as far from extraordinary as one can get. People who believe claims that are unsupported by evidence should not be allowed near power tools or carving knives. The statement that "everybody knows it" is not evidence. It is what idiots say when they have no evidence. Donald Trump is an idiot. And so are you if you nod in agreement when he says it.