South Park creators rename show 'South America'

119 points by hermitcrab 12 hours ago on hackernews | 22 comments

throw0101a | 11 hours ago

majorchord | 10 hours ago

That's genius.

PorciiVorbesc | 10 hours ago

Wouldn't 'America Park' been the correct renaming pun?

fishfasell | 10 hours ago

Lake America, Gulf of America, New America, South America

It's consistent. This administration is a colossal failure.

avaer | 10 hours ago

The joke is that it's incorrect and confusing.

majorchord | 2 hours ago

And probably that just using the term "South America" they know would enrage Trump, not only by mocking his America-all-the-things rhetoric, but also by using it to refer to a completely different region that he hates, and they think that's hilarious.

autoexec | 10 hours ago

Trump renames things to "America' as a 'fuck you' to other countries and because to him (and his followers) America means "USA". He's happy to make hateful yet empty gestures that to his base seem to show support for the country while he's robbing it blind and demolishing it. Renaming South Park to South America mocks Trump's renaming of things, but also names South Park after another continent. A continent full of people Trump has repeatedly insulted and bombed. A continent he invaded to take their natural resources.

vlyan | 9 hours ago

I don't think his base is as happy as you seem to believe. I lurked thedonald during the early days of your Special Military Operation, and it is now as anally moderated as r/politics, r/europe, and Russian social media -- inconvenient submissions get removed, detractors get banned. the orange man will eventually shit himself in public and the commissars will ban anyone mentioning it.

a significant percentage of his supporters voted for a respite from the clown world antics of the previous administration and nothing else. the percentage of those who want neocon MIGA bullshit is insignificant, as demonstrated by him trampling over ¡Jeb! and the rest of those fucks in 2016. and now that he had definitely lost that significant chunk, I think republicans will lose the midterms and they won't be in power again until after 8 years of AOC's Clown World Pro Max happening against the background of accelerating decline of your empire.

hungryhobbit | 10 hours ago

Which is a funnier name for a Colorado town: "America Park" or "South America"?

Remember, South Park is a comedy.

epsteingpt | 9 hours ago

Humor is too often lost on HN

keithnz | 10 hours ago

Looking forward to renaming all the states....

Lets start with :-

  America Iceland  (Alaska) 
  America Volcano Vacation Land (Hawaii)
  America Bad Decision Desert (Nevada)
  America Sweaty Peninsula (Florida)

ElProlactin | 9 hours ago

I thought Florida had been renamed Mar-a-Lago.

delichon | 10 hours ago

It would have been fascinating to watch the love-hate battle if Trump had renamed Lake Ontario to Lake Dolly.

fishfasell | 10 hours ago

He's incapable of empathy, his only other option would be Lake Trump. He is quite literally the American Nero.

philipov | 10 hours ago

Nero was just a poor boy who wanted to play the fiddle. Are you sure Caligula isn't a better comparison? He's the one who constantly tried to own the ̶l̶i̶b̶s̶ senate. That's what the whole deal with the horse was about.

_joel | 10 hours ago

I think historians might have something to say about Nero just playing the fiddle. I mean, he literally ordered the murder of his own mother.

randomImmigrant | 10 hours ago

Should Hacker News be renamed Hacker America?

ronsor | 10 hours ago

America News*

tjwebbnorfolk | 9 hours ago

*America America

Eddy_Viscosity2 | 9 hours ago

He's probably already drafting an EO to NASA to rename the sun to "the america".

Smoosh | an hour ago

I think The Dictator covered this:

https://youtu.be/NYJ2w82WifU

JdeBP | 9 hours ago

One of the few good things to have come out of this repeated silliness, is that for 2 years I've witnessed people reading more about what is being altered by these executive orders and sourced by Google Maps et al. and learning why the U.S.A. GNIS is such a woefully bad data source.

And it's not because of the antics of Donald J. Trump. It's been a shit-show for 50 years: a tale of long-term multiple-phase projects losing funding and changing direction mid-phase, of technical debt never dealt with, of the consequences of data entry methodologies, and of cultural erasure because of magtapes encoded in EBCDIC.

(Yes, EBCDIC. There wasn't a systematic deliberate plan to eliminate diacritics from the U.S.A. in the 1970s, as one might guess from observation. There was EBCDIC. In fact, there was initially a plan to put the accents back on, with extra data fields to record the correct names from state-level sources, after moving away from EBCDIC. During the Reagan Era. You can see today how that turned out.)

One bizarre thing, almost as bizarre as the re-spelling of an entire country by EBCDIC, is that the name change from South Park to South America is tame in comparison to the sort of shenanighans that went on in the GNIS. Ghost towns that never existed got named after rural post offices in wide open unpopulated country, railway stations, steam train water stops, local stations serving farms, company executives, loads of springs in California, and in extreme cases things like a fish pond, survey marker trees, and a cage for a monkey. Or a lone building at a crossroads got the name of something else because a map font was difficult to distinguish, or a name printed by something else just happened to run over it.

And then some people handy with computer automation enshrined this rubbish, by mass-importing it into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is still cleaning this up by hand almost two decades later. Oh the wonders that we have collectively done with computers! (-:

The creators of South Park have a long way to go before they are anywhere near as mad as actual history is.

* https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/USGS_GNIS

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliability_of_GNIS_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_Names_Information_S...