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

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.

I live in the US, is this the most left thing on tv?

why dont you tell us; you seem pretty good at reviewing things you dont watch

Oh snap!

i thought oliver's willingness to take some shots at snowden was markedly NOT lefty, especially when compared to the daily shows more sycophantic hijinx and the fact that he and snowden share HBO as a media patron

for some reason I don't really think of Oliver as a lefty (tbf I feel the same way about Stewart. People call Maher a lefty too and I find that ridiculous)

anyway COPS is and will always be the most lefty thing on TV

I hadn't considered that the oliver/snowden interview might have been part of the Citizenfour distribution deal but that seems maybe possible?

it got snowden trending again so if that's the case it worked
i kinda assume it was more that oliver's team asked and hbo helped set it up

You guys were right Snowden talking at the end is great.

glad we were here to help you finish watching a television show

The dick pic stuff is comedy gold. Much satire. It was great when John Oliver interrupted what he was saying to make a new dick pic joke.

yeah it was

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