Wanda Sykes on the abuse of speeding tickets

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.

Hasan Minhaj on the lab leak and Dilbert stories

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 comic being canceled all across the country

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.

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Childfree people are slow to gain acceptance

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”.
[Read more…]

Nextdoor discussion about lizards

On Jimmy Kimmel’s show, he had actors recreate a Nextdoor community thread based on what people posted after someone asked for help about what to do with a lizard that had entered their house and hidden somewhere.

I have seen many threads like that on Nextdoor. It starts when one person posts a real problem they have encountered and asks for advice. While a few responders offer helpful suggestions, others use the opportunity to post unhelpful tangents or boast about something that is only mildly related or even make snarky comments.

Childless by choice

Chelsea Handler, one of the rotating hosts of The Daily Show until they find a permanent replacement for Trevor Noah, talks about her decision not to have children and the reactions of disapproval she gets from people when they learn of it.

It is quite astonishing how people feel quite comfortable criticizing the choices of other people even if those choices have absolutely nothing to do with them.