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No Pants posted:People who taste the extra chemical in cilantro can eat a bunch of cilantro and train themselves out of it tasting bad. You're not fooling me with your cilantro tastes good conspiracy.
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Jul 3, 2018 15:53
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Ah yes, because the smell of piss is usually just sunshine and roses.Raspberry Jam It In Me posted:Hell yeah, my routine morning poo poo at work is now a medical condition I totally forgot about all the horrible cyberpunk potential of people having your DNA on file. The only thing I've heard on that front so far is insurers potentially charging people more if they have a genetic disease. (Thanks, America's broken healthcare system)
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Jul 4, 2018 18:23
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That is a real weird territory, much like how some blind or deaf people resent their disabilities being cured. It enriches lives but may reduce diversity. Of course the only other place I've seen that argued is with pro-lifers.
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Jul 5, 2018 05:43
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ZorajitZorajit posted:I never had confused feelings about Inque from Batman Beyond! I don't even know why you'd accuse a person of that. That's definitely not anybody's ideal genetic abomination. Huh, if you take Inque, the splicing episode, the one episode where a terrorist organization is trying to accelerate global warming and wipe out most of humanity so that they could turn themselves into dinosaur men and rule the earth, and the secret backstory episode of Justice League where it turns out that Terry's dad was secretly genetically altered to give his progeny Bruce Wayne's DNA, that was a really commonly reoccurring theme in the show.
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Jul 6, 2018 05:22
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India already has a market for cosmetic products to lighten skin, it's not hard to imagine people over there taking the next step. I wonder if a prevalence in genetic modification could lead to certain DNA sequences becoming too popular, leading to incest-style mutations in the next generation or two.
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Jul 6, 2018 19:28
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It feels like one of those things that society should've figured out a long time ago, but I guess it didn't, so here we are. It's certainly possible to make false accusations, but public perceptions and society's values will never change if everybody dismisses it every time. It feels like a kindegartener getting angry because nobody told him you need to go to the bathroom to poop. Doesn't help that this scenario of a woman falsely accusing, successfully tanking a man's career and making out like a bandit with oodles of cash seems almost entirely hypothetical. Incidentally, I don't know what incidents John Oliver might've been witness to that he's ashamed about, but one of his former workplaces was literally criminal, so he definitely has something to be ashamed of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJlXXvSFyUU
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Jul 31, 2018 00:35
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I guess it all comes down to corporations being unable to treat people as people so there's no real way to use human judgement or conflict management, they may need to use set rules in order to avoid having to understand and use human judgement. At the very least, the recent surge of concern has outed a bunch of jerks.. With the rise and concentration of corporate power, people like that get more and more dangerous. There may be workers' rights concerns on the other side of things, but the upper echelons seem pretty straightforward.
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Aug 1, 2018 01:16
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I don't know if the trend is pervasive throughout "smaller" mass murders as well, but all the famous mass shootings that have been happening lately seem like some kind of elaborate suicide. They don't seem like they actually want to make it out alive in the first place, so I'm not sure if making sure they're dead really works that well as a punishment. Emotionally, I can understand wanting to keep execution available for the most dire of cases, but functionally, a system should not be designed around edge cases first and foremost, and the bulk of the people who get pushed through the system are not absolute monsters, which seems to be the default assertion of the justice system. Suspects are assumed guilty and pressured into confessions because they have no confidence in the justice system actually working. The "deterrent" quality of harsh sentences only serves to pressure people harder into confessing. It's basically medieval. It's a lot like the issue with the police overusing lethal force and getting off scott free every time they wrongly kill somebody, except it takes a lot longer. And it's nuts that American prosecutors are basically Manfred von Karma from Phoenix Wright. I think that's the more important part of this episode, rather than the issues with the death penalty specifically.
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Aug 9, 2018 00:57
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Incidentally, international trade agreements are crazy complicated, because they're an amalgamation of hundreds of individual arguments trying to wrestle out the best deal. It really ruins everything if a chimpanzee with vague nostalgia for the steel industry of its youth wanders in to wreck everything. US dollars themselves are valuable exports thanks to a little chicanery at Breton Woods 74 years ago, and it's possible that the demand for foreign-held dollars has been suppressing price inflation. But what really surprised me this episode was how horribly uncomfortable local newscasters were about telling jokes. I thought half of local journalism was just coming up with jokes and puns for headlines and segment segues. webmeister posted:Never thought I'd see loving Bob Katter on LWT. Yes, he's really that appalling. Also he has Lebanese heritage via one of his grandfathers. Huh, reminds me of an old bit John Oliver did that I was looking up earlier today...
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Aug 20, 2018 22:07
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The US has a couple of systems it uses to create underclasses of people who are exempted from legal rights. This is one of them, and it's real poo poo. One of the many ways that the prison system is very obviously not about reformation and oh hey, here's a way where they can arbitrarily play god with people's lives. Maybe it's because they're being racist to a black man, or maybe the fact that he's running rehab programs just signals to them that he'd vote against them even if they weren't running their own little quintesson court. Who knows, who cares. All poo poo. Incidentally, I don't know much about Floridian politics, but I do remember Rick Scott from a piece on the daily show back when he was trying to force welfare recipients to take drug tests and Assif Mandvi tried to get him to piss into a cup.
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Sep 11, 2018 06:28
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TheCenturion posted:I watched a documentary on Netflix a few months ago about the American prison system, I forget it’s name, but Danny Trejo was involved. Anywho, one of it’s main posits, as I recall, is that said American prison system really is “slavery, but we can’t call it that.” Theoretically it's less like slavery than it used to be, although I don't have all the details. Imprisoning people for being black and then renting them out as laborers was one of the big workarounds for the repeal of slavery though. Supposedly, nowadays there are measures in place to mitigate the slavery aspect, like making sure it's not against the prisoners' will and paying them, but it's still a hosed-up institution. One of the recent Dollop episodes reminded me of how even in best-case scenarios, prison labor is wildly unfair to free laborers, since now they have to compete with legal unpersons who don't have a living wage, and it drags down wages, benefits, and safety standards. I think there are private prisons that don't do prison labor though, and those are mostly just scams on the government using human lives as collateral. oohhboy posted:The retribution culture is so strong even progressives have to bend or else they are soft on crime, a political death sentence. The problem extends well beyond the prison system, John could run several concurrent shows on the justice system. It's one of those things that ruins watching movies or TV once you realize what the problem is, and how often that entirely mistaken perspective is parroted and reinforced throughout media. Kinda like how every time you see a depiction of somebody getting rough with a suspect to successfully get more information, it's a mini-treatise on how actually torture is a good and effective method to get information. But don't worry, non-Americans, the US happens to be one of the biggest exporters of media, so you'll get infected eventually.
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Sep 11, 2018 17:31
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Incidentally, the space mice had a real good tactic for pulling John Oliver away from his show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVZtQO4Sypc It's interesting that variety/talk shows these days have been mostly taken over by pseudo-reporting. News, but with a focus on comedy or comedy with an emphasis on news. Jon Stewart blazed the trail for that, but most of the element of making fun of and criticizing the 24-hour media cycle has sorta fallen by the wayside, and the comedy shows have been absorbed by the news cycle. LWT is the most informative of the bunch, definitely.
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Sep 19, 2018 23:02
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I think it'd be very interesting to juxtapose the way Facebook has been in Myanmar with how so many tech companies bend over and go full Orwell when China asks them to.ZorajitZorajit posted:I can believe that. It's ...such a bad zinger. I'd just be sad to have 'demon rat' yelled at me by an angry cracker. There have been so many attempts to make some kind of clever insult out of the Democratic party's name, and all of them are terrible. And yet somehow I have heard zero attempts to do the same to the Republican party, and even most people still use the term GOP to refer to them, which is the republican party's cutesy little nickname for itself.
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Sep 26, 2018 17:20
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ZorajitZorajit posted:More often, I just hear people using the phrase "The Democrat Party" disparaging which isn't so much disparaging as just kind of vaguely annoying and halting sound. That one's the dumbest, since you absolutely won't notice at all until you have it explained to you.
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Sep 26, 2018 21:30
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The theory is that democracy and the democratic process is a good thing, but the democrat party has nothing to do with those, so use the noun instead of the adjective blah blah old man blah blah. I suppose the pro-democracy sentiment is better than the fascist stuff that's more common these days, but it's still blindly partisan garbage. I don't even see the point in trying to skew the literal name of the party into a slur. They proudly have a donkey as their mascot from the days when people were calling Jackson "Jackass". That's rich material for ridicule right there.
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Sep 27, 2018 03:26
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punk rebel ecks posted:That Facebook topic was rough. I typically am anti-businesses censoring anything on their sites, but maybe it should be different in other countries? Then again... I am interested in what measures the burmese government took to deal with the mass disinformation going on with Facebook, and whether they had to petition facebook to take action. I think usually a traditional media source spewing blatant lies and encouraging genocide is a very clear example of speech that needs to be curtailed.
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Sep 27, 2018 22:50
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From his behavior, it feels like he's never even been in a courtroom. You could get fired from a loving office job for being like that when your superiors are questioning you, and he's acting like the law is just a suggestion and nobody should bother with any sort of details. He's a cross between a little baby and a drunk man getting kicked out of a 7/11. So far as I know, the reason they want Kavanagh specifically is because he's a loving stooge and he was a stooge for the W administration, and the potential abortion ban is just the literal only selling point they've managed to come up with for getting a man with no principals or abilities beyond party loyalty on the bench. We all know the score as to why they're trying to dismiss the allegations without a second thought, right? They just don't believe in the rights of women beyond being a man's property, and they'd be fine with a girl being dragged into the middle of congress for a gangbang if it meant maintaining the party's grasp on power. It's Roy Moore all over again. I just can't loving stand the moronic posturing to act like they're just ignorant when they all know that they wouldn't care even if he did it in front of them. It's disgusting.
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Oct 1, 2018 21:55
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Except Obama went to prep school, Hillary Clinton went to Yale, Al Gore went to Harvard. It's totally arbitrary whose aristocratic bonafides get respected and who they try to make absurdist anti-elitist arguments against. That's why it's so easy to lay them under the umbrella of fascism, because a core aspect of fascism is the total lack of coherence in any of their guiding principles. There's no coherent philosophy to understand and debunk, all we can really know from outside their own heads is that they're sexist and racist and in the pocket of big business. All that really matters to them is getting their own way and crushing those in the outgroup.
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Oct 2, 2018 00:43
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Well there you get into how the Democrats are also deeply invested into the current establishment, and over the last 40 years have continually passed up most opportunities to reform, and there's a lot of critical issues that the upper echelons of the party seems really uncomfortable about taking good positions on. The two-party system forces us to accept them as the only option to oppose Republican hegemony, but unless they do some kind of big party reforms, then even a Dem landslide for the next two years will be at best a temporary respite before the Republicans reassert themselves.
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Oct 3, 2018 19:31
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It feels like there's been a huge rightward shift around the world for the last few years, and I'm not sure there are any signs of things getting better. Many democracies had far right people take charge, Canada and France managed to barely squeak by, and the countries that were already super oppressive had big milestones for their consolidation of power, like China appointing its dictator for life and Israel finally putting down in words their policy for only jews to have self-determination. It also feels like all this came out of nowhere, with seemingly unrelated reasons for the far right rising in every country. Is it just the natural progression of things?
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Oct 11, 2018 00:08
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It's not so much that he's lying as he is such a terrible liar. And nobody gives a gently caress. Nobody. Just piss on everybody's faces and tell them it's raining. And of course he's a bad liar. He's a loving idiot. You don't get to be #1 pick for fascist stooge by having a brain, independent will, principles, or skills.
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Oct 11, 2018 06:34
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There were a number of terms that were used to be more proper, and most of them were also discarded. I'm not sure why, or what baggage they carry. "African American" came around and was put into all the official places, but at that point people were also comfortable enough to just say black. "African American" also doesn't work for people who aren't american, so it's fairly limited. There are also a bunch of terms that were abandoned because of the popular understanding of race shifted. Nobody cares about the distinction of an "octaroon" anymore, which is probably for the best.
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Oct 14, 2018 16:48
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Honestly I think I preferred John Oliver's hair before he ctrl-v'd a generic business haircut onto his head. The Saudi monarchy is in many ways shaped by how back in around WW1, the Saudis were the radicals, as compared to the other state which was in contention for control of the Arabian peninsula wich was backstabbed by European "allies". It's really creepy just how well their monarchy can blend with the kelptocrats and corporations. Just another little reminder of how the path we're on is leading us back towards feudalism.
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Oct 17, 2018 01:38
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It's an ethnic cleansing. I feel like that needs to be said, because that's the effect and that's the intent. The idea of a "deterrent" for people coming to the US, land of opportunity, is nebulous at best. They just want the people gone and want to enact violence upon them to punish them for existing. It's not a coincidence these people are all intermingling with white nationalists and adopting fascist tactics. It is only the saving grace of what's left of American values permeating the system keeping them from actually enacting violence, so they're limited to more soft genocide tactics: Destroy families to destroy the people. Craptacular! posted:Stuff There are valid arguments that can be made about the way our country exploits the immigrants that come in here, and even uses the threat of deportation to prevent them from asserting their rights as humans (like how Trump built his tower), but sadly there's no room for that sort of nuance when there are people who are pushing for policies of extermination that must be stopped for the sake of humanity. The whole deal of undocumented immigrants being exempt from human rights and labor laws and there being no option but to deport them is poo poo, but the fact that explicitly legal immigrants have been declared illegals is such a loving violation. There's an ungodly amount of paperwork that follows asylum seekers around, they're not undocumented, they're just an easy target because they don't know their rights and often lack community support.
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Nov 5, 2018 22:57
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There's a sad part of conservatism where they simply can't imagine a better world than the shithole that they've dug themselves into. Conservatives without health insurance coverage just accept that it's a matter of course that their wallets should be hemorrhaging and that they "deserve" the situation they are in for not being ambitious enough to achieve power. Instead of just...socialized healthcare as a public good provided by the state. Alan_Shore posted:No one watched this week? You missed a fine peach There's been a few episodes nobody really seems to want to comment on. I guess some things are just kinda too depressing to comment about. So much of the next administration is going to be focused on rooting out all the corruption of the current one, and it'll have to be a DELICATE mass systemic purge of corruption because otherwise it'll end up setting a horrible precedent to allow subsequent administrations to do their own mass-replacement of federal staff. We need serious action, but there's always the danger of intensifying a vicious cycle. And on the note of the milieu of federal administrations being infested by corruption in opposition to the public good and in favor of corporations, Planet Money did a piece on the Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and how legislation intended to relieve the student debt crisis is being alternately abused and ignored to maintain debt servitude and assist banks in abusing students, often in opposition to state governments.
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Nov 13, 2018 21:36
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I get the sense that Oliver created a variant on the news comedy show with the central gimmick of quality investigative journalism, but sometimes he forgets how that is the biggest draw of the show. I don't know how many jokes are him and how many are his writers, but overall the comedy aspect of the show is pretty weak, and occasionally he puts a dumb joke as the centerpiece of the show instead of an investigative journalism piece, and it's really annoying. His comedy also has some weird focuses, the one that bugs me the most is the weird food elitism. He definitely has the sort of arrogance that people are always accusing liberals of. Back during the rise of Trump, he failed us, but then again almost every media outlet did on some level. We know NOW that he's a severe threat to democracy and part of a fascist movement, but back THEN everybody was so dead-set on how he's such an idiot that the racism, racketeering, and thorough undermining of the concept of truth was never the big headline centerpiece of his campaign. So many of the easy jokes about Trump are a trap that seemingly defangs him in the eyes of the public and distract from the fascism and pillaging of the entire country as a whole. Some More News did a piece on how ol' turtle-face doesn't just look like he's ready to retreat into a shell, he's one of the most corrupt and reprehensible and hated (by his own constituents) members of the Senate. Every easy joke becomes a deflection from how much of a real shitbag these people are. LWT has some of the best research, but so often the jokes are just some lazy flab that detracts from the whole.
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Nov 16, 2018 01:39
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Servaetes posted:Yeah, I think I follow you. Out of curiousity, would this be kinda close to the point you're getting at? Honestly the worst part of all of these comedy shows drinking from the same well, pulling from the same pool of talent, and trying for the same sort of responsible political humor is that they all go after the same topics as they happen and they all go for the same jokes. If any of them hit a clunker, they all hit the same clunk, if any of them make a hit, then odds are it's going to get worn out by all the other shows before the cycle drops it. The world is lesser for the lack of diversification. And I say all this, but I still like political humor. You know what show manages to always stay fresh to me? John Oliver's old show that he left behind, The Bugle. It casts a wider net looking at politics around the world, has its own, unique style of humor, and intersperses everything with weird less-political bits like history and puns. FDR's lobsters still stands out to me as one of the great dumb jokes of our time.
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Nov 16, 2018 18:27
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The authoritarian bit is both scary and depressing. It's not necessarily a given that democracy will triumph in the end, and it's fully possible it'll end up going quietly into that good night. I feel like there's also been a circular effect of our institutions weakening allowing authoritarians to rise up to help them deteriorate. Journalists just haven't been cultural heroes to us for a while. Great Musk burn.
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Nov 24, 2018 06:42
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Phi230 posted:Its pretty telling that Oliver completely danced around the analysis that fascism rises when capitalism fails and that liberal democracy can do nothing to stop it I dunno, while certainly it is handy for many situations for there to be ways that society provides for the needs of its people, it kinda doesn't directly address the political problem. Fascism is largely a response to fictional or self-inflicted problems, not real ones, after all. Preaching for socialism in that context makes it sound like a sketchy cure-all even before you get into particulars (if you even get into particulars). Aside from that, your bizarre dichotomy offhandedly discarding most people in the country as the nonnegotiable enemy sounds entirely wrong, making vague, unsupported assertions to popular support in the quest to destroy a poorly defined, yet very widely encompassing enemy. That's not a good look.
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Nov 25, 2018 01:43
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Phi230 posted:First of all, history shows that in liberal democracies, liberals would rather side with fascists than socialists. This is being repeated today across the world. I mean here's your big problem right here, you're couching everything in terminology and political theory that's roundabout 200 years old by now with few clear successes to it's name. I'm not really sure what "liberal" means in this context because there's been a lot of wheeling and dealing in the last couple centuries, and the old context of people just pushing for some light voting rights and ability to form political parties against a system of pure monarchy doesn't exist anymore, and they have a nebulous at best relation to the movements that started popping up a hundred years later. Phi230 posted:Second of all, fascism is not a response to fictional or self-inflicted problems. While they use such things as propaganda tools and ways to mobilize, fascism has social and material conditions that are prerequisite. Liberals made the mistake of refusing to recognize fascism as a legitimate mass movement to mostly the left's detriment. Were they, though? The whole current wave seems to have been sparked back when Obama became president, which is one of those problems that's not a problem. They don't ever really seem to talk as if the economy is an issue for them, their focus isn't their conditions, it's just their prejudices that they bother focusing on, and almost all the crises they're focused on are entirely fictional. I don't think I've even heard them talk about the recession. All the rich people taking part in the alt-right sure don't seem disadvantaged. You can't say that the suburbs are both the hub of fascism and that fascists are just responding to being disadvantaged. That's going two different directions at once. Phi230 posted:And no, most people are not a non-negotiable enemy. The vast majority of people in the US are working people who are on the receiving end of liberalism's failures. Not all white liberals will go reactionary. The goal is mobilize the majority against the reactionary minority, however people like you seem content with punching left more than punching right even in the face of a very real threat. I mean like I said before, vague, unsupported, and still blindly dismissive. Trying to maintain some kind of nebulous mandate from an unheard, unobservable silent majority in the face of any amount of criticism is just what Oliver said in the episode that authoritarians relied on. No fuckin poo poo people would draw comparisons to Stalin in there. These sorts of vague assertions are very easy to twist however you want to whatever purpose you want. Phi230 posted:bitch read a book and look at some polls and come back to me Howdy-ho, here's something I could rustle up real quick. http://www.people-press.org/2005/05/10/beyond-red-vs-blue/ Decade-old numbers, but when you're throwing around such big assertions like you are, if 13 years throw all your immortal concepts of society into chaos, they were never worth much in the first place.
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Nov 25, 2018 03:01
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The problem with trying to herd around political ideologies by name is that none of them are fully internally consistent, and the self-identification definitions don't ever match up at all with the external definitions at all, just like there's the whole rigamarole with what is and isn't socialism again and again and again. And then things change around a whole lot between separate political environments and the way things shift around over time, everything becomes wildly inconsistent when you treat the labels as unchanging. You get things like "classical liberals" who are probably more conservative than anything else and then the liberals of the 19th century probably fit more with modern libertarians.
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Nov 25, 2018 16:34
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In the context of the segment, bemoaning how so many people in charge are dismantling institutions under the unsubstantiated claim of popular support, perhaps it's possible to see why people are hesitant to rally around the idea of dismantling institutions under an substantiated claim of popular support. Yeah, I get that socialism in theory benefits the majority, but you still gotta actually have the support of that majority. It's bad enough when detractors make the jump from providing for the populace and workers' rights to making lists of people who will be up against the wall when the time comes, it's worse when people pro-socialism insist on making the jump.
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Nov 26, 2018 01:14
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Phenotype posted:When people ask me my political affiliations I tell them that I'd call myself a Libertarian if the Libertarians weren't such a mess. It means that I generally think the government's job is to protect its citizens and otherwise stay out of our lives. Except that means I'm in favor of guns being legal and a strong military to look out for our interests and also in favor of the EPA and stuff like that because protecting citizens means protecting our environment, and I think it should stop corporations from having too much power over us, and basically no one really fits into any category at all and it's just a fancy word that doesn't mean anything. Sorry bud, turns out most of the "small government" crowd are actually stealth monarchists, but with corporations as the little feudal dominions of absolute power. Or at least the ones with money are. So that's what they make it into. Also a big centerpiece of that kind of movement is "fiscal conservatism" which is really just a formulated way to percieve anyone getting anything as somehow you getting screwed, but also they'll piss a couple billion dollars into a hole while arguing about thousands because nobody really cares about making numbers work.
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Nov 30, 2018 14:12
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It's a fair point that governments shouldn't be run for profit, but there is something to be said for at least trying to stay solvent. The one big thing I know that Bill Clinton did in his presidency wasestablish a budget surplus, where the US was actually paying back some of its debt, that W in grand Republican fashion literally just gave away. Like there's two arguments to be made here, one against using some nitpicky beancounting to cut important programs and one that none of those beans are even counted right anyways.
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Dec 2, 2018 15:33
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I mean, don't get me wrong, I know there's problems with severe austerity measures, and there's lovely ways some governments go about increasing revenues, but there's still advantages to decreasing national debt. The US does benefit from having enough influence to borrow indefinitely for now, as well as US dollars being a valuable export in themselves from some old schenanigans in setting up the world monetary system, but that may all fall apart at some point. And it definitely doesn't help that US politics has turned the debt into a ticking time bomb because it's an excuse to holler and yell about raising the debt ceiling, and I keep expecting Mr. Three-bankrupcies-and-a-piss-fetish to pull the trigger on the whole thing and default. Honestly, it's not like trying to increase revenue is a mystery for the ages. There's basically a blueprint on how, just reverse all those Republican tax cuts. Or boost IRS funding, LWT did a whole sement on that one.
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Dec 3, 2018 05:06
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