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mcmagic posted:I feel like we don’t need this show to learn that psychics are full of poo poo. I've been a fan of James Randi (super psychic debunker) for decades so I sure didn't need any convincing but I was shocked to learn that it was still a $2 billion industry. I guess they almost could have covered it via one of their "How is this still a thing?" interstitial segments but the fact that they're ripping off so many people every day and it's still an ongoing issue meant that they had to go into it with a bit more depth, plus I'm sure they were pretty eager to make use of all that awesome footage they'd dug up.
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Feb 25, 2019 16:12
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Dumb Lowtax posted:From now on I'll be watching all episodes of this show through that lens. "It's great that he's brought an unheard of leftist cause into the public awareness, and his research team dug up some great stuff, but is he proposing a solution?" What the heck are you talking about, he proposes solutions pretty darn frequently. This episode he was pushing for "first right of refusal" laws in more states to give resident groups the chance to buy their parks if they come up for sale, last episode he was asking fans to pressure the WWE to take care of their performers because that's the only kind of pressure that's ever made the WWE change anything ever, in previous episodes he's informed people about important but relatively unknown polls on important issues and urged them to turn up and cast their vote, he's raised money for specific charities, he bought his own mobile clinic truck, etc etc.. Also note that the show would still be perfectly fine if it never did anything like that because that's not their job and it's a ridiculous standard to hold them to. Even if you judge the show purely on current affairs values and not just comedy/entertainment values it's still a dumb standard to hold them to, no one ever said "60 Minutes is a failure because they only expose stories, they don't propose solutions" or "The 6 O'Clock News is a failure because they only report the news, they don't propose solutions." This show takes complex situations that are often hard to follow and full of tedious information and makes them entertaining so they're easier to digest. Asking them to go further and actually solve the problems they cover is unrealistic. Dumb Lowtax posted:This show might be helping the left, but it is also part of the problem by spreading the centrist lies that nothing is worth fighting for, that nothing can be different systemwide, and that any attempts to change it are not only a waste of time, but in fact cause disharmony that is the only true problem in society must stamp out. The show absolutely does not spread the message that nothing is worth fighting for or that disharmony is the only true problem, that's an weird thing to say. If you're going to throw around claims like that you're going to have to bring some pretty good arguments to back it up. Dumb Lowtax posted:That the true onus lies on voters, not rulers, to learn better and to fix things or else get out of the way. The true onus DOES lie on voters, and learning more and being better informed (which is what this show is all about) is an essential element of that. That's how democracy is supposed to work, and that's the only way that actual solutions have any chance of being enacted.
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Apr 8, 2019 12:36
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Dumb Lowtax posted:A few weeks ago you would have been preaching to the choir but I've come around. So should you. If you think I'm just saying these things out of the blue and am totally alone, try going into CSPAM and saying what you just did and see how well it goes over. I did, this month, and look at the aftermath: No. I have zero interest in going to CSPAM for any reason. If you have something to say about the show then say it, drop this stupid "The other forum yelled at me therefore I changed my opinion and you would too if you did [internet research]" bullshit. I don't give a poo poo what they're saying in CSPAM. Dumb Lowtax posted:I notice you left that part (the most damning part) out of your quote, and I can see why, because there are no excuses to be made for: I left it out because none of that stuff is loving relevant. There's a million things that the show doesn't mention and half the stuff they do mention is dumb fluff like news readers making lame Saint Patrick's Day jokes or whatever. If the show doesn't cover the topics that you personally want them to that's not a conspiracy. Dumb Lowtax posted:Our system is functionally not a democracy and most votes do not count. What you're expressing is a belief that the system works, which is central to the thesis of this show (that voting better can make everything better) and antithetical to leftist revolution. If people vote differently, the people at the top of our institutions will just go to farther and farther lengths to protect their hegemony, and their actions alone can keep things the way they are; economic and political power are currently monopolized in the hands of the few, which is the whole problem. Blaming the voters is exactly what keeps attention off of the policy-based manipulations of the ruling class that holds the voters down. If any of that is true then John Oliver couldn't make a difference whatever he said so he might as well talk about whatever the hell he wants. Edit: also I noticed that you just ignored most of my post and handwaved it away by going "Well try posting that in CSPAM!" which was weak as hell Snowglobe of Doom fucked around with this message at 14:05 on Apr 10, 2019 |
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Apr 10, 2019 14:00
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Also John was surprisingly lenient on the fuckwit Australian politicians in the opening segment, they're a lot shittier and have been loving up a lot harder than he let on. Clive Palmer's vanity project political party in particular has been spectacularly dumb from the get go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsZ8z1tw_Sc I did a brief write up about the biggest gently caress ups so far this election in the PYF schadenfreude thread and there'll no doubt be even bigger gently caress ups in the next two weeks before polling day, rumour has it that the muck raking teams employed by the major parties are sitting on some especially juicy stuff which they'll release just before the election in order to cause maximum carnage.
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May 6, 2019 13:10
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SlothfulCobra posted:I've only heard of the guy who tried to both admit to kidnapping some kids back in 1996 and argue that it wasn't kidnapping. It turns out that the kidnapping story was just the tip of the iceberg! https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/apr/26/one-nation-candidate-mark-ellis-allegedly-threatened-to-kill-employee
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May 6, 2019 21:35
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SlothfulCobra posted:The big problem is that the death penalty is just one of many ways our justice system really sucks. It's focused more on punishment than rehabilitation and a huge number of people get falsely convicted. Even before conviction, there's the fact that real lawyers are expensive and public attorneys are a poo poo show. Before that there's the fact that bail sucks as an institution. Before that there's the fact that there's a lot of bad police out there will just harass people for no good reason, or even just use excessive force up to and including on the spot executions, and it all goes full circle. And then add to that the facts that many prisons are privatised and are putting pressure on the state to supply more inmates in order to maximise their profits, plus most state attorneys campaign on being tough on crime and push as hard as they can for the maximum sentences possible in as many cases as they can .....
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May 9, 2019 17:05
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New episode tonight! In the meantime have this delightful "in discussion" video of John with his good friend Nell Scovell, in case you haven't seen it already. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5xlwkvHIF8
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Jun 2, 2019 13:32
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It felt like John was back to his usual energy levels this episode (and holy poo poo that was some scary stuff) but I'm real disappointed they didn't actually book Momz In Da Hood to close the show.
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Jun 3, 2019 15:38
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kittenmittons posted:Is this real? I honestly can't tell anymore. Ja, das stimmt!
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Jun 17, 2019 06:24
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:This but high-speed internet. We were supposed to have this in Australia but we had a change in government a few years back just as the infrastructure was about to be rolled out and they went "National network connecting every household to the internet via optical fibre? Pffft, in OUR day we had copper wires and we liked it just fine so there's no way we're paying for this "optical fibre" malarky. What do people even need high speed internet for? Suck it you millennial snowflakes!!" so now our internet speed is ranked 50th in the world (behind Estonia, Kenya and Slovakia) and last week the government was going "Whoa the internet is slow as hell, let's start levying an "excessive downloads" fee on people like Netflix subscribers because they're clearly the problem here"
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Jul 8, 2019 19:36
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Speaking of .... https://twitter.com/iamjohnoliver/status/1148582981126295553 John: 
Snowglobe of Doom fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Jul 19, 2019 |
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Jul 19, 2019 04:38
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Nouvelle Vague posted:gently caress you Michael Bolton! No gently caress YOU 
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Sep 30, 2019 15:01
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Djarum posted:My god the ending. Probably the best ending of a Last Week Tonight ever. It was SUCH a good, cathartic episode. I'm telling everyone I know to watch it.
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Nov 11, 2019 10:58
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This is your one month warning, the show returns Feb 16! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe4UZEH3g4Y
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Jan 15, 2020 18:31
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Orange Devil posted:I like (loving hate) this the most when I've just booked a holiday to a certain place. Next weeks/months I get advertisements for holidays to the same place, sometimes even the exact same house I decided to rent. How about instead you send me ads for poo poo to do in that area, given how I'm obviously in the market for that? It's like when a relative thinks they bought you a great gift so they keep buying you variations on that for every single birthday and Christmas for the next few decades, regardless of whether you actually liked it. Except, y'know, motivated by faceless corporate greed and not misplaced but well-meaning familial affection.
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Jan 24, 2020 13:44
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tsob posted:Oh they definitely do, but the main role America plays is not so much finding or creating those shitheads, but organizing and funding them so they operate along similar lines. Yep. One of the shitheel right wing/anti-immigration independent parties here in Australia got caught in a sting when an Al Jazeera reporter pretended to be an NRA staffer and offered them $20 million to vote against Australia's gun control laws. They absolutely leapt at the offer. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-28/pauline-hanson-slams-scott-morrison-over-one-nation-preferences/10948574
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Feb 18, 2020 18:01
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Yeah, John sticking to his usual delivery without audience responses was a bizarre viewing experience
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Mar 16, 2020 11:09
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Poor Outlook posted:Which is to say, I'm not sure there's an equivalent figure in the Trump white house. There is, but it's Jared Kushner. God help you all.
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Apr 1, 2020 02:02
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Skippy McPants posted:Sorry, the week before last. Whenever they last did an episode. That was mid April which feels like it was 6 months ago
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May 4, 2020 19:55
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Atomizer posted:(or, alternatively, lying about it, like everything else.) Trump is always and forever lying about what he's doing, but he's also constantly doing the dumbest possible thing. In this specific instance he's claimed that he's been doing a very very stupid thing which means he's either lying (but also acting sensibly) or he's acting stupidly (but also telling the truth). Since it's just not possible for him to act sensibly or to tell the truth this can only mean that he's stuck in a permanent liminal state where he's simultaneously sensibly lying and being truthfully moronic (and also simultanesouly doing both of them for the wrong reasons and in the worst and dumbest manner possible).
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May 20, 2020 04:06
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Milo and POTUS posted:It's possible his doctor is giving him sugar pills Yep, note that the letter his doctor issued confirming that they'd discussed hydroxychloroquine very very carefully avoids saying that he actually prescribed it to Trump at all https://twitter.com/anitakumar01/status/1262534996750929922
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May 20, 2020 08:57
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Jun 9, 2020 12:45
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I was watching some old clips from the BEFORE TIMES on youtube and hearing the live studio audiences reactions again felt weird
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Jun 17, 2020 19:22
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Xealot posted:This is a really interesting solution I haven't heard before, and it's pretty elegant. That is, punishing real estate hoarders without ruining single homeowners in the process. Land Tax here in Australia isn't charged on the principle place of residence, or at least it wasn't when I worked for the land tax office wayyyyy back in the 1990s. Their database was particularly lovely and I liked nothing better than to put aside an hour every day just to go through random files and repair data, quite often merging duplicate listings which would usually mean that a landlord who had been undercharged for years would suddenly be issued a recalculated bill for thousands of dollars. 
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Jul 2, 2020 12:29
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SlothfulCobra posted:All I know about Australian real estate is that for a while, most of the wealthy were people who literally stole land (or stolen a second time after the aborigines were chased off) that was supposed to be government property and intended to be divvied out to settlers, and there was a whole thing where a guy built a suit of armor and went around attacking places to erase the records of people's debt. That guy with his homemade armour is still a national hero.  He and his gang got to wear their lovely suits of armour in just the one shootout with the police, things were going really well until the cops realised that they hadn't made any leg armour so they kneecapped 'em all and that was the end of that.
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Jul 3, 2020 03:15
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tarlibone posted:Most people rent because they have to, not because they want to. Also most renters seem to end up renting the nicest/least shittiest property they can afford, which is usually not as nice as they would have hoped but just tolerable enough to get by. That also means they're spending right up to their limit which totally destroys any chances of saving enough for a deposit on a house anytime soon. It can take decades to escape the rental trap and most people never make it out. I'm in my late 40s and there's absolutely no chance I'll ever own my own home.
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Jul 6, 2020 15:07
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SlothfulCobra posted:LWT has been weaker about comedy as the news becomes more apocalyptic. I'll say that. Their best comedic bits were their complex, drawn out stunts which took months of planning and behind the scenes work to pull off and that stuff is nigh impossible during a pandemic lockdown.  Just imagine all the crazy stuff they must have had halfway done which they had to completely abandon.
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Aug 2, 2020 09:28
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:Throw in a mindset that is stuck in 1987, where there are only three types of countries: Communist Enemies, People Who Need to be Protected from Communist Enemies, and Poor People. I was posting in the GBS George Floyd protests thread a few hours ago and said that American Exceptionalism and "Rugged Individualism" were toxic at their core and were major contributors to everything that the BLM movement was fighting against and some random chud poster immediately accused me of loving the Soviet Union, LOL McCarthyism alive and well in 2020
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Aug 4, 2020 21:54
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Aces High posted:who's the stiff wearing the tie? Desmond O'Connor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desmond_O%27Connor_(cabaret_performer)
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Sep 24, 2020 15:07
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Oh drat this is a great game, let's see which celebrities were born the same year as me and how decrepit they are now E: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Moss, Misha Collins, Penelope Cruz, Christian Bale oh come on they're like .... perfect human specimens  E2: Steve-O, jackpot!!
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Sep 24, 2020 17:22
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He denied knowing who they were the next day and then told them to stand back and stand by again LOL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEdD98QGCJU
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Oct 2, 2020 05:35
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Tiggum posted:Everyone's does, and in sane countries that's fine because no one is ever comparing your signature against a reference to verify your identity (because it's wildly unreliable). As an Australian I've only been finding out about the American electoral process in dribs and drabs over the years and every time I find out some new fact it's always some  coocoo crazy bullshit that I would never have guessed. Like, just the fact that they vote to elect a single candidate (plus VP) and then that person gets to choose their cabinet afterwards is loving insane. E: I mean, not to start a derail about the Electoral College because we all know how loving crazy it is but it's really loving crazy https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1313346398520258560 Slamhound posted:My mother's signature never changed and that was unusual enough that the election poll workers would point it out when she would vote. A while back we discovered that our real estate agent had hosed up our lease and a housemate who'd moved out years ago needed to sign some paperwork to say that he didn't live here anymore but I'd lost contact with him and I decided to just fake his signature because it didn't look that complicated and it was way harder than I expected. Also the idea that any party could collect the signatures of a significant number of registered voters and cast mail-in ballots on their behalf and the scheme wouldn't unravel at any point is just unbelievably dumb Snowglobe of Doom fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Oct 6, 2020 |
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Oct 6, 2020 11:19
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SlothfulCobra posted:The US is also not alone in being increasingly unrepresentative. "Increasingly" is right, just look at this fucker go: https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/1314009246305079296 https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/1314009467311271938 https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/1314012494227296258 https://twitter.com/SenMikeLee/status/1314089207875371008
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Oct 8, 2020 11:40
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Milo and POTUS posted:What were the four things that Limbaugh was railing against that the  The segment starts about 5:30 here
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Oct 12, 2020 12:31
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Remember that Paul Ryan said that Rage Against the Machine was his favorite band. https://twitter.com/tmorello/status/1324907210426642433
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Nov 7, 2020 11:22
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Pringles posted this today: https://twitter.com/Pringles/status/1336432293930557441 So they just happened to have a new mascot costume ready? The whole thing seems like a coordinated PR stunt now.
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Dec 9, 2020 04:37
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Cancel your Valentine's Day plans, new season starts Feb 14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5_4wPW6jJQ
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Jan 17, 2021 07:03
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I'm starting to think that this show is just an elaborate front for John's etsy store
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Apr 12, 2021 07:48
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gently caress yeah he's doing real world stunts again 
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May 24, 2021 11:01
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tsob posted:He probably wouldn't hire that guy to stand in a room with him wearing a fursuit during a lockdown anyway, and would probably have paid to have the guy pull a public stunt of some kind instead. He had a mascot on the show a couple weeks ago, I wonder if he convinced his wife to wear the costume
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May 28, 2021 20:31
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