Edit - I don’t remember where I read/heard it, but I remember very early on someone said that liberals will one day turn on Israel but it’ll be after a certain number of people begin dying - 5k, 10k, 30k, 50k. I wish I could find it.
That perfectly encapsulated the liberal mindset. They won’t stand with us before the atrocity begins, when we are saying this will happen - only when it’s already happening and their conscience gets in the way. (I’m talking about the people, not the ones in charge - the latter know perfectly well what they’re doing, of course).
It’s just endlessly frustrating, because the same thing happens over and over again.
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Guy who both sides the initial coverage for his liberal audience but after 30,000 people have been killed he sides with the American students who risk very little compared to those living in Palestine and countries surrounding Israel.
No participation trophies for white chauvinists.
this is how low the bar is.
Nice that he eventually got there, but just like every lib he was backing Israel at the start
It only took 6 months, when the damage is already done and public opinion wont change shit anymore for the libs to say “genocide bad*”
Ok, fuck it, I’ve watched a terrible football match in person, have insomnia, and unfortunately know a couple of people who used to know (fairly tangentially) John Oliver.
John Oliver is the Oxbridge comedy boy that didn’t do / suck up enough to be accepted by the ‘comedy’ elite that allows you to skip the hard work.
He did put in some of that hard work. He did play clubs. He did pitch lukewarm satire to drunk Brits. But it wasn’t like he had to claw hus way up either.
His struggle was (like many others, in fact most comedians) not getting in the good graces of a BBC commissioner when some of his friends did.
His passing over by the BBC (blamed on, by him at the time, former uni 'friend’s who had sway at rhe BBC at the time) was part of the reason The Bugle got picked up by The Times in their incredibly nascent podcasting portfolio (long before other British media). He ran it with the less employable (too weird, too Jewish, too pointed in his satire, but still very middle class friendly) but definitely funnier Andy Zaltzman who runs it to this day with guests.
He languished there, for a while, for sure. It was not a meteoric rise to deeply rubbish guest spots on the Daily Show. But, he always did better in guest spots in the US than in the UK. In the US he was a posh British insider poking fun (but never too barbed at anyone but the most obvious clowns of British politics). And honestly, American liberalism is the perfect fit for him. He was never ideologically consistent. His whole ethos was being ever so slightly to the left of the right of the Labour Party, either genuinely or so he couldn’t be said to be a party actor.
His continued appearances on The Bugle even after he’d gone to work on American TV showed as much. He became a ‘reaction guy’, who only ever took pot shots at the most obvious joke targets (Boris, Trump). His occasional excuse was that he got British politics second hand, but it was clear that ideologically he only felt comfortable even talking about the far right of the Tory Party and making weak jokes about Corbynism in the most shallow Corbyn factitious stereotype basis. He didn’t have problems following the news when it came to a couple of Lib Dem and Tory politicians that he knew at school (and presumably didn’t like).
He was, in many ways, the perfect replacement for Jon Stewart; an outsider lib who could take apparent moral stands on issued of exactly no-threat to anyone in power, and didn’t have the baggage / disadvantage of his past points an being well known to American political doofuses for gotcha comedy interviews.
So what am I going on about? It’s not gonna be a surprise to people here, but Joliver has always been this guy. Not just a lib. But the useful lib who preempts the worse embarrassment by the state to reveal their past crimes but insist that the same couldn’t be happening. He’s not CIA, he’s just a wannabe posh boy who has always been desperate for acceptance. He didnt get it from OxBridge. He didnt get it from his poster comedy peers. He didn’t get it from the Beeb. Or the British comedy circuit. But he got it from American libs for playing a soft-left British minstrel. He married a Republican Iraq War veteran who was organising at the Republican convention because they let him join their group in a bar area to avoid getting a talking to by security.
This argument on his part may be correct, or even just partly correct, and that’s fine. But let’s not lionize someone who is, at absolute best, a personal and moral coward.
Yes I am aware of the irony of a post this long on q forum.
He’s not CIA, he’s just a wannabe posh boy who has always been desperate for acceptance.
He may not be CIA but his wife is FBI (or maybe it was NSA, either way) and a republican too, he met her while covering the RNC for the daily show
I agree, I even mentioned it.
The point is that, like every personal account I’ve ever heard about him, he met someone who was, ostensibly, his adversary and when they weren’t a total monster to him personally he not only began defending them, but married them. His romantic life is none of my business, but the point is that this is who he has always been.
His place in American media (yes Chomsky, etc etc) is because of this. But there’s a class dynamic that I think Americans miss. John Oliver is a particular type of British middle class lib who found the social mobility he so desperately craved in British society, but eventually realised he would never get, by going to the US and laying down in the street for the establishment right.
The reason I bring this up is because it is far, far from unique. Take a good amount of British MPs for example, particularly on the Labour side. They’re fucking obsessed with their working group trips to Washington to meet Clinton staffers and take pointers on how to strategize for love then out elections. If you ask most of them (the most obvious shadows cabinet ghouls aside) straightforwardly they do a little song and dance about how far gone American politics is, division, British institutions, blah blah blah and then their eyes light up and their tone shifts as they start to picture the life they imagine for themselves in the US when they leave their lowly government jobs, assuming they make the right ghoulish connections.
The American dream is alive. It’s just for a handful of aspiring upper-middle class political operators who will do anything to make three times the wage (but have twice fhe expenses) in the US and seem like the ‘reasonable European observers’ instead of the slime that lubricates a hundreds of years old engine of decay and shame keep chugging along.
The same way crooked local politicians across the globe have been bought off and fed fantasies by the US state throughout history. The difference is that British politicians are still the perfect combination of arrogant and stupid enough to assume that couldn’t possibly be happening to them, not to the Great Britain, the US’ most important ally.
But yeah, at this point this is just a rambling treatise on a particular phenomenon of lower-end British political class.
he met her while covering the RNC for the daily show
Let me guess, the genocide is systemic.
So why is it Palestine in the one geopolitical issue turbo-Libs seem to be allowed to have decent takes on?
Because it’s so undeniably horrible and in the open , that most well-meaning turbolibs cannot brunch over the sound of the atrocities being committed, unlike every other issue they claim to care about, but have the worst takes on.
Yeah but I think guys like Oliver have handlers, as in a literally think he gets emails from a State Dept guy weekly. It’s weird he’s letting John have okayish takes, unless its like a “limited hangout” thing where the ghouls recognize they need to let their left-of-center assets have okay takes on Palestine to preserve their legitimacy.
My brother once called John Oliver “that beaky guy” and ever since then that’s what I’ve called him too, “Beaky Guy”
He’s the guy with that one joke about meerkats, where he acts like one
Wow if even turbolib John Oliver is saying that this is bad then that’s really bad news for the establishment who is still actively and strongly supporting this genocide. If you can’t even get him on your side who do you have left?
Libs turn when the NY Times turns. The NY Times turns when US Foreign policy turns.
