Hasan Minhaj: Patriot Act

New weekly Netflix series, third episode was posted yesterday.  Smart, funny, brutally honest solo stage shows about current events.  His persona is almost as redefining as Hannah Gadsby.

The first episode was about a lawsuit making its way to the Supreme Court brought by an Asian-American accusing Harvard of racial profiling.  Turns out the person behind the suit is a long-time opponent of affirmative action (& white), who is using this twist to try to overthrow all compensatory legislation.  Millions of students will be affected if the new Kavanaugh Kourt rules in his favor, as is widely expected.

The second episode was about Saudi Arabia, and how their arms buying does not justify turning a blind eye to their human rights abuses.  Along the way Minhaj discussed feminism, bidets, FDR, and dozens of other topics which he cleverly tied together.

Last night's episode was on Amazon, how it uses predatory pricing to eliminate the competition and also avoid monopoly legislation.  Lots of stories about people being forced, by market share, to sell through Amazon only to have Amazon poach their product line and force them out of business.  

Hasan's delivery is quick, smart, detailed, full of obscure references (many of which were generationally opaque to me).  The shows are only about 30 minutes each, but you end up exhausted from the pace of the delivery.

One of the best new shows I've seen.  Hope it maintains the high standard it's set.

4th episode is about oil. Not really anything new but well-presented and cleverly done.

5th was about fashion and in particular one brand called Supreme, which apparently sells everything from sneakers to crowbars -- but by making them all limited editions they command insane prices -- for what are in fact other people's products that have simply been rebranded.

Consumers can be incredibly stupid.

The second episode was hard hitting enough that Saudi Arabia got it pulled from Netflix.  Unbelievable.

Quote :

Ironically, Minhaj dedicated his last episode of 2018 to discussing content moderation by tech companies.

Hasan Minhaj wrote:

Clearly, the best way to stop people from watching something is to ban it, make it trend online, and then leave it up on YouTube.

Latest episode was on the electronic videogame industry, which is misogynist (gasp) and male-dominated (swoon) and treats their developers like shit (hits the floor).  Some employees are talking about unionizing.

Yeah, like that'll ever happen.

Surprisingly, Hasan barely mentioned the misogyny, male-domination, violence-aggrandizement and anti-social nature of the shoot-'em-up games themselves.  Although he showed some examples.  It would appear that 99% of the games are first-person shooter games, where your POV is over the right shoulder of a steroid soldier as he walks through increasingly-complex landscapes, shooting everything that moves.

I used to think -- with some justification -- that these "games" were thinly-disguised recruiting for military volunteers. Now, perhaps the audience is school shooters.

The 2nd-to-last episode is on the fentanyl crisis.  Fentanyl killed 95,000 people in the US last year, and most of them didn't even know they were taking it (other drugs are cut with fentanyl to make them seem stronger).  Users often get hooked on legal fentanyl prescriptions, then turn to the black market when their prescriptions run out. In the black market, lethal doses are unbelievably easy to come by (see Prince, Mac Miller, Tom Petty, and about 94,997 others).

Mis- or uniformed users are part of the problem.  Drug companies pushing highly-profitable opioids are part of the problem.  Doctors prescribing opioids when they're not indicated (because of drug company kickbacks and perks like cash and vacations and lap dances!) are part of the problem.

But I'd say it sounds like the biggest problem is the FDA.

Fentanyl was approved only for use by late-stage cancer patients for extreme pain relief.  Nobody cares if it's addictive if you're in the final months of life.

But the FDA -- with its politically-appointed directors -- decided that McKesson, the drug company distributor, should police the distribution of fentanyl --  so it has been marketed in everything from nasal sprays to candy suckers.  99% of all fentanyl use goes to non-cancer patients.

That seems like it might be an issue to me.

And they've just approved a new opioid that's 10x more powerful than fentanyl.

My only experience with fentanyl was when I had the heart attack. It instantly killed extreme pain and put me to sleep. It works when you need it to.

My only experience with fentanyl was with pancreatitis. It worked better than morphine, but not as well as dilaudid.

New episode of Patriot Act talks about the eviction crisis that is sure to follow the unemployment crisis, and the mortgage default crisis that is sure to follow the eviction crisis, and the Wall Street investment firms that are now bundling rent-based securities after mortgage-based securities proved disastrous due to the difficulty of foreclosing.

Turns out evictions are MUCH easier than foreclosures.

So big Wall Street firms are buying up distressed properties, and renting them out to distressed renters, knowing they’re easy to evict. There will always be more distressed renters lined up at the door to pay 1st and last month’s rent and a security deposit. Then you kick them out and do it all over again.

Horrific.

Here's a concrete example of what Hasan was talking about.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/homewreckers-housing-vultures/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

After the COVID crisis is over -- six months, two years, ten years (all estimates I've heard) -- the mortgage/rental crisis COVID spawned will still be with us. In a few years it'll be the biggest news item on the agenda, as hundreds of thousands of Americans become homeless.

Here it comes.
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/867856602/millions-of-americans-skipping-payments-as-tidal-wave-of-defaults-and-evictions-

Latest episode is called "what's wrong with our elections" and it's all about "winner take all" elections where a plurality of the votes can win, even if THE MAJORITY voted for other candidates.  Donald Trump -- according to Hasan -- won with only 5.5% of registered voters. [Pew disagrees on the numbers, but the concept stands.]

His solution?  Ranked choice voting, where if nobody gets 50% outright, the votes given to the least-popular candidate are reapportioned -- based on a ranking of 2nd, 3rd and 4th choice -- to the voters' next choice.  This continues until one candidate achieves a majority, i.e. over 50%.

This is, he brought out, true majority rule.

Right now, minorities can (and do) rule if there are enough candidates to split the opposing votes.

This is an interesting chart.  The USA (and Luxembourg?) have far & away the highest percentage of registered voters who don't vote.

I still like my idea of "reparations" for Black people: give everyone with 50+% Black blood two votes, for the foreseeable future.  Get them invested in Democracy.

Add ranked choice voting to the mix, and we have the possibility of raising our participation levels from the dismal 40s.

NoCoPilot wrote:

His persona is almost as redefining as Hannah Gadsby.

Hassan's new Netflix comedy special, "The King's Jester," is the first post-"Nanette" special I've seen that really draws on her style.  He mixes up comedy with serious-as-a-heart-attack real life, butting the two up together.  After he antagonized the Saudis, he got real famous for a while but also things got real real "real" for him.  Ever since Kathy Griffin's ordeal after the gag with a severed Donald Trump mask, comedians have been scared of taking on certain bastions of power, because THEY CAN'T TAKE A FUCKING JOKE.  Hassan tells some stories that had me gasping for air, he had me crying hysterically, and he had me laughing out loud.

A masterful, masterful piece of theater.