South Park is a pile of garbage that insults anyone that dares to make the mistake of caring about anything. It doesn't "insult everyone equally" as much as it insults anyone that cares about making the world anything other than the status quo.
Are you kidding? The town of South Park has really gone up in the world with their new CtyPaTown and Whole Foods Market. They've become a worldly, sophisticated town full of charming and educated people.
He or she is concluding that the only reason why the author could relate is because of the colour of his skin. And the connection there is that because he's white and has an opinion that this person doesn't agree with, that it's obviously because he's white, and not because of any other reason.
Maybe it's because these opinions are utter shit. Maybe treating peoples' grievances as sincere expressions of personal self-interest instead of reflexively treating them as imbeciles, charlatans, or malefactors is how one gets treated with respect in kind.
Maybe people catch on that garbage comes out of one's mouth is always reactionary rejection of other peoples' experiences and stop pretending one is acting in good faith.
At the root of it, wholesale asserting that someone's grievances are invalid because they are too stupid or too malevolent to understand their own life experience is a very stupid kind of elitism.
South Park is a mouthpiece for very stupid elitism. It's not exclusive to generic men like Stone and Parker but it's also very commonly preferred by generic men who haven't outgrown their misanthropic teenager phase.
“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” -Toni Morrison
So maybe white, but possibly not. It is a personal decision. It is a statement about one's personal politics where one sees their identity as either apolitical or that it ought to be apolitical. Perhaps even that identity politics itself should not be a thing. A politics of generic identity.
I said 'men' because I was referring to Stone and Parker. Their politics epitomize genericity and a politics of being apolitical which is functionally a reactionary politics.
You're taking quite the issue with the comedy stylings of a tv show that has long taken shots at anything that takes itself seriously. I suspect you take your politics very seriously indeed, but that doesn't make them actually serious. If you learn the distinction, you'll have less agita over entertainment.
Upvoted because I don't think you should be silenced for your believes, but I disagree with you.
Many of us have personal grievances, and if the words of these folks should be believed, than mine are as real as theirs. Yet I do not expect the world to change to fit my narrative.
If you have personal grievances and you choose not to lobby for your self-interest then you've deemed those grievances as unimportant, or subordinate to some personal principle of yours. I'm sure because it is a tautology that if you have a compelling enough self-interest to advocate for yourself in some social context, be it the workplace, school, the household, local government, national government, social media or any place really, you will. Because that's what any rational human being would do.
What you are implying is that those other people are valuing their grievances incorrectly: They aren't as important as they think they are. After all, you don't value your own grievances as much.
I think that's a logical error.
And rooted in all of this, and I am not accusing you of doing this because we haven't brought up any specific examples, but there's a cognitive bias that people have where they think they can judge other peoples' life experiences just as well as those people, and that their value judgments are in some way objective and do not depend on the differences in social context between them and those people.
Most modern ideologies that aren't some authoritarian or paternalistic drivel soundly disagree with such fallacious reasoning.
My point of view is that I'm not as smart as I think I am about other people, and if I had a tv show I could use as a bully pulpit I wouldn't be using it to say "lol what a bunch of s aren't they so stupid and absurd"?
South Park is a weekly morality play espousing the virtues of a nihilistic "libertarianism"* that appeals to the kind of person who wants to be reassured that not caring about other human beings is laudable behavior.
* I don't like libertarianism and have been known to vigorously dissent with its principles, but even I wouldn't stoop so low as to consider South Park a reflection of the views of a sincere and thoughtful libertarian.
I'm truly sorry that you think libertarian philosophy means not caring for your fellow human. The very reason I reject the "we'll stomp you in the throat until you comply" authoritarian approaches of the left/right is precisely because I care about others.
Libertarianism has a lot of 'freedom!' rhetoric, but absolutely nothing in it is community-building. Any care for fellow humans in libertarianism (though I have yet to see a libertarian argue for community over individuality in anything) comes a distant second to "my stuff is MY stuff".
Libertarianism is a philosophy that rewards the wealthy and those with in-demand skills. It very much isn't a philosophy about caring for fellow humans in any way but lip service.
A libertarian must necessarily believe, I think, that markets work to enable technological progress, and that technological progress "lifts all boats" (with a much stronger effect-size than that of direct economic stimulus.)
Being a libertarian and not believing these things sounds like a very sociopathic mindset, I agree. If you think "turning the economic crank as fast as possible" won't eventually invent us all flying cars and diseaseless super-bodies and free food-dispensers (and a pony!), then it's pretty obvious that redistributing wealth is the "right thing to do."
But if you do believe that, then you have to measure the ROI of each dollar spent investing in the economy (and thus in turning the technological crank) vs. direct redistributive charity, as a means of helping the people on the bottom. Personally, I don't think it's clear which direction has higher ROI.
Part of the philosophy of libertarianism is the idea that if you allow people to cooperate (eg: build a community) they will advance faster... and looking at what happened in China and India when those countries legalized capitalism, the libertarians have a good point.
This is, of course, an economic perspective, but the history of economics generally agrees with them.
Capitalism is not a binary state. Chinese capitalism is not American capitalism is not Western European capitalism.
Herein is one of the huge problems of libertarianism - there's no space for shades of gray. Everything is an absolute, a binary; either something is or something isn't, but the real world doesn't work that way. Some capitalism is good. Unfettered capitalism is not - the libertarian cry of "well if someone wrongs you, then sue them for damages in court" is all but useless. You may not even know which chemical company was poisoning the air you have been breathing for 10 years that caused your illness, but libertarians wouldn't restrict the company's actions ahead of time; apparently a monetary settlement (that of course an individual will be able to force a large company into settling in courts...) is always an appropriate solution.
Hell, one libertarian I was talking to was suggesting privatising courts, and saying that the courts would be paid on performance. Somehow he thought that would mean the courts would be fair, rather than heavily biased to the private entity providing the paycheck.
So, we'd end up with a system where the only restriction on capitalism would be actions performed well after the fact. We've seen what happens when profit motives are unfettered, and it's not pretty.
> So, we'd end up with a system where the only restriction on capitalism would be actions performed well after the fact.
Why is that a problem specific to capitalism? What system of justice prevents everything up front? As long as justice is somewhat predictable, others can plan based on what will happen to them.
For example, we are currently in a system where the only restriction on murder is an action performed well after the fact (e.g., prison).
> Herein is one of the huge problems of libertarianism - there's no space for shades of gray.
That's not how I see it. Markets are one big shade of gray. There's nothing absolute about them at all.
Libertarians argue against regulations, which are restrictions in place ahead of time. I find it disturbing that you are oblivious to that, even though you're responding to a comment which mentions air quality as an issue. As it stands, government regulations limit air pollution. Libertarians would remove those regulations and move the onus onto individuals to prove their cases in court.
> What system of justice prevents everything up front?
Where did I say 'everything'? This is exactly what I mean by libertarianism has no shades of gray.
> Markets are one big shade of gray.
'Unpredictability' is not the gray we're talking about here.
> That is some seriously twisted logic to turn 'regulations' into 'restrictions implemented after the event'.
I don't really understand where your confusion is coming from. Regulations usually take the form of, "X is now illegal. If you do X, you will be punished with Y." It's pretty uninteresting if you ask me. People then avoid doing X because they don't want to be punished by Y.
Say a new regulation is passed that says dumping waste in the local river is illegal. Governments don't then station officials watching every corner of the river preventing waste from being dumped. People can still dump if they want. But if they're caught, they now face a potentially severe penalty.
There is very little difference from how regulations fundamentally operate than how other laws function. "Don't do X. If you do, we'll do Y to you." Pretty simple. The same kind of thing is prescribed by libertarians too. The only real difference is that libertarians would like to do it without coercion. (Since most libertarians view the State as the biggest perpetrator of coercion, they understandably want to reduce or eliminate it.) None of this implies that regulations like "don't dump waste in the river" can't exist if the State were reduced or eliminated.
> My criticisms would apply equally to those as well.
I gave you an example in my initial comment that demonstrates how your criticism is far more broadly applicable than just libertarianism.
Every party has flaws. Every philosophy that derives from first principles has flaws. If there's a flaw in libertarianism, it's that it doesn't recognize externalities well.
That it infuriates you is problematic. I bounce all over the spectrum on what I believe, and I frequent the DMV voter registration guy to change parties enough that he knows me by name. That said, no matter how much you love any particular philosophy, it can't always hold to be the rightest thing ever.
The American left thinks that it's too burdensome to demand an ID to exercise the right to vote, which isn't even enumerated in the constitution, but think that in-depth background checks are perfectly acceptable to purchase a firearm. The American right feels exactly the opposite. A true civil libertarian believes that an ID infringes on both, and would reject registration hurdles for both.
In scenarios like this I believe that libertarians hold the most enlightened view, which is why I sometimes refer to myself as a libertarian for convenience, depending on the conversation.
> libertarianism has no shades of gray.
On this I disagree vehemently. There are many, many shades of gray within libertarianism. Yes, there are absolutists in every camp, and yes, as with every other camp, they tend to be vocal, but there's no singular libertarian rulebook that everybody follows. There's even a Wiki article on their quibbles:
Generally speaking, the one universal truth within libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, which states that force should not be used. As most penalties eventually result in force (not paying taxes results in jail), it tends to seem absolutist, but not all libertarians are propertarians, nor are they universally opposed to business obligations (like carbon offsets and the like).
> Generally speaking, the one universal truth within libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, which states that force should not be used.
Which is one of the most nonsensical things about libertarianism - that any time authority want you do to something, it's referred to as 'violence'. It's 'violence' because if you keep refusing to comply, then at the end of a long chain of events, eventually an authorised officer will start to manhandle you. Hence even the smallest thing becomes 'violence'.
Yet...
Libertarianism offers "the courts" as the solution to pretty much all disputes. What happens when someone doesn't comply with court rulings? The court finds that your activities have injured your neighbour and you must give remuneration. You flip off both the court and the neighbour. What happens now? Libertarianism has quite a few of these blind spots.
Again, you don't have to be a Libertarian to be for civil liberties.
> What happens when someone doesn't comply with court rulings?
Again, that problem is not specific to libertarianism. Every socioeconomic system must address it, and none of the solutions are pretty. In our current world, a person who ignores a court's ruling is physically forced to comply. I don't see any particular reason why something similar couldn't work in a more libertarian world.
I agree with you, but as you mention, it's not building the community.
It's always worth noting that you don't have to be libertarian to believe in strengthening civil liberties. Libertarianism is but one flavour of that section of the political pie.
I agree with you 100%, concerning this comment and others you've made in this thread.
For a long time South Park has pushed the message that apathy is cool, and while protest, pacifism, and consideration for social issues is, as the creators would probably put it, "gay".
People can claim that it's entertainment all they want, but it's undeniably influential. And people like this season because of its especially strong resonance with other brain-dead ideas they have about "SJWs", "MGTOW", "Dindu Nothings", "Tumblrinas", etc.
Not really sure why South Park is getting so much praise these days. Very little has changed from the previous seasons in terms of its outrageousness and the things it satirizes.
I think the creators are just doing what they usually do which is take advantage of a controversial topic and satirize it. I guess it just so happens that more people care about the topic at hand (political correctness) and empathize with it.
This also is, to my recollection, the first time that they took one topic and went with it for a whole season. That is not to say that they deliberately singled this topic out for more attention; rather, it seems to be following a trend that they started last season where it felt like they experimented with more season long connections.
Not really though, last year they had Randy play Lorde for the whole season. And they've been doing 2-3 episode stories for a while. Even in this season the Yelp episode was off topic from the main plot.
-> Even in this season the Yelp episode was off topic from the main plot.
Was it, though? It seemed like the the chiding of Yelpers directly ties in to how people take their (perhaps authoritarian) views and opinions on things as sacrosanct and beyond reproach. In the same way that the PC Bros feel they're obligated to check everyone's privilege, the Yelpers felt like, if they weren't reviewing, no one would know anything about eating.
I read somewhere (on Facebook FWIW) that the storyline for this season was originally pitched as another South Park movie. When it didn't get up as a movie, they decided to make a season out of it instead.
> "South Park" used to be so anti-continuity - its episodes are often written days before airing
That last fact needs extra emphasis. The multi-month lead time needed for every other scripted show on Television means that South Park is the only show that can pull Ripped-From-the-Headlines commentary without things being dated by the time the episode airs. (Law and Order: SVU is show that is guilty of this to a hilarious degree)
I think "scripted" is the right word in this case.
"Procedural" refers to a specific type of scripted television, typically but not always a legal, medical, or law-enforcement drama. A procedural show follows the same format every episode: a mystery of some kind is introduced (medical, crime, or what have you), and the characters go through the procedures of solving the mystery. Law & Order: SVU can be described as a procedural; South Park cannot, unless you're using a very very loose definition of the term.
If you're looking at this in terms of nested sets or categories:
- Scripted vs. Nonscripted
- Comedy vs. Drama (usually also means half-hour vs. hour)
- Episodic (every episode is self-contained) vs. Serialized (the show follows an overall, evolving storyline that builds each episode)
- Subgenre
So a show like L&O: SVU would be a scripted, one-hour drama in the crime procedural subgenre. (We could also describe the show as episodic, but given that all procedurals are episodic, this would be redundant.)
South Park is a scripted, half-hour comedy in the animation subgenre that typically follows an episodic format, with occasional serialized story arcs spanning multiple episodes (and in the case of this season, the whole season).
I once watched every episode of every season back to back consecutively (over the course of a month and a half) in order to test a thesis that I have about the long term themes in the show. I and a friend of mine had an informal theory that there was along term plot line involving the cows of southpark and the aliens, and that in the end each major character's story line will wrap up in some way that brings closure to their particular character story line.
tldr if there is a long term story it is very loose.
There has been long term development of some themes, each of the four characters has a key characteristic that I do think develops over time, but not with the same hidden strong continuity that I expected to find when I set out on this journey.
Most notably Randy's deteriorating marriage to Sharon, Stan's loneliness and insecurity about his family, (and Shelly) progresses from season to season
Cartman's relationship with his mother and his coming to terms with his weight, possible homosexuality, and finding his father progresses from season to season.
I looked to find development in Kyle's moral compass but could not discern anything.
Kenny overcoming his identity as "the poor kid" for lack of a better term seems to progress as well.
I watch the show less often now because that sprint was enough South Park to last a lifetime but I look forward to seeing how the show wraps up and if there is any closure instead of just ending in a fart joke.
It's really pretty impressive how quickly they churn out episodes. "Six Days to Air" is a really interesting documentary on that process. I wish they had included more details on how they manage to get all of the animation and artwork done in such a short time window. They've got to have invested some considerable effort in their tooling and processes to support that - and they do touch briefly on the original way that the pilot and early seasons were produced, stop-motion with construction paper.
Just the facial animation to sync up the mouths with the script, limited as it is in South Park, has to have some interesting automation underlying it. Unless they've got a huge army of animators chained to their desks pushing sprites around that they didn't show.
Outrage is a choice, and it isn't one made by those who are willing to have an adult discussion about a topic.
I think MLK's strategy is the absolute gold standard for promoting intelligent discussion around social issues. Outrage won't solve anything, other than to silence dissent. And what a terrible world that would be to live in.
Couldn't that be the heart of why Seinfeld doesn't play university campuses anymore and Bill Mahar's critique of us millennials as pampered p%ssies? An inability to hear differing viewpoints without them being shouted down and Yale Halloween costume girl screaming at guy she helped elect? It cannot be a legitimate, honest academic environment when the groupthink, thoughpolice are in charge, or when students are merely customers to appease at every moment... respectful debate and challenging of views, assumptions and ethical rationale gets lost.
Doesn't it seem currently (as also dramatized by SP) to be a war of emotional extortion of whom can most, disproportionately bully others with their micropain and force the rest of us to change our language every other week and walk on eggshells? (Sure, real sensitivity to prevent actual offense; and address actual bullying.)
"of whom can most, disproportionately bully others with their micro pain"
That reminds me a great deal of the situation at the "Twentieth Century Motor Corporation" in Atlas Shrugged, when the workers were paid according to their need- they focused on needing more.
The latest episodes on ads with a wink (does she know she's an ad vs does she know she's a replicant) at Blade Runner (which is seen as the first SciFi to forecast the importance of ads in the future) fairly accurately depicted how hard I feel it is to not be distracted on the Internet these days, as well as discussing the really disturbing trend of the "sponsored content" in text content medias.
I don't understand how people are able to put so much emotional energy into their views on South Park.
It's satire, if you don't enjoy watching it.
Then don't.
If you are truly worried about peoples views being strongly influenced by the content of South Park, then your opinion of peoples intelligence is far less than mine. It's for entertainment, and the viewer ship knows this.
> I don't understand how people are able to put so much emotional energy into their views on South Park.
I think you might be overestimating the amount of energy that is put into having an opinion on the Internet. We're not exactly sending hand-written letters via pigeon. It takes seconds-to-minutes to state a view.
> If you are truly worried about peoples views being strongly influenced by the content of South Park, then your opinion of peoples intelligence is far less than mine. It's for entertainment, and the viewer ship knows this.
Putting consumerist entertainment on a pedestal is unjustified. What one thinks is entertaining is a reflection of their views on society. Being for entertainment does not strip a commodity of its social context.
>It's for entertainment, and the viewer ship knows this.
That's not true at all.
Edit: I'll expand on this since it's getting downvoted.
Most Americans have absolutely no idea what "satire" is -- so they can't "know that South Park is satire". I think they know south park is funny, but in the same way a bully making fun of a nerd is funny: the bully is hilarious because the nerd is pathetic. South Park is funny because "social justice warriors"/Al Gore's insistence that climate change is an urgent problem/gun control advocates are wrong in their position.
The cool thing in millenial culture is to not care about anything. Having a cause of any kind makes you an SJW or a nutjob and that isn't cool. Liking what you do for a living makes you a nerd and that isn't cool. Being genuinely in love with your partner makes you whipped and that isn't cool. The only thing people aren't chill about is the need to be chill. All the time.
South Park captures this very well, I think. Caring about anything, having any hobby, South Park shoots it all down. It even shoots down itself -- notice how after every moving monologue from Stan or Kyle about how we all just need to stop caring about something, we get a nice comic relief of Cartman calling whoever just poured their heart out a faggot and does something vulgar? We can't even care about not caring.
Because of this, South Park was pretty regularly referred to as a moral and ethical guide by most of the friends I made in college. Who, like most people, have no idea what sarcasm even is (it isn't cool to pay attention in AP lit, you just do it for the grade and move on).
(I would even say that South Park isn't sarcastic or satirical and is instead flatly advocating utter nihilism. This seems to fit with the creator's styles and I think is a major contributor towards this cultural impulse towards nihilism. But that's another comment.)
-> The cool thing in millenial culture is to not care about anything.
It seems to be quite the opposite. Every week I'm let know what it is I'm supposed to be outraged about.
-> I would even say that South Park isn't sarcastic or satirical and is instead flatly advocating utter nihilism.
It would seem, if anything, South Park just tries to round things out to free speech. You can call that nihilism, I guess, in a sort of perfunctory way.
->Every week I'm let know what it is I'm supposed to be outraged about.
I call this the "Five minutes of hate". If you don't get that reference, read 1984 by George Orwell. I think you'll find it very illuminating.
One week, it was Chik-fil-a and how we should hate them because their CEO gave money to a cause I disagree with, the next it's some baker in oregon who dared to refuse to do a wedding cake for a gay couple. (I'm queer, I believe in gay marriage, but just because you have the right to marry doesn't mean you have the right to make some business sell you something.)
There's a lot of other stuff from 1984 that have become real-
The memory hole-- how everyone forgets the past (and the media-- our big shouting head-- pretends like it doesn't exist.)
Oh. My. God. You're right! Social media is our version of the Two Minutes Hate. I've been complaining about this for years! Can't believe I never made that connection.
>It seems to be quite the opposite. Every week I'm let know what it is I'm supposed to be outraged about.
One of the things that's most jarring about the Internet age is that a minority group that previously would be blacklisted from newspapers, ignored by local administrators, etc., can actually broadcast its grievances to the world as a whole without any mediation. The decline of money going to journalism as the print medium dies means that instead of an actual journalist working on a story for weeks at a time, a "journalist" is a SEO grayhat with a click quota, and pulling "stories" from twitter is easy.
Do you think that most millenials are activists? How many do you think are involved in activism? How many millenials do you think have been to a protest?
>It would seem, if anything, South Park just tries to round things out to free speech. You can call that nihilism, I guess, in a sort of perfunctory way.
I think you're reading too much into the theme of this season -- it's easy to do that when it seems like someone agrees with you. But how does dismissing climate change, gun control advocacy, or the concern of parents over their children's safety relate to free speech?
-> Do you think that most millenials are activists? How many do you think are involved in activism? How many millenials do you think have been to a protest?
I think a lot would call themselves activists, yeah. Because like you pointed out the barriers to participation are considerably lower and millennials are an entire generation removed from the the 1960s-70s, so they didn't witness the civil rights movement etc. Now, how many have actually been to a protest? I'm not sure, but I also don't think that matters anymore since that seems hardly the threshold level for participation anymore.
-> I think you're reading too much into the theme of this season -- it's easy to do that when it seems like someone agrees with you. But how does dismissing climate change, gun control advocacy, or the concern of parents over their children's safety relate to free speech?
And we wouldn't want any room for debate on those nuanced, complicated issues now, would we.
> I don't understand how people are able to put so much emotional energy into their views on South Park.
Isn't this just a classic example of selection bias? The people who will have views on South Park are exactly the people who put a lot of emotional energy into expressing them. I'm willing to bet that they're a tiny minority compared to the number of people who don't care enough either way to say anything.
From the OP >>> But in a way, its project and theirs are the same: to deal with tensions by prescribing more conversation, even if it’s uncomfortable, not less.
Why do reviewers always assume that because a show uses controversial content that it must have some sort of sociological agenda? They are making a show that is funny so that people watch and they can profit. The author strikes me as the sort of person who would describe Howard Stern as a troubled artist, rather than a talented entertainer. Some people are out there just to make people laugh and bring home a few bucks while doing so.
> But in a way, its project and theirs are the same: to deal with tensions by prescribing more conversation, even if it’s uncomfortable, not less.
Are you kidding me? The show does the exact opposite if you've seen more than a handful of episodes. This comment summarizes the show much better than this article:
> Uncritical, detached acceptance of the status quo is the only morally upright posture, and those who draw a distinction between is and ought are all smug bullies, outlandish freaks, and/or closed-minded zealots.
> It's a show that teaches its audience to become lazy and self-satisfied, that praises them for being uncritically accepting of their own biases, and that provides them with an endless buffet of thought-terminating cliches suitable for shutting down all manner of challenges to their comfort zones.
>> Uncritical, detached acceptance of the status quo is the only morally upright posture, and those who draw a distinction between is and ought are all smug bullies, outlandish freaks, and/or closed-minded zealots.
To play devils advocate to this point, I think perhaps this season in particular is trying to say that changing the status quo is fine, but changing the status quo for the sake of changing the status quo isn't. Changing the status quo requires collective scrutiny, and accepting the supposition that the status quo is always bad is not quite correct.
Randy complains to his wife that, because South Park has ostensibly embraced this new anti-status quo agenda, it is therefore paradise. His wife retorts "is it?"
>> It's a show that teaches its audience to become lazy and self-satisfied, that praises them for being uncritically accepting of their own biases, and that provides them with an endless buffet of thought-terminating cliches suitable for shutting down all manner of challenges to their comfort zones.
On this point, the same critique of laziness can be applied to the "status quo == bad" crowd. Perhaps applying a little more intellectual depth and thought to why, from a moral philosophy perspective, we should go about changing it and then processing that into a how with the goal of that change being a productive, value-added process.
When people talk about "prescribing more conversation, even if it’s uncomfortable, not less", that's what they mean these days - preserving the status quo. The only conversation they want more of is about how awful anyone is who challenges it, and the only people they want to make uncomfortable are the ones that do. Witness for example the Erika Christakis debacle, where a university professor accused the university of attacking free speech for saying that some Halloween costumes mocked other races because it might make white students uncomfortable wearing them, and yet was portrayed as a hero standing up for the grand university tradition of saying things that make students uncomfortable while her opponents were accused of demanding to be coddled and protected from views they disagreed with.
r/circlebroke is ego defense dressed up as analysis.
"apathetic-libertarian" is an interpretation for people that identify so strongly with their own political positions, that they can no longer laugh at themselves. A lazy categorization that allows them to dismiss thoughts the show might otherwise spark.
South Park's political criticism is often more about the unreasonable ways people act than their political goals. You can behave like a shithead and take yourself too seriously even in the service of an incredibly laudable goal. But that idea doesn't always play in a "with us or against us" mindset.
South Park has middle fingers up in all directions. That's just skeptical and contrarian, not apathetic. Unless you're already primed to choose apathy over having a think. Or will still choose apathy over something you can't believe in 110%. And the "libertarianism" of the show is largely just an anti-authoritarian "fuck off." But because you can tie it to that name, people with nothing smarter to say can just use guilt by association and tie it to everything crazy that also happens under that name.
I believe South Park prefers to be a "middle voice" seeing both sides as completely polarized "you are with me or against me" and trying to entertain all ideas.
One perfect example for me was the episode where Kenny was left brain-dead in the hospital. Cartman wants the plug off to inherit his toys and the other kids want him to stay plugged because they think that's what their friend wanted. Cue a whole episode of "my side vs. your side" until we learn that Kenny DID want to be plugged off should something like this happen. Cartman was right for the wrong reasons and Stan & Kyle were wrong for the right reasons. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Friends_Forever_(South_Pa...
Or the 2008 episode about the american elections where both sides are obsessing about how the other will turn America into hell by the next morning only to discover the world is still there. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_Last_Night..._(South_Par...
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Maybe people catch on that garbage comes out of one's mouth is always reactionary rejection of other peoples' experiences and stop pretending one is acting in good faith.
At the root of it, wholesale asserting that someone's grievances are invalid because they are too stupid or too malevolent to understand their own life experience is a very stupid kind of elitism.
South Park is a mouthpiece for very stupid elitism. It's not exclusive to generic men like Stone and Parker but it's also very commonly preferred by generic men who haven't outgrown their misanthropic teenager phase.
“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” -Toni Morrison
So maybe white, but possibly not. It is a personal decision. It is a statement about one's personal politics where one sees their identity as either apolitical or that it ought to be apolitical. Perhaps even that identity politics itself should not be a thing. A politics of generic identity.
I said 'men' because I was referring to Stone and Parker. Their politics epitomize genericity and a politics of being apolitical which is functionally a reactionary politics.
Many of us have personal grievances, and if the words of these folks should be believed, than mine are as real as theirs. Yet I do not expect the world to change to fit my narrative.
What you are implying is that those other people are valuing their grievances incorrectly: They aren't as important as they think they are. After all, you don't value your own grievances as much.
I think that's a logical error.
And rooted in all of this, and I am not accusing you of doing this because we haven't brought up any specific examples, but there's a cognitive bias that people have where they think they can judge other peoples' life experiences just as well as those people, and that their value judgments are in some way objective and do not depend on the differences in social context between them and those people.
Most modern ideologies that aren't some authoritarian or paternalistic drivel soundly disagree with such fallacious reasoning.
My point of view is that I'm not as smart as I think I am about other people, and if I had a tv show I could use as a bully pulpit I wouldn't be using it to say "lol what a bunch of s aren't they so stupid and absurd"?
Because I think that's gross.
* I don't like libertarianism and have been known to vigorously dissent with its principles, but even I wouldn't stoop so low as to consider South Park a reflection of the views of a sincere and thoughtful libertarian.
Libertarianism is a philosophy that rewards the wealthy and those with in-demand skills. It very much isn't a philosophy about caring for fellow humans in any way but lip service.
Being a libertarian and not believing these things sounds like a very sociopathic mindset, I agree. If you think "turning the economic crank as fast as possible" won't eventually invent us all flying cars and diseaseless super-bodies and free food-dispensers (and a pony!), then it's pretty obvious that redistributing wealth is the "right thing to do."
But if you do believe that, then you have to measure the ROI of each dollar spent investing in the economy (and thus in turning the technological crank) vs. direct redistributive charity, as a means of helping the people on the bottom. Personally, I don't think it's clear which direction has higher ROI.
This is, of course, an economic perspective, but the history of economics generally agrees with them.
Herein is one of the huge problems of libertarianism - there's no space for shades of gray. Everything is an absolute, a binary; either something is or something isn't, but the real world doesn't work that way. Some capitalism is good. Unfettered capitalism is not - the libertarian cry of "well if someone wrongs you, then sue them for damages in court" is all but useless. You may not even know which chemical company was poisoning the air you have been breathing for 10 years that caused your illness, but libertarians wouldn't restrict the company's actions ahead of time; apparently a monetary settlement (that of course an individual will be able to force a large company into settling in courts...) is always an appropriate solution.
Hell, one libertarian I was talking to was suggesting privatising courts, and saying that the courts would be paid on performance. Somehow he thought that would mean the courts would be fair, rather than heavily biased to the private entity providing the paycheck.
So, we'd end up with a system where the only restriction on capitalism would be actions performed well after the fact. We've seen what happens when profit motives are unfettered, and it's not pretty.
Why is that a problem specific to capitalism? What system of justice prevents everything up front? As long as justice is somewhat predictable, others can plan based on what will happen to them.
For example, we are currently in a system where the only restriction on murder is an action performed well after the fact (e.g., prison).
> Herein is one of the huge problems of libertarianism - there's no space for shades of gray.
That's not how I see it. Markets are one big shade of gray. There's nothing absolute about them at all.
Libertarians argue against regulations, which are restrictions in place ahead of time. I find it disturbing that you are oblivious to that, even though you're responding to a comment which mentions air quality as an issue. As it stands, government regulations limit air pollution. Libertarians would remove those regulations and move the onus onto individuals to prove their cases in court.
> What system of justice prevents everything up front?
Where did I say 'everything'? This is exactly what I mean by libertarianism has no shades of gray.
> Markets are one big shade of gray.
'Unpredictability' is not the gray we're talking about here.
Regulations typically impose penalties for breaking them. People don't want to pay the penalty, so they don't break them.
> Where did I say 'everything'? This is exactly what I mean by libertarianism has no shades of gray.
My point is that you're lodging a criticism against libertarianism that isn't actually specific to libertarianism.
That is some seriously twisted logic to turn 'regulations' into 'restrictions implemented after the event'.
> My point is that you're lodging a criticism against libertarianism...
What other system wants to strip away all regulations? My criticisms would apply equally to those as well.
I don't really understand where your confusion is coming from. Regulations usually take the form of, "X is now illegal. If you do X, you will be punished with Y." It's pretty uninteresting if you ask me. People then avoid doing X because they don't want to be punished by Y.
Say a new regulation is passed that says dumping waste in the local river is illegal. Governments don't then station officials watching every corner of the river preventing waste from being dumped. People can still dump if they want. But if they're caught, they now face a potentially severe penalty.
There is very little difference from how regulations fundamentally operate than how other laws function. "Don't do X. If you do, we'll do Y to you." Pretty simple. The same kind of thing is prescribed by libertarians too. The only real difference is that libertarians would like to do it without coercion. (Since most libertarians view the State as the biggest perpetrator of coercion, they understandably want to reduce or eliminate it.) None of this implies that regulations like "don't dump waste in the river" can't exist if the State were reduced or eliminated.
> My criticisms would apply equally to those as well.
I gave you an example in my initial comment that demonstrates how your criticism is far more broadly applicable than just libertarianism.
Every party has flaws. Every philosophy that derives from first principles has flaws. If there's a flaw in libertarianism, it's that it doesn't recognize externalities well.
That it infuriates you is problematic. I bounce all over the spectrum on what I believe, and I frequent the DMV voter registration guy to change parties enough that he knows me by name. That said, no matter how much you love any particular philosophy, it can't always hold to be the rightest thing ever.
The American left thinks that it's too burdensome to demand an ID to exercise the right to vote, which isn't even enumerated in the constitution, but think that in-depth background checks are perfectly acceptable to purchase a firearm. The American right feels exactly the opposite. A true civil libertarian believes that an ID infringes on both, and would reject registration hurdles for both.
In scenarios like this I believe that libertarians hold the most enlightened view, which is why I sometimes refer to myself as a libertarian for convenience, depending on the conversation.
> libertarianism has no shades of gray.
On this I disagree vehemently. There are many, many shades of gray within libertarianism. Yes, there are absolutists in every camp, and yes, as with every other camp, they tend to be vocal, but there's no singular libertarian rulebook that everybody follows. There's even a Wiki article on their quibbles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debates_within_libertarianism
Generally speaking, the one universal truth within libertarianism is the non-aggression principle, which states that force should not be used. As most penalties eventually result in force (not paying taxes results in jail), it tends to seem absolutist, but not all libertarians are propertarians, nor are they universally opposed to business obligations (like carbon offsets and the like).
Which is one of the most nonsensical things about libertarianism - that any time authority want you do to something, it's referred to as 'violence'. It's 'violence' because if you keep refusing to comply, then at the end of a long chain of events, eventually an authorised officer will start to manhandle you. Hence even the smallest thing becomes 'violence'.
Yet...
Libertarianism offers "the courts" as the solution to pretty much all disputes. What happens when someone doesn't comply with court rulings? The court finds that your activities have injured your neighbour and you must give remuneration. You flip off both the court and the neighbour. What happens now? Libertarianism has quite a few of these blind spots.
Again, you don't have to be a Libertarian to be for civil liberties.
The entire (free) audiobook is a fascinating listen, even if you walk away disagreeing with everything.
Again, that problem is not specific to libertarianism. Every socioeconomic system must address it, and none of the solutions are pretty. In our current world, a person who ignores a court's ruling is physically forced to comply. I don't see any particular reason why something similar couldn't work in a more libertarian world.
Ending the drug war would help lots of communities. (Or more accurately, stop destroying them).
It's always worth noting that you don't have to be libertarian to believe in strengthening civil liberties. Libertarianism is but one flavour of that section of the political pie.
For a long time South Park has pushed the message that apathy is cool, and while protest, pacifism, and consideration for social issues is, as the creators would probably put it, "gay".
People can claim that it's entertainment all they want, but it's undeniably influential. And people like this season because of its especially strong resonance with other brain-dead ideas they have about "SJWs", "MGTOW", "Dindu Nothings", "Tumblrinas", etc.
I want proper news like in the olden days of several years ago... not gossip from a minority of social media users.
And that's the BBC, not some commercial outfit with financial troubles.
I think the creators are just doing what they usually do which is take advantage of a controversial topic and satirize it. I guess it just so happens that more people care about the topic at hand (political correctness) and empathize with it.
Was it, though? It seemed like the the chiding of Yelpers directly ties in to how people take their (perhaps authoritarian) views and opinions on things as sacrosanct and beyond reproach. In the same way that the PC Bros feel they're obligated to check everyone's privilege, the Yelpers felt like, if they weren't reviewing, no one would know anything about eating.
That last fact needs extra emphasis. The multi-month lead time needed for every other scripted show on Television means that South Park is the only show that can pull Ripped-From-the-Headlines commentary without things being dated by the time the episode airs. (Law and Order: SVU is show that is guilty of this to a hilarious degree)
"Procedural" refers to a specific type of scripted television, typically but not always a legal, medical, or law-enforcement drama. A procedural show follows the same format every episode: a mystery of some kind is introduced (medical, crime, or what have you), and the characters go through the procedures of solving the mystery. Law & Order: SVU can be described as a procedural; South Park cannot, unless you're using a very very loose definition of the term.
If you're looking at this in terms of nested sets or categories:
- Scripted vs. Nonscripted
- Comedy vs. Drama (usually also means half-hour vs. hour)
- Episodic (every episode is self-contained) vs. Serialized (the show follows an overall, evolving storyline that builds each episode)
- Subgenre
So a show like L&O: SVU would be a scripted, one-hour drama in the crime procedural subgenre. (We could also describe the show as episodic, but given that all procedurals are episodic, this would be redundant.)
South Park is a scripted, half-hour comedy in the animation subgenre that typically follows an episodic format, with occasional serialized story arcs spanning multiple episodes (and in the case of this season, the whole season).
tldr if there is a long term story it is very loose.
There has been long term development of some themes, each of the four characters has a key characteristic that I do think develops over time, but not with the same hidden strong continuity that I expected to find when I set out on this journey.
Most notably Randy's deteriorating marriage to Sharon, Stan's loneliness and insecurity about his family, (and Shelly) progresses from season to season
Cartman's relationship with his mother and his coming to terms with his weight, possible homosexuality, and finding his father progresses from season to season.
I looked to find development in Kyle's moral compass but could not discern anything.
Kenny overcoming his identity as "the poor kid" for lack of a better term seems to progress as well.
I watch the show less often now because that sprint was enough South Park to last a lifetime but I look forward to seeing how the show wraps up and if there is any closure instead of just ending in a fart joke.
Just the facial animation to sync up the mouths with the script, limited as it is in South Park, has to have some interesting automation underlying it. Unless they've got a huge army of animators chained to their desks pushing sprites around that they didn't show.
I think MLK's strategy is the absolute gold standard for promoting intelligent discussion around social issues. Outrage won't solve anything, other than to silence dissent. And what a terrible world that would be to live in.
Doesn't it seem currently (as also dramatized by SP) to be a war of emotional extortion of whom can most, disproportionately bully others with their micropain and force the rest of us to change our language every other week and walk on eggshells? (Sure, real sensitivity to prevent actual offense; and address actual bullying.)
That reminds me a great deal of the situation at the "Twentieth Century Motor Corporation" in Atlas Shrugged, when the workers were paid according to their need- they focused on needing more.
It's satire, if you don't enjoy watching it.
Then don't.
If you are truly worried about peoples views being strongly influenced by the content of South Park, then your opinion of peoples intelligence is far less than mine. It's for entertainment, and the viewer ship knows this.
I think you might be overestimating the amount of energy that is put into having an opinion on the Internet. We're not exactly sending hand-written letters via pigeon. It takes seconds-to-minutes to state a view.
> If you are truly worried about peoples views being strongly influenced by the content of South Park, then your opinion of peoples intelligence is far less than mine. It's for entertainment, and the viewer ship knows this.
Putting consumerist entertainment on a pedestal is unjustified. What one thinks is entertaining is a reflection of their views on society. Being for entertainment does not strip a commodity of its social context.
That's not true at all.
Edit: I'll expand on this since it's getting downvoted.
Most Americans have absolutely no idea what "satire" is -- so they can't "know that South Park is satire". I think they know south park is funny, but in the same way a bully making fun of a nerd is funny: the bully is hilarious because the nerd is pathetic. South Park is funny because "social justice warriors"/Al Gore's insistence that climate change is an urgent problem/gun control advocates are wrong in their position.
The cool thing in millenial culture is to not care about anything. Having a cause of any kind makes you an SJW or a nutjob and that isn't cool. Liking what you do for a living makes you a nerd and that isn't cool. Being genuinely in love with your partner makes you whipped and that isn't cool. The only thing people aren't chill about is the need to be chill. All the time.
South Park captures this very well, I think. Caring about anything, having any hobby, South Park shoots it all down. It even shoots down itself -- notice how after every moving monologue from Stan or Kyle about how we all just need to stop caring about something, we get a nice comic relief of Cartman calling whoever just poured their heart out a faggot and does something vulgar? We can't even care about not caring.
Because of this, South Park was pretty regularly referred to as a moral and ethical guide by most of the friends I made in college. Who, like most people, have no idea what sarcasm even is (it isn't cool to pay attention in AP lit, you just do it for the grade and move on).
(I would even say that South Park isn't sarcastic or satirical and is instead flatly advocating utter nihilism. This seems to fit with the creator's styles and I think is a major contributor towards this cultural impulse towards nihilism. But that's another comment.)
It seems to be quite the opposite. Every week I'm let know what it is I'm supposed to be outraged about.
-> I would even say that South Park isn't sarcastic or satirical and is instead flatly advocating utter nihilism.
It would seem, if anything, South Park just tries to round things out to free speech. You can call that nihilism, I guess, in a sort of perfunctory way.
I call this the "Five minutes of hate". If you don't get that reference, read 1984 by George Orwell. I think you'll find it very illuminating.
One week, it was Chik-fil-a and how we should hate them because their CEO gave money to a cause I disagree with, the next it's some baker in oregon who dared to refuse to do a wedding cake for a gay couple. (I'm queer, I believe in gay marriage, but just because you have the right to marry doesn't mean you have the right to make some business sell you something.)
There's a lot of other stuff from 1984 that have become real-
The memory hole-- how everyone forgets the past (and the media-- our big shouting head-- pretends like it doesn't exist.)
Double-Speak is Double-plus real too. Etc.
One of the things that's most jarring about the Internet age is that a minority group that previously would be blacklisted from newspapers, ignored by local administrators, etc., can actually broadcast its grievances to the world as a whole without any mediation. The decline of money going to journalism as the print medium dies means that instead of an actual journalist working on a story for weeks at a time, a "journalist" is a SEO grayhat with a click quota, and pulling "stories" from twitter is easy.
Do you think that most millenials are activists? How many do you think are involved in activism? How many millenials do you think have been to a protest?
>It would seem, if anything, South Park just tries to round things out to free speech. You can call that nihilism, I guess, in a sort of perfunctory way.
I think you're reading too much into the theme of this season -- it's easy to do that when it seems like someone agrees with you. But how does dismissing climate change, gun control advocacy, or the concern of parents over their children's safety relate to free speech?
I think a lot would call themselves activists, yeah. Because like you pointed out the barriers to participation are considerably lower and millennials are an entire generation removed from the the 1960s-70s, so they didn't witness the civil rights movement etc. Now, how many have actually been to a protest? I'm not sure, but I also don't think that matters anymore since that seems hardly the threshold level for participation anymore.
-> I think you're reading too much into the theme of this season -- it's easy to do that when it seems like someone agrees with you. But how does dismissing climate change, gun control advocacy, or the concern of parents over their children's safety relate to free speech?
And we wouldn't want any room for debate on those nuanced, complicated issues now, would we.
These people were accepted to a college?
Isn't this just a classic example of selection bias? The people who will have views on South Park are exactly the people who put a lot of emotional energy into expressing them. I'm willing to bet that they're a tiny minority compared to the number of people who don't care enough either way to say anything.
Why do reviewers always assume that because a show uses controversial content that it must have some sort of sociological agenda? They are making a show that is funny so that people watch and they can profit. The author strikes me as the sort of person who would describe Howard Stern as a troubled artist, rather than a talented entertainer. Some people are out there just to make people laugh and bring home a few bucks while doing so.
> But in a way, its project and theirs are the same: to deal with tensions by prescribing more conversation, even if it’s uncomfortable, not less.
Are you kidding me? The show does the exact opposite if you've seen more than a handful of episodes. This comment summarizes the show much better than this article:
https://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/3tsd5o/south_p...
> Uncritical, detached acceptance of the status quo is the only morally upright posture, and those who draw a distinction between is and ought are all smug bullies, outlandish freaks, and/or closed-minded zealots.
> It's a show that teaches its audience to become lazy and self-satisfied, that praises them for being uncritically accepting of their own biases, and that provides them with an endless buffet of thought-terminating cliches suitable for shutting down all manner of challenges to their comfort zones.
Or in video form: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TttI60-mjQ
To play devils advocate to this point, I think perhaps this season in particular is trying to say that changing the status quo is fine, but changing the status quo for the sake of changing the status quo isn't. Changing the status quo requires collective scrutiny, and accepting the supposition that the status quo is always bad is not quite correct.
Randy complains to his wife that, because South Park has ostensibly embraced this new anti-status quo agenda, it is therefore paradise. His wife retorts "is it?"
>> It's a show that teaches its audience to become lazy and self-satisfied, that praises them for being uncritically accepting of their own biases, and that provides them with an endless buffet of thought-terminating cliches suitable for shutting down all manner of challenges to their comfort zones.
On this point, the same critique of laziness can be applied to the "status quo == bad" crowd. Perhaps applying a little more intellectual depth and thought to why, from a moral philosophy perspective, we should go about changing it and then processing that into a how with the goal of that change being a productive, value-added process.
r/circlebroke is ego defense dressed up as analysis.
"apathetic-libertarian" is an interpretation for people that identify so strongly with their own political positions, that they can no longer laugh at themselves. A lazy categorization that allows them to dismiss thoughts the show might otherwise spark.
South Park's political criticism is often more about the unreasonable ways people act than their political goals. You can behave like a shithead and take yourself too seriously even in the service of an incredibly laudable goal. But that idea doesn't always play in a "with us or against us" mindset.
South Park has middle fingers up in all directions. That's just skeptical and contrarian, not apathetic. Unless you're already primed to choose apathy over having a think. Or will still choose apathy over something you can't believe in 110%. And the "libertarianism" of the show is largely just an anti-authoritarian "fuck off." But because you can tie it to that name, people with nothing smarter to say can just use guilt by association and tie it to everything crazy that also happens under that name.
One perfect example for me was the episode where Kenny was left brain-dead in the hospital. Cartman wants the plug off to inherit his toys and the other kids want him to stay plugged because they think that's what their friend wanted. Cue a whole episode of "my side vs. your side" until we learn that Kenny DID want to be plugged off should something like this happen. Cartman was right for the wrong reasons and Stan & Kyle were wrong for the right reasons. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Friends_Forever_(South_Pa...
Or the 2008 episode about the american elections where both sides are obsessing about how the other will turn America into hell by the next morning only to discover the world is still there. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_Last_Night..._(South_Par...