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tsob posted:I was watching the Georgia special election results count and was just wondering if someone more versed in US politics could answer a small query; namely that the election was called at 52/48 with only 81% of the vote apparently counted. Which seems...weird. I'm assuming someone counted the rest of the votes regardless and they didn't counter-act the apparent result, but why was it called so early when the remaining 19% could surely make up a 4 point difference? Compare that to the virtual lack of national coverage of the New Jersey gubernatorial primary to replace Chris Christie. Also, John Oliver was probably the only guy who took any interest in the UK election, which I thought should have been way more interesting across the pond... compared to the French election which did get quite a lot of interest in the US.
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Jun 23, 2017 01:00
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 13:17 |
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Eat poo poo, Bill Maher.
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Jun 26, 2017 18:05
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The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The TV IV > LWT: Jon Stewart's Mannequin Sex Dungeon
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Jul 3, 2017 17:25
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I really don't understand the kneejerk need to rehabilitate Bush. Bush commuted Scooter Libby. A big reason I feel dread now in the age of Trump is not because it feels worse than the Bush years, but so much of it reminds me of the dread I felt when Bush was president. I felt Bush won in 2004 not from his supposed merits, but because he managed to deepen the nation's culture war fault lines. The idea of "red states and blue states" only became a thing during his presidency. I'm still willing to give Bush credit for the few not terrible things he did, but gently caress Bush and gently caress Trump.
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Jul 30, 2017 20:53
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If you have to ask, yes, I know the GOP was terrible long before Bush. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. Bush was bad. Trump is bad. I'm kind of reminded of all the liberals in the Bush days trying to push the idea that Reagan wasn't so bad because REASONS.
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Jul 30, 2017 21:01
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I was referring to the red state / blue state thing specifically as a symptom of the deepening culture war divide under Dubya. In 2000, there were still quite a few election maps that were red for Gore, blue for Bush. But the whole "Red State and proud" thing only emerged around 2004. Heck, Obama's famous DNC speech was probably the first time I was aware of it. My point was Bush wasn't above running a campaign that wasn't so much against Kerry, but against people who vote for Democrats. He wasn't remarkable in that matter. Reagan and Nixon did it too. Trump further weaponized it. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Jul 30, 2017 |
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Jul 30, 2017 21:54
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Raxivace posted:Cloud Atlas owns. 
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Aug 15, 2017 22:26
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Oh yeah... that Megan Kelly montage. I'm glad she floundered in the ratings.
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Sep 26, 2017 14:46
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I'm sad John Oliver didn't cover Theresa May's trainwreck even further. It was more than her message literally falling apart. Also, Ben Affleck owned slaves.
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Oct 9, 2017 15:11
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https://twitter.com/LastWeekTonight/status/919768552416186368 https://twitter.com/LastWeekTonight/status/919768523261362182 I'm really sick of capitalism at this point.
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Oct 16, 2017 14:24
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Carlos Bernard directed four episodes. 
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Nov 6, 2017 15:31
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I don't disagree with Oliver's overall take on Trump and Fox News' tactics. If I had to nitpick though, public opinion of the mainstream press has eroded a lot in the past few decades, and Trump is capitalizing on their systemic problems that were always there and haven't corrected. (I guess I'm doing a whataboutism about the media...) Longtime Daily Show viewers know CNN was always terrible, and it sucks that Trump co-opted it as The Thing To Hate. Like, the appeal of whataboutism goes beyond the waters being muddied. Whataboutism works because of how entrenched the culture war fault lines are. Facts don't hurt, but won't save us from Trumpism. Maybe it's just because I'm 30, and I'm nostalgic for the old internet, but I still remember a time when trolling wasn't mostly associated with the nihilistic Right. Trolling is appealing because people want to think their ideological opponent as the evil establishment, and the opposition to Trump hasn't successfully branded the president with the failed status quo. Like, mainstream liberalism now has this weird "let's restore the former status quo" vibe that is off-putting. I don't expect John Oliver to pitch an alternative, because that's beyond the scope of him and his show. I think an unpopular establishment press and social media dumping mud into the pond are part of How Things Are now. You can't ask for the culture war fault lines to go away, but you can try to draw it in the widest net possible, without giving an inch to the shitlords and the super rich. Just spitballing here. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Nov 14, 2017 |
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Nov 13, 2017 17:05
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I'm enjoying Nightly Show alum Robin Thede's show on BET. It's kind of like Full Frontal, but so far there's not much left-punching. Also it's not white as heck.
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Dec 13, 2017 15:58
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Filling out the rest of the TDS family, there's Jordan Klepper's show. It's.... okay? I watch it out of force of habit. I can't flat out recommend it, but it's not as bad as I was expecting. It's obviously a Colbert Report knockoff, but Jordan also has a solid team of correspondents who also do decent field pieces. It's also frustrating. Jon Stewart was able give something that was a little bit more than just a milquetoast liberal perspective, which is what I'm looking for. But I feel like that little more is still largely missing from Bee, Noah, Klepper, and Late Show Colbert. Even though Colbert is still quite good. I'll just say it. It's hard for me to watch these shows without the whole Bernie vs. Hillary schism hovering over my mind. Stewart was comfortable criticizing Democrats. But it's more difficult to do now in light of the the rift between liberals and the left, and I think a lot of television-oriented comedians naturally have a more anti-populist bent to them. Sam Bee seems to be the one most comfortable with posturing herself the standard bearer of metropolitan liberalism, which is why it's probably the hardest show of all of these for me to watch. It's the one show I dropped from the TDS family. I know plenty on the Left (especially here on SA) dislike John Oliver because REASONS, but I appreciate how he consistently explains all the ways corporations have hosed us all. Echo Chamber fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 16:57
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Not sure if it was articulated in this thread or another, but someone said that it's because Stewart gradually made The Daily Show more politically-conscious from its humble beginnings as a Weekend Update knockoff that helped contribute to the goodwill he's enjoyed from the audience. A lot of his more disagreeable viewpoints were forgiven because of this. I thought Stewart was being sincere about how he understood his own program as a comedy show, not a news show, despite how some of his fans and frenemies hated how he supposedly wanted it both ways. Noah and Bee inherited a satirical landscape that presumed its importance. The heirs' attempts at self-deprecation in their polished programs comes off as a bit more insincere. Perhaps this impression is unfair. As for the news cycle, it's because Oliver still gets to buck the day-to-day Trump stuff, in his main stories at least, that makes his program a bit more refreshing. Obviously, he's still unambiguously preachy, but his frequent pivots away from only talking about Trump, and his apparent editorial freedom makes his show seem less cynically focus-grouped in the age of Trumpism and "the Resistance". Klepper's chance to do his own show kind of fell on his lap. I don't mean this as a way to bash him. Comedy Central needed an 11:30 show, and was conscious of all the talent they lost from so many other TDS cast members leaving the network for greener pastures. His time at TDS seemed shorter than Colbert, Oliver, Bee, Wilmore, Williams; but I still see him as part of "the family". In many ways, I'm still a huge fan of Jon, and a lot of personal goodwill (perhaps over-deserved) I have for him rubs onto the people he hired or "saw something in".
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Dec 13, 2017 18:49
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I can't say Trump is worse than Dubya. At least not yet. But the whole "the republic will endure" talk is bull crap. So many people died and suffered under Dubya. The same is happening under Trump. The people worst off now don't want to hear people say "well is it really that bad?" It doesn't hurt that comedians are going after Trump, even if problems are way worse than just Trump.
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Dec 13, 2017 23:53
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Sam Bee isn't left-wing. For better or for worse, she's a liberal. Especially since the Democratic Primaries, she has had a bone to pick with the Left. I still watch Noah's show. I know a lot of leftists gave up on Trevor a long time ago, but I'm still going to give him the benefit of the doubt even with his single unsympathetic depiction of Antifa. (Like, it's just one bit. I think he can be swayed if more sympathetic anecdotes or stories with Antifa surface.) Trevor, like Bee, has postured himself as a standard liberal. Unlike Sam Bee, he doesn't aggressively punch left, and seems to like Bernie Sanders a bit more, although he doesn't seem to have a high opinion of his fan club. With both Noah and Sam Bee, there's a slight paternalist tone towards the Left and millennials... like they wish they've known better or understood how the world really works, etc. Obviously, these are just my impressions of their politics. But I don't think I'm projecting too much. They aren't above policing the Left, but prefer Trump as a target obviously. The Opposition with Jordan Klepper actually had a very sympathetic Kobi Libii segment about Antifa. I'm too much of a kneejerk SNL hater to give Seth Meyers a fair shot. I know there's that overlap between SNL and TDS with Michael Che.
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Dec 14, 2017 03:39
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Still my favorite thing to come out of bitcoin
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Mar 12, 2018 18:04
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I'm glad John still finds Fight Song as hilariously awful as we do.
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Mar 19, 2018 21:56
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I have no opinion of Pence's daughter, but between Meghan McCain and Ivanka, I'm pretty much done with the whole "White women who pay lip service to a few decent things while saying how much they love their horrible Republican dad, also nepotism" shtick. I'll give the Second Daughter a pass for now, if this book tour is the only time she's in the public spotlight.
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Mar 20, 2018 21:06
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That covfefe rant could have been better if it ended with "drumpf" just as a self-aware joke
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Apr 2, 2018 14:52
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It's become synonymous with mediocre, Trump-era satire. John Oliver takes a lot of poo poo for it, despite how he only did that joke once.
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Apr 2, 2018 17:26
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It still pisses me off that CNN gave Trump all that free air time during the election. And NBC let Trump host SNL as he was seeking the nomination. But Trump still gets to use THE MEDIA as a political foil. Like, I hate the media and Hollywood more than right wing shitheads pretend to. But so far, there's no substantial backlash or critique against the media coming from the Left within mainstream political discourse.
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Apr 3, 2018 02:40
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In general, every problem is a feature, not a bug.
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Apr 19, 2018 17:59
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Dumb Lowtax posted:Is that photo that always gets posted of Guliani dancing in drag with his legs exposed real or photoshopped? I reverse google image searched it once and got nothing
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May 8, 2018 00:14
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No comments on yesterday's episode? The show didn't actually end.
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May 15, 2018 03:03
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There's a difference between a planet doing a full 360 degree rotation and rotating until the sun is back over the same spot on the planet. It takes 23 hours and 56 minutes for the earth to spin 360 degrees. It takes another four minutes, because the earth is also revolving around the sun, to get the sun back to the same spot in relation to the observers on the planet itself.
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Jun 5, 2018 02:20
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The Fords are essentially Canada's Trump/Brexit. Can't wait to see how the American liberal press which has portrayed Trudeau's Canada as magically immune from the West's problems try to make sense of a nationalist meltdown up north.
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Jun 9, 2018 00:54
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I thought they would've tracked down that same douche-looking actor for their final sketch in the astroturf bit.
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Aug 13, 2018 15:06
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Caught up the last four episodes in the past two days. Yay, I got relive the Kavanaugh saga. Oliver only scratched the surface of how big a clusterfuck Brazil's been. He didn't mention the soft coup against Dilma Rousseff. And then the tragic joke that was Michel Temer. Or the assassination of Marielle Franco. Or that national museum getting burned down.
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Oct 9, 2018 15:35
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The Right tried to make a big deal that there was no money shot of the flag on the moon in that Armstrong biopic that came out. It's a typical culture war non-controversy controversy. John Oliver didn't mention one bit about the Saudis I found a little bit chilling, which was they might have had a hand at getting Rex Tillerson sacked. (To be fair, this piece is a bit speculative, and Tillerson obviously had a shaky relationship with Trump to begin with.)
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Oct 15, 2018 14:42
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Hasan Minhaj's Netflix show is very comparable to LWT's format; with the deep dives sprinkled with jokes that are often love-it-or-hate-it pop culture references. The big difference is that Minhaj has said he's going to avoid talking about the POTUS. And his show has more "woke liberal hashtag excellence" cultural posturing, which might put off many people. I appreciated how his extended bit on Affirmative Action places heavy emphasis on anti-AA activists' Asian American enablers; that he's willing to use his platform to "police" the worst aspects of Asian America. I'm still waiting for a post-Stewart spinoff show that's unabashedly left wing, rather than liberal. The field is crowded, but it seems like most of these shows are ignoring the tensions within progressivism (or in Sam Bee's case, taking the wrong "side"), and will still largely be be blindsided if the political tide turns towards Sanders or Ocasio in a few short years.
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Nov 16, 2018 22:34
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The "I'm not a comedian" line gets cited a lot in Stewart criticism, but I remember he only used it in specific circumstances, like in his moment with Tucker Carlson. He specifically used it against media hacks who claimed the high ground. It wasn't a blanket "silence criticism" defense that many said it was.
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Nov 18, 2018 16:45
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 13:17 |
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pwn posted:The Authoritarianism segment was thoroughly depressing. Brazil, the Philippines, India, eastern Europe, and many other countries placed ultranationalists in power in part because of the mere threat of social change. Oliver's analysis lacked a "Why now?" which I feel would have been important to try to answer.
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Nov 19, 2018 15:09
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