Permanently Deleted
correction: the clip his unpaid interns found is fucking absolutely wild.
:( fucking hell, America's obsession with unpaid interns, tipping and not adding tax until the final bill is so fucked
If it's any consolation, I can tell you that any interns for Last Week Tonight were fired in April and haven't been called back since.
I would guess that they are. LWT is part of the same NYC 'circuit' of comedy shows as the Daily Show, and a lot of their staff are Daily Show veterans. They are under a different corporate umbrella, but I'd like to think that John Oliver would've mandated that his interns get paid since shitty labor practices are such a focus of his show.
All that being said, you never know how the corporate overlords might interfere, so take it all with a grain of salt.
Jesus Christ, it's keeps shocking me how openly fascists cops are when they talk freely for a bit.
Dunno, I feel like since the quarantine the quality of the show, and how decent the criticism of the American empire is improved.
Absolutely, John Oliver may not be a "leftist" but we shouldn't trash him, we need people like him in mainstream media to spread vaguely left ideas.
The far right has a massive array of talking heads spreading their beliefs while people like John Oliver are pretty much the closest we'll get (with a non-negligible audience).
Like yeah, we can jerk each other off over our ideological purity alongside the other couple thousand chapo chat users while the fascists share their propaganda with millions of people every single day. People like John Oliver are the closest to allies in mainstream media that we'll get.
If just tankies or whatever we call them now were the only ones doing videos, I wouldn't have even gone left.
Hell, he might even be a leftist, and smart enough to stay inside lib takes to not lose the platform.
Image him going full Marxist, he'd be off HBO immediately
Eh, his Vuvuzela episode was peak lib shit but I think he's being radicalized similarly to Robert Evans by recent events.
Source: My radicalization followed a very similar trajectory to theirs and people like Cody Johnston (though I suspect Cody was always a little more radical than he let on).
How do we get through critiques of American Empire. It's pretty easy to correct the record in Latin America, but China is another level. Like even I'm afraid to talk about Xinjiang to libs.
As you should be. China might lift millions out of poverty per year, and provide them with access to industrialized society, but for an allegedly socialist society workers in large parts still get shafted pretty hard.
Sure, some of it boils down to the west actively seeking out exploitative environments, due to them being cheap, and some might boil down to China intentionally allowing it, to gain influence in the global economy, therefore allowing them to build a more just society decades down the line, but at least I personally believe that the well being of hundreds of thousands of individual workers shouldn't be sacrificed like that...
John Oliver may not be as left as any of us but having a popular media figure draw through lines between the RNC and Kenosha shootings, criticize meaningless corporate gestures, praise the NBA strikes, and say that voting is not enough is definitely a good thing.
Indeed. The lib-to-leftist video pipeline is real, and Last Week Tonight is a big part of it.
Yeah, he may be part of a lib to leftist pipeline but what kind of leftists?
It actually feels like it's getting harder and harder to fight the Uyghur myths when people show up supporting them, the longer people don't encounter any opposition to it the more and more engrained and "true" it becomes to them.
He mentions the NBA player's strike but not that Obomber shut it down.
Still a good episode though.
Off topic, but: I think that's the first time I've heard Kushner actually speak, and dear lord HOW does he sound even more weasel-y than he looks??
Same here, I don't suppose anyone can give a brief description?
The sheriff wants to lock up "these males" who are out making "10 women pregnant with small children", in warehouses (concentration camps) until they perish.
Edit: And the kicker is that he wants to turn these warehouses into strip malls or Amazon storehouses after a generation of "these males" have "perished" there.
And of course we all know he doesn't literally mean strictly men who have sired children with multiple women. It's just a major dog whistle for black men. He really just wants to round up black men and put them in concentration camps.
I found a way after a few searches, here is a proxy which worked for me. https://www.youtubeunblocked.live/
Hot take: not all radlibs are bad. Mike Duncan, for example, is good.
Mike Duncan of all people definitely knows how major political change happens, and it ain't by voting
He has said on twitter now really feels like that episode he puts out before everything goes to hell.
True but based on the last time I heard him talk present-day politics (interview with Patrick Wyman back in April) I think he leans much closer to social democracy than socialism.
This is probably the best Oliver has ever been. Hopefully the trend continues.
Yeah he's treading pretty close to ACAB territory with this an his episode on police brutality during the beginning of the George Floyd protests.
Don't you think its weird that you think John Oliver finding this clip is something helpful and important enough for you to post it here but you still couldn't make it through the title without undercutting your own argument by shitting on John for being a liberal?
A product is 3 things; product, packaging and marketing. When all 3 elements reinforce themselves, your product will be more effective and ideas work just the same.
Why do you we putting our products (leftism, workers rights, housing guarantees, universal healthcare, etc...) in rightwing packaging or try to market it with rightwing rhetoric? I think we've been gaslit into edginess so that our views would be marginalized and it worked. We're trying to help but the only way we can imagine doing that is by being a dickhead on the internet instead of being helpful on the internet.
Why do you we putting our products (leftism, workers rights, housing guarantees, universal healthcare, etc…) in rightwing packaging or try to market it with rightwing rhetoric? I think we’re the reason why our views are marginalized.
Comrade I don't think anyone on this website is a prospective leftist; and even if they were - I think they'd be able to tell the difference between "John Oliver is a liberal still lol" and actual right-wing rhetoric like "Hell yeah anyone who runs over protesters is a badass in my book."
Okay but you realize that the way we communicate here affects how we communicate out there. If we keep being assholes here, we end up being assholes out there. You can look at yourself and think of an example of not being an asshole and decide im wrong but the way we communicate isn't "one statement" its the culmination of all the different ways we communicate.
We are here playing with the most important ideas in the history of humankind and yet we won't even try hard enough to come up with an effective strategy to communicate them. Social media is negative gaslighting and we all fell for it. I'm done. I'm only going to say things I care about. I'm going to try to be more positive and I'm going to keep trying harder and harder to get other people to see that cooperating is more effective than competing. I'm personally trying to use more cooperative communication. Thanks for chatting. Stay safe and have a good one.
I understand what you're saying - and while I think your intentions and overall point are good - I don't agree with it 100%.
Does the Left need an actual communication strategy & role models that we can point to when people decry communism or anarchism as violent, reactionary, or whatever other bullshit they're spewing? Absolutely; the history books could always use more truly amazing people like Brown, Debs, Guevara, and Sankara.
But does that mean that every leftist ought to essentially act as speech police to each-other over innocuous things like using 'liberal' as an insult on an explicitly leftist forum? Hell no. Anyone who stumbles their way here from a reddit comment or whatnot is either probably already somewhat left of center and interested - or a wrecker. Whenever we start hosting Chapo Direct Action Food Drives or whatever, then yeah, I think then it might be time to collectively talk about how we use the word 'liberal' lol.
Stay safe as well! We'll need you in the fight against fascism. :red-fist:
speech police to each-other over innocuous things like using ‘liberal’
see this is the false dichotomy that i think social media deliberately created. im not policing or attacking you because i disagree or because I told you i disagreed. Nothing actually happened to you. I couldn't have hurt you with my words so how could I be the police? Those fuckers have guns, i got a keyboard. Social media is based off engineering that does not differentiate between positive and negative engagement but in real life humans actually prefer positive engagement. I think if we all just act like Leftist Steve Bannon then we all are Leftist Steve Bannon. We can organize massive campaigns just by tweeting A LOT and being as clever and nice as he was clever and evil.
I think it takes private equity to sell negativity and politics and tech had a whole lotta finance money to sell that shitty product. Virality for negative shit requires funding and tactics and on social media the mechanism they used was to create an algorithm that gave loving something and hating it the same value.. It was top down authoritarianism just like every non-tech version of it throughout history. The answer to that is spreading the positive aspects of good ideas that can neutralize those negative feedback cycles. I don't need a backer like Bannon did because I don't want to walk in front of anyone. I want us all to walk together.
Isn't this kinda fun? Trying to frame our problems as solvable and niceness as more effective than meanness isn't delusional, its just the most effective strategy for community organization.
Again; I get what you're saying - but I just wanna point out that perhaps policing wasn't the best word choice because "you're policing/attacking me" wasn't what I meant lol.
Honestly with what you're trying to drive home, I'd recommend you focus on more of the 'X gets the wall' talk and less on the 'haha liberal' comments.
‘X gets the wall’ talk and less on the ‘haha liberal’ comments.
Damn if you're not 100% right. Thanks for helping me. I'm really not good at starting messages/conversations. They come out accusatory which makes people, quite understandably, defensive. But I kinda think I learned it from 20 years of internet pop culture. Something clicked in my brain and now I want to change its hard to unlearn the habit. Seriously, thanks.
I completely get that haha. It was definitely a habit for me too that I still sometimes struggle with to the point where I don't even really like to quote-reply sections of peoples' comments because I feel like it is immediately read/seen as negatively argumentative. Obsessively posting on GameFaqs, SomethingAwful, and IGN forums as a pre-teen definitely ruined me forever - and whats worse is that, at least for Gamefaqs and SA, I can actually go back and read my cringe comments from 2007 and really fall into that pit of self-loathing.
I think the fact that you recognize those flaws in your interactions online speaks volumes about your intentions being good overall and I respect that. Although, personally, it is my belief that just as we need our level-headed and kind comrades to help educate & draw people in - we also need the people who tap into their anger when they're at protests or public events and are probably more likely to tell someone to "pick up a fucking book" when asked a question.
You're probably right about framing our problems as solvable things and approaching the general community who are unaligned with us politically with niceness is probably a better way to organize - but I think the same can be said about just denouncing capitalism and anyone who earnestly supports those who are at the top. I'm sure I'll regret it in a few years when Zuckerberg hands over a ready-made list of every even slightly left of center profile to the FBI, but I have kept my Facebook for the last couple of years solely just to mock people like my old boss who post shitty boomer memes that talk about 'getting a job' and whatnot; and surprisingly I've had at least 3-4 people reach out to me privately, who have seen me just posting shit like a "shut the fuck up, centrist" meme to every three paragraph long response in a 50 comment thread where I've already explained something like wage theft, asking to know more or for clarification on a point raised. That's when I try to engage them respectfully & nicely.
Just different strokes for different folks, you know? Thanks for coming to my Tedx Talk :admiral-biderman:
