Wandering Reader

Although Oliver had a segment about stand your ground laws—they’re bad!—he devoted the first section of his show to a fiery monologue about Israel and Palestine, calling the week’s events “a pretty good reminder that while some things are incredibly complex and require a great deal of context, others are just wrong.” So if you have HBO Max, don’t content yourself with the YouTube clip from this week’s show, check out the full episode—it’s not every day an American talk show host calls Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “a form of apartheid,” or accuses the Israeli government of war crimes. Oliver ended the segment by condemning the false equivalencies and euphemisms that prevent us from talking honestly about the situation:

Look, there is a real tendency, particularly in America, to both-sides this situation. And I am not saying that there aren’t some areas where that’s warranted, but it’s important to recognize there are also areas where it’s simply not. Both sides are firing rockets, but one side has one of the most advanced militaries in the world. Both sides are suffering heartbreaking casualties, but one side is suffering them exponentially. And it’s not like the U.S. is operating from the moral high ground here. It’s obviously no stranger to drone striking weddings and saying, “We were just trying to target enemy combatants.” This country has blood on its hands too. And look, if you believe Israel’s actions are warranted and proportionate this week, you’re welcome to try and make that argument.

PLEASE DO NOT THINK FOR EVEN A SECOND THAT YOUR VOICE WILL NOT HAVE AN IMPACT THIS IS LITERALLY THE BARE MINIMUM

35 deaths. 12 of which are children.

Edit : 119 deaths, 27 children.

Photos credited to AJ+. The woman in the video and her family, Thanks To Allah , survived

“ Your posts and tweets are treasures to us “

Here a rough translation of what she said:

Oh and Bid-n just signed off $735 million weapons sale to Isr***l.

735 million. Imagine what the government could be doing to better your lives with all this money , instead it's funding murder of innocent civilians.

This post isn't to make anyone pick a side. Just highlighting where the government's priorities lie.

Debunking misinformation around Palestine.

Like, me and my sister went to a museum, and they had an extra exhibit of butterflies. But it cost £3. So we sighed, walked past, then stopped. We each had £3. We could see the butterflies. And we did it was great. We followed it up with an ice-cream as well because Mum and Dad weren’t there to say no.

I was driving back from a work trip with 2 other people in their early 20s, and we drove past a MacDonalds. One of the others went “Aww man, I’d love a McFlurry.” And the guy driving pulled in to the drive through. It was wild. But it was great.

I went to a park over the weekend and I was thinking “Man, I’d love to hire one of those bikes and cycle round the park.” It took me a few minutes to go “Wait, I can hire one of those bikes!”

“Mercator initially made globes. Later transferring his map from a three-dimensional curved surface to a flat sheet of paper was problematic. Taking the equator as the logical map center left big, confusing gaps near the poles.Mercator’s solution was to stretch out the northern and southern extremities of the globe to fill those gaps, producing an elegant and usable map.”

Oh. Right. 

That obviously doesn’t fucking work now, and the only reason that was a thing in Sherlock is because Moffat is a pretentious asshole who thinks that a show being well written, sensible, and having a coherent plot structure is all for lesser writers, and the only thing he needs is to seem as clever as possible. Which admittedly, does work out for him for a few years, until the plot holes build up too much, and fans start to get pissed off about nothing ever being resolved but instead being thrown away for the new bigger mystery it led to, which then gets thrown away for the new bigger mystery that led to. Remember Doctor Who, how at the start of Moffat’s time as showrunner, he opened series 5 with ‘what caused the crack in Amy’s wall’? He never fucking answered that. He got distracted and wandered off into different plot threads that also never got resolved. He’s a very good writer when given a single episode to work with! His first episode on Doctor Who, he was just a guest writer, and he did the first Weeping Angels episode, and it was really good, because he only had that hour to tell the story. There was no follow up episode, no next season, just this amount of time, start a story, wrap it up satisfyingly, the end. He should NEVER have been put in charge of a show, because he’s the sort of writer that really needs something to reign him in and keep him on track, to remind him ‘hey you didn’t finish that plot, wrap it up before switching tracks’.

So it looks like he’s building this giant complex mystery, and keeps promising a satisfying answer to EVERYTHING once it’s over, but it’s never over because he doesn’t know how to let shit go - there’s always got to be another twist. The Weeping Angels can’t just zap you back in time and call it a day, they need to be made an EVEN BIGGER THREAT, they gotta be able to possess you! And steal the voices of dead people! and move while you’re looking! and be the statue of liberty! and instead of leaving you alone after the time warp, they hold you prisoner for the rest of your life now! No need to explain how or why, just escalate! And of course, Sherlock can’t just fake his death, take down moriarty’s organization, and then return to solving weird crimes, nope, there has to be a bigger threat than goddamn moriarty! he needs to have a secret evil sister! and secret dead childhood friend whose represented as a dog in his memories! and maybe moriarty isnt really dead - no wait, he is - no wait, he ISN’T - no wait, he is - OR IS HE? and john can’t just get married to a nice girl he loves, NOPE, gotta be more drama, she’s secretly an assassin and on the run from the government.

Moffat just keeps building and building and building, but eventually his stories start to collapse under their own weight because he’ll never let there be an end - he just can’t let go. And eventually fans will start to get bored and annoyed with the twists, and the show that used to make them feel smart will now just make them feel irritated. And they know there will never be a conclusion to the story, so they lose interest in the characters, because there’s no struggle - its never going to wrap up, so who cares? So they stop watching, and moffat starts dropping in viewers and ratings, and tries more desperate twists to bring people back, driving away the ones still holding on… lather rinse repeat until the network finally pulls the plug and makes him walk away.