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.
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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.
The whole point is it wasn't "hindsight". They took obviously wrong, easily refuted positions on some very important issues, like climate change and political choice, and abused their platform to promote that nonsense.
Impressionable baby techbros here on HN still quote them on that stuff, so the consequences of their fuckups haven't finished playing out yet.
"Hindsight" would be recognizing "oh shit, I'm a fucking idiot and I didn't realize it." But they haven't actually reached that level of hindsight yet.
Well, when people get their news from entertainers, that’s when things are wrong. One should not be informed on important topics by people who have little understanding of things but have a lot of feelings about things in the world. If you give entertainers that much credibility then you get good along with bad.
Huh? You're right that South Park has had a "both sides bad" approach to politics in the past, but I think you're misrepresenting how the show covered Trump. South Park was pretty much shitting on him the moment he announced his campaign and they painted him as a malevolent force that was going to ruin America, the entire time.
They kinda made fun of Hillary, but nothing beyond she's lame and a bad campaigner. And they were a little hamstrung there considering they were jumping ahead of the real life election cycle a bit.
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.
Well, I think both sides are the same to an uncomfortable degree. To quote Bill Maher:
“Trump has renamed Lake Ontario to the Lake of America. Of course, the left knows you can’t just rename things for political gain, just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
Latinx is attempting to provide an umbrella term for latino and latina, it's not renaming one of the two.
"Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female. (You can express your own feelings about the reality that this exists, but it does exist regardless of how you feel about it).
On the other hand Lake Ontario is a real lake that already had a name and now someone is trying to give it a new one.
Largely agree with you, but Democrats should drop "birthing persons" ASAP (if they haven't already) IMO.
I'm all for inclusivity, but there's a certain point/form of language policing where you're asking folks to perform a lot of mental labor to adjust their language to reflect an extremely rare edge case. Like why?
It's like if we insisted that people avoid the phrase "look at this" in general communication lest you offend/exclude a blind person who might be listening.
Also, there's no such thing as being able to give birth and not being female. Many argue that "woman" refers to an internal sense of gender and not the physical reality of one's body, but even in that framework the term "female" refers to the nature of the body. And if you can give birth, you are female, because that is the configuration your body is in.
If you want to provide appropriate care to people with wombs you don't want to filter based on what their drivers' license or birth certificate say, because those can not only defy your expectations, but they can also be wrong due to clerical errors or other factors.
I can't even humor your assumption that there are only two sexes and one birthing sex, because intersexed people exist, as do people with unusual chromosomes. Some of them have wombs and can give birth. Language like "birthing persons", while awkward, admits the existence of those people into a larger group without requiring even more awkward phrasing akin to "women, and men with wombs, and intersexed people with wombs".
It ultimately does depend on how you choose to define "sex". This turns out to be a hard question, with different definitions making sense in different contexts. Is it gametes, chromosomes, genitals, hormones, something else, or some mix of all of that? What happens when these characteristics that can change, do? How do we classify people who have mismatches between some of these categories of characteristics? What assumptions are safe to make about people of different sexes?
My point is, our interpretation of these observable biological processes and facts, and our response to them, is socially constructed. There are many Doctors and Scientists who do very much agree with this complex view, just as I'm sure there are those who believe in a strong binary like you. I see the complex view here as much more useful, especially in navigating things like human dynamics and healthcare needs in ways that benefit us all
Latinx is terrible, though, because it is something no native Spanish speaker would ever say. It's an example of the exact same sort of cultural imperialism that most of the people who like to say latinx rail against.
The term that Hispanic queer and non-binary communities use is latine, which is pronounceable, follows normal Spanish grammatical rules, actually arose from the communities being discussed, and pluralizes easily to "les latines".
It's almost like it's not a Spanish word. It was coined by native English speakers to describe themselves. It also happens to be a terrible English word, but the fact that it doesn't work in a different language's grammar isn't why it's a bad English word.
Latinx actually is comparable to what Trump is doing. It is outsiders trying to force a word on a community that doesn't want it.
Only about 4% of the US Hispanic population uses it, 75% say it should not be used, and half have never even heard of the word. It doesn't fit Spanish grammar or pronunciation rules which makes it look even out of place.
As a person experiencing Canadian citizenship I support the renaming. And as a person experiencing South America I can tell you that no one outside of a few spots for tourists in BA uses Latinx. And latinas will go one a 20 minute rant if they even see it.
Lake Ontario is it’s dead name, please don’t use it anymore that’s not how it identifies anymore in America.
I also love the tariff war as Canada has yet another excuse to not fix its economy. Anyone who is left wing should also support it as it’s largely the only reason Canada didn’t elect the conservatives and if Brazil remains socialist that is also the reason.
Eh, it's a decent joke, but it seems like the power dynamics here are a bit out of balance?
Maybe I just live in a red area, but I see a lot of people judge liberals based on wild Twitter takes and random think pieces — which aren't actually policies/rule of law.
If Joe Biden signed an EO denouncing the use of the phrase "pregnant woman" in government documents as a queerphobic slur or mandating Gov employees add their pronouns to their email signatures, I'd find this take more compelling.
You reminded me that I had a person at work get mad that I used the phrase “9 women can’t have a baby in 1 month”. They couldn’t explain why other than I’m a man and can’t talk about women. So it’s not wild Twitter takes.
That’s the exact conversation. We were talking about speeding up a development process and I used the classic saying in the context that some things just take time. It shook me a bit because I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, but me and the other people in the room sat there at a loss with what the issue was. She also couldn’t explain other than saying woman is bad, which showed she didn’t take the time to even try to understand what it meant.
She was eventually fired in part for yelling at a guy in a huge meeting when he answered a question about to a hypothetical boss as “he” instead of she or they.
So I understand your skepticism and would also be a skeptic if I didn’t live it.
There are much better examples where the 2 parties are frustratingly aligned to a large extent. For example, datacenters, ICE, and foreign policy. You can find a good number of democrats who are mad about Iran not because it's a dumb war, but because it wasn't done correctly by going through congress.
Both sides are aligned pretty closely in making their donors happy above their voters. That keeps democrats from regulating like they should and it keeps republicans focused on "the enemies within".
Maher himself is a perfect example of this. He's a hardcore Zionist warhawk who has an ideology nearly identical to Ted Cruz, yet he's a "liberal" (neoliberal). He also had Democrat Van Jones on his show making fun of dead Gaza babies. While I don't think the media and politician class represent the public (at all!), they are as aligned as lasers on promoting Israel.
You know, aside from, well, everything else that makes this a stupid comparison, the most important part is the motive that people like you seem so happy to ignore.
Latinx is a not particularly useful attempt by a tiny group of people to make another tiny group of oppressed people feel slightly more comfortable
Trump renamed lake ontario because he is a gigantic asshole.
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.
Satire is dead. People are simply unable to handle it.
That's just it, though. The people who buy electric cars because they want to help the environment are wrong. They're only doing a good thing because they're self righteous pricks who are full of themselves. They're just as bad as the polluters.
The people who want to stop smoking are wrong because they're self righteous pricks who are full of themselves. They're worse than the cigarette companies.
The guy who want to help the environment is wrong because he's a self righteous prick who is full of himself.
The folks raising awareness about North Korea are wrong because raising awareness isn't actually helping people directly. It's just a bunch of self righteous pricks who are full of themselves.
Any one of those episodes has a perfectly valid point to make. But taken as a whole, the overarching message is that both sides are always bad, and the one that sounds like it wants to make the world a little better is probably worse than the evil they're opposing.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
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.
What if the mansion had balloons and the jet was grounded? /s The point of shows like SP taking on targets like Gore were their eco-shaming angles; these people we know of and hear of are polished products of Corp. Inc. and if they have a green angle it's accompanied by green-washing, which will have anti and pro groupies alongside stirring up discourse that is both helpful and non
Your observation of the contradiction is correct, but reductionist to a fault. If Gore would have been better than Dubya, and if campaigning requires travel, etc.
I take it you don't decry hydro for the use of concrete?
That's ridiculous. It is perfectly reasonable to live a normal life by the current standards of the world while advocating for political change that will change those standards to be better for the environment.
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.
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)
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.
Though surely to say a system or process is 'retarded' means something is holding it back?
To equate this to a derogatory term for a learning disability (worthy of self-censorship!) is, frankly, bizarre and rather smacks of virtue signalling.
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.
You'll find people on both sides of the aisle who agree with this sentiment, they just disagree with what side is destroying the country and what side is letting it happen
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 don’t see how maga is the logical conclusion of the mindset. Both sides do suck, and the answer isn’t blind tribalism, it’s common sense and reason. There is a lot of basic stuff that most of America would be on board with if they stopped trying to make everyone fight over a few issues that they’ve been fighting over for decades.
Get some wins on the easy stuff, build some momentum and cooperation, and then maybe it will be easier to tackle some of those harder problems.
> The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real, as was the "I wanna make sexist or racist jokes" to Alt-Right pipeline.
It would have been so easy for the Democrats to embrace economics and labour over culture war and scolding. To push for getting money out of politics (Citizen's United). They could have kept the Bernie crowd, Gen Z men, and maybe even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure).
Losing in 2024 was insane though and it still feels like the Democrats might screw it up again. FFS people scolding South Park...
> even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure).
The right has owned the talk radio space for ever now. I'm rolling podcasts into that as well. I'm not familiar with many left talking heads, but I can name off many from the right. I'd suspect that Rogan noticed where the audience was and adjust programming based on that.
Positions that were mainstream in the Democratic Party 10-15 years ago are now being labeled as far right. There are a lot of normal people who haven’t changed their politics very much, but were left behind by the Democratic Party. The right happily scooped them up, as they had nowhere else to go. I think Rogan, and much of his audience fall into this camp.
Illegal immigration. Preventing it, and correcting lax enforcement of the past is now labeled a maga issue, with democratic cities actively trying to work against ICE and people who support the left protesting against it.
Here is a short clip of Obama, Hillary, and Bill Clinton supporting deporting illegal aliens, especially those who have broken laws. If they said this stuff today they’d be called maga.
You're taking a small slice of left progressives and applying it to all democrats to try and push this "the left are all commies" narrative. ICE is running around like the gestapo in targeted blue cities, so of course it's an issue. If they were doing this in red cities (where the crime actually is), there'd be the same push back. It's obvious that republicans are intentionally trying to create issues and division using every tool at their disposal. There won't be enough leopards for all of these faces.
I didn’t call anyone a “commie”. The push to allow illegal immigrants to stay, or to just give them citizenship unchecked, started well before any of the more recent ICE issues. Sanctuary cities existed before Trump’s current term.
If cities cooperated with ICE instead of fighting them, ICE could just go pick people up at the jail instead of ended up in this “gestapo” scenario. Federal and local governments fighting against each other is the problem here. 15-20 years ago they would have likely been on the same side of this issue and could have worked together to handle thing with more professionalism and tact.
The data doesn’t seem to support crime being localized to red or blue cities. Your characterization and Trump’s both seem incorrect.
Subsidizing unionized EV and Battery manufacturing jobs in deep red states [0], expanding tax credits and subsidizes for the bottom 50% of Americans [1], expanding Medicaid access [2], and other tangible pocketbook benefits showed a portion of American voters do not care about their pocketbook.
And you aren't even American based on your very obvious commonwealth spelling. Butt out of our political commentary.
Don't be ridiculous. I'd love it if I didn't have to care about US politics, except it has infected the rest of the world. Telling someone to butt out when your dear leader is invading other countries, intentionally influencing foreign elections (Vance stumping for the AfD), and claiming others are 51st states, etc. I also have friends and family in the US that only ever want to talk politics these days.
For the record, I think Biden deserves kudos for pursuing a far more progressive and labour oriented strategy than people expected.
Nonsense. 100% nonsense. To the contrary, acting like only one side is bad and thus only one side can be made fun of is a huge reason we're in this situation. The right took the left's cancel culture and weaponized it to the extreme.
South Park's "all sacred cows slaughtered equally" doctrine is a huge part of what kept them interesting, refreshing, and relevant for so long. Their descent into hyper-focus on Trump and his regime are a big step backwards.
I say this as someone who thinks the current situation is catastrophically bad for America, by the way. I'm not minimizing Trump's disaster.
As someone who is very bought into the mindset that all systems of people do stupid, short-sighted, and occasionally outright evil things, and yet thinks that maybe they're better than the alternative of burning everything down, I do not agree that MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.
I don’t understand this attitude. There’s zero evidence that South Park had any effect on any political outcome of any kind. South Park is a comedy show and they make fun of things, liberals and progressives included. I thought people were supposed to speak truth, or is that only the case when they say what you want them to hear.
Apparently Rupert Murdoch absolutely loves when they rip into Fox and associated assets. Married with Children used to do the same thing.
I know a few people who have met and worked with Murdoch and all have said he is perfectly pleasant to be with and has a great sense of humor, just a shame about absolutely everything else he does.
I am a master of national names. I suggest we support the, already in use, name of America for the whole continent, so, almost for free, USA means all north and south America countries together and we are done with land. Now the oceans are tricky: Atlantic can become East American sea and Pacific, West American sea. Or just the Small sea or Little Boy and the Big sea or Fat Man.
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadWhat 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.
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.
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]
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.
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Your example is an episode where they lampoon both candidates.
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.
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.
Ah yes, Power Christian Principal
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.
Impressionable baby techbros here on HN still quote them on that stuff, so the consequences of their fuckups haven't finished playing out yet.
"Hindsight" would be recognizing "oh shit, I'm a fucking idiot and I didn't realize it." But they haven't actually reached that level of hindsight yet.
They kinda made fun of Hillary, but nothing beyond she's lame and a bad campaigner. And they were a little hamstrung there considering they were jumping ahead of the real life election cycle a bit.
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.
“Trump has renamed Lake Ontario to the Lake of America. Of course, the left knows you can’t just rename things for political gain, just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
Latinx is attempting to provide an umbrella term for latino and latina, it's not renaming one of the two.
"Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female. (You can express your own feelings about the reality that this exists, but it does exist regardless of how you feel about it).
On the other hand Lake Ontario is a real lake that already had a name and now someone is trying to give it a new one.
I'm all for inclusivity, but there's a certain point/form of language policing where you're asking folks to perform a lot of mental labor to adjust their language to reflect an extremely rare edge case. Like why?
It's like if we insisted that people avoid the phrase "look at this" in general communication lest you offend/exclude a blind person who might be listening.
I've never heard 1 democrat politician say "birthing person".
This was never something "democrats" said and always something that rightwing media says that Democrats say.
There's nothing to drop or defend as this is completely a distraction from real issues.
Basically, rightwing media LOVES picking fringe individuals pushing a position and pretending like every democrat actually believes the same.
These word changes were real things that happened by government policy.
Literally the first sentence in the guidelines that talk about birthing person.
The entire paragraph says "it's fine if you want to" and isn't prescriptive.
This is a fake controversy. You are literally just mad that some people recognize and want to be accommodating to trans people.
I can't even humor your assumption that there are only two sexes and one birthing sex, because intersexed people exist, as do people with unusual chromosomes. Some of them have wombs and can give birth. Language like "birthing persons", while awkward, admits the existence of those people into a larger group without requiring even more awkward phrasing akin to "women, and men with wombs, and intersexed people with wombs".
My point is, our interpretation of these observable biological processes and facts, and our response to them, is socially constructed. There are many Doctors and Scientists who do very much agree with this complex view, just as I'm sure there are those who believe in a strong binary like you. I see the complex view here as much more useful, especially in navigating things like human dynamics and healthcare needs in ways that benefit us all
The term that Hispanic queer and non-binary communities use is latine, which is pronounceable, follows normal Spanish grammatical rules, actually arose from the communities being discussed, and pluralizes easily to "les latines".
There is no person that can give birth and is not female.
Only about 4% of the US Hispanic population uses it, 75% say it should not be used, and half have never even heard of the word. It doesn't fit Spanish grammar or pronunciation rules which makes it look even out of place.
Lake Ontario is it’s dead name, please don’t use it anymore that’s not how it identifies anymore in America.
I also love the tariff war as Canada has yet another excuse to not fix its economy. Anyone who is left wing should also support it as it’s largely the only reason Canada didn’t elect the conservatives and if Brazil remains socialist that is also the reason.
Maybe I just live in a red area, but I see a lot of people judge liberals based on wild Twitter takes and random think pieces — which aren't actually policies/rule of law.
If Joe Biden signed an EO denouncing the use of the phrase "pregnant woman" in government documents as a queerphobic slur or mandating Gov employees add their pronouns to their email signatures, I'd find this take more compelling.
But he didn't.
She was eventually fired in part for yelling at a guy in a huge meeting when he answered a question about to a hypothetical boss as “he” instead of she or they.
So I understand your skepticism and would also be a skeptic if I didn’t live it.
There are much better examples where the 2 parties are frustratingly aligned to a large extent. For example, datacenters, ICE, and foreign policy. You can find a good number of democrats who are mad about Iran not because it's a dumb war, but because it wasn't done correctly by going through congress.
Both sides are aligned pretty closely in making their donors happy above their voters. That keeps democrats from regulating like they should and it keeps republicans focused on "the enemies within".
Latinx is a not particularly useful attempt by a tiny group of people to make another tiny group of oppressed people feel slightly more comfortable
Trump renamed lake ontario because he is a gigantic asshole.
How is that not changing?
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.
And with Gore, it's not that he took a huge stance, it's that his messaging was goofy and ineffective.
Satire is dead. People are simply unable to handle it.
The people who want to stop smoking are wrong because they're self righteous pricks who are full of themselves. They're worse than the cigarette companies.
The guy who want to help the environment is wrong because he's a self righteous prick who is full of himself.
The folks raising awareness about North Korea are wrong because raising awareness isn't actually helping people directly. It's just a bunch of self righteous pricks who are full of themselves.
Any one of those episodes has a perfectly valid point to make. But taken as a whole, the overarching message is that both sides are always bad, and the one that sounds like it wants to make the world a little better is probably worse than the evil they're opposing.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
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.
No champion of the environment gallivants in a jet and lives in a mansion.
I take it you don't decry hydro for the use of concrete?
Shame. I wonder if they got "talked to."
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.
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.
For just one of them, ‘it never happened’ :p https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-a...
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)
Woe to he who falls afoul of the Twitter mob
Saying the Left are "pro-censorship" is not factually incorrect but definitely has a different connotation.
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)
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.
For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.
??
Though surely to say a system or process is 'retarded' means something is holding it back?
To equate this to a derogatory term for a learning disability (worthy of self-censorship!) is, frankly, bizarre and rather smacks of virtue signalling.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XVbLmexU8
https://genius.com/Megadeth-hook-in-mouth-lyrics
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.
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.
They handed a guy a seven month jail sentence for posting a joke that Hillary voters could text in their votes.
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
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...
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.
Your style of thinking in and of itself could be a SP episode
Get some wins on the easy stuff, build some momentum and cooperation, and then maybe it will be easier to tackle some of those harder problems.
The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real.
Anyhow, it doesn't matter what Matt Stone and Trey Parker do now. South Park is boomer media.
It would have been so easy for the Democrats to embrace economics and labour over culture war and scolding. To push for getting money out of politics (Citizen's United). They could have kept the Bernie crowd, Gen Z men, and maybe even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure).
Losing in 2024 was insane though and it still feels like the Democrats might screw it up again. FFS people scolding South Park...
The right has owned the talk radio space for ever now. I'm rolling podcasts into that as well. I'm not familiar with many left talking heads, but I can name off many from the right. I'd suspect that Rogan noticed where the audience was and adjust programming based on that.
Here is a short clip of Obama, Hillary, and Bill Clinton supporting deporting illegal aliens, especially those who have broken laws. If they said this stuff today they’d be called maga.
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/tb37decBZFk
If cities cooperated with ICE instead of fighting them, ICE could just go pick people up at the jail instead of ended up in this “gestapo” scenario. Federal and local governments fighting against each other is the problem here. 15-20 years ago they would have likely been on the same side of this issue and could have worked together to handle thing with more professionalism and tact.
The data doesn’t seem to support crime being localized to red or blue cities. Your characterization and Trump’s both seem incorrect.
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-donald-trump-claims-crime-u...
And you aren't even American based on your very obvious commonwealth spelling. Butt out of our political commentary.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/16/georgia-ev...
[1] - https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/biden-low-inc...
[2] - https://ballotpedia.org/Medicaid_work_requirements_during_th...
Don't be ridiculous. I'd love it if I didn't have to care about US politics, except it has infected the rest of the world. Telling someone to butt out when your dear leader is invading other countries, intentionally influencing foreign elections (Vance stumping for the AfD), and claiming others are 51st states, etc. I also have friends and family in the US that only ever want to talk politics these days.
For the record, I think Biden deserves kudos for pursuing a far more progressive and labour oriented strategy than people expected.
That's the issue. Paramount+ only has roughly 59 million subscribers in the US.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, and Hulu/Disney+ remain the big 4 nationally [0]
[0] - https://flixpatrol.com/streaming-services/subscribers/united...
South Park's "all sacred cows slaughtered equally" doctrine is a huge part of what kept them interesting, refreshing, and relevant for so long. Their descent into hyper-focus on Trump and his regime are a big step backwards.
I say this as someone who thinks the current situation is catastrophically bad for America, by the way. I'm not minimizing Trump's disaster.
As someone who is very bought into the mindset that all systems of people do stupid, short-sighted, and occasionally outright evil things, and yet thinks that maybe they're better than the alternative of burning everything down, I do not agree that MAGA is the only thing that makes sense.
When names collide everything start to lose meaning.
“We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount -- a Skydance Capitulation.” (née 'Corporation')
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Skydance
Sick burn.
I know a few people who have met and worked with Murdoch and all have said he is perfectly pleasant to be with and has a great sense of humor, just a shame about absolutely everything else he does.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/588794-x-twitter-to-nitter...
It's as bad as the old Emarica versus Vimerica wars.
And no mention of the root cause of the lake fiasco, DistractEpsteinica.