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I don't care about the Miss America pageant, but I love me some exposition of fraudulent financial claims. This show has the best researchers.
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Sep 23, 2014 00:52
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I knew that there was an embargo, and I guess I just assumed it would go on indefinitely. I had no idea that it had to be constantly renewed, and all Obama would have to do is not sign something. God knows why it's still going. The cold war's long dead, and even Fidel Castro is out of power. And we dropped the embargo against North Korea of all places.
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Sep 24, 2014 16:43
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It helps that John Oliver isn't just repeating all the latest news stories with a comedic spin, he focuses more on things. I kind of miss the days of the daily show when they would occasionally bring up some goofy story from a small town somewhere about how they're trying to make a robot to tase hobos or something.
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Sep 27, 2014 17:47
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I'm surprised how they didn't mention that Ayn Rand is from Russia, which is why she has a crazy bizarro view of how capitalism is supposed to work. It's also why her name is so weird, she took it when she moved here to sound less foreign.
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Sep 29, 2014 16:29
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Ayn Rand's biggest philosophical accomplishment was being able to ignore the works of any real philosopher, and somehow make the argument that even if you find holes in her philosophy, it doesn't invalidate anything.
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Sep 30, 2014 06:59
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Ayn Rand's philosophy is useful as a placeholder, since there haven't been any famous not-crazy philosophers playing the devil's advocate against socialism for a long time now. It's really fitting that everything about her falls apart on closer examination, since it goes to show that there aren't really any overarching philosophical underpinnings to capitalism like there are for communism. Capitalism is just what ended up happening over time. And seeing as how we're still talking about it, they must've done something right with the segment.
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Oct 3, 2014 17:43
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Really this show is just what The Bugle would be with an actual research staff.
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Oct 19, 2014 07:37
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Considering how hosed up the VA is, it's no surprise that civilian contractors get even a worse deal.Echo Chamber posted:Nooooooooo Asian dude from Mythbusters I thought you were cool. McDonald's has the most negative press out of any restaurant next to Denny's. There's no shame in going up and affirming to people that "yes this food is food."
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Oct 20, 2014 18:52
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I was surprised that he didn't mention any of the gubernatorial elections. In places where the legislative bodies don't meet very often, all the power tends to fall into the governor's hands. The intent may have been to make a more minimalistic government, but it ends up just focusing everything into one person. At least that's how it goes in Texas.
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Nov 3, 2014 23:36
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I guess state-sponsored gambling is a bad thing, especially if it moves the burden of taxes from people who actually have the money to afford them. I thought of the lottery before as just a gutless things that state governments do to crank out more revenue without actually raising taxes, but I suppose it's also a way to maintain revenues while cutting taxes for people who are lobbying at them. There's also programs designed to get people to save that are shut down by states because they compete with the lottery. It's a fairly important issue. Still seems like a weak thing to go out on though. I wonder if John Oliver just didn't want to say something too controversial right before going on break. Xoidanor posted:I can barely even imagine the logistics that must have gone into the salmon scene. It's not that hard to imagine. They probably just bought a bunch of fake salmon and shipped them out to people. The fish catapult isn't that new of a thing, so they would've had plenty of time to put it together. It helps that a bunch of the people they used are also in New York.
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Nov 10, 2014 17:42
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I can't see him doing the anti-vaccination movement in a full 15-minute segment, but he might touch upon it. There's not all that much to go into, is there? You should get vaccinated, and the bulk of reasons not to are terrible. Seems simple enough.
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Feb 11, 2015 08:19
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The van looked more just red to me. I never really thought about the election of judges before, but my granddad did have stories from when he worked as a police dispatch about how the sheriff being elected caused problems. They had to wait until the very last moment to inform him about a raid so that he couldn't sabotage it to protect his interests.
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Feb 24, 2015 04:14
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This episode was mostly a miss for me. First of all, the Fanta-nazi thing was a little unfair, since the German branch of the Coca Cola company did everything you could reasonably expect to not be involved with the Nazis. The man in charge never became a member of the party (when everyone including the future pope was), and he kept all the profits to give back to the company at the end of the war. It'd be easier to go after IBM, they helped enable the holocaust. And then after that, it was a little weird to focus on the ability to vote for president? I don't think that would really solve the problems he's talking about. What you'd really want is meaningful representation in congress. Even if the president were born in one of those areas, it would be hard to push congress to reform for those small regional areas. Congressional representatives are the ones who are supposed to look out for their people, and it's written into the constitution that they don't get that unless they're states, and Puerto Rico voted against that last time it came up. Also, John Oliver skipped a certain other mostly minority area (50.7% black according to wikipedia, highest proprtion in the union) of the the United States that doesn't get meaningful representation in congress: The District of Columbia, murder capital of the country. They do get the right to vote for president though, except for when their elector decided not to vote. SlothfulCobra fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Mar 9, 2015 |
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Mar 9, 2015 19:43
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bull3964 posted:"Retain current form of Territorial Status" was the framing of the first question. Many people would like to retain Territorial status but alter the form that would give them more say in the current government. Well that wasn't presented as an option mainly because that's stupid and it's never going to happen. It'd be way simpler to incorporate them as a state than it would be to get congress to mess with the constitution to create a new status just so that Puerto Rico could get the rights of a state without technically being a state. Of course, the American Samoa thing was straight bullshit.
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Mar 11, 2015 15:38
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Yeah, the stuff people in the territories have to deal with is no cakewalk, but in general the way we handle veterans is mostly awful. The VA is a mess that never gets anything done. I feel like when some people thank the soldiers "who give their lives for their country" are also tacitly thanking them for having the good sense to die so that the government doesn't have to take care of them. It's not exactly a new thing for vets to get shafted either. At least things aren't bad enough now to make veterans form a shanty town at the capital in protest.
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Mar 15, 2015 16:58
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The show hasn't really been going into issues that most people are unaware of lately. This one's been all over the news already. I guess I didn't know how all the extra profits from college sports were Of course, if you want to get really nasty, look at football instead of basketball, where the athletes are also being exploited and given a substandard education, but they are also sustaining long-term brain damage.
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Mar 16, 2015 21:06
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Of course, sports organizations can get away with all this poo poo because the sports fans have undying allegiance to them, and whenever they're threatened, the fans take it personally. Like that time when there were riots at Penn State after the coach was fired for covering up how Sandusky was molesting children.
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Mar 17, 2015 16:11
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Irish Joe posted:So what does that say about the people who are actually paying for them? If you wanted a worthless degree without having gotten any real education from it, you can get one for way cheaper without the risk of injury from a degree mill.
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Mar 22, 2015 16:57
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That 4th grade class couldn't have had a better lesson on how government works. drat right your dumb bill is going to get torn up and twisted to be used as some ridiculous talking point, you're just some kids, you don't have lobbyists or public opinion working for you. It's no real secret that local governments use police fines to jack up government income without (gasp) raising taxes, Ferguson just was caught doing it. And nobody is going to step out and say that the government shouldn't punish people who break laws, so everything slants towards being overly harsh. It's sort of a cross between the forces working behind civil forfeiture and those working behind the US's problem with incarceration. People who are unlucky enough to break the law subsidize the lack of tax increases for the wealthy. It is about being soft on crime, because being as hard on it as we are destroys lives.
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Mar 23, 2015 17:22
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Incidentally, passing debts that need to be collected to private collection agencies is a thing that happens all the time in other parts of the economy, so it's only natural that the industry spilled over into the public sector. When various loan companies give up on individuals paying back their debts, they sell the claim to the debt to private debt collectors, who then use debatably legal means to convince people into paying money. Of course, when you work for the US government, all those methods have an extra degree of legitimacy, so there's no limit to what they can do. Not sure how prevalent bullshit fees on top of debt are when there isn't a real threat of jail time though.
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Mar 27, 2015 05:54
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A lot of things are illegal, enforcement is pretty inconsistent.
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Mar 28, 2015 05:16
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gently caress., just...gently caress. The goddamned dedication John Oliver had to go to Russia not just to interview Edward Snowden, but to make fun of him and break his spirit some, makes him simultaneously the best and worst person there is. I thought this issue was old hat, but I guess they found a new angle to present it with. If this show managed to find a way to make the public care about government violation of privacy in a way that they haven't for the last decade, then John Oliver is a loving champion. It's unlikely, but I'm hopeful for the first time in a while.
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Apr 6, 2015 07:11
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It's not at all new that complicated news needs to be put into context; it's just that most news outlets prefer to do stories about things that people are already interested in rather than doing their loving job and making the important things of the day interesting to the viewer. Actual investigative reporting is mostly dead because reporters can't loving present things in an interesting way.
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Apr 6, 2015 23:27
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The IRS being left to decay is one of those little sad problems with the government that nobody is ever really eager to fix. It's easy to cast them as some sort of "bad guy" since nobody likes paying money to the government, but then when there isn't proper tax revenue available, things like ludicrous punitive fines have to step up to fill the gap.
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Apr 13, 2015 21:40
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Incidentally, John Oliver makes the point that the IRS isn't cool, but that's not the case in other countries. In the Phillipines, they try to make their equivalent of the IRS seem tough by posing with guns in order to spook people into paying their taxes.
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Apr 14, 2015 19:53
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I don't care how fancy shrimp and salmon are, $46 for a plate of food is not cheap. The rest of the other foods weren't that cheap either ($7.99 is middle of the road for a rotisserie chicken, and dumplings can go way cheaper than 74￠ a pop), and the hazard of cheap foods isn't that they've had balls on them, it's that they may be rotten or disease infested or use sand as a filler. The whole end of that bit was just shaming people who eat inexpensively. Or maybe New York just has really skewed food prices. Other than that, of course companies aren't going spend a lot of time and money to thoroughly check if their subcontractors aren't taking some sketchy cost-cutting measures. Human rights are for governments to enforce, not corporations.
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Apr 27, 2015 18:50
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It's amazing how often John Oliver will dive into issues just to pull out some lovely company profiteering off of suffering and somehow never getting any media attention. I thought the whole standardized testing thing was just institutionally flawed, I didn't know that it was another privatized shithole.
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May 4, 2015 17:11
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Do they just have a guy employed on their show who only knows how to make mascot costumes?
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May 11, 2015 21:18
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Who is the real troll, Irish Joe, or the people who make a big show of engaging with Irish Joe, as if his words are truly meaningful to them? There's no way they don't know his schtick. Honestly, the more I see people arguing with Irish Joe, the more I think he has a point.
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May 12, 2015 01:35
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Having kids is vital to our growth as a country, it's not rocket science or anything. It's not even that big of a deal to these companies, they're just big babies about any sort of regulations. I guess this is just another example of how the corporate system seeks to grind away at humanity in the misplaced quest for efficiency.
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May 12, 2015 07:28
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Having a child isn't some kind of weird financial investment, of course the numbers would never work out from a fiscal perspective. You shouldn't have to sacrifice your career in order to reproduce. The government isn't giving people an easy rides, they're just helping to cut some slack for people who are doing their duty to continue the human race. Babies aren't just a personal issue that the government has no business worrying about, they're people, and as such need government support like everybody else. Next thing you'll be spewing dumb malthusian doom prophecies about overpopulation.
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May 12, 2015 17:10
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It's hopeless to try to "win" an argument on the internet. At the end of the day, a bunch of people will still disagree, and that's OK because we live in a society of many diverse individuals. While I would agree that paid maternity leave may be a bit complex to call a "universal right," in general, if you're in favor of human reproduction in general, you should support easing the burden of childbirth on new parents. But I guess you're not in favor of reproduction, so I understand not wanting any potential burdens from such a policy to fall upon yourself.
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May 15, 2015 01:29
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Honestly, gently caress Johnny Depp, as it is he's lucky he's not going to see any real legal punishment for smuggling his two stupid little dogs. It's nice to see somebody talking about the actual business side of agriculture, and all the nasty dealings there. Normally people just are panicking about GMOs and animal living conditions. I know that a lot of farmers don't make much money and sometimes have to rely on government subsidies, but I didn't know that chicken farms were that kind of racket.
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May 18, 2015 20:43
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Rabies is also one of the deadliest diseases known to man. You have to get vaccinated right away after getting bitten, because if you start manifesting symptoms, you're dead. Dead dead. Well, mostly dead. There's the Milwaukee protocol, which has worked on 5 people so far, but there's some debate over whether it's legitimate.
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May 19, 2015 05:12
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The whole scale of the Olympics is just an obscene triumph of modern day industriousness. Countries fight for the "honor" of hosting them, under the pretense that tourism will make up the cost (I don't think it ever does), and then they erect these massive structures and put on a great show to show off to the rest of the world. The sheer spectacle of the whole thing reminds me of what the World's Fair used to be, except instead of celebrating culture or science and providing lasting monuments, it's just a brief, fleeting celebration of how good each country's dudes are at running and jumping along with weird international rivalries and ludicrous amounts of money being spent.
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May 27, 2015 21:56
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Thailand fought on the opposite side of the war from Hitler, although they were fighting mainly against Japan, so I could understand them not really knowing what Hitler's deal was. I don't know, maybe Hitler registers as a pop culture figure to them because of his prominence as a villain in media produced in the west?
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Jun 2, 2015 04:18
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Wow, I never thought that Gunsmith Cats was an accurate depiction of the American legal system. I wonder how long it'll be until there's a high-profile bounty hunter murder. That stuff about Washington and Florida was interesting, but otherwise I doubt anything will change any time soon, considering how the bail system is hardwired into the constitution. As for Bill Maher, he's just an rear end. Worst thing I can say about John Oliver is that he has a bit of a vendetta against cheap food.
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Jun 9, 2015 02:07
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I recognized the Caspian sea right away. It's the only thing in that region with consistent borders. Shame you can't say the same thing for its neighbor, the Aral sea. I'm not sure what Azerbaijan was expecting though. I don't think there's been an olympics in the last ten years that didn't have a scandal about human rights abuses.
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Jun 15, 2015 19:01
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Man, I thought the whole gamergate debacle was over by now. This whole thing is just part of how the wild west of the internet needs to be tamed somehow. Normally the biggest attempts at regulating it come from corporate interests, but then there's all this poo poo running about.
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Jun 22, 2015 21:33
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hemophilia posted:People are going to be rude and lovely and instead of calling the news to act indignant for a camera, try calling the loving police when creeps take it too far. Yeah but the people in the segment did that and it didn't work. I think the whole naked picture thing was the bit that there's an actual clear solution for though.
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Jun 23, 2015 01:09
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