I have distaste for both men.
Maher is kind of like Nixon for me, except liberal. He's a very smart man that shit in his own nest, and I cannot stomach him.
Trump is a dunce, and we need not go there. Trump doesn't understand humor, and he is a very dim man, and there will be a day, when even Havax will concede this fact.
For popular culture, I would say that Christopher Hitchens and Richard Feynmen are heros of mine, both of them so insanely smart that we can't really even touch them.
Feynman won the Nobel prize and totally skipped out on the ceremony, he just couldn't be arsed. This man elucidated proton structure as we know it, and AND was the human that showed us that ups and downs (the fundamental particles that make up a proton) must have fractional charge. When you know that a proton has a charge of +1, and is made up of two ups and one down, and these fractional charges add up to 1, it's very easy to intuit how they are. My problem, is how, in the motherfuck of everything, did he come to understand that this was so? I simply cannot get how he came upon it. Nobel prize, indeed.
Hitchens was a contrarian moralist, who sort of came to be known as a person that eschewed the idea of a God. He sort of began with Mother Theresa: The Missionary Position
And then continued with God Is Not Great: How Religion poisons everything
For you and other smart people like Havax, I highly recommend this read. Hitchens begins by saying "Okay, so you are perhaps wondering how religion poisons everything? How, in the world does religion poison the 3 cans of paint sitting in my garage? It does. Let's continue."
and from there, Hitchens talks, and it's a fun romp
