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Maher was OK when his show Politically Incorrect was on Comedy Central. It was even OK for most of its run on whatever broadcast network it landed on later. He wasn't quite the leftist pundit that he is now. Back then, he seemed left of center, but not annoyingly so. At the time, I was right of center, and he was very watchable. The show was even thought-provoking at times. At some point, though, he started to move further and further to the left on many issues, and nowadays, if a Republican said the sky was blue, he'd have a 45-minute rebuttal ready by the next week's show. But even that would be OK if he just weren't so ridiculously stupid about other things. After all, if we can have a Glenn Beck, a Rush Limbaugh, and an Ann Coulter, then we can suffer a Bill Maher or two. But the GMO stuff and the anti-vaccine stuff... it's just too much. He even thought that religious groups must have been behind his crappy "documentary" Religulous not winning an academy award. Because of course that's the only explanation.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:52
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IRQ posted:Didn't they hire private fire/security or something too for just their neighborhoods? I think that was the framing device for the movie Cuffs.
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Jun 11, 2015 16:51
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John Oliver is a Muslim-American ferriner. That is amazing. I mean, yeah, unless you're in England, he's quite obviously a frrrriner, as this dude claims. But Muslim-American?? At least, that's what it sounds like he's saying. Sounds like he's going full-on Tea Party on Mr. Oliver. tarlibone fucked around with this message at 07:34 on Jun 12, 2015 |
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Jun 12, 2015 07:32
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xcore posted:That is most definitely not what he said. I'll take your word for it. I repeated that snippet 10 times and could only come up with "Muslim American," which didn't make sense... but given how much sense the rest of this guy has been making since the indictment, including when he "proved" the US was up to some shenanigans by referring to an article in The Onion, I honestly could see how he'd try to throw that in there.
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Jun 12, 2015 14:45
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I just want to be clear... I don't know if this guy is anti-Muslim or not, or if Trinidad and Tobago as a whole has those tendencies. That's probably not the case. But to me, it really sounded like he was tossing "Muslim" in there, and I honestly still can't tell what that word is supposed to be. For all I know, it's just a mildly pejorative slang insult common in the local vernacular. I can't wait for the next show, because I wonder what Mr. Oliver will think he said. The mittens of disapproval are already on. Will we see the scarf of sternness? The parka of condemnation? The long johns of Oliver?
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Jun 12, 2015 16:44
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I'm a geography nut, and have collected maps ever since I was a kid. So, when Mr. Oliver highlights a region on a map and does the whole "Now let's talk about X, which is a place you care so little about that you didn't even realize that this isn't X, it's Y...." routine, I am already ahead of him. The only trick is trying to figure out what he's actually highlighted is before he reveals it, which I can usually do except in the landlocked nations of South America and some of the newer Balkans. But last night, he topped himself. I knew that wasn't Azerbaijan. I was not expecting him to highlight something that wasn't even a land mass, though. Well played, sir.
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Jun 15, 2015 18:15
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Pick posted:If only John Oliver knew how good it feels to anonymously tell a woman he intended to murder her because she had bad video game opinions. I know. I'm starting to think that Mr. Oliver doesn't even understand the white man's burden at all. Doesn't he know, heavy is the head that literally wears the proverbial crowns? As in, just about all of the crowns?
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Jun 22, 2015 23:32
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Zythrst posted:I'm not sure its entirely relevant, but one year we spent the entire black history month learning about Paul Robeson. I'm pretty sure the teacher met him once as a teenager and that was pretty much why, but hey at least it was different then learning about Booker T. Washington and 100 things you can do with a peanut, which is what we did throughout grade and middle school. To be fair, though, George Washington Carver came up with so many uses for the peanut that it would be hard to cover them all in one month, much less the stupidly short month of February. I mean, take peanut brittle. That's a rich subject! Easily worth a week all on its own.
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Jun 25, 2015 19:02
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Craptacular! posted:I watched the most recent episode, and I guess I agree with most of it except this idea that not taking pictures of your genitals is somehow an unacceptable compromise, WE MUST PHOTOGRAPH OUR REPRODUCTIVE ORGANS. That last part is sarcasm, but an NPR show (I think On The Media) actually took a stance like that once, that pictures of your naked body are just the currency of basic relationship etiquette now, so society and law should just accept and adapt.  Really, not much to add. I think the problem is that we're tilting so hard toward "don't blame the victim" that it's becoming unpolite--unpolite!!--to learn from the mistakes of others, and to help others learn from those mistakes, and indeed even to consider them mistakes in the first place. Naked pictures of you sent to your family and coworkers and friends? Don't tell that person not to take naked pics and store them on devices that have been proven time and time again to be insecure. That's blaming the victim!! We musn't blame the victim! And while I agree that blaming the victim is a very bad thing, that doesn't mean you can't look at what the victim did, identify certain things that put them at risk, and then take steps to avoid becoming a victim in a similar fashion.
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Jun 26, 2015 17:25
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Soylentbits posted:That seems culturally impractical. Like teaching kids to avoid stds with abstinence. It's definitely true and reasonable but it's not happening. A majority of them are still going to have sex with each other. People are going to keep taking naked pictures of themselves because that's where we currently are culturally. Hormonally based behaviors defy logic. This is a textbook strawman argument. Having sex and taking nude pictures are superficially similar: both tend to occur when someone's genitals are exposed. Both are "naughty" things to do, according to some authority pictures. Sex is the strawman here. Then, you argue against the strawman: sure, if no one has sex, no one gets STD's (it's STI's now, by the way--you really should be more sensitive!), but teenagers will have sex. And I can't argue with that. Teens are full of hormones, sexy hormones at that, and it's a biological imperative written into our DNA: GO OUT AND gently caress. And, from a scientific standpoint, it is literally the only thing that we actually exist to do. Finally, you sum it up by equalizing the status of sex and taking naked pictures. Your argument is thus complete. Thanks for providing such a clear example of a strawman argument. Often, people toss "strawman" out there when they don't know what else to say to a sound, reasoned argument. But not you. You went full strawman. You never go full strawman, man. The need to take naked pictures of our significant others, or even just our gently caress buddies, friends with benefits, or total strangers, is not a need in any sense of the word. It is not something written into our DNA. It is not necessary for us to propagate the species, which means it is not a biological imperative. It's something that people like to do, sure, but nobody has to do it, and doing it often leads to unintended, negative consequences. I'm not even going to tell people not to do it, because I'm nobody's boss. But I know I won't do it, and my advice is that if you don't want your mom to see it, then don't take a picture of it. Anything you put on a computer of any kind and think is private is available to someone who wants to get it, and if you give it to someone who may, in the future, want to make your life a living hell, it's going to be seen by everyone who you don't want seeing it. That, Soylentbits, is where we currently are, culturally: computers do not understand secrecy or decency, and people exploit that.
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Jun 26, 2015 21:40
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Gaz-L posted:OK. I don't want people to know my credit card number, guess if some rear end in a top hat cracks a payment database and steals my info then it's my fault for wanting to have a bank account or pay for cable, rather than stuff my mattress with SSDs loaded with bitcoin and gold doubloons. Not really the same thing. And by "really" I mean "even close to being." If your account numbers get out, you can mitigate the damage, sometimes even recovering all of your losses, and you can get new account numbers. In rare situations, you can even do that with your SSN, and there are steps you can take to prevent it from happening again. The same can't be said of nude photos that are leaked to the Internet. They're out there forever, there's almost nothing you can do about it, and that's your new online legacy. Furthermore, it is unlikely--unless you're an idiot--that you're giving your girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever a file containing all of your account numbers with the understanding that she (going with girlfriend for the sake of simplicity) can look at them as much as she wants, but she isn't allowed to tell anyone. And why don't you give your access to your accounts to someone you're not planning on spending the rest of your life with? Probably because you don't want to get hosed over if things go south. Freaquency posted:There are literally thousands of years of erotica that directly contradict your main assertion. Cave paintings, fertility idols, ancient erotic literature, there's an entire book of the Bible that basically boils down to "Yeah I'm hitting that." Humanity has a real knack for taking every cultural/technological advance and asking how it can get us laid. Our desire to explore our sexuality seems pretty well engrained alongside that base desire. You can make this argument about the biological imperative all you want, but unless your sexy times are solely of the efficient, get-in get-out, making a baby variety, it doesn't really hold water. Actually, you're comparing apples to obstinance. When an artist creates erotica, he (or she) is generally not creating it with the expectation that no one will ever see it except for a very small group of people, perhaps only one. He is making something for display or distribution that he presumes won't adversely affect his life should the public at large see it, although in some cultures (and more often in the past), the artist might know the danger and risk it anyway because of the possible rewards of profit or notoriety. There are huge differences between a woman taking a picture of herself naked and texting it to her boyfriend and an artist painting a crude drawing of a dude having sex with a chick on a cave wall in 20,000 BC. Or, if you prefer, a Twilight fan writing an S&M fanfic. Or a video staring your favorite porn performer. When someone sends a nude pic of him/herself to someone they like with the understanding that it's for that person's eyes only, it is not the same thing as someone producing erotica. One of those actions carries an unrealistic, false, and/or ignorance-based expectation of privacy and discretion. The other carries an expectation that is pretty much the opposite. How on Earth you think those are the same thing is beyond me. Xibanya posted:I'd another analogy would be a pastor/rabbi/coven mother sharing a personal matter you told them about in confidence with your community knowing that it would harm you. Churchgoers have an emotional bond with their pastor and have a reasonable expectation that their pastor cares for them, but some pastors are shitheels. You can't just tell people "well don't ever get tell your pastor anything" or "lol skywizard" because it's human nature to seek intimacy, whether that's emotional, sexual, spiritual, whatever. You at least bothered to come up with a useful comparison. Nude pictures of one's self are like the private things you might share with appropriate clergy for the reasons you state, and like the sharing of nude photos between consenting adults, there is an expectation of privacy, seeing as how this information, like the pictures, could damage one's reputation or effectively ruin one's life. So I like the analogy here, and you have a point. I would counter, though, that the clergy have a vastly better reputation for keeping that information private* than the people you date, who have been airing dirty laundry about you as soon as you break up for the past few centuries or so. Also, it's pretty widely known now that there are people out there who will try to gain access to all you try to keep locked up, particularly if you're a celebrity. So it's not quite the same, but at least you have a valid counter-argument. Something to think about. I'm just not buying the notion that you have to take these pictures. I mean, you don't. And it's not even like the days when you could take Poloroids and at least have some control over the picture. That just isn't the case with digital images--they can be stolen remotely, copied infinitely, and once they're on the Internet, they're on the Internet. Do what you want, but know the risks first. And seriously... there are laws telling the guy who sells me a mattress that I have to be able to look at a tag to know what's in the mattress. We can't have laws that deal harshly with revenge porn and nude photo hacking? Because there are laws that prevent your doctors from sharing embarrassing, possibly life-ruining information that they know about you. Wherever you come down on this issue, I think most people would agree that the lack of legal protection and/or recourse is inexcusable. The web isn't brand new anymore. * With the notable exception of Scientologist auditors
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Jun 27, 2015 00:52
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Freaquency posted:You ignored pretty much my entire argument to go hunting for strawmen again. You claimed that there is no biological imperative or logical reason to engage in this behavior, even though there's a pretty clear streak throughout history that shows we did some wacky poo poo to get our rocks off. Humans like sex, we need sex, and we express our enjoyment of that in a bunch of different ways. If taking nude photos is not for you or you don't "get it," that's fine, but your argument is basically boiling down to "it's illogical to want to share your sexuality with someone in this way so it's your fault when someone else winds up with your nudie pics." It's a lot healthier socially to allow people to express themselves this way than it is to vilify them for it and say that they walked into it just because of a few bad actors. The thing is, I wasn't searching for strawmen in your second argument. A strawman is required to be at least superficially similar to the thing being argued about. Put simply, your example was not. An artist's (or a culture's) creation of erotica in all its forms—literature, drawings, paintings, photographs, film, comic books, etc.—has almost no similarity to the intimate act of sharing a naked picture of yourself with your lover. One act is the creation of something designed to make people happy or aroused (or angry or disgusted, I suppose) and maybe even give you fame and money, although the art can be done for its own reward, especially if the artist wears pork pie hats and only drinks IPAs. The other is something you do for your lover and your lover only. They are two totally different things; comparing them to each other and drawing insight on one issue by looking at the other one is thus problematic. I get what you're trying to say, but not even the most ardent "don't tell them not to do that, that's blaming the victim!"-ers don't think that these naked selfies are anything like erotica. The whole point is that they're not, actually. They're personal. Erotica isn't. Totally different. You can't make a point about erotica that is relevant to this issue. quote:e: the thing is, I get what you're saying on regard to protecting oneself when sending or storing photos of this nature, but if someone has made a reasonable attempt at security and someone else has circumvented it for malicious reasons, saying that it's the users fault is crazy. You can go on and on about how you can't be 100% secure in this regard, but nothing comes without risk and of you try to completely mitigate all risk you wind up bitter and boring. I'm not saying it's the user's fault. I'm only saying that one shouldn't have an expectation of privacy in this situation, given the frequent incidence and damaging nature of revenge porn and hacked personal naked pictures. This is a high-profile problem, and until legal remedies are in place to deal with the problem, or until someone figures out how to secure the cloud or smartphones a lot better than they are now, people need to be aware of this and think about it before they send intimate pictures. And that said, when someone does get revenged porned or hacked, they didn't deserve it, and it's not their fault unless they did something that directly caused it, like accidentally emailing it to everyone at once.
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Jun 27, 2015 01:54
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Gaz-L posted:You really think this only ever happens to casual partners? No, which is probably why I didn't say that. But I'll bet it happens more often to people who break up before marriage than after a divorce. quote:And I was actually making the same point as Freaquency just did. You're arguing that you should never place anything you wouldn't want another human being to have access to online. My point is that even you have to concede that SOME level of privacy and security needs to be able to be assumed in the digital landscape or the digital economy would collapse. If we can be confident that our bank details are safe, why not our family photos? And if our family photos, why not dick pics? First... family photos are the same as dick picks to you? I'm not really arguing that you should never place anything you wouldn't want another human being to have access to online. But I am arguing that you should carefully weigh the risks before doing so. I can recover from having my financial data stolen. Hell, I've done it before. It sucked, but it was possible using existing legal and commercially available remedies. The same isn't true of naked pictures of yourself. In some professions, the leaking of those images can get you fired and ruin your career (if you're a high school teacher, for example). And there's no way to deal with it. quote:Or how about this, would your 'don't ever do it, ever ever ever' argument extend beyond simply selfies of your tits? What about sexting? Should you never ever send a dirty text or email to your partner? How about foreplay or just plain play in the form of phone sex? I mean, that could be being recorded by the other person to mess with you later. Which is why I've always chosen not to do this over the phone. And that was true when all you had to worry about was someone recording you back when that was not easy for everyone to do. Memorializing this stuff in stored text messages on a phone where anyone could discover it? If that floats your boat, go for it. I don't do it because 1) my wife is right over there, so there's no need to do that with her, and 2) if I were cheating on her, leaving this much evidence would get me divorced, out of the house, and away from my son. High risk. And dick picks are like family pics to you? Seriously? quote:I think the issue is you're seeing it purely as 'don't put the info out there', when the problem with that is it amounts to never trusting ANYone. Sorry... still getting over how you're as worried about your family pictures getting out as you are about pictures of your dick. I'm not making the argument you think I'm making. There is a wide gray area between sending intimate pictures of yourself and buying a book on Amazon. If you can't see that, I don't know how I can help you.
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Jun 27, 2015 02:52
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Gaz-L posted:And tarlibone, what argument are you making then, because "be careful about who and when you send poo poo to other people" is not a point I think anyone's disagreeing on. So the only thing about your stance that makes this make sense is that you're saying to never do it because you can't trust anyone. Maybe I am, in fact, missing something, but in that case, please make it clear. My argument is that until the legal system catches up with revenge porn, people should just think twice before sending that naked picture. Do it if you want, if you trust the person you're sending it to. But think about it first, because the reality is that 1) people you like sometimes end up being dickbags; 2) dickbags do lovely things if they don't like you anymore, and 3) once something like this is out there, not only can you not get it back, but you can't count on being able to see to it that the perpetrator is punished. In many jurisdictions, revenge porn is either not illegal at all, or the legal authorities don't know how to enforce the laws that do exist, or they are apathetic. While this is still the status quo, it is important for people to think before they act. That is all I'm saying: think about it, because there is a risk, and it's not as small as people think. Now, if you take reasonable precautions and send that pic to only someone you trust, and that person later fucks you over, it's not your fault. You don't deserve the poo poo you're going to have to endure as a result. It is that rear end in a top hat's fault, not yours. My question: why is the suggestion that people either think twice or maybe not engage in this behavior--and remember, we're talking about a specific action: taking naked pictures and sending them over networks to other people--so offensive? And I'm not being sarcastic or lovely here, I'm honestly asking this question, and would appreciate a serious answer. I mean, is it a generational thing? I'm 40-ish. I grew up with "people who play stupid games win stupid prizes." Over the years, I've learned that just because you're doing something that's dumb, that doesn't mean you deserve what you end up getting. Am I just old? Because I'm OK with that. I knew what I was getting into.
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Jun 27, 2015 07:48
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Narcissus1916 posted:its crazy, crazy poo poo that absolutely no one talks about. I didn't learn about this until I was in college, and that was only because the survey history course I was able to get into (I was a Music/English/Math student) covered US history from the post-Civil War period to... hell, I can't remember, probably "present day," which really meant the 1970s. (This was in 1996 or so; anything under 20 years wasn't "history.") I knew about the pre-Civil-Rights-era South, but I had no idea that during Reconstruction, blacks were elected to office in large numbers in the South. The prof said it matter-of-factly on, oh, day 3 of the class, and I was blown away, because at no point had anyone ever told me that, and I'd taken the standard history classes in high school. Then, it was explained how those reforms were, well, un-done with the demise of Reconstruction, and I was amazed. I mean, I went in thinking I'd hear about the Indian Wars and other stupid poo poo that happened before WWI and WWII. The few weeks we spent on Reconstruction and its demise changed me. I was a kid who grew up in Illinois but was born and raised up to the age of 5 in North Carolina, so I was full-on Confederate apologist, Civil War Defeat Was Inevitable Because of the Big Bad North. It really opened my eyes. And, this was a survey class! This was nothing that I couldn't have been told in high school.
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Jun 27, 2015 08:19
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Artistic expression that was never intended for mass consumption has been around for a while. Henry Darger comes to mind, but only because of an episode of the Venture Bros.
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Jun 28, 2015 01:49
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IRQ posted:I think you have to get around the first amendment issues by having it fall under harassment or stalking or something. Yeah, the problem with it being civil instead of criminal is that the victim is on the hook for legal fees most of the time. Blackmail has special requirements which, if met, would make it a blackmail case. Defamation has its own rules, too. There really needs to be a law about this kind of thing, a law dedicated to this issue and others like it. Yes, it might be hard to prosecute a revenge porn case, no matter how the law is written. But things are different now, very different, than they were 20 years ago. This needs to be accounted for.
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Jun 28, 2015 02:22
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In particular, I expect to hear some material devoted to the notion some GOPpers are throwing around regarding amending the Constitution to nullify the SCOTUS decision. Maybe even some jokes about how Lindsey Graham is trying to pump the GOP's breaks on that particular idea. At least, one can hope.
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Jun 29, 2015 00:01
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The thing that gets me about what is known popularly as the Confederate Flag is that its staunch defenders, the heritagefolk, will trip over their dicks all day long trying to tell you that it is not a Confederate flag. "It wasn't one of the official flags!" they say. "It was just used by one of the armies as a battle flag, that's it, it's not the Confederate flag." Then you say, "Wait.. what wasn't the Confederate flag?" Then they say, "This Confederate flag on my shirt and belt buckle." With a smile. It's a fun thing, watching defenders deny that it's the Confederate flag before and after they refer to it as such. And seeing as how they were the only ones to ever fly it, even if it literally wasn't flown over every government building, it's still, at the very least, a Confederate flag. When my dad was an OTR truck driver, he told me how you'd be driving and run across these people on the CB. It'd be a grille cover, and people would talk about it. Once, someone chimed in, "Hey, who's that on (some Interstate) in the (some Truck make) with the Union Jack on the front?" Not one second later, an angry redneck replied, "That's a REBEL flag, son! Confederate flag!" and a bunch of cussing. My dad said (or claims to have said), "But I thought the Confederate flag was white?" That got a few of 'em going, and a few of the non-fans of the flag joined in. My dad: a CB troll. RIP. I went through a rebel flag phase. What can I say? I'm white (well, mixed, but 3/4ths white and I look white), I was born in North Carolina, and I grew up in southern Illinois in a town with only white people. When I moved to a more diverse area, I quickly found out how other people view the flag, and I put my rebel flag stuff away. I'm sure it's all gone by now. Here's the real shame of it all: from a strictly aesthetic perspective, that flag would make a great US flag. It has echoes of the Union Jack, which would make sense given who the original 13 colonies belonged to at the time of the revolution. It has a nice 13 star design, in honor of those original states. It's practically purpose-designed to be a bandana, too. It just looks cool. No, it would never do with 50 stars, but not many countries have a flag as busy as ours without government seals, coats of arms, or lettering. (Didn't China call us the Flower Flag nation or something?) It's too bad the people who came up with a really cool American flag were a bunch of slavery-defending rebels.
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Jun 29, 2015 02:19
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Burkion posted:See, Nazi Germany and all of the cool looking poo poo ruined forever by racist murdering assholes. Either on the TV series or movie Outsourced, this made an appearance.
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Jun 29, 2015 03:07
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Exclamation Marx posted:That Edge joke was incredible The noun or the verb?
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Jun 29, 2015 14:56
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Intersex and trans aren't the same thing, though, are they? As I understand it--and I could be wrong or be operating on out-of-date information--intersex people are born with externally ambiguous genitalia: it is simply not possible to determine their gender by the common examinations, and even genetic tests could be incorrect. In and of itself, this leads to all kinds of issues later in life, particularly with fertility. Transgender people, on the other hand, do not identify with the gender that they were assigned at birth, but they were born with unambiguously male or female genitals. And I'm not trying to offend; I've just always seen these as two different situations. If the terms are more-or-less interchangeable now, that's news to me. I've also seen documentaries on intersex individuals, especially those who, as noted, underwent a gender (re)assignment as very young children. Often, the stories focused on intersex kids who were surgically converted to female, as that is the easier surgery to perform and resulted in a more natural appearance, and then the parents were told to raise the child as female. There was a seed of progressiveness in this atrocity, by the way: at the time, the idea that gender is 100% nurture and 0% nature was gaining some traction, so this seemed like a viable solution to what was seen at the time as the medical and psychological "problems" an intersex child presented. Just cut off the sort-of penis that's there, put her in a dress, make her play with dolls, let her grow her hair--and she'll simply be a girl, because there's no difference between the genders, that's all society's doing. Turns out, that was a bad move, because although we can't express it as infants, we are born with a gender identity. The people in the stories I saw identified as male from an extremely young age, doing stereotypically boyish things, wanting to wear boy's clothes, etc. And the real tragedy is that at some point, they realized that before they could even have a say, well-meaning doctors and parents decided that their genitals would be better off mutilated than ambiguous. This all seems to have been big news 10-20 years ago, and I don't think this kind of intersex gender assignment surgery and therapy is still practiced in the United States. I could be very wrong about that,though. tarlibone fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 21:28
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IRQ posted:I guess if there actually was still anyone not aware of that at this point they missed out on a pretty funny movie 20 years ago so go see The Road to Wellville. Talk about your underrated movies! Hell, even if you don't appreciate the humor, this actually makes for a good historical film that shines a light on a time when beliefs were widely held that look so preposterously insane to our eyes that I bet many people watching it simply think, "there is no way this is even close to being how things were back then." But it was. Good flavor? Sex of any kind? Not enough yogurt in your rectum? Watch out, all of that will kill you! Lady problems? Hysteria got you all in a frazzle? Head on down to your local doctor's office! He'll tickle your cunny bone, and you'll be right as rain! And laughter really does heal. Literally. The truly crazy thing about all those beliefs, the Kellogg brothers (and yes, we're talking about those Kelloggs), the Graham followers, and all that? That was not really all that long ago, and it was during the age of print, so you can literally look it up and see for yourself.
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Jul 1, 2015 17:03
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swickles posted:Am I the only one who thought the Q was for "questioning"? Probably. But, I'll tell you this: the first time I saw the expanded LGBT initialism with Q in it, I racked my brain for quite a while before looking it up. Part of my brain was saying, "it's Queer! Obviously!" and the other part was saying, "No, that's too easy, and isn't that a slur now anyway?" and then yet another part was saying "Hey, didn't that first part say that it was queer? Tarlibone's brain is queer! Tarlibone's brain is queer! You know what that means...," and then the first part said, "OK, see, that sounds like a slur; 'queer' is OK now if they use it, like the n-word," and the second part was like, "I don't know, 'queer' could still be a slur," and the third part, sounding genuinely confused and said, "wait... so queers can use the n-word now? Just the black ones, or...," and a fourth part chimed in with, "no, nobody's saying that, nobody gets to use the n -word except for... uhm... you know, them," and then a female voice--a shrill one--started shouting, "ARE YOU SAYING THAT QUEERS ARE A BUNCH OF N-WORDS??" and #4 immediately stammered, "No, I'm talking about--" and #'s 1, 2, and 3 stopped him by murmuring, "don't even think it," and then the woman's voice said, "wait... isn't this all just thoughts anyway? This is all in his head, right?" By the looks of everyone else in the room, I can tell you that at least some of it wasn't.
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Jul 3, 2015 16:57
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Baloogan posted:Can you imagine the hootenanny it would cause every time the US wins at a sporting event when this starts playing? ... I like it. Those aren't the lyrics I'm more familiar with, but as a musician and once a student of music... it's just a well-written tune. It's sweet and wonderful, like sweet iced tea with a slice of conflict-free lemon. Hell, Abraham Lincoln was a fan of the song. Thanks, Confederacy, for ruining all the nice stuff.
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Jul 6, 2015 21:18
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TheOneAndOnlyT posted:How the gently caress did John say that stadiums look like they're designed by coked-up Willy Wonka, start talking about the Marlins, and not once mention what happens when they hit a home run? Well, my money is on believability. When you're doing a satirical bit on the design insanity of some of the modern stadiums out there, you must be believable or people will, well, not believe you, and they'll assume you're blowing things out of proportion or outright lying to make a story where none exists. If he said anything about the home run routine at that place, people who didn't already know it was true would assume he was making it up, either for laughs or just to be mean.
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Jul 15, 2015 14:50
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swickles posted:The dinger machine has no place in a ball park. It should be in the National Gallery or some branch of the Smithsonian. Its a national treasure that should be celebrated at every moment. As a resident of Miami Dade county, I would be more than happy to give my tax dollars to the statue. The rest of the stadium is actually pretty cool, but the dinger statue is true art. Little known fact: that moving home run statue thing? It's run by a steam engine whose boiler is fired by burning taxpayer dollars.
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Jul 16, 2015 15:42
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Gumby posted:I'm a little surprised that Oliver and team didn't figure out that Laibach is and always has been a parody of fascism, taking totalitarian imagery and blowing it up to preposterous proportions in their videos. Well, I think it was last week when he asked the Freeburg, Illinois folks what they were thinking by choosing the "Freeburg Midgets" as their school's teams' name and mascot. Problem is, there is a perfectly innocent and completely verifiable explanation for how they came to have that name, but an Englishman explaining something in a logical and reasonable way isn't quite as entertaining as his incredulous outrage tends to be. Of course, he can't take the time out to be in-depth about all of the elements of each of the stories he covers; one must remember the context of the show--it's comedy, not news. Besides, it's not like Laibach makes it very easy. Answering that you are a fascist in the same way that Hitler was a painter isn't all that clear-cut, because Hitler was a prolific (if not very talented) painter. I think what everybody is missing here is that, hooray! Rock and roll is coming to North Korea!!
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Jul 20, 2015 17:46
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Baloogan posted:There is no way they can hide behind the "oh its COMEDY not news" cop out. Its news, with some jokes thrown in. Oh, I agree that it's a cop-out. But, it's also kind-of true. First and foremost, this show is a comedy show. The difference between this show and any other comedy is that the framing device is a news show, and the topics from which humor is drawn are current events. Personally, I do not have the same expectations of this show that I have from, say, the NBC Nightly News. Daily Show and Last Week Tonight will sometimes just opt for the quick laugh or other guttural reaction over the in-depth analysis, and such is the risk you run when getting your news from a comedy show.
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Jul 20, 2015 19:24
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Soylentbits posted:The news is comedy that thinks it's news. Huey Lewis thinks he's the News.
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Jul 20, 2015 20:54
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Echo Chamber posted:Whenever I see someone try to raise the "John Oliver (or Colbert or Stewart) is making the 'it's comedy not news' copout" argument, I often have a hard time precisely figuring out what blame of material harm the comedian is supposedly trying to dodge. I don't know about Colbert, but I know that Stewart at least once went on the record using this defense. Of course, the context is key: he was on Bill O'Reilly's show on Fox News, and Papa Bear had been trying to take him to task for not giving a fully rounded and fair picture of some topical news story. (And yes, I know, O'Reilly's lack of self-awareness is ridiculous, and the irony was totally lost on him.) What he actually said was pretty funny, because he talked about the fact that after his show was over, the next show featured puppets making prank phone calls. So it has been used before, and Stewart never backed down from that position. I think it's really only a problem for the people who don't agree with his take on a given situation (usually, these people are social conservatives). Everyone else either agrees with him wholeheartedly, or they're too busy laughing to fact-check his monolog.
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Jul 20, 2015 21:29
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ultramiraculous posted:"My sex education for what being 11 or 12 will be like when I was 10" is more like it, but I'm really trying to avoid arguing against Irish Joe. There are so many P-words that could be used here.
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Aug 16, 2015 17:23
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TurboFlamingChicken posted:Oral Roberts: http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1677098,00.html Oral Roberts sounds like a sex act. Not one as exotic as a Rusty Venture (or as mundane as one, depending on who you ask), but it's definitely a blowjob thing.
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Aug 17, 2015 23:37
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Tatum Girlparts posted:Which of you goons sent the cum Wait... you all didn't send semen?
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Sep 14, 2015 06:27
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raditts posted:I have to wonder how it went on so long with nobody saying "hey guys, isn't this basically like having debtors' prisons?" Well... Klaus88 posted:Answer: Its Florida. OK... I'd love to just hand-waive this with "it's Florida," but... well, here's the thing: this affects mostly the poor, and without looking at the data, I'm going to go out on a rickety limb here and just take a wild guess that it also mostly affects minorities. And that, folks, is why it went on so long with nobody saying, "Hey guys, isn't this basically like having a debtors' prison." It's not just Florida, either. Decent people, even Goons, tend to care about the problems faced by minorities and the poor, especially if it appears that the local government is kicking people while they're down. Most of us hear about this and think, "That's unfair! I care about this! This has enraged me!!" Seven minutes later, though, most of us forget about it, because it doesn't affect us. I mean, this exact thing was in the news recently, but not in Florida--in St. Louis County (aka Ferguson). It was the same thing, right down to the comparisons to debtor's prisons. That this exists should surprise nobody, really. tarlibone fucked around with this message at 04:04 on Sep 18, 2015 |
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Sep 18, 2015 01:53
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bull3964 posted:There's also the massive VW emissions scandal. I think this could be a major theme of an upcoming show. These were the 4-cylynder diesel engines that commercials said were so friendly for the environment that if you drove one of these automobiles instead of a filthy gasoline-guzzler, you could shrink your carbon footprint so much that you could literally burn an entire barrel of crude oil using a ton of coal and still cut down on greenhouse gas. It's like when Lance Armstrong admitted to doping: doping is bad enough. By itself, it's bad. But combined with the fact that he was going out of his way to very loudly protest his accusations and declare his innocence, and it's actually worse. Doing something bad and keeping your head down is one thing. Doing the bad thing and bragging about how good you are and how you'd never do a bad thing is just wrong. Thankfully, the peaceful history between Germany and Britain over the years probably means that we won't hear any outdated metaphors for the antagonists of this story.
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Sep 26, 2015 01:54
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EL BROMANCE posted:I'd love to see an interview with the pope, just so John can roll him footage of nobody recognising him or knowing what he does. I don't know. Most people have at least a vague idea of what the Pope looks like, especially with all the media coverage over the last couple of days.
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Sep 26, 2015 18:17
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"Greek yogurt tastes like the ice cream they'd make in a town where dancing is illegal.." Yes. Yes it does.
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Oct 5, 2015 22:42
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Mr. Fowl posted:That was unreal. I still can't believe that it happened. Given the fact that they are crying fowl* over the "gotcha" questions at the CNBC debate, which is what they label any question that points out their ignorance, hypocrisy, or that they haven't had a team of bullshitters spend hours on, working out a way to dodge the question, well... to me, the only surprise now is that they didn't do something like it sooner. Ever since Sarah Palin's string of ridiculously incorrect answers to very basic questions caused the term "'gotcha!' questions" to enter the public lexicon, it's become increasingly apparent that as either side cozies up to the fringes of its party in order to make up for losses elsewhere, they end up taking stances that are so preposterous (and often contradictory) that their positions do not stand up to even casual observation, much less any kind of scrutiny. Given that, it makes perfect sense that at some point, they're going to give up and go for theatrics, and few things are more theatrical than watching and old man whose tough-guy roles in movies makes you forget he sang in Paint Your Wagon having a sarcastic argument with someone who isn't there, and illustrating said someone's not-there-edness by using an empty chair in what I can only imagine was a joke suggestion put forth by a young Republican prankster who never in a million years thought that anyone would take his suggestion seriously. *: yes, fowl. I don't have any proof, but $5 says that when they cried foul, they used the wrong word.
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Nov 4, 2015 20:22
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 03:45 |
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In all seriousness, I can see where they were going with the empty chair. Even if there was a plan to have a hologram there early on, and I don't know if I believe that because you can't just put a hologram somewhere--it takes a lot of equipment, unless you've booked Automan and it's late at night--there's a certain kind of sense in what they were trying to do. Someone needed to put big, bad, other b-word Obama in his place, and to illustrate the fact that he's both there taking the beating and too afraid to actually show up, they set his chair there, conspicuous by its emptiness. I'm not saying that it would ever have worked, because my God, that debacle could teach a class in how not to work. But I can see how that, at some point, may have seemed like a good idea to someone whose main goal was trying to make President Obama look bad. I mean, at one point, they pantomimed (sort-of) a petulant Obama telling His Lord and Highness Eastwood to shut-up, and when he's getting criticized fairly, isn't that just exactly what a little crybaby weenie like Obama would do, amiright amiright? The problem is that at no point did anyone bother to say, "OK, now let's look at how this is going to look to anyone who isn't a hardcore, dyed-in-the-wool Republican." And this turned out to be an important thing that someone should have said, because when the guy yelling at the empty chair is approximately 1,000 years old... well, let's just say the optics weren't good. And any reasonable person should have been able to predict that.
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Nov 5, 2015 15:41
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