Not feeling that I need to have the last word works well for me, and saves me an enormous amount of time.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Not feeling that I need to have the last word works well for me, and saves me an enormous amount of time.
In the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver examines Ron DeSantis’s record as governor of Florida and shows that his schtick is entirely based on fighting what he calls ‘wokism’, a word that is undefined but seems to mean anything that he dislikes and can be used to rile up the party base on culture war issues. He does not seem to have done anything that materially improves the lives of Floridians but instead feeds their grievances.
During his week guest hosting The Daily Show, Hasan Minhaj discussed how social media enable even not-so-smart grifters to scam people.
This was in a new recurring segment on the show called Long Story Short where the host tackles one issue in depth. Seth Meyers has long been doing that on his show in a segment that is called A Closer Look. Both of them seem to be inspired by John Oliver’s success with Last Week Tonight where almost the entire show is devoted to a single topic.
It looks like many viewers are like me in wanting to see more in-depth examinations of important topics laced with humor.
Sykes is one of the rotating hosts of The Daily Show and she had a good segment about how some local communities use speeding tickets as a source of revenue, by adding all manner of other fees to the fine itself. They even put poor people in jail for inability to pay the fines, and then add on more costs to pay for their incarceration.
She says that these fines are hardly a deterrent for rich people and recommends the model of some countries like Finland where the penalty is proportional to a person’s income, and where a Nokia executive got hit with a $103,000 speeding ticket.
Minhaj returns as this week’s rotating host of The Daily Show where he was a correspondent for five years.
He argues that rich people like Scott Adams end up saying awful things because they are bored with their lives.
Minhaj said Adams is a prime example of “a certain type of rich person.” They have no problems of their own, so they invent new ones just to make their own lives interesting.
“I can guarantee you: J.K. Rowling had zero opinions about trans people when she was on welfare,” he said. He suggested a wealth tax would solve the problem.
“Rich people, this is for your own good,” he said. “The wealth tax is actually a shut-the-fuck-up tax.”
“Spend more time working, kissing your loved ones, getting groceries ― y’know, being a normal person,” he said. “Because normal people don’t hate Black people. We’re all too busy hating that one squeaky wheel on the shopping cart.”
Dilbert creator Scott Adams has long been known to have racist and homophobic views but his recent tirade about Black people was even more extreme than in the past. As a result, newspapers across the country have decided to stop publishing the daily and Sunday strip.
Its creator, Scott Adams, recently denigrated Black people as a “hate group”, advising white people to “just get the hell away” from them.
…The strip was founded in 1989, and at its peak about 2,000 newspapers across 70 countries carried it. Adams lit a fuse under the success of his own work in a recent episode of his YouTube show Real Coffee with Scott Adams.
In the course of the show, Adams misinterpreted a Rasmussen poll that asked people whether they disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white”. As the Anti-Defamation League has pointed out, the phrase originated with the extremist online forum 4chan as a trolling campaign and was then seized upon by white supremacists – but Adams took it literally.
On the back of it, he declared Black people “a hate group” and expressed his relief that he had managed to flee them by living in a neighborhood with a “very low” African American population.
A few days ago, I posted a clip from comedian Chelsea Handler, that week’s host of The Daily Show, about her choice to be childfree and the nasty responses she received when she told people this, and I expressed surprise that other people would think it was perfectly acceptable to pass judgment on someone’s personal life choices that did not affect them at all.
Handler is by no means an outlier. As this article points out, the numbers making this choice are increasing, along with the backlash. The article also says that we need to distinguish between the term ‘childfree’, which is meant to “capture the sense of freedom and lack of obligation felt by many of those who had voluntarily decided not to have kids” and ‘childless’ which is used for “adults who don’t currently have kids, but want them in the future, or adults who had hoped to have children, but were unable to”.
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He finds that craziness is not limited to Trump supporters.
The intrepid comedian once again enters MAGAworld when he goes to a recent event in South Carolina where Trump had an event. It was not the kind of big rally that Trump used to have but the people who came seemed to be of the same type, willing to share the weirdest ideas.
