Well, duh. John Oliver. Of course he's biased. Duh. Duh duh duh. So, Is that all I want to say to you? That he's biased -- if he still currently identifies as "he". "Discerning viewers will have noticed that we, John and I, don't have not undissimilar senses of humor. His ballet troupe of epicene scriveners, when they occasionally manage to disenmesh themselves -- and I mean "themselves" in the pronounular singular -- not wishing to misgender them all -- they, I say, can be entertainingly amusing. And John's artful repetition of the words they have written for him -- apelike though it be in its primal nature, like that orangutan, a primate, on the internet that's doing laundry -- just endearing -- John's monkey-say verbal emissions -- the way BF Skinner imagined emotions and ideations excrete merely and entirely from biochemical processes and behaviors -- those emissions, I say, the verbal one's -- albeit nocturnal -- are well-executed -- amusing.
The dude has talent, the way idiot savants can reproduce music as flies reproduced maggots -- precise, infinite, and without soul.
On the internet -- a resource you, currently, are most-likely exploiting -- one might find his program. I've seen some number of them. Most recently, on Supreme Court ethics.
So of course the examples were against the conservatives. Nothing at all, really, to say contra the left. That is to my mind a problem. Fairmindedness. John Oliver, like virtually all of them, is a lefty hack, as self-righteous as I am but without the integrity or real intelligence or objectivity. We are all right, and we're all wrong. In whatever specific or blind spot.
So, for example, he hacks out an attack on Clarence Thomas, his views on the Goddess given rights of abortion and sodomy and the chupacabra of gay marriage.
Oliver's points about accepting gifts and perks are well-taken. The ethics rules, as with actual laws, should apply to every functionary of our Constitutional Federated Republic. Thomas gets Let's Make a Deal luxury trips and loan-forgiveness for 100s of 1000s of dollars. Technically legal, but trashy. The only excuse, which is not one, would be that THEY DO IT TOO. Everyone does it. Like booger eating, for little children.
My issue is not that he does it, or they all do it. That would be like having a problem with eating leading to pooping. Just the way it is. There are a few righteous men, and women. I'm sure there must be. But mostly it's just people, plugging along, some have some shame, which keeps them in check, not out of control lest they be discovered in the pettiness of their souls.
Then there are those of John Oliver's ilk -- by the evidence, shameless. Of course he reviles the conservative positions. I do the same, contrariwise. But I don't do it without having examined their reasoning, such as it is.
So, those examples, abortion, gay marriage and sodomy laws. Abortion kills a human being. They are okay with that, either because the fetus is not human, or it is, but just doesn't matter, enough -- too inconvenient, or triggering. Gay marriage simply undermines the social purpose of marriage, which is not about happiness, but about the stability of a culture. Divorce used to be hard to get, for that same reason. Tehre is no longer a defensible objection to polygamy or child marriage, or incest, or bestiality. Personal happiness, over cultural normative norms. You may not like my reasoning -- I probably don't mean YOU, since you've gotten this far -- but that whole slippery slope trope is a real if not dispositive thing.
As for sodomy, it may very well be that, unlike abortion and the definition of marriage, sodomy is a private act. Abortion is not private -- it reduces the human population, like fatal radioactivity or environmental carcinogens, or asbestos and mercury, or dioxin. Marriage is not private, by definition. But sodomy is just a thing that men can do with their penises and anuses. Women too, via paraphilic devices or surgically constructed neopenises. That's about as private as you can get -- whether shame or shameless. Of course the cost of surgeries, charged to insurance, and the public health costs, re supporting disease -- that's just the price of individual happiness?
This is an example of my fairmindedness. There are personal preferences and revulsions, and religions strictures or compulsions, and matters of public hygiene -- disease and common sense. Then there are things that on no conscious level need to affect me. HL Menkin slandered, or libeled, the puritans by saying they had the "haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." I don't care if anyone is, or is not happy. It would be nice, but nice has that old definition too, of petty.
I have said, viciously but accurately, that gay marriage is to marriage as an anus is to a vagina. But the SATs took out that sort of analogy-intelligence, logic. So these recent generations are all, like, well, just, whatever. Everyone should always be happy and always get everything they want. So Hale Satin. And Heal Hateler. And goooooooo, Hamas!
Just, like, whatever.
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