Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Stand Your Ground Laws
May 17, 2021 12:27 AM - Season 8, Episode 12 - Subscribe

This week, once again from the void... . Local governments try different ways to incentivize getting vaccinated against COVID, from lottery money to free fast food. And Now: Ari Melber, Rap Genius, Will Just Not Fucking Stop. The conflict between Israel and Hamas terrorists escalates, a conflict that, despite the both-sides, tit-for-tat framing the news media uses for it, greatly harms innocent Palestinians more than Israelis. The main story concerns Stand Your Ground laws (19m), an unnecessary set of laws passed in 22 states that removes the "duty to retreat" from armed confrontations, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

F.37: "Carpe Diesel," GAS SHORTAGE
posted by JHarris (6 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I've missed two episodes, I will try to make up for them but am not sure when that will be.
posted by JHarris at 12:27 AM on May 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


Zero worries, JHarris. Thank you for posting these.

Good on JOliver for speaking truth. I'm super surprised that local politics has such a large unthinking pro-Israeli component when it is so insupportable.

Weighing in on gun control? Big balls. Fuuuuck.
posted by porpoise at 1:55 AM on May 17, 2021 [2 favorites]


We call John Oliver the Angry British Man (as in, "do you want to watch the Angry British Man now or later?" - note than "I don't want to watch the Anrgy British Man" is not an option). Anyway this one was really good, I thought.
posted by joannemerriam at 1:43 PM on May 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I have some further information on a person in this episode....

Gun Lobbyist Marion Hammer is a prominent figure in the beginning of Season 2, Episode 7 of the podcast Gangster Capitalism. The whole season covers the NRA and its many ethical (and potentially criminal) problems, but right at the start of this episode they tell the story of Marion Hammer's vendetta against the scrubjay. It turns out there's a reason for her adamant pushback against it becoming the Florida state bird. It's part of an amazingly and intensely petty beef she has against the Audubon Society for their support of a three day waiting period for firearms!

10,000 school children supported making the scrubjay the official state bird as a civics lesson, the Audubon Society signed on because of the awareness it would raise, and when Hammer found out she immediately went to the state legislature to come up with every bullshit conservative buzzword reason she could think of to deny its adoption! And she's done this multiple times, and it has always worked, perhaps in the process giving those school children more of a lesson on how Florida state politics works than they expected.

There is also a New Yorker article on her from 2018.
posted by JHarris at 12:55 AM on May 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


Marion Hammer versus the Florida Audubon Society is covered in the great video from the recent, The State Birds Are Garbage post.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 8:22 PM on May 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


Somewhat, but it doesn't cover the vehemence of Hammer's vendetta, or explain that it's a petty beef against the Audubon society. And no outlet I've so far seen explains how Hammer is able to, at her whim, command an audience of Florida state representatives, and single-handedly command them, with entirely stupid reasoning, to UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE THE STATE BIRD THE FLORIDA SCRUBJAY!!! I mean, caring about state birds is the province of school children, why not let the school children have this, no they cannot, they cannot because of Marion Hammer.

The more I read about her absurd and petty anti-bird vendetta, the more obvious it becomes that she's a controlling and manipulative individual, and that casts doubt on her additionally absurd story, that a car full of people attacked her in a parking garage. She's sued someone for sending her pictures of gunshot wounds via email. According to Wikipedia, she says suffered harassment due to her vocal gun rights stance, but it came in the wake of the wave of school shootings. It looks at least a bit like what she calls harassment is people responding to her incredibly shitty and unaccountably influential opinions. She just seems like an awful awful person.
posted by JHarris at 2:51 PM on May 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


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