As you’ve probably seen in the news of late, Ben Affleck and Bill Maher had something of a tête-à-tête on the latter’s TV show this week. The discussion came in the context of Waking Up, a book written by another of Maher’s guests, one Sam Harris, and specifically Harris’ view that liberalism has failed in its approach to Islam, and how “every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated into bigotry against Muslims as people.” We don’t often write about international geopolitics here on Flavorwire, but it’s worth looking at how the discussion unfolded, both because it took place between two prominent cultural figures on an HBO talk show and because the whole incident illustrates a fundamental problem with the way we discuss these issues.