Post Game: September 2, 2016

In Membership, Post Game - On Demand by Gigi Manukyan36 Comments

Steve, Malcolm, and Dave hosting. Steve discusses his new show, Aggressive Progressives. Dave calls out Cenk and Ana on how they handled the Alex Jones situation. Malcolm shares an update on the Nigerian Delta Avengers. Malcolm presents a story on a polygamous sect member accused of food stamp fraud.

Comments

  1. Compulsory voting is a great idea. Yes there should be None of the Above. But instead of a fine for not voting, it should be a tax penalty. And a tax incentive. Use the carrot method with increasing tax credits for voting in primary and local elections.

  2. I’m quite disturbed that Steve Oh has to even ask the question “Should the government intervene?” in regards to these cults. Girls are brainwashed from the birth to believe that they are the sex objects and breeders of men. They have no choice when they reach marriageable age (whatever that may be in these sick cults), partly because men and older women make these choices for them, but partly because they are thoroughly brainwashed at this point into believing that this is their sole purpose in life. This is outright child abuse; it is an example of lifelong Stockholm Syndrome. Even if a girl is not legally underage, she has still had her ability to choose not to be a part of this disgusting culture stripped from her. If we don’t allow parents to refuse medical treatment for their children due to religious reasons, then we shouldn’t allow them to basically sell their children into sex slavery for similar reasons.

    And yes, this is about the girls, but what’s done to the boys is awful, too. Not just that they banish many of the boys, but that they raise them to believe they are superior to girls. It’s equally psychologically damaging.

    1. I am in total agreement with CuriousArtemis. In fact, I am a bit creeped out. Steve, some of these girls are ‘married’ as young as 7 or 8 and go at that point to live in their new ‘husbands’ home; of course it’s totally understood that the young ‘woman’ will not be touched until she has her first period. In today’s America, with all our estrogen / antibiotic treated meat, that can be much younger than it was in my day, (I am 49), some girls get their periods as young as 9, 10, or 11. If you have sisters or kids, think of kids that young being raped by 50 year old men. If that doesn’t make you vomit, then there is really, seriously something wrong with you. So, when should the gov’t intervene? Immediately. Before the first 12 year old has the nerve to grab her baby and try to escape. Because if she doesn’t succeed what do you think happens to her? If she’s lucky, starvation and beatings and brainwashing and where’s my baby?! If not, it’s entirely possible that child may disappear only to be later reported as a never to be found runaway. The revolting male sentiment of “if there’s grass on the field..” doesn’t play with your female viewership. Even 17 would be far, far too young. But it’s not 17 we are talking about in these cults. It’s prepubescent and just turned teens. Libertarianism doesn’t mean you can look away and check your ethics at the party door. Rethink this issue and I hope you’ll do some more research on this topic- child abuse usually begins with and stays in families. Look where this ‘Food Stamp Fugitive’ came from, and then I hope we’ll hear from you about it on another Post Game.

      1. Come on, you really think I am okay with grown men marrying children?

        The question I was asking, perhaps inartfully, is HOW/WHEN should the government regulate and intervene? My exact question was “at what point does the government have a duty to [intercede]?” Is it when someone calls and files a complaint? Should the government send agent down there to monitor the situation in perpetuity? What should be the permissible age for marriage? Several states allow 15-yr olds to get married. Should that age be raised? Of course we should protect children from these predators. The question is how/when the govt intercede.

        The reason for my question is that the federal government DID intercede against the Mormons in the early 1900s b/c of polygamy and child abuse. The govt was a bit heavy-handed and basically ripped babies from the arms of parents to save them from the cult of Mormonism. The result was a massive backlash against govt intervention and a group of Mormons split from the rest to create their own enclave that has turned into today’s fundamental Mormons. And b/c of the govt’s possible overreach, the govt then became extremely reluctant to get involved again, and allowed these fundamentalists to live without ANY govt protection/oversight for decades. Thus my question, what is the right balance of intervention?

        Lastly, I was asking the question to be a bit of a devil’s advocate, which plays out later in the post game. My bigger point is that religions should NOT be exempt from the laws of the rest of society. So whether you’re a fundamentalist Mormon, Muslim, Christian or Jew, you are not exempt from secular laws.

  3. RE: Agressive progressives… it is always interesting to hear other opinions, but here is my OWN opinion: Ideologues of any stripe, be it conservative, liberal, and YES progressive, are all poison to good governance.

    When it comes to the noise regarding the refusal to vote for Hillary Clinton, lets just make sure we are all “eyes wide open” here. SCOTUS nominations are the only real issue in this election. The fact that there is even ONE seat up is, itself, enough to utterly eclipse all other considerations. When you have a GOP nominee who has made it clear that rolling back Roe v. Wade, etc., it truly blows my mind that some of the smaller, first world issues cited as reasons for dislike of Hillary Clinton are viewed as sufficient reason to assist in handing the election to the hands of the person making such promises. I’m not saying you need to agree with me, I am just saying that it becomes extremely hard to take someone seriously as a thoughtful, rational progressive if they hold that line.

    It almost comes across as a “because we can’t have everything here and now, we’d rather see the system blown up and lose 50 years of progressive successes than see someone we don’t quite support win”.

    It really comes down to this: A lot of ASSUMPTIONS about what Hillary “might” do are being used as reasons to disqualify her from being voted for, while a lot of PROMISES directly from Donald Trump’s mouth are not being viewed with proper perspective.

    Why would any logical, rational progressive miss the importance of that reality i just illustrated? The progressive movement is under existential threat at the moment. Who cares about the rest of the noise? I’d like to see how well any of the issues Jimmy, etc. care about fare after the SCOTUS is lost for the next 30+ years. That puts the next several decades of elections into a category of being utterly lost.

    If you truly care about progressive values and issues, here is your litmus test. Are you willing to actual behave and vote in a manner that at least PROTECTS progress already made, even if it doesn’t necessarily appear that it will immediately further them?

    1. Sorry, to clarify, when you have a GOP nominee who has said that one of many litmus tests for any of his SCOTUS nominations would be a hard line stance on willingness to vote to roll back Roe v. Wade and the like, THAT eclipses other considerations. I am not trying to say there aren’t other extremely important issues. I’m just saying all of them are fairly meaningless if you don’t have a SCOTUS that is ready to back up your stances. And a Trump picked SCOTUS (even if it were to remain at ONE seat up for nomination, that is a problem. But we may have up to 3 seats, so yes, we are talking about losing the not only the next 30 years to a conservative SCOTUS, we are in a high likelihood of having the 50 previous years of progressive progress rolled back).

      That isn’t something said to make people afraid… that isn’t akin to saying ISIS is going to come to your house to kill you. That is stating cold, hard, logical reality of the outcome of a Trump presidency because he has made it clear that IS what he will be doing. So, to ignore that all important reality seems to make me feel like there is an extreme loss of perspective Jimmy, Dave and Co. are suffering from.

      1. Well, Obama nominated Merrick Garland, a conservative who supports Citizens United. Clinton has indicated that she would honor that nomination if elected. Kind of gives the lie to the SCOTUS argument…

  4. Sorry, Steve, Malcolm is right about compulsory voting and you and Dave are wrong! I didn’t really hear any compelling arguments about why it’s not a good idea. (See what I did there.) The government compels you to get vaccinated, go to school, register for the draft and pay taxes. And yes, now have health insurance (which I also agree with but not if your only choice is to get it through a private company.) Obviously the government can compel you to do something if it’s for the public good. I think you probably are in favor of most of the things the government compels you to do. The only difference is that right now we aren’t compelled to vote and we are compelled to do all the other things that you are used to doing. Why not change on voting too? Everyone voting would serve the public good. If everyone voted we would have a government that much more closely represented what people want and not what corporations want. Bernie might have even been our next President. Right now voting is basically controlled by marketing, advertising to people to make them go out there and vote for whoever. There are people like us who would vote anyway but I think with everyone voting, that block of people who get worked up over a single issue or are ruled by fear wouldn’t be so over-represented in policy decisions. TOTALLY TRUE!!!

  5. “We don’t have time for weekly whirled news” proceeds to host a 55 minute post game, hahahah. Love the Friday post games.

  6. Hello,

    Hopefully some of the longer term members can please clarify something for me.

    Are the recent data loss issues the reason why a number of the post game shows, election coverage videos etc. are only showing as short previews?

    I’m trying to ascertain if it’s a wider issue or a ‘my account’ issue.

    Thanks.

    1. i have this problem too, & they don’t really read comments sections, you need to email support@tytnetwork.com & then you’ll get a reply. I tweeted jeni but she never replied to my tweets, but they always respond to email or attend to it.

      1. I’d also like to start monitoring the comments. Malcolm was kind enough to forward these to me.

        Yes, the data loss was kind of a disaster. Like giant meteor+dinosaurs disaster. Much of the content uploaded during the Gbox era has yet to be restored. We have the bits, we just don’t have enough hands to get it all re-uploaded.

        If there’s a particular video or set of videos you’d like restored sooner than later, please send a message to support@tytnetwork.com. I’m monitoring that queue closely.

        –graz

        John Graziano
        Vice President, Technology
        The Young Turks, LLC

  7. ONCE AGAIN, the “low resolution” download was actually high resolution.

    1) I don’t understand why this happens so often. Is everything done manually at TYT? Is this the result of human error, or badly written software?

    2) Does anyone at TYT understand the full ramifications of this particular error, in terms of impact on those of us Members who have limited broadband available?

    I live in a rural area where high speed DSL is not an option. I have satellite and a download package that is very limited. I log in during “off” hours to download the previous night’s TYT broadcast in low resolution. If every TYT download is low res, I am able to watch TYT all month. However, every time I click on “low resolution download” and a HIGH resolution download happens instead… that reduces the number of TYT episodes I can watch that month, because the HIGH res download takes such a big bite out of my available gigs.

    So, downloading yesterday’s PG in HIGH resolution (despite the fact that I clicked on Low Res download) means that there will be one less TYT news hours I will be able to view in September.

    Please get it together, TYT.

    I remain a loyal supporter. I’m sure you will work out these technical issues. Perhaps if whoever is in charge of creating these download links understands the consequences for Members, it will make that person more alert to the importance of getting it right.

    1. Hey Deb – no one has been more critical of TYT tech over the years than I have. That’s a big reason why I’m now working for them.

      To answer your questions: no, none of this is automated in any way. And yes, we definitely plan on changing that.

      John Graziano
      Vice President, Technology
      The Young Turks, LLC

  8. This PC apology tour for the Alex Jones incident has to stop.

    TYT staff in my opinion should have beaten the fucking daylights of that fat fuck and the law is actually on their side.

    Civility got TYT nothing, the bullies ended up dictating the narrative and getting away with murder.

    1. @sec86379 I second that! Couldn’t have said it better.
      I swear this stereotype of progressives being weak sauce and the conservatives allowed to fuck people up without any repercussions needs to be changed!
      TYT is totally in the right, Cenk is the real change with the essential need of Jimmy with the dirty tactics in order to win (these are all the right ingredients).
      We love you guys and would support you no matter what, even if you shoot someone in the street :P
      FUCK YOU ALEX JONES! HOPE HE GETS RABIES FOR THE DIRTY DOG HE IS!!

      2. Cenk was about 3 seconds from a fist fight. Jimmy spits on people and you call it a “dirty tactic?”

        People like you will bring TYT down because if this mentality continues among TYT supporters you may as well join infowars and give jim hoft a foot massage.

        1. You’re right, emotions were running really high and Jimmy’s act simply brought him down to their level (something conservatives would definitely applaud). Relatively speaking it was not something totally outrageous.

          However in accepted culture, this act is simply heinous. I guess fighting fire with fire makes us look like the antagonists.

          1. This happened at a time when Cenk was selling the idea of TYT expansion and chapters across the country as a visions for accountability among law enforcement, elected pols, and journalism. The events themselves are not the problem but the reactions because if you were to try and open new chapters with general amateurs who condone the actions and see no need for improvement it will bring the whole house down.

            Emotions themselves are extremely high and many of us are still puzzled at how Kim Jong smuggled himself into California and became a multi-talented ventriloquist making it look like our police threatened US citizens for free speech. The Chief of Santa Clara PD expressed the “sadness” over a dude sitting during a song but has never expressed any concerns for the numerous cases of cops killing unarmed citizens. Strange how the same crowds that screamed over Islamic Sharia have no problem creating and maintaining Blue Sharia.

    3. Accountability is not an apology tour and if you would look past the end nose peak you would see throughout history successful non violent protests ALWAYS used training and accountability. Even during the Jesus movement it was obvious they were trained before mission work. During the Civil Rights Era an unbelievable amount of energy was dedicated to the training.

      Why?

      Equality is far more valuable and more important than a freaking Bush “bring it on” mentality.

      AJ baited TYT because he knows TYT is heading in the best direction for voters and activists and the little stunt cost TYT some members because there is no way someone not part of TYT or AJ could watch that clip and learn about TYT.

      The bullies dictated what happened because TYT panel was not prepared.

      Cenk has made it clear TYT needs to spread across the nation using chapters and the value of these teams cannot be overestimated for equality. Do you realize how silly it looks informing people about how awesome TYT as become only for them to respond with the video of AJ being spit on?

      This isnt about you or me, but all of us. As I said before, the primary concern is not what happened in the heat of the moment but only how to move forward afterwards and the goal should be working together.

      1. Actually you’re undermining TYT, it has spread across the globe. Take for instance my example, although I am a US citizen but currently I am sitting in Lahore, Pakistan and viewing it.

        I have been following them for over 4 years now but you’d be surprised to know that I learned about them during a writing and communication class (journalism course) through my instructor who was Pakistani. She used them as an example for us to follow and I remember after that day the whole class was liberated! They are really popular in Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS).

        TYT and LWT with John Oliver (although he is not a journalist) are hands down the best!!

  11. In discussion of the Niger Delta Avengers story, Dave comments, “Africa has so become a caricature of itself.” As a note, I myself am Nigerian.

    Africa has become a caricature of itself? What does this mean? Is Dave really going to claim that he understands the core identity of the breadth of disparate cultures in the African continent to any great degree? To such great degree that he can proclaim when the conditions in Africa seem to mock what it is intended to be? What is Africa intended to be, Dave?

    You joke about the suffering in Africa as if it is window dressing. Are the millions now under threat of starvation in Nigeria a “caricature”? Are those hiding from Boko Haram, or from the fighting in South Sudan a caricature? Are the children who’ve dropped out of school to mine minerals for our phones in the Congo a caricature?

    Further, when King Leopold the II took to the Congo as a private colony and slaughtered and disfigured millions, multiple times the population of his own country, was that a caricature? When the European powers drew frivolous borders across the continent over afternoon tea in Berlin, was that a caricature? When the United States conspired with Belgium to have Patrice Lumumba assassinated, was that a caricature?

    In every second of our lives, we fear that the potential for peace and prosperity in our ancestral home was slain centuries ago, and we simply haven’t realized it yet. Before our sisters and brothers were strung from trees and set aflame, then chopped into pieces and handed out as souvenirs. Before the civil wars, genocide and suffering that blight our home now. Before the mass rape, torture, murder and subjugation of our kin was used to build what now claims to be the greatest, most blessed and most moral nation its fabled god has ever created.

    This is a continent that has been pillaged for centuries, and is still to this day. I doubt there is an African alive who would say that Africa is perfect. But, “So a caricature of itself”? Fuck right off.

    1. EDIT

      “Such a caricature of itself.”

      And then. he comments that they are “well-fed.” Of course, they should not be. How could there be a well-fed African, right?

    3. Chuka,
      First, thanks for being a member and for watching the Friday postgame. Although I take something of a flippant tone in discussing the stories about the NDA, I do so knowing that the despoiling of the Niger Delta region by the multinational oil companies, often with the complicity of the Nigerian government, is an ongoing tragedy and one that too few Americans are aware of. I still hold Shell responsible for Ken Saro-Wiwa’s death and will not buy gas from Shell (although I know that my personal boycott doesn’t amount to much).

      As to Dave’s comment, if I can offer a slight defense, I believe he made the caricature comment after suggesting that the military leader pictured with the weapons resembled Idi Amin. I took his meaning to be that Amin was a larger-than-life figure but one who (much like other larger-than-life figures, such as Donald Trump) became iconic but also the butt of jokes as the quintessential African dictator archetype – to such an extent that more recent leaders may be (consciously or unconsciously) attempting to convey a similar air in their appearance, dress, etc. as Amin. I think THAT’S what Dave meant about the caricature comment – that more newly minted African dictators are not too far removed from being virtual Idi Amin 2.0s.

      Although his comment was no doubt flip and offered off-the-cuff, I’m sure he would be concerned to learn that his vaguely worded observation might be interpreted as a criticism of all Africans or as belittling toward the people fighting Boko Haram or minimizing the horrors visited upon those in the Congo by Leopold II – or any of the millions of others across Africa whose suffering is very real and often the direct result of centuries of western imperialism.

      That’s just my interpretation, and you may certainly disagree. Either way, I do appreciate your taking the time to compose your comment and share your perspective. Lord knows we are not the sole repositories of knowledge on all subjects (Dave apparently doesn’t even know that in his own religious tradition, the bris is NOT performed at the same time as the bar mitzvah) and we appreciate when audience members share their opinions and experiences, even if it’s to tell us how wrong we are.

      Best.
      Malcolm

      1. Hey Malcolm,

        Thank you for reading and responding.

        There is (VERY) little doubt in my mind that each you, Dave and Steve have earnest empathy for all people. I of course also do not accuse Dave of not caring for those suffering under Boko Haram, or in other parts of Africa. In attempting to make my point, I may have taken some dramatic liberties. In citing those events, I only meant to express that I failed to see how conditions and occurrences in Africa could render it a caricature, though the acts of other nations which contributed to and profited from those conditions – or even the acts of nations unrelated to Africa that clearly violate international law, kill civilians in huge numbers and destabilize the international order to calamitous effect – do not. However, that is not what Dave said.

        I am clearly somewhat sensitive to this issue. I suspect, or perhaps believe, that many people in the world, though they would claim that they do not hold racial prejudices, simultaneously look at Africa and see it as evidence (even if evidence best not mentioned) that black people are lesser. I have encountered innumerable people like this in my life. That is the sentiment I felt Dave’s comment expressed, though it is not an opinion I would argue that he holds.

        If I spoke rudely, apologies. If I mistook the meaning of Dave’s comment, apologies again. I appreciate you considering my statement regardless, and I do recognize the points you’ve made.

        In no part of my reaction to Dave’s comment or this exchange did I develop negative sentiment for TYT.

        1. I agree that David’s comment sounded harsh, though he did not mean it in a bad way (the TYT Members Court pronounces him absolutely “not guilty” on the intent), but it is great that it motivated you to write a comment that shed light on the situation that the panellists of the show aware of, but some (many) TYT subscribers might be not. I am joining Malcolm in thanking you for the input.

    4. Hi, Chuka~
      I think I understand Dave’s comment was not well-considered. Sometimes he is rather sour, even cold.
      BUT…the good that comes of it is that you have written an excellent reminder of the European
      atrocities that exploited and mutilated beautiful, bounteous Africa and its people.
      Just reading the name Leopold II chills me. I’ve grieved my way through history books.
      Thank you~!
      UPAYA

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