The Fastest Man Alive
The "I've been harassed on one of those harbour cruises" thing was pretty much the only laugh in the whole piece. It was a good moment, in a dark way.
Of course, this is balanced out by the "Is that guy looking at my ass?" bit, because he could just as easily be looking at the film crew sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. Also, it pushes the definition of harassment kind of far. Tumblr/Buzzfeed culture seems to be feeding an attitude of "You can't even look at a woman on the street" lately that's super self-righteous and annoying. The guy isn't doing anything except sitting on a step and looking at somebody. That's not harassing you.
My last word on the piece (because there's way better segments to spend three days talking about than this one): It was a mostly nothing segment where I kept waiting for something else to happen but never did, with one good bit of comedy, and one aggravating "joke".
Mad Scientist Wannabe
Probably because a lot of women on those sites do not want the sort of attention they could attract on the street. It's hard to tell who's just looking in the same direction as you and who's actually ogling you.
Of course, don't you know anything about ALCHEMY?!- Twin clones of Ivan the Great
Student of Story
Well, there's a good reason for them to feel uncomfortable about it, since it sometimes leads to stalking, groping, and even more occasionally, violence. And after you've been the victim of it once, how can you not be afraid the same thing will happen again and again?
The victim, 20, was attacked around midnight Friday in Southwest Philadelphia as he walked along the 6500 block of Dicks Avenue with his 17-year-old girlfriend, who is five-months pregnant, and her sister.
The girlfriend, who did not want to be identified, told NBC 10 they were approached by a group of men.
“Three guys started catcalling me,” the girl said. “My boyfriend was standing next to me. He started to say, ‘That’s rude. That’s disrespectful. I’m her boyfriend and I’m right here.’”
The girl says the men then approached her boyfriend.
“They kind of made a circle around him,” she said. “They were pretty large guys. Then one man standing in front of him came out of nowhere and punched him on the side of the jaw.”
"Hey, watch what you're saying," was all he said to the cat callers.
According to the police report, one of the men inside the car then got out and punched the man defending the women. The blow knocked the man back so hard he hit his head on the concrete and fell unconscious. The assulter got back in the car and quickly drove off.
The stabbing was reported at about 11:25 p.m. in the 400 block of Ellis Street.
The 33-year-old victim was walking down the street when a stranger approached her and propositioned her, police spokesman Officer Albie Esparza said.
When she rejected him, the man became very upset and slashed the victim in the face and stabbed her in the arm, Esparza said.
But I do get scared even when I'm in no perceptible danger. I'm tired of pretending like I can shake everything off like lukewarm water. When I'm walking to the Cal Train at 7:30 in the morning and men have said good morning to me, I've occasionally taken off running for no reason except that there's no one around and I am suddenly painfully aware of the space I take up. For me, laughing it off is no longer working.
For good measure they also reportedly chanted "Fucking sluts." The Yale Daily News reports that they also yelled stuff like, "My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I fuck dead women." Our future CEOs of America in action!
So if you don't feel like being judged, don't do the same behavior as the people who deserve to be judged, and try not to take it as a personal insult to you when women are telling these stories, and those stories make them defensive or upset. You would be too if you were in their place.
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
I'd like to propose moving this discussion over to the On-Topic Conversations forum, since at this point I'm starting to feel like I've accidentally derailed the thread by bringing it up.
Extra 1: Poochy Ain't Stupid
I wonder if any of those UN guys were fired for badmouthing other countries on TV.
Never trust anyone who uses "degenerate" as an insult.
I think that they should have let Sam guest host the entirety of last night's episode. Jason was way too nervous. It was great seeing Wyatt again though.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Agreed. Maybe she'll do it tonight.
The Fastest Man Alive
I thought Jason did great. It was cool to see his usual persona hosting too, since John Oliver had to drop his when he hosted for a much longer period of time. And then having Sam join him was a blast.
I've got friends on the other side
To be fair, I think Sam would've been just as nervous hosting as Jason was. I think they were just playing with the "hosting jealousy" bit from Oliver's hosting time. Jason seemed plenty confident during that bit last time.
Lost in Space
I didn't know that Jason and Sam were married. And apparently they both just passed their U.S. citizenship exams. Congratulations to both of them.
The episode was clearly filler, but it was amusing filler.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
my opinion on tonight's show:
The Texas Pro-Choice Guy: I would've added on; "Ah, I wouldn't have expected a white Texan with guns to actually care about women's reproductive rights. You're probably thankful for pro-life policies so you can force her to keep the baby."
I enjoyed the "Run From Barack" segment if only because it amuses me how spineless our Democrats are. If anything, they deserve this loss to teach them to grow a spine.
You know that won't be the lesson they learn if they lose. They'll think they didn't run from Obama fast enough...
Student of Story
Since 1980 or so, Democrats have internalized the message that being actually liberal instead of a Lighter and Softer version of Republican policies is the way to use. (See Clinton's triangulation strategy, for example.) So any time they lose, they think it's because they strayed too far from what Repubs and conservatives decide is "the middle", and they promptly move rightward while being totally spineless about what they may actually believe or think is right.
That they continue to do so despite the fairly obvious hunger among their base for true lefties continues to astound me. As does the failure to see that being weaselly and spineless doesn't get you voters, taking a stand and differentiating yourself from the other side gets people inspired and wanting to jump on board. (Until you take it too far, that is. Trouble is, they think anything is too far.)
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Certainly, the behavior of US politicians seems bizarre from the outside and it's also easy to look at their behavior and say where they're going wrong and losing touch with the base values of the nation, but... well, having looked at the going ons for a long time (but only on a superficial level, I'm not claiming any expert knowledge) it seems that the fault can hardly be laid alone or even mainly on the feet of the representatives or the system. The problem has to be in the electorate. It seems that the normal people in US are guilty of some base assumptions that are false and as long as those persist, the system will remain very very wonky.
Like the assumption that taking a stand, differentiating yourself and taking a stand on issues is what gets you elected. Because clearly, demonstratively, that is not the case. How elections play out and how both parties approach them proves that.
Of course this assumption alone isn't the root of the problem, there are more fundamental issues where the accepted reality of the American electorate differs from the the facts/obfuscates root causes, but this thread is hardly the place to go into that.
Not directly related to the show, but Jon's directorial debut (Rosewater, about an Iranian journalist) is currently better-reviewed on Rotten Tomatoes than Christopher Nolan's movie Interstellar (75% to 73%, currently). I think Jon can feel proud of himself for that.
The Fastest Man Alive
It also probably has significantly less reviews.
True. 101 for Jon, 248 for Nolan, although Interstellar's also been out for a week already.
The Fastest Man Alive
That doesn't mean anything. A movie will get almost all of its reviews in its first weekend.
And Rosewater should have a bunch of reviews from whichever festival it was in this fall (I want to say Sundance? Might've been TIFF.)
I don't like the new guy.
Never trust anyone who uses "degenerate" as an insult.
I've got friends on the other side
I didn't have a problem with the new guy, but the whole pig segment felt very Strawman-ish to me. Especially when they seemed to imply that gestation crates are used for arbitrary reasons, when they're most likely used to make more money. The clip even mentioned that the crates were used to stop the pigs from fighting, so even if the practice is inhumane, it's being used for a reason.
Also, I'm upset that they cut out the part of the Turkey sandwich response where the person states that they did just that when they worked on Black Friday because it creates a very different connotation when that part is left out.
edited 20th Nov '14 7:57:35 PM by TricksterCal
I like the new guy. I didn't realize new cast members were arriving. Some research later, and I'm excited for the next new person in December.
The show's always used straw men on occasion; I remember catching a couple when I first discovered the show (back around Indecision 2004). It feels like there's been a drastic increase in them this year though. They did the same thing with the controversial Redskins fans interview; when they quoted one of the fans saying he "wouldn't have worn [his] Redskins jacket", they cut out the second half of that sentence on how the producers insisted on him wearing it. And that was referring to the interview that actually happened, not the hypothetical "would you do it again if given the chance?" interview they tried to frame it as. The Washington Post article they cited also said the producers flat-out lied to the fans' faces, saying there wasn't going to be a cross-panel discussion.
To be honest, I'm a bit worried about the direction the show seems to be heading. It's as if John Oliver took some of the best writers with him to HBO. We still get a good amount of the usual topical witty snark, but the humorless outrage-filled rants and the painfully obvious straw men have become noticeably more common. If I wanted to listen to someone preaching to the choir about social problems I'm already aware of, I could just watch MSNBC. Or go on Tumblr. Or just about any online forum discussing these issues, really. (Although even when TDS gets preachy, they at least aren't anywhere nearly as condescending as people online, I'll give them that.)
edited 24th Nov '14 5:16:26 AM by PoochyEXE
Extra 1: Poochy Ain't Stupid
Then again, the fans were racists...
I've said it before—it's a bit myopic to assume that just because you have an intimate knowledge of certain issues everyone in the audience does.
edited 24th Nov '14 5:05:48 PM by Wackd
Maybe you'd be less disappointed if you stopped expecting things to be Carmen Sandiego movies.
I laughed at the segment also. She did a great job of capturing the Catch-22 Dilemma that faces women these days.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"