Now, much of this episode was informative; a little scare-mongering maybe, but informative. John Oliver does not get very political for most of the episode, but after thoroughly scaring the audience about nuclear waste and our lack of permanent storage thereof, he does take a moment to blame politicians for this problem. Now this is important, so pay attention. There is only one politician that John Oliver blames by name. That politician is former Senate Majority Leader, Democrat Harry Reid. If you go to 13:50 in the video I linked, you can see where he does so. He also throws a jab at Rick Perry, but doesn't directly blame him for the problem. At no point does he blame either political party for this problem. (This is bolded for emphasis. Yes, this is important too.)
I thought this was a fairly good episode. Now, it is my understanding that some of the details in this episode may have been misleading. That's just based on a little reading I did after watching this episode, and honestly I forget where I read it or what the issues were. But regardless, that's not what I want to talk about here. The accuracy of the episode is not what I particularly care about.
OK, so I watched some television. And now you know what I watched. What does this have to do with anything? Well, I don't want to talk about nuclear waste. What I want to talk about is watching YouTube. Yes, only a few short days after I watched Last Week Tonight, I got on YouTube and started browsing. One of the people whose channels I was subscribed to at the time (though I rarely watched) was conservative funny man who's open to having his mind changed, Steven Crowder. Yes, I was subscribed to Steven Crowder.
To be specific, I watched this segment that Crowder posted on his YouTube channel. This is supposedly a "rebuttal" of John Oliver's segment on nuclear waste. In reality, it's not a rebuttal at all. John Oliver's segment is specifically about nuclear waste. At no point does he discuss power plant emissions or compare nuclear power to other sources of power. Crowder spends the majority of his segment comparing nuclear plant emissions with coal emissions. He discusses how nuclear power is clean. He discusses how France, which relies on nuclear power, is fairing better than Germany, which is trying to rely on renewable energy. He shows a graph comparing deaths caused by nuclear power versus coal power.
The only problem is, John Oliver's segment actually wasn't arguing to end nuclear power. Nor did John Oliver at any point compare power sources. John Oliver's segment was entirely discussing where to put nuclear waste. So make this my point number one: Steven Crowder's "rebuttal" was not a rebuttal at all. He switched the topic. This is called a red herring, and it is something logicians and philosophers, like myself, are taught to watch out for. A red herring is when you substitute the subject of the debate with a different subject in order to debate on your own terms rather than addressing your opponent's arguments. It is a fallacy because it deceives the audience into thinking you have countered your opponent's claims when in fact you have only changed the subject.
But even more troublesome than the red herring is what Crowder says towards the beginning of his "rebuttal." He's what Crowder says about john Oliver's segment starting in Crowder's video at about 36 seconds in.
"What he [Oliver] does is he presents a problem, OK. Then he talks about how terrible the problem is, and he ignores the fact the democrats have created the problem and republicans tried to fix it for a long time. Then he ignores any solutions, and then he ends by restating how terrible the problem is without offering any solutions. That's the segment." (Bolded for emphasis by me.)
This is the quote that made me stop listening to Crowder forever. First of all, John Oliver did talk about at least one solution. Specifically, he talked about the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. Second of all, John Oliver mentioned only one politician in his entire segment that he blamed for the failure of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Facility. That politician was a democrat, senator Harry Reid. That's right, Crowder accuses John Oliver of letting democrats off the hook for creating the problem of nuclear waste, when in fact the only politician John Oliver directly blames is . . . wait for it . . . a DEMOCRAT!
Call this petty. Call it what you want, but hearing these words out of Crowder's mouth just really irritated me. Here he was, accusing others of partisanship, when he himself was propagating a false narrative. He was creating a narrative that John Oliver was just pandering to a democrat agenda, all the while he himself was pandering to an anti-democrat agenda.
After watching both of these segments again in order to write this post, Crowder's words do not bother me as much now as they did then. Have I just gotten used to his B.S.? Maybe. And I am aware that when I did a little research, some things in John Oliver's segment were not completely accurate (again, I forget what those were. I'll have to research again). But none of that is the point. Crowder's entire "rebuttal" was based on a glaring logical fallacy and . . . what?. . . a lie at worst and lazy partisanship at best. He did not address any substantive claims from John Oliver's segment, and he created a narrative about John Oliver that anyone who watched John Oliver knows is false.
Although I watched Crowder's show little to begin with, and I knew he was more of a comedian than an informed source of knowledge, this was the incident that made me unsubscribe and never watch another complete segment by him again. I sometimes try to; I really do. But I have seen enough not to trust him as a source of much knowledge.
I will admit, he did provide us with a really good meme. It's his politics that are the problem. Well, there you have it. Steven Crowder is logically fallacious and a liar. Change my mind.
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