Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Coronavirus in Prisons

June 22, 2020 10:47 PM - Season 7, Episode 16

This week (another void episode): After a quick recap of Trump's first rally since the pandemic hit (not a lot of people showed up) and Juneteenth, we go right in to the main story, the Coronavirus, "that thing you regularly have to convince your parents still exists." Specifically, about a surge in cases in prisons, in some cases up to 80% of their residents having contracted it. On YouTube (28m) And Now: A Father's Day Tribute to the World's Greatest Dad. (It's Trump. They're being sarcastic.) And a final piece on fancams, for the old people out there, "short montages of a performer that you like set to music." Which performer? Any performer. The point is, however, K-Pop stars are deploying fancams to fight the white supremacy hashtag [hash]whitelivesmatter, and support tags like #protecttheprotestors. They have also overwhelmed an app police published for people to use to report protestors with irrelevant images. LWT made their own rat-erotica-K-Pop-fancam for use in signal jamming; it's available from (takes a deep breath as I prepare to type this) rateroticafancam.com. Another proud member of the HBO family of websites!

More on talking to parents about the Coronavirus: "You went to a Shoneys did you? Who else was there? The whole town? Please stay inside you extremely fragile maniacs."

John Oliver: "There's absolutely no one in the room with me right now, although, interestingly, that's still somehow only slightly fewer people than were at President Trump's Oklahoma rally last night."

On social media: "[...]the service that forces the question, 'Is this celebrity trending for bring too horny, too racist, or too dead?'"

On racist voices: "It is genuinely refreshing to see racists getting drowned out in America, instead of our usual policy of letting them co-star in family Christmas comedies."

On Adam Levine: "[...]a man who looks like the world's saddest adult coloring book."

F.37 "Buyum Tieum," FATHER'S DAY

posted by JHarris (5 comments total)

This is relevant to my interests. There is an overcrowded jail in a nearby city which has seen ongoing protests and lobbying to see release of some of those being held inside. What I glean from the comments on every article on this is the people who hold the strongest opinions on incarceration know the least about incarceration. Any attempt to distinguish between prisons and jails gets an avalanche of “If they can’t do the time, they shouldn’t have done the crime,” and bots (or possibly people no brighter than bots) writing emoji-filled screens about how brain-dead liberals want murderers released into your neighbourhood.

I actually managed to pin someone down with the inescapable fact that murder is a federal crime and murderers are not serving time in the city jail: these are shoplifters and people who got in a fight in a parking lot. I was told that most of them probably are murderers who have just escaped detection. It’s the 21st century version of, “Kill them all The Lord will know his own.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:39 PM on June 24, 2020 [4 favorites]

I have no idea whether his trying to activate tictok and kpop will work.

2020.
posted by porpoise at 2:16 AM on June 25, 2020

This piece from the latest New Yorker is very relevant to what Oliver was saying and well worth reading.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:15 PM on June 25, 2020

I very much appreciate totally pissed off John Oliver as the person I want to get my comedy news from lately.
posted by jessamyn at 5:56 PM on June 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

If even one of them had refrained from helping John Bolton sell his shitty book I'd be impressed
posted by StarkRoads at 12:30 PM on June 29, 2020