Jon Stewart on gun control

Ever since Trevor Noah left as host of The Daily Show, the show has been having a series of guest hosts, seemingly trying out people to see who might fit the bill best. The results must have been unsatisfactory because they have brought back former long-time host Jon Stewart, the person who made it much more focused on sharp political and social satire until he retired from the show nine years ago. He will host the show only on Mondays, though, with the correspondents doing the next three days of the week.

In his first appearance, Stewart did an extended piece on the absurd lack of reasonable gun control measures in the US. (I am informed by commenters Bruce and johnson catman that this is an old clip that they see-released on the TDS website. His first appearance will be this coming Monday.)

(Almost) everyone is having fun with the Taylor Swift conspiracy theories

The ridiculous conspiracy theories that are circling around the singer and the Super Bowl are a source of great amusement to me and to a lot of others. I had thought that Swift had become a big star just in the last couple of years but it turns out that that was because I had not been paying attention. She has been performing for 17 years and selling out stadiums for a long time. But while that level of success made her a household name among those who follow popular music, her relationship with an NFL football player has thrust her in front of a much wider audience, people like me who had only been dimly aware of her.

The wild idea that she is a part of a ‘psyop’ operation by the Pentagon has clearly created amusement in that austere institution.

The claims by Fox News and far-right influencers that pop star Taylor Swift is part of a Pentagon “psychological operation” to get President Joe Biden reelected, and somehow rig the Super Bowl to benefit Kansas City Chiefs tight end (and Swift’s boyfriend) Travis Kelce, has been met with forehead slaps in the national security world.

“The absurdity of it all boggles the mind,” said one senior administration official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly on the matter. “It feels like one of those ‘tell me you are a MAGA conspiracy theorist, without telling me you are a MAGA conspiracy theorist’ memes.”
…

Faced with an onslaught of journalist questions about the theory, spokesperson Sabrina Singh was ready for it.

In the name of being honest, Singh vehemently denied Swift is part of a DOD operation.

“We know all too well the dangers of conspiracy theories, so to set the record straight — Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period,” Singh told POLITICO.

Of course, that is what people behind such an operation would say, no? Don’t be fooled, sheeple!

(Jack Ohman)
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Trump’s rage and thin skin may hurt him

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) has won the first two primary events in the Republican calendar and there is only one person still in the race for the Republican nomination. It is true that his margin of victory over Nikki Haley was only 11% but it is clear that her chances of defeating him are almost zero. So a sensible strategy would be for him to woo the people, both Republicans and independents who voted for her and supported her with donations, so that even though they expressed a preference for her, they would come back into the fold and vote for him in the general election once he gets the nomination.

That is what a sane, sensible candidate would do. But SSAT is a rage-filled narcissist who launches attacks on anyone who does not support him at the present moment. He will attack you until you grovel before him and only then will he be nice to you. The idea of trying to win over potential supporters slowly in the future by being nice to them now just does not seem to register in what passes for his brain. So he has taken to harshly attacking Haley, even calling her a ‘birdbrain’, even if that might turn off some Haley supporters who might very well have supported him once she dropped out.
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More evidence, if you needed it, that Trump lacks any grace

It has log been obvious that serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is a sociopath with no concept of how to treat people as human beings. If you oppose him, he will attack you viciously. If you are nice to him, he will say nice things about you, although he will not do nice things for you. He is purely transactional in his relationships and if you switch from being a rival to a supporter, he will stop saying nasty things and say nice things. There are no principles involved at all.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the way he treated his rivals. Although he is not the president, right from the beginning he was like an incumbent when it came to seeking the Republican nomination. and hence he enjoyed a huge lead from the get-go and was never threatened by any of his rivals. He could have just coasted along knowing that they would drop out eventually and endorse him.
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Sex work should be legalized and destigmatized

Kal Penn, this week’s guest host of The Daily Show, talked about the need to legalize sex work and highlighted how in Nevada they have done so with good results. Apparently Maine has also just decriminalized sex work. Let’s hope the movement spreads.

Although strippers are not sex workers, they too suffer from considerable stigma and hence are deprived of some of the protections that other workers enjoy and thus can be exploited and abused by the management of the places they work in and also by the clientele. Adam Conover, a big advocate of unions, had an interesting discussion with two strippers who unionized their place of work so that they could address these abuses.

Undermining the model minority myth

Kal Penn, this week’s guest host on The Daily Show, did his bit to undermine the model minority myth by having a discussion on politics with a group of Indian-Americans, in which most of the men revealed themselves to be utterly smug, self-satisfied, opinionated, arrogant, and ignorant, older versions of Vivek Ramaswamy. I wish I could suggest that Penn had picked a particularly obnoxious group but my own experience with other people from the Indian subcontinent, including Sri Lankans, supports the view that of course while not everyone is like that, the negative impression that especially the older men gave is not at all uncommon.