Bill Maher is wrong again.

Bill Maher is wrong again.

The other day on his show, Bill Maher asked that people stop talking about politics. He made the unfounded claim that nobody ever changes their minds and therefore it's useless. I hate to disagree with a man who has his own TV show, but I'm going to. Bill, you're wrong. People do in fact change their minds. When I first voted, I voted as a Reagan Democrat. By the time I moved to Arizona, I was a conservative Republican. (yup... crazy, ain't it.) By the time "W" was elected (or stole the election in 2000) I refused to vote for him. The Party had moved away from me, or perhaps I had moved away from the party, or perhaps some of both. By now, 18 years later, I've shifted toward being a progressive or liberal Democrat. You might even call me a Democratic Socialist. (I wouldn't but that's another story.) People do change, Bill. and Political discussions are a part of that. Not the canned talking points, trolling, and carefully studied insults that we have today, but actual discussion, where the facts themselves are not in question, but the interpretation of those facts is the matter of discussion. Bill, we don't need to stop talking politics, we need to stop having arguments about what the fundamental facts are. Even as early as the mid-90s, people on the internet were trying to bring their own facts. That's what we need to stop doing -- stop using our own facts. Stop bringing "Alternative facts" to the discussion. That done, we can move on to discuss the actual issues at hand. It's not going to be easy. People have to mutually agree to trust sources of facts, and that's going to be difficult. Not impossible, just difficult. It will likely take as long to move back to that that than it took to get to where we are, and to stop shouting slogans at each other.