I watched South Park for almost 20 years, but stopped about a decade ago. Have the creators ever reconned with their role in normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation?
What I mean is, SP is one of most prominent cultural examples of " both sides are equally bad, everyone and everything sucks", they've had great success with this schtick, ManBearPig, Turd Sandwich, etc. They did a lot of prep work for the current regime, after all, once you but into their mindset, MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.
Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich, the epitome of "both sides are the same." John Kerry would not have invaded Iraq on false pretenses. He wouldn't have perma-fucked the budget with his massive tax cuts for the rich. The GWB administration was a disaster and these guys pretended they were equivalent.
ManBearPig lambasted the very idea of climate change as laughable, and anyone who cared about it was a pussy liberal loser. They have recently walked this back, but the damage is done.
Overall they contributed to the perception that sincerity and earnestness are lame and the only way to appear cool and enlightened is to be a cynic.
> In the 2004 presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members of Skull and Bones. When asked what it meant that both he and George W. Bush were Bonesmen, former presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."[46][47]
John Kerry seemed like a nice guy and I found (and continue to find) the republican attacks on his (and other) military service to be very very distasteful.
Senator Kerry voted for the iraq war.
Al Gore was the guy to get elected and not invade Iraq. Kerry was the following election. The south park episode about that election was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapper_Keeper_(South_Park) but it came out after and was boring.
---
Your example is an episode where they lampoon both candidates.
Why would they? They're firmly in the "too rich to care what the peasants think" bucket as well as not being culturally relevant for 20 years. Honestly, the fact that someone even posted here is pretty cringeworthy.
I think it’s worth watching more recent seasons, at least from the first trump presidency. I agree that they had originally a “both sides bad” approach, but over the last 10 years or so, they have much more clearly come down on the side of “maga is wrong and evil”.
There are still a variety of subjects where I’m sure people on the other side of the aisle would take objection (i think of the ultra PC “pc principal” who demands that everyone honor everyone’s pronouns at the threat of violence). Last couple of years though, the tone has shifted, for example the depiction of trump as the literal duplicate of saddam Hussein and satans new boyfriend, who literally impregnates satan with the Antichrist, and then spends the season trying to abort it.
They satire society and that changes with who is in power. A cartoon that can have pc principal then rebrand him as religious maga fan when the tide changes also satires people who shift who they are when the world changes.
PC Principal has an interesting arc when he hooks up with strong woman and has pc babies who reject his transformation and then ultimately accept him.
> they have much more clearly come down on the side of “maga is wrong and evil”.
That's kinda good to hear - I suppose - but they only did that after the consequences of their destructive actions became clear to them, even though nearly every other intelligent person on the planet had been warning about that.
They have not changed. They still maintain this "enlightened centrist" persona, while claiming "both sides are the same". And their social commentary, if you could call it that, is very tame. They did briefly lean into making politicians out to be evil, but they kind of walked that back and now their story lines read more goofy than anything.
The whole premise of the new season is telling. It's not about the suffering people have gone through due to wars (trade or military) or the food situation (the diarrhea parasite / cancer beef ep writes itself). Nope, it's about how the silly goose in office is renaming stuff.
It's possible to be serious and funny, but the new stuff I've seen has been unserious and unfunny.
They didn't go after Gore because he was wrong. They went after him because he committed the cardinal sin of really, earnestly taking a stand on a big issue. That is NEVER okay in South Park. There is never a correct side. Both sides must always be bad, on every issue. The "correct" view in South Park is always to not really take a stance on anything, and any character who is strongly on one side or the other on any issue will always be portrayed as wrong to do so.
That's not to say that South Park doesn't have some great episodes poking fun at some very deserving targets. They absolutely do. Some real gems in recent seasons.
As an example, you do realize that in the South Park episode where Gerald starts farting into a wine glass after buying an electric car, they're not making fun of people who buy electric cars, but rather people who think they're special for having bought an electric car, right?
And with Gore, it's not that he took a huge stance, it's that his messaging was goofy and ineffective.
Pedantry is a double-edged sword, I replied to a comment beginning with the unequivocal: "They have not changed."
In fact they've changed a lot, their sense of humor, how they make the show, their willingness to embrace a broader viewpoint, and yes their ability to admit that they screwed up something important. It may not be as much change as you'd like, but that's a different question.
If they are centrist and treating both sides the same, what are your favorite Joe Biden jokes from South Park?
Given the number of Trump jokes and the both sidesism you mentioned there should be a lot of material to work with
Yeah! And for that matter, has Jon Stewart atoned for his sin of leaving The Daily Show in 2015? If he had stayed, no way Trump could have won! And why didn't Oprah run in 2024--she could have saved us! It's all their fault!
Get real.
I don't think South Park ever implied both parties are equally bad. Just that they are both bad. And I don't think irreverent satire is prep work or psy-op propaganda for an authoritarian government. If anything, it's the inoculation.
It's quite clear that you haven't watched the series in the past decade. I'm sure you wouldn't be crowing the same tune if you'd watched the Mr. Garrison storyline.
I watched the first 13 seasons of South Park as they aired and the post you're replying to feels like at least a sincere and reasonable interpretation of SP's politics.
What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from?
Why is it insufficient to (assuming the poster isn't lying to us) watch SP for 20 years before drawing a conclusion about it and the creators? They owned up to not having watched recently before asking about whether things have changed. I don't understand the weird hostility in your post when they owned up to the limitations of their PoV.
It's not the voters, the party apparatchiks, (social) media barons, big-dollar donors--no, it's those pesky artists who are responsible for "normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation"!
Besides that, they indeed "owned up" that they hadn't watched it in over a decade. Not only would they plausibly have drawn a different conclusion if they had, but it's just a bit ridiculous to blame some TV series 10+ years ago for "the current situation".
Hence my comparison to Jon Stewart's contemporaneous departure from The Daily Show, which is a "media butterfly effect" I see more frequently blamed in Democrat-leaning circles.
south park is a product of the 1990's! its origins lean heavily on the still-true left/democratic party's pro-censorship leanings
just because the recent right/republicans were able to more effectively lean into the meme-heavy southpark-type (crude, male-targeted) humor as marketing doesn't really track with your last assertion (for me)
broadly speaking, it _is_ factually incorrect to say that. Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access. No one on "the left" is trying to pass a law saying that people should get jail time for using the R-word.
Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship. And it's not splitting hairs to say this; words have meaning and though 'censorship' is particularly abused, it is still quite different from me looking down on someone who uses the R slur on X (as I do daily)
> Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access
Wikipedia and the ACLU both use a more expansive definition, where your definition is only 1 type of censorship. The "Left" uses empathy to convince people to self-censor and less often uses "Cancel Culture" to pressure companies into private censorship.
There are more subtle forms of censorship, continuously employed by the government to prop up or push down various things. Covid had many such examples of pressure tactics from the government come to light but I'm sure it happens constantly.
For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.
How did the institutions dominated by the left react to dissent when it came to COVID 19 policy? Like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Were they open with speculation about the virus, vaccine policy or the lockdowns? Or did they censor Disinformation and Misinformation on Campus, on social media,and at the work place?
The Christian right was trying to ban books in the 70s/80s. Fought heavy metal music in the 80s. Then you have 911 censorship. But after 2008 the left brought woke to power which saw banning people from twitter, social media, right speech. Then we reached covid which saw banning of facts. Deplatforming / banning / doxing became the norm until the return of Trump who then moved the needle and started pro Jewish censorship which has pushed the needle for the anti Jewish censorship crew which is taking over.
Harry Potter is the funniest example because it started out being a target of the evangelical "right" and has become a target of the culture-war "left"!
I feel it worth pointing out an important distinction between censorship coming from "the left" vs. that coming from "the right".
On the left, when someone uses a racial or sexist epithet, for example, the reaction is to exert social pressure against that individual. Social media escalates that to a giant dogpile, which, in some cases, results in some extreme cases where the individual loses their job in addition to becoming a social pariah.
However, all of this is merely an exercise in free speech and free association. The person in question suffers no legal consequences for their speech. Instead, it is a large number of onlookers who decide they disagree with the individual and choose to counter him/her with their own speech and/or dissolve any association they have with him/her.
I won't say I condone how little it takes for the crowd to react sometimes or the extent to which they do, but everything is well within First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
In contrast, when something the right doesn't like is discovered, they take legal action. Books are removed from public and school libraries. Laws are written to target anyone who is guilty of the offensive speech (e.g., Florida's Don't Say Gay law). More recently, it's been popular to write these laws such that the offending individuals are opened to civil suits by third parties rather than suffer jail time, as a loophole trying to avoid the Supreme Court striking them down as blatant First Amendment violations.
> On the left, when someone uses a racial or sexist epithet, for example, the reaction is to exert social pressure against that individual. Social media escalates that to a giant dogpile
Not sure it’s correct to characterize that as a reaction of only the “left” - case in point, the reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death.
I think they're largely making fun of extremes, whether left, right or Kanye West, Disney/China, Scientology etc. (And once in a while apologize when they get it wrong, like Man Bear Pig) Lately the extremes are more extreme and powerful on the right and so more episodes target that
The last season made fun of ICE, Peter Thiel, Trump-gift-based-economy, shitcoins and so on (Labubus, 67, ...)
They also poked fun at themselves that South Park sucks now as it's all about politics, which I don't think they ever really wanted
Agreed. And they have been poking fun at the right for decades. Heck they made a whole movie about how ridiculous the global war on terror was, back in 2004.
I also watched it in its prime when I was a teenager, but have hardly watched any in the last 10 years. It feels similar to The Simpsons where they're mostly reacting to the latest news and popular culture, which I don't find as enjoyable.
I think it's hard to say how much they are responsible for modern politics vs just a reflection of the attitudes that created it. This piece[1] from 2020 puts it pretty well I think. Either way it's hard for me to look at old episodes like "The Death Camp of Tolerance" without seeing a precursor to "anti-wokism".
>Political correctness is itself a fascinating term. Its elastic, capacious usage has grown to encompass just about anything conservative political culture would prefer not to talk about. Like South Park’s own essential premises, it judges the crime of bringing things up—grand injustices or just hurt feelings—to be worse than any unfairness, inequity, or simple rudeness. It is a sort of singular and universal commandment: Moses gone up the mountain to return with a single tablet that proclaims, “Stop complaining!”
Well, in fairness, both sides were bad, and still are -- although, now, one side is spectacularly worse. Dems can't ever agree on a candidate or position or message, and intentionally run candidates the otherside would abhore, and Republicans would happily vote in unison for an old shoe as long as it was sufficiently dog-whistley.
One "side" is actively and intentionally destroying the country, the other is letting them. It's not that both sides are bad, it's that both sides are the same side, working for the same people.
No; the cruel libertarian streak that has been at the basis of the show since inception is still ever present.
They are still very good about not punching down and I think that is one of the nicer things to say about the show but their shtick got old during the 45th admin and I haven't tuned back since.
I love the idea that one side has simply been historically evil in your mind, and that by not spending most of their time explaining carefully to everyone how that group IS in fact evil and despicable, they're somehow part of the extremist group having found a populist president amid a nation that generally has extremely low voter turnout.
Your style of thinking in and of itself could be a SP episode
I thought Turd Sandwich fairly accurately captured what was and still is often a common sentiment that hasn't gone away just because the U.S federal government is conducting itself in such an uncommonly (although not that uncommonly) abhorrent way. A similar sort of election plays out every year and many levels of government in many countries. It's usually between some douche and some turd, and things rarely change for the better as a consequence, so people who feel apathetic and forgotten about don't bother, while people who fear what the other side will do try to convince everyone else theirs is correct. Tale as old as any two-party system.
I never felt as though it was a "both sides are equally stupid" sort of perspective, but rather more like "both sides are at least worth making fun of" along with the people who religiously feel that only their side isn't worth mocking. As in, whichever group seems to be trying to be the most pious, most sanctimonious, the most evidently rediculous, is effectively the one most worth mocking.
I think they have a lot of good material to work with going into this next season, and some of it will hit, and some will miss, for varying reasons, as is the way of all previous seasons. I personally worry that it'll be too politically oriented, because as a subject it just gets boring, but as a Canadian I've always got a kick of out the stupidity that is whatever comes out of the U.S. We're facing the side-effects of our own internal misgivings and trusting the U.S too much, but the U.S seems to be burning itself to the ground.
which benefits fascists, generally speaking. degrading global social communication enables the basal ganglia into the local us vs them.
As much as I find satire amusing, a lot of it does not do what people think it does as effectively in this context.
Sacha baron cohen, sining throw the jews down the well had a bunch of racists singing it with zero care what it's satiring. Dave chapelle did similar to black culture. South park gets pretty close to the same.
theres a bit overeliance on satirization. Paul ryan wasn't satirically listening to "Rage against the machine"; he was actively trying to redefine it for his own delusion.
> Sacha baron cohen, sining throw the jews down the well had a bunch of racists singing it with zero care what it's satiring. Dave chapelle did similar to black culture. South park gets pretty close to the same.
I worked with people who totally missed the sarcasm and satire in Parker & Stone's Team America World Police and legit thought it was just a cool action movie about America kicking the world's ass. I had to double check before it dawned on me that they were serious.
It's the same reason I can't watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Rick & Morty anymore, despite them being great shows. The parts they're lampooning are the parts most celebrated.
Or another example is Springsteens "Born in the USA" being played at so many political rallies: Reagan, Dole, Buchanan, Trump (without permission).
Sarcasm wasn't designed for these people. They're simple people that will never allow themselves to be educated. Sarcasm is not for them, it's for the people around them.
You will never be able to stop the simple minded racist with your educational movie. He only consumes media that appeals to him. "Go woke go broke!" as they say. If you want to get through to him you need to appeal to his smarter friends and family. You can bring them together with sarcasm more than any other tool, because two people of opposing views can relate to the same media.
guywithahat | 13 hours ago
bena | 12 hours ago
sethops1 | 11 hours ago
tt24 | 11 hours ago
bliteben | 11 hours ago
mdp2021 | 11 hours ago
Fricken | 6 hours ago
martythemaniak | 13 hours ago
What I mean is, SP is one of most prominent cultural examples of " both sides are equally bad, everyone and everything sucks", they've had great success with this schtick, ManBearPig, Turd Sandwich, etc. They did a lot of prep work for the current regime, after all, once you but into their mindset, MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.
lobf | 12 hours ago
liveoneggs | 12 hours ago
lobf | 11 hours ago
ManBearPig lambasted the very idea of climate change as laughable, and anyone who cared about it was a pussy liberal loser. They have recently walked this back, but the damage is done.
Overall they contributed to the perception that sincerity and earnestness are lame and the only way to appear cool and enlightened is to be a cynic.
Lammy | 9 hours ago
idk I feel like an election boiling down to “Which Bonesman would you like?” is a valid thing to question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones#Notable_member...
> In the 2004 presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members of Skull and Bones. When asked what it meant that both he and George W. Bush were Bonesmen, former presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."[46][47]
lobf | 8 hours ago
Lammy | 3 hours ago
liveoneggs | 7 hours ago
Senator Kerry voted for the iraq war.
Al Gore was the guy to get elected and not invade Iraq. Kerry was the following election. The south park episode about that election was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapper_Keeper_(South_Park) but it came out after and was boring.
---
Your example is an episode where they lampoon both candidates.
xingped | 12 hours ago
mattzito | 12 hours ago
There are still a variety of subjects where I’m sure people on the other side of the aisle would take objection (i think of the ultra PC “pc principal” who demands that everyone honor everyone’s pronouns at the threat of violence). Last couple of years though, the tone has shifted, for example the depiction of trump as the literal duplicate of saddam Hussein and satans new boyfriend, who literally impregnates satan with the Antichrist, and then spends the season trying to abort it.
kylehotchkiss | 12 hours ago
ipaddr | 11 hours ago
PC Principal has an interesting arc when he hooks up with strong woman and has pc babies who reject his transformation and then ultimately accept him.
antonvs | 11 hours ago
That's kinda good to hear - I suppose - but they only did that after the consequences of their destructive actions became clear to them, even though nearly every other intelligent person on the planet had been warning about that.
mywittyname | 12 hours ago
The whole premise of the new season is telling. It's not about the suffering people have gone through due to wars (trade or military) or the food situation (the diarrhea parasite / cancer beef ep writes itself). Nope, it's about how the silly goose in office is renaming stuff.
It's possible to be serious and funny, but the new stuff I've seen has been unserious and unfunny.
EA-3167 | 12 hours ago
How is that not changing?
CobrastanJorji | 11 hours ago
They didn't go after Gore because he was wrong. They went after him because he committed the cardinal sin of really, earnestly taking a stand on a big issue. That is NEVER okay in South Park. There is never a correct side. Both sides must always be bad, on every issue. The "correct" view in South Park is always to not really take a stance on anything, and any character who is strongly on one side or the other on any issue will always be portrayed as wrong to do so.
That's not to say that South Park doesn't have some great episodes poking fun at some very deserving targets. They absolutely do. Some real gems in recent seasons.
kulahan | 10 hours ago
And with Gore, it's not that he took a huge stance, it's that his messaging was goofy and ineffective.
Satire is dead, I guess.
EA-3167 | 10 hours ago
In fact they've changed a lot, their sense of humor, how they make the show, their willingness to embrace a broader viewpoint, and yes their ability to admit that they screwed up something important. It may not be as much change as you'd like, but that's a different question.
Gud | 3 hours ago
No champion of the environment gallivants in a jet and lives in a mansion.
Whoppertime | 11 hours ago
cucumber3732842 | 10 hours ago
Shame. I wonder if they got "talked to."
kyboren | 12 hours ago
Get real.
I don't think South Park ever implied both parties are equally bad. Just that they are both bad. And I don't think irreverent satire is prep work or psy-op propaganda for an authoritarian government. If anything, it's the inoculation.
It's quite clear that you haven't watched the series in the past decade. I'm sure you wouldn't be crowing the same tune if you'd watched the Mr. Garrison storyline.
kg | 12 hours ago
What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from?
Why is it insufficient to (assuming the poster isn't lying to us) watch SP for 20 years before drawing a conclusion about it and the creators? They owned up to not having watched recently before asking about whether things have changed. I don't understand the weird hostility in your post when they owned up to the limitations of their PoV.
Jtsummers | 12 hours ago
It started about 10 years ago, when the person apparently stopped watching it, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
kyboren | 8 hours ago
It's not the voters, the party apparatchiks, (social) media barons, big-dollar donors--no, it's those pesky artists who are responsible for "normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation"!
Besides that, they indeed "owned up" that they hadn't watched it in over a decade. Not only would they plausibly have drawn a different conclusion if they had, but it's just a bit ridiculous to blame some TV series 10+ years ago for "the current situation".
Hence my comparison to Jon Stewart's contemporaneous departure from The Daily Show, which is a "media butterfly effect" I see more frequently blamed in Democrat-leaning circles.
Lammy | 12 hours ago
For just one of them, ‘it never happened’ :p https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-a...
liveoneggs | 12 hours ago
just because the recent right/republicans were able to more effectively lean into the meme-heavy southpark-type (crude, male-targeted) humor as marketing doesn't really track with your last assertion (for me)
edoceo | 11 hours ago
henryfjordan | 11 hours ago
Saying the Left are "pro-censorship" is not factually incorrect but definitely has a different connotation.
coloneltcb | 10 hours ago
Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship. And it's not splitting hairs to say this; words have meaning and though 'censorship' is particularly abused, it is still quite different from me looking down on someone who uses the R slur on X (as I do daily)
henryfjordan | 10 hours ago
Wikipedia and the ACLU both use a more expansive definition, where your definition is only 1 type of censorship. The "Left" uses empathy to convince people to self-censor and less often uses "Cancel Culture" to pressure companies into private censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship
sapphicsnail | 8 hours ago
seba_dos1 | 4 hours ago
ipaddr | 10 hours ago
Cancel culture is literally censorship. Deplatforming is censorship. Debanked is censorship.
I don't know what the R word is but there is a group of people you can't even look down at because they have been deplatformed and cancelled.
The left has passed laws and people do get jail time for social media posts in the UK.
liveoneggs | 6 hours ago
For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.
GJim | an hour ago
??
Whoppertime | 11 hours ago
liveoneggs | 10 hours ago
k12sosse | 9 hours ago
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XVbLmexU8
https://genius.com/Megadeth-hook-in-mouth-lyrics
ipaddr | 10 hours ago
liveoneggs | 5 hours ago
joquarky | 10 hours ago
atmavatar | 10 hours ago
On the left, when someone uses a racial or sexist epithet, for example, the reaction is to exert social pressure against that individual. Social media escalates that to a giant dogpile, which, in some cases, results in some extreme cases where the individual loses their job in addition to becoming a social pariah.
However, all of this is merely an exercise in free speech and free association. The person in question suffers no legal consequences for their speech. Instead, it is a large number of onlookers who decide they disagree with the individual and choose to counter him/her with their own speech and/or dissolve any association they have with him/her.
I won't say I condone how little it takes for the crowd to react sometimes or the extent to which they do, but everything is well within First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
In contrast, when something the right doesn't like is discovered, they take legal action. Books are removed from public and school libraries. Laws are written to target anyone who is guilty of the offensive speech (e.g., Florida's Don't Say Gay law). More recently, it's been popular to write these laws such that the offending individuals are opened to civil suits by third parties rather than suffer jail time, as a loophole trying to avoid the Supreme Court striking them down as blatant First Amendment violations.
cr1895 | 3 hours ago
Not sure it’s correct to characterize that as a reaction of only the “left” - case in point, the reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death.
dktp | 11 hours ago
The last season made fun of ICE, Peter Thiel, Trump-gift-based-economy, shitcoins and so on (Labubus, 67, ...)
They also poked fun at themselves that South Park sucks now as it's all about politics, which I don't think they ever really wanted
I'm a big fan though
ipython | 11 hours ago
a34729t | 10 hours ago
jsiepkes | 11 hours ago
why_at | 11 hours ago
I think it's hard to say how much they are responsible for modern politics vs just a reflection of the attitudes that created it. This piece[1] from 2020 puts it pretty well I think. Either way it's hard for me to look at old episodes like "The Death Camp of Tolerance" without seeing a precursor to "anti-wokism".
>Political correctness is itself a fascinating term. Its elastic, capacious usage has grown to encompass just about anything conservative political culture would prefer not to talk about. Like South Park’s own essential premises, it judges the crime of bringing things up—grand injustices or just hurt feelings—to be worse than any unfairness, inequity, or simple rudeness. It is a sort of singular and universal commandment: Moses gone up the mountain to return with a single tablet that proclaims, “Stop complaining!”
[1]https://newrepublic.com/article/157066/watching-south-park-e...
k12sosse | 9 hours ago
skygazer | 11 hours ago
psadauskas | 11 hours ago
plussed_reader | 11 hours ago
They are still very good about not punching down and I think that is one of the nicer things to say about the show but their shtick got old during the 45th admin and I haven't tuned back since.
kulahan | 11 hours ago
Your style of thinking in and of itself could be a SP episode
brailsafe | 7 hours ago
I never felt as though it was a "both sides are equally stupid" sort of perspective, but rather more like "both sides are at least worth making fun of" along with the people who religiously feel that only their side isn't worth mocking. As in, whichever group seems to be trying to be the most pious, most sanctimonious, the most evidently rediculous, is effectively the one most worth mocking.
I think they have a lot of good material to work with going into this next season, and some of it will hit, and some will miss, for varying reasons, as is the way of all previous seasons. I personally worry that it'll be too politically oriented, because as a subject it just gets boring, but as a Canadian I've always got a kick of out the stupidity that is whatever comes out of the U.S. We're facing the side-effects of our own internal misgivings and trusting the U.S too much, but the U.S seems to be burning itself to the ground.
gmuslera | 12 hours ago
When names collide everything start to lose meaning.
cyanydeez | 11 hours ago
As much as I find satire amusing, a lot of it does not do what people think it does as effectively in this context.
Sacha baron cohen, sining throw the jews down the well had a bunch of racists singing it with zero care what it's satiring. Dave chapelle did similar to black culture. South park gets pretty close to the same.
theres a bit overeliance on satirization. Paul ryan wasn't satirically listening to "Rage against the machine"; he was actively trying to redefine it for his own delusion.
ryandrake | 11 hours ago
I worked with people who totally missed the sarcasm and satire in Parker & Stone's Team America World Police and legit thought it was just a cool action movie about America kicking the world's ass. I had to double check before it dawned on me that they were serious.
mulderc | 11 hours ago
etempleton | 9 hours ago
croon | an hour ago
Or another example is Springsteens "Born in the USA" being played at so many political rallies: Reagan, Dole, Buchanan, Trump (without permission).
philipallstar | 11 hours ago
behringer | 11 hours ago
You will never be able to stop the simple minded racist with your educational movie. He only consumes media that appeals to him. "Go woke go broke!" as they say. If you want to get through to him you need to appeal to his smarter friends and family. You can bring them together with sarcasm more than any other tool, because two people of opposing views can relate to the same media.
throw0101a | 11 hours ago
“We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount -- a Skydance Capitulation.” (née 'Corporation')
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Skydance
grebc | 11 hours ago
ChrisMarshallNY | 11 hours ago
justin66 | 11 hours ago
krapp | 10 hours ago
brailsafe | 8 hours ago
This must be why MAANGO companies require 24hrs of fasting prior to the on-site
euroderf | an hour ago
Decisions, decisions. Microsoft/Meta Amazon/Apple/Alphabet Netflix/Nvidia Google Oracle ?
ChrisMarshallNY | 11 hours ago
Sick burn.
ctippett | 11 hours ago
publlus_enigma | 9 hours ago
dzogchen | 11 hours ago
doublerabbit | 11 hours ago
Markoff | 2 hours ago
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/588794-x-twitter-to-nitter...
UnitedStateser | 11 hours ago
irishcoffee | 11 hours ago
I’m trying to understand and I just don’t get it.
unrented7977 | 10 hours ago
It isn't funny, it's just dark
euroderf | an hour ago
shawn_w | 9 hours ago
aristofun | 7 hours ago