Last Week Tonight Discussion : Brazilian Election+Law and Order (9/25/22)

[TheGlyphstone]

Sure enough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RxqNv6bEug

A 40-mile stretch of beach in South Texas is suffering a plague of partially dismembered dolls and doll parts washing up on shore.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfojf0KkTrQ

[TheGlyphstone]

We're back from hiatus, and so John dives straight into what every one is talking about.

https://youtu.be/MBo4GViDxzc

To summarize a 20min video....its complicated. Also, there are frogs.

[Annaamarth]

Frogs best investment.

[TheGlyphstone]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtIZZs-GAOA


So, this week is probably going to hit heavy for a lot of people, me included. I fought with mental health issues for a long time, including the weight of stigma and the 'suck it up, buttercup' attitude of society towards depression. I did manage to find a therapist eventually, who got me on medication, but he's since had to retire. So this got me on both ends, the problem itself and the increasing lack of professionals who can help with it.

[TheGlyphstone]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2hw_ghPcQs

To 'celebrate' the 1-year anniversary of our withdrawal from Afghanistan, John is going and looking back over just how badly the whole thing was mismanaged and poorly planned from beginning to end, and how it's gotten even worse since we left.

There's just something very, very wrong when a country's primary export becomes the kidneys of living citizens...

[Humble Scribe]

Most of why it has got worse is continuing western sanctions on Afghanistan, which feel a bit like the US embargo on Cuba - more out of spite than practical politics. The withdrawal was handled badly, but I'm still not sure what else was supposed to happen. Afghanistan, like Iraq (and Libya) was a fuck up from start to finish, but an indefinite deployment was surely never going to change anything.

Also, often the weirdest moments of LWT turn up in the incidental segments, in this case Steve Buscemi marrying John to a cabbage...

[TheGlyphstone]

The intermissions are always weird, yes. But sadly HBO doesn't allow them online legally.

As far as the foreign aid money...like John pointed out, the Taliban was harboring the head of Al Qeuda until we hit him with a chunky salsa missile. So the fear that they'll just embezzle any money given to them for food or medicine to fund terrorist groups, I can't call that out of the question.

[Leon Weber]

The intermissions are always weird, yes. But sadly HBO doesn't allow them online legally.

As far as the foreign aid money...like John pointed out, the Taliban was harboring the head of Al Qeuda until we hit him with a chunky salsa missile. So the fear that they'll just embezzle any money given to them for food or medicine to fund terrorist groups, I can't call that out of the question.

The fear that they'll embezzle the money to fund terrorism abroad is a reasonable fear, but after a certain point it ceases to be a reasonable position to continue to hold.

Inevitably withholding humanitarian aid from a country that we devastated for two decades fighting a lion that we trained and equipped to begin with seems less and less reasonable the more you go on.

[TheGlyphstone]

And of course there is the counter-argument that starving, desperate people are more likely to sign up to be terrorists.

[Oniya]

And of course there is the counter-argument that starving, desperate people are more likely to sign up to be terrorists.

And also more likely to be really pissed off at the people withholding humanitarian aid.

[Oniya]

Hey all, Glyph is in the process of moving, so I'll be trying to keep this thread updated.  We've actually had two episodes drop since the Afghanistan one, but since we've been discussing climate change in another thread here, I'm posting the older of the two, on Carbon Offsets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6p8zAbFKpW0

[TheGlyphstone]

And we're back (sort of)! With a two-part feature, to boot:

In international news, we have this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uySgklnlX3Y


Brazilian national elections are next week, including the re-election vote for Jair Bolsonaro , A.K.A. "What if Trump was Latin American and even more openly corrupt and fascist?"

A relatively young democracy, where plenty of people still remember the days of military junta rule. And based on Bolsonaro's rhetoric, he's willing to return to it. It's easy to focus on the American right-wing and forget how he's as much a symptom of a wider-reaching issue as he is an aggravating factor.

------------------------------------

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I

And for domestic news, 2-weeks-ago's feature about the hit copagandaTV franchise Law and Order, and how it's not just shaping public perception about police work, but the perception and behaviors of actual police officers, despite being in many obvious cases far from anything approaching reality.