Hello, buglers! John Oliver has a weekly show, "Last Week Tonight"

his jokes are funny, it's the polemical aspects of it that I find a bit pointless

liberal panic monster of the week as entertainment only goes so far for me anyway but oliver seems particularly insincere, i don't buy that he really cares about anything he talks about moreso than any other given buzzfeed reader

as far as Daily Show spinoffs go at this point I prefer Wilmore, which is at least a bit unpredictable and with a variety of voices

yeah, i'm down with wilmore. even just thinking about the two of them oliver seems like such a cranky fuck in comparison

he is very very funny and i admire how well researched his show is

oliver i mean

oliver is a slightly-retuned version of Jon Stewart with the energy he had ten years ago, so it's good to me.
i wanted wilmore to be better but finding it generally pretty boring and uneven, and the panel segments to be a chore. it's missing a spark somewhere.

i love oliver, tone of the show is v similar to the bugle

Oliver and Wilmore have two different aims imo, so it's hard to determine who's doing a better job. I like both. The fact that Oliver only airs once a week makes it seem like his show has higher stakes, though.

but oliver seems particularly insincere, i don't buy that he really cares about anything he talks about moreso than any other given buzzfeed reader

I totally do, based mainly on having listened to the Bugle for ages. There have been lots of moments when one or other of them edge close to being dead serious angry/upset. Oliver being married to a veteran (combat medic I think?) makes me pay attention to his show's pieces on the military.

sometimes the level of cynicism on ilx is just astounding

I don't think this latest rant was that good, and the hashtag was dumb and useless. In general, this season doesn't seem as good as the first, though that's probably rose-tinted glasses since it was a debut and all that. Some of the hashtag-stuff has been good, such as when it's used to counter the bullying behavious by the president of Ecaudor, or when it shines a light on Philip Morris trying to get away with treating poor countries horrendously without anyone noticing. Here, more exposure could conceivably make a difference. But this rant on municipal violations seemed much less pointed than it could have been, and because of Ferguson everyone has been sorta thinking about it recently anyway. Just doing a 'do you know that this exists?' on one of the biggest news stories recently is not LWTwJO at it's finest.

I only see the 20-minute videos that go on youtube, so I might be missing something, but I thought the NCAA one from last week was great. Nothing that anyone who pays attention to sports doesn't already know but it was nice to hear sharp jokes and criticism from someone in the media aside from, I dunno, Deadspin.

JFC you fucking idiots, John Oliver's show is foregrounding shit we've been ranting about for a fucking decade plus on here. Remember that this shit has to permeate a thick fecal slurry of constant, un-mute-able noise from a thousand media sphincters shitting out endless social clickbait distraction. There's a very narrow finite amount of socially or culturally acceptable topics to talk about in a week's amount of air-time, and this show can get a thing that's _rather_ important out there to the point where something can actually happen. Crashing the FCC's servers about net.neutrality is a great example.

Larry Wilmore's show is great and worthwhile, too. Once in a while, he'll play a deep-bench nerd ref card that tips the hand of either his or his writing staff's obsessions into nerdshit.

None of this shit is fucking perfect and will never be. At this point, enjoy what we can get of non-horrible cultural material being produced. This is mass entertainment blasted at millions of people on a nightly to weekly basis, and its in a digestible format that other worthy causes shared on social media don't reach. These guys can get previously unaddressed topics to get mentioned on either Headline News or take yer pick of breakfast chat shows, or at least are the closest methods to do so.

In other words, I agree with gr8080.

kingfish otm

sorry but obviously Oliver is a dead-souled cynical charlatan from some country that probably doesn't even exist anymore who came here to exploit America's obsessions with Net Neutrality and FIFA for $$$$ and proximity to Bill Mahar

er

lol

Well THAT happened.

I don't even regularly watch this show but caught it last night randomly, excellent interview.

surprisingly antagonistic!

yeah, that was really good. it made snowden seem a bit more human than citizenfour - i really liked that movie but it was great to see someone asking hard questions and him struggling to answer them.

he was surprisingly weak in his responses about the competence of some of the journalists he's working with, and whether he'd read the entire cache of documents. he seemed genuinely crestfallen when he was shown the video of people who didn't know who he was.

oliver is great at making complex subjects understandable and funny at the same time.

yeah i thought it was a good interview ! designed to leave audience asking at least some of the right questions

Snowden: "I did this to give the American people a chance to decide for themselves the kind of government they want to have. That is a conversation that the American people deserve to decide."
Oliver: "Is it a conversation that we have the capacity to have? Because it's so complicated."

Hah what? Is this even an argument? I understand Oliver is really running w the whole "Americans are idiots" motif but this is some hiding your head in the sand type bs.

did you watch the whole episode

I stopped pretty soon after he was showing him the laptop with random Times Square people not remembering his name. Should I finish it?

sounds like jokes to me

i don't know, i see where he's coming from. he's just alluding to the fact that Americans don't care (can't speak to the rest of the world). i guess he's implying that we don't care because it's beyond our capacity or it's too complicated, so that's worthy of criticism or debate. but the core point is that americans don't give a shit. the NSA/snowden/privacy stuff couldn't be any more clear. it's been documented relentlessly, and no one cares. no one talks about it.

the random idiots not knowing who snowden is is the tie-in to "are we capable of having this conversation." Snowden started the conversation and the majority of america responded with "..." Xps

my problem with that set-up is that you'd get the same response from Americans about almost anything political--"Who is John Boehner?" "Who is Harry Reid?"

I don't disagree with that -- it's basically a version of Jaywalking which is some low-hanging fruit -- put the further tying-in of that stuff to the dick pic thing was pretty solid as far as setting priorities.

the core point is that americans don't give a shit

The core point there is that they are confused about who Edward Snowden is, not that they don't give a shit about privacy. Spending most of the time available showing Oliver waiting for Snowden, conjecturing about him being late, looking out the window at the scary KGB, etc. is also a way to shift focus from an actual discussion to a media piece on a personality. Same thing w the laptop, I'm sure Snowden was there to talk about the real issues not if some randos know his name. It's not an entirely bad interview cos they do discuss real issues but they spend far more time w cult of personality/mis-direction they are pretending to be above.

Americans don't give a shit about privacy the same way they don't give a shit about torture. They figure as long as they aren't doing anything wrong (funding terrorists, looking at child porn, organizing protests) they have nothing to worry about so who cares.

Maybe they do give a shit and it's just in the system's interest to perpetuate the notion that they don't?

what evidence do you have that they give a shit

people can't even be bothered to change their passwords

"just give me the pr0n and the facebooks and the free music!" basically

the point of that question was leading to the other question he directed to people on the street, which was "if the government could see your dick, would you care?" and their asnwer to that was a unified "yes". So his point was: abstracting the discussion takes it over the heads of the populace.

what evidence do you have that they give a shit

Oliver points out that politicians from the left and the right are going on about it from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz. That's some evidence. The password thing you mentioned is evidence they are lazy not that they don't care about gov't surveillance.

I stopped pretty soon after he was showing him the laptop with random Times Square people not remembering his name. Should I finish it?

― ©Oz Quiz© (Adam Bruneau), Tuesday, April 7, 2015 12:36 PM (20 minutes ago)

by all means keep telling us how wrong john oliver is to focus on americans 'short attention spans

hahaha

yeah, watch the whole thing first, its literally only 33 minutes in toto

akm otm, snowden became much more compelling to listen to once he stopped trying to outsmart Oliver and just answered directly about whether or not the government can access your dick pics.

You guys are adding so much to this conversation. I mean I'm fine w it I guess, it is a comedy show, and it is fun to laugh at other people and how stupid they aren. Certainly more entertaining than discussing the implications of widespread acceptance of gov't surveillance. It is good for that gov't surveillance system to perpetuate the idea that most Americans don't care about it (and are stupider than you, too!) and it doesn't actually bring anything to the discussion is my point. This is Jay Leno-style key rattling for potential leftists.

But it's on HBO I'm watching it on google youtube, all these companies are tied into that system. They could have spent that time talking about proposed legislation or who the congresspeople were pushing for things to get better. Instead it is more divisive stuff. Rather than see John Oliver walk around an empty room for a few minutes and throwing pens at nothing they could have actual reported the news. Things that are being discussed among our elected representatives.

A good democracy requires an informed public. The media should be there to provide that service. This show is making the point that we have an uninformed public but it is itself wasting that opportunity.

we should vote this show out of office in three years

it is a comedy show, and it is fun to laugh at other people and how stupid they are

i don't think that was really the thrust? but i watched the whole thing so what do i know

Once corporations get religious rights does that mean they become immortal?

you are a clown

That's cool clowns are rad. People laugh at how i look anyways i am used to that.

why should a comedy show report the news, that is not the job. Oliver is a satirist not a reporter.

that segment was tryhard without all that shit tbh
that said i think Oliver is far more good than bad, especially his work lately

idk y'all are probably right. maybe I just don't get British humor

that said yes the latest episode was very good and I think he works better now without the audience, unlike the other late night shows which just don't really work anymore

the facial recognition episode was terrifying. particularly the bit where it was able to find a 30-something news anchor's teenage photo

I've told this story in another thread but I was pretty alarmed when Facebook tried to tag me in someone's photo from the work Christmas party, despite the fact that A) I'm way in the background and B) we have no mutual friends. my 'hope' was that it's just using location data but even still that seems pretty questionable

i got locked out of facebook the other week and they 'needed' my phone number and a non-blurry photograph in order to 'verify my account'. i assume this was for stuff like the above.

(they should have my number because i had the app installed a few years ago. but they probably didn't have a photo, at least not one where i've been tagged)

my friend was in New Orleans for her 40th bday and kissed some random dude. that was the only contact they ever had. 5 years later FB popped up his profile asking if she knew him.

He's been searching for her on there

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2020 season is nominated in the 2020 ILX TV poll:

ILX's Best Television of 2020 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 29, 2021

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

don't think a single American TV journalist summed up the Israeli/Palestinian conflict better than John Oliver last night

Forgive the thread spam, but I wanted to note that this show's 2021 season is nominated in the ILX TV poll, with voting ending this weekend:

ILX's Best Television of 2021 Poll / VOTING AND CAMPAIGNING THREAD / Voting Ends After January 31, 2022

If you like this show and you'd like to see it have a good showing in the poll (running in February) all you need to do is submit a ballot including it and your other favorites (3 minimum, 25 maximum, ranked by your favorite to least favorite) to forksclovetofu at gmail. It'll take five minutes; get to it!

the episode last week on police interrogations was really good. actually brought back a memory of being 13 and getting "busted" for 2 counts of shoplifting even though I didn't steal anything the first time, and wasn't even there the second time. they used all the tactics in this episode, the whole "We have you dead to rights here" thing, the "I'm just trying to help you but I can't if you're gonna lie to me" line, the "how can you be sure you didn't block it out of your memory" argument, using my "confession" even though a minute later I said "no, I didn't do it, I want to see the video" (what do you know, they didn't have it, but if I wanted to challenge it they were going to slap on another charge of "lying to a police officer"), fucking wild to see it all laid out like this. nobody believed me that I didn't do it! my parents didn't trust me for months after that! I thought I was going insane!!

Racist idiots next door called teh police n me for trying to get them to leave a local paper I have delivered alone. I think that woman is a headcase. I 'd had the husband standing outside my door threatening me then 20 minutes later a cop is knocking on my door.
So have always wondered what their required result was. I think they are beyond belief. His behaviour has left a lot to be desired at other time.s
So I've had that running through my head when I watch things like that.
Am hearing that the Texas Death Row inmate who was interrogated when she was laready in extreme stress from her daughter dying mentioned as having a support/protest campaign talked about on a few podcasts I've heard thsi week. Think its teh same one.

& the night these idiots were trying that on with me I was actually trying to take part in a Human Rights campaign for First nations people in Canada. Unbelievable. White privileged morons.

those sketches they do at the end of episodes are kinda hit & miss but the Korean Subway drama had me laughing nonstop. I would totally watch that series.

that sort of episode is the show at its best, tackling the sort of questions that are on the back of everyone's mind but never get any "real" news coverage. I live in a town of 55,000 and we have 6 Subways. one of them is literally less than a quarter mile away from another. nobody is ever at any of them.

agreed, good topic selection and ending skit. almost unbelievable that the real thing exists

credit for incorporating it into the plot though, unlike this scene they showed from an actual #1 US TV show which still feels utterly unreal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQYwFND7rHE

lol we watched Happy Gilmore with my son this weekend. I hadn't seen it probably since it came out on VHS and had totally forgotten that it was also a 92 minute Subway commercial.

fun gimmick last week they did one episode about HOAs and then another for anyone under 35 (who will never own a house) about Chuck E Cheese. no surprise but the Chuck E Cheese episode was a lot funnier

yeah, it was... though i kinda wish it had a better point to make me sit through the 30 minutes of that. At least the HOA one had some coherent point to it

Oh my god I was wondering what was up with that billboard!! That’s a quarter mile away from where I used to live!

lol!!

first two eps this season have been solid, can't believe I hadn't heard of "pig butchering" before, I get those texts all the time and even respond to them sometimes. big yikes when it's revealed who's actually sending them though