John Oliver's Last Week Tonight

Sweet sweet British Self-Deprecation

Also beware salty deplorables in the YT Comments

EDIT: Pagetopper for the new year wooh!

edited 31st Jan '17 6:36:05 AM by Pachylad

I'm looking forward to its return tomorrow.

That ending is so petty and beautiful.

Ah when people you like hit their limitations.

The main thing is the total absence of history. Basic facts about Russia in The '90s, the whole context that led to why he came to power, anything like basic Russian geopolitics. Stuff that John Arch Getty provided.

It reminds me of Edward Said's Orientalism. The constant desire to see people as "Other". The same technique you see here. Most of the sources are West and Anglo, you don't have interviews with academics who know a lot about Russia, no attempt at trying to get viewpoints other than those who agree with you. And even if it keeps admitting that it doesn't have evidence, it goes on hearsay, rumor and bias anyway. Does anyone not know anything about the time that Putin allowed Dubya Bush to use Russian airspace for his war in Afghanistan, and then America expanded to NATO after that. Or that Putin played a part in securing Obama's N-Deal with Iran and is more or less the only guy in the world who can legitimately uphold that part of 44's legacy.

And to be honest, Putin's whataboutism is a justified response to such irresponsibly smug coverage which has such a basic absence of what Sigmund Freud called "Reality-Testing". It was not so long ago that it was America, courtesy Reagan and others who told the world repeatedly that there's no better world than one in which the rich oppress the poor...and that's a message that the Eastern Europeans have taken to heart, as has Putin and others belatedly. There's consequences to that. Oliver has also entirely dismissed, mischaracterized, and written off Russian Literature in general, and Leo Tolstoy specifically. So there's cultural neanderthal attitudes to add there.

...Okay, where the fuck did he do that?

It's not like he constantly mocks the culture of his own home countries, nope.

He made a joke around 15:25 about Russian Literature being 100% nihilistic grimdark all the time, with a made up book with that idea joking that Tolstoy wrote it.

edited 20th Feb '17 5:50:19 AM by IFwanderer

Ah, right. Forgot about that.

...You've got to learn to take a joke, Julian.

In the context of that episode, it's not a funny joke. He more or less mocks and insults an entire culture without any consideration for the other side. Look when he covered the Indian election of Narendra Modi, another corrupt and tyrannical leader, he was fair and tried to understand the real reasons why people would support him.

There are genuine reasons why Putin gets support in Russia. Oliver more or less implies that his supporters are idiots easily fooled by propaganda about the vases. Some of them are but that's not the main or only reason why people support him. He just cherry picked the video that suited his argument. That's not responsible satire by any means.

Fair enough, I suppose. I'm not sure if he could have sufficiently covered everything that you mentioned in the space of a 20 minute segment, though.

Apologies if I was rude earlier - I haven't had a lot of sleep as of late, and I let my aggression get the better of me.

edited 20th Feb '17 11:04:31 AM by KarkatTheDalek

Relax you weren't rude at all.

I disagree with Putin with almost everything but in this age of mass media people need to be a bit more aware of international relations and its responsibilities. Like all that demonization of Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the Iraq War, founded on fact as it was, amounted to making things worse than ever, without any understanding or acknowledgement of the social context in which he existed.

Thanks. Maybe I was thinking more of what I was saying in my head.

"There are genuine reasons why Putin gets support in Russia. Oliver more or less implies that his supporters are idiots easily fooled by propaganda about the vases. Some of them are but that's not the main or only reason why people support him. He just cherry picked the video that suited his argument. That's not responsible satire by any means."

Putin gets support because he's the only remotely palatable option within the context of Russian politics, where Kompromat is the norm and not the exception, where outright bribery and extortion by oligarchs and The Mafiya is a regular occurrence, and all of his political opponents are either socialists or far worse, some far-right clown. He's still an absolutely despicable person, but the Russian political scene is full of despicable people. He's the only one with a brain.

There's also the fact that the stuff the West hates him for, the invasion of Crimea and his position on NATO and Ukraine...are stuff that's consensus among Putin and his critics. Like even Gorbachev backed Putin on Crimea and he's the Golden Boy for the West.

You are right about that. Nobody wants to mention that the (very distant) second largest party in Russia after United Russia is...the Communist Party of Russia. John Oliver and other Western media keep highlighting "liberals" but by doing that they are doing the equivalent of say, making the Green Party and Ralph Nader the true opposition to the Republicans and ignoring the Democrat party.

I honestly don't see the point of this episode. It's not tackling a major issue like Oliver did last season. It's not backed by evidence or research like his other satires. It's more or less agitprop to mock and insult a major nuclear power and reinforce pre-existing stereotypes. I mean Trump's Putin bromance is genuinely weird and bizarre but we really don't know anything about it. Maybe someday we will find out and that could be decades from now...when someone declassifies documents in Russia or somewhere.

Wow. So saying Russian literature is dark is going too far? Because Oliver did not say a single thing about the quality of Russian literature, he mocked the fact that it was overwhelmingly bleak which...yeah, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, they were real rays of sunshine these guys.

Before saying that it is offensive, please, go ask the question in the Russia OTC thread, to Russian people, and see if they are offended when Russian writers are described as bleak. I seem to remember that the Russians tend to casually say that they are indeed pessimistic and fatalistic, so I reeeeaally doubt they would take such a comment as anything else but a joke. Especially when, again, Oliver doesn't say that Russian literature is bad, or uninteresting, or negligible - just that it's bleak.

The whole episode was there to show how the POTUS (very meekly) reacted to Russia. It's not made to insult Putin (although he deserves it), but to make people realize how wimpy and submissive Trump is towards him, and how problematic it can be. Hence why, once again, the last segment is turned into a "message for Trump".

edited 20th Feb '17 11:48:03 AM by Julep

As I was saying it was the context that bothered me...the entire episode is more or less Russophobic and filled with pre-existing stereotypes. The only positive Russians are the Token Heroic Orc.

And bear in mind that Oliver is not just saying that Russian Literature is bleak. He's describing Putin's worldview as that of a nihilistic who sees problems as irremediable and more or less feels that there's no perfect system so why bother...and then says that's every Russian novel by Leo Tolstoy. That's implying that Putin and Tolstoy have views in common, when Tolstoy was an anarchist critic of the Russian Empire, who ended up being excommunicated by the Russian Empire.

And Russian Literature is no bleaker than say, American literature...Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, Thomas Pynchon to name a few. Between them you have a worldview about as bleak or bleaker than Russian literature.

OK, so you didn't get the joke. Moving on.

I'd agree that Oliver did not properly look at and understand the internal politics of Russia, however that wasn't the point of the episode. This wasn't meant to be an in-depth look at Russia and why Putin is popular (note that Oliver did repeatedly state that Putin is genuinely popular), it was a look at the weird relationship that Trump has with Putin and how Trump's insistence that the US "get along with Russia" makes no sense.

I am actually glad that he called out the "they are just as bad as we are" narrative....because at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if that is true. It doesn't make your own actions in any way better. And we shouldn't forget that it is not actually the US which is threatened the most by Putin, it's his direct neighbours. Finland, which has to deal with the Russian army constantly invading its airspace in order to show its dominance. The Baltic states, which live in constant fear of getting conquered. The EU, which Putin wants to destroy for his own gain. And naturally the Ukraine. No matter what one thinks about the political situation in the country, Russia was the one which annexed part of it and used the military first. And the "excuse" for this boils down to "we have shot back".

My main issue is with the episode in question and not the political backdrop which is in any case not as simplistic as that as Efraim Zuroff among other non-partisan observers have noted.

I just think it's one-note one-dimensional and ignorant of the other's side view, most importantly of all, it's not useful in any way. Trump won't see it. Trump's supporters won't see it. It's not giving anything people haven't heard before.

And I am sorry "the both sides do it" argument is pretty valid in international discourse, because Russians remember the time they tried to be friendly to America and kept getting nothing but broken promises no matter whether it's Republican or Democrat in charge. Everybody is so keen on demonizing Putin that nobody wants to deal with actual international relations.

Again: Whatever is going on between the US and Russia, the one Russia is threatening above all are the European states. And it currently looks like Trump wants to join him...but there is no gain whatsoever for the US to destroy the EU.

The main point here is that having a good relationship with Russia is not just about a friendly smile. Putin is dangerous. And it is dangerous to play into his hand.

Even if the "we're just as bad" thing was true it's not a valid argument, it's only valid when arguing for your own improvement, not when excusing the other guy's failure.

The US being bad does not make Russia being bad okay, because in the end the people who suffer from Putin aren't the US government.

If Putin justified putting sanctions on US officals via the US record on humans rights I'd be kinda okay with that, but he hasn't done that, he's invaded/bullied third countries and then said that because the US is bad it's okay.

If I wear to punch my neighbour it would not justify them kicking our other neighbours dog, because that would be stupid.

edited 20th Feb '17 7:30:12 PM by Silasw

Hmm. I finally got around to watching the video, and as far as I'm concerned, Oliver goes pretty damn light on Russia's political and social problems.

Most importantly, the "everyone does it" excuse is clearly designed to make people brush off corruption and political violence as an unchangeable problem.

edited 21st Feb '17 9:49:59 AM by Fighteer

The link to this video doesn't work.