> We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount -- a Skydance Capitulation.
Sick burn.
ctippett 2 days ago [-]
They show a similar level of respect to their parent company as John Oliver does his.
publlus_enigma 1 days ago [-]
You surely mean his "Business Daddy"?
nayuki 12 hours ago [-]
The Simpsons have lightly mocked their parent company Fox too.
FlowingRiver 11 hours ago [-]
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.
ChrisMarshallNY 10 hours ago [-]
From what I hear, Larry Ellison has no detectable sense of humor. Something about a lawnmower...
martythemaniak 2 days ago [-]
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.
mattzito 2 days ago [-]
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.
ipaddr 2 days ago [-]
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.
titanomachy 11 hours ago [-]
> rebrand him as religious maga
Ah yes, Power Christian Principal
kylehotchkiss 2 days ago [-]
You forgot the Emmy winning lovemaking scene between POTUS and VPOTUS
antonvs 2 days ago [-]
> 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.
conorcleary 1 days ago [-]
Hindsight and all that; there are always[sic] people who blame [prior person] for [current problem] all the time (insert blanket statement here)
antonvs 15 hours ago [-]
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 multiple 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.
Essentially, Matt Stone and Trey Parker are enthusiastic heralds of the idiocracy.
mc32 12 hours ago [-]
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.
actionfromafar 12 hours ago [-]
You shouldn’t do a lot of things. Yet people do. Feels like you are talking past each other
prawn 11 hours ago [-]
Are you talking about South Park or Trump here?
Capricorn2481 11 hours ago [-]
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.
skygazer 2 days ago [-]
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.
psadauskas 2 days ago [-]
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.
Whoppertime 11 hours ago [-]
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
mywittyname 2 days ago [-]
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.
Whoppertime 2 days ago [-]
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
cucumber3732842 1 days ago [-]
>They did briefly lean into making politicians out to be evil,
They didn't go after Gore because he was wrong. They went after him because he committed the cardinal sin of really, earnestly taking a stand on a big issue. That is NEVER okay in South Park. There is never a correct side. Both sides must always be bad, on every issue. The "correct" view in South Park is always to not really take a stance on anything, and any character who is strongly on one side or the other on any issue will always be portrayed as wrong to do so.
That's not to say that South Park doesn't have some great episodes poking fun at some very deserving targets. They absolutely do. Some real gems in recent seasons.
kulahan 1 days ago [-]
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, I guess.
CobrastanJorji 13 hours ago [-]
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.
kulahan 12 hours ago [-]
Thank you for posting exactly the hilariously wrong interpretations I'm actively speaking about.
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.”
kulahan 12 hours ago [-]
Antisemitism and satire - famously the same thing and this is definitely not an insane comparison.
EA-3167 1 days ago [-]
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.
Gud 1 days ago [-]
Gore is a massive hypocrite and deserves the ridicule he gets.
No champion of the environment gallivants in a jet and lives in a mansion.
tzs 11 hours ago [-]
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.
conorcleary 1 days ago [-]
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
Gud 1 days ago [-]
If Gore had built a floating castle in the sky, a one off magical house, I’d say, he’s alright
psd1 16 hours ago [-]
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?
gjsman-1000 2 days ago [-]
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.”
cogman10 2 days ago [-]
Really bad example by Maher.
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".
laimewhisps 2 days ago [-]
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.
kg 2 days ago [-]
His examples don't hold up.
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.
jackp96 2 days ago [-]
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.
cogman10 2 days ago [-]
> Democrats should drop "birthing persons"
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.
bigstrat2003 2 days ago [-]
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.
psd1 16 hours ago [-]
You've never heard of hermaphrodism? Biology is _complicated_
badc0ffee 2 days ago [-]
You definitely need to be female to give birth, regardless of whatever gender identity label you give yourself (e.g. "man" or "non binary").
optionalsquid 1 days ago [-]
That was conclusively disproven by Schwarzenegger et al., 1994.
nosioptar 18 hours ago [-]
Our education system has failed younger generations. Everyone my age watched the documentary about Schwarzenegger's pregnancy.
I'm not sure if you're kidding or what but the mothers in that paper had 46 (the normal number) of XX chromosomes, a female with a mosaic-type defect containing some Y - successfully giving birth further proves these were female humans.
nostrademons 19 hours ago [-]
If you want your mind-blown, read up on feto-maternal microchimerism:
tl;dr: All boy moms will have some proportion of XY cells lodged in their bodies until they die. And this can result in them showing up as genetically male on a DNA test, simply because they once gave birth to a boy. When you get down to a cellular or molecular level, notions of "sex" or even "individuality" are far more blurry than our mental models admit. Sorta like recent findings that by cell count, humans are only about 43% human, and the rest is the bacteria making up our microbiome, and that our microbiome can have significant impact on our behavior.
yeah I knew that already - I have a son and it was mentioned as a fun fact along the way
kg 1 days ago [-]
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".
what 1 days ago [-]
Intersex and chromosomal disorders don’t change the sexual binary. They aren’t some weird other sex.
wredcoll 11 hours ago [-]
You should probably let all the doctors and scientists know that you're changing the definition of sex and they're all wrong then.
what 10 hours ago [-]
There are literally two sexes. There is no doctor or scientist that would disagree. What other sexes do you think exist?
nostrademons 2 days ago [-]
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".
plorkyeran 1 days ago [-]
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.
liveoneggs 18 hours ago [-]
when did this retcon get invented?
tzs 10 hours ago [-]
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.
what 1 days ago [-]
> "Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female.
There is no person that can give birth and is not female.
sphinxterai 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
wredcoll 12 hours ago [-]
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.
jackp96 2 days ago [-]
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.
But he didn't.
matwood 1 days ago [-]
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.
wredcoll 12 hours ago [-]
Boy, this sounds like a fair and honest representation of a totally real conversation you had.
matwood 3 hours ago [-]
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.
_3u10 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
_3u10 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
al_borland 12 hours ago [-]
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.
alephnerd 11 hours ago [-]
Much of the culture war crap that helped justify Tea Party and proto-alt right commentary started out from 2000s and early 2010s South Park.
The "Bernie bro" to MAGA pipeline is very real, as was the "I wanna make sexist or racist jokes" to Alt-Right pipeline.
Anyhow, it doesn't matter what Matt Stone and Trey Parker do now. South Park is boomer media and not easily accessible on modern streaming.
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
It's on Paramount+. How is it "not easily accessible on modern streaming"?
alephnerd 10 hours ago [-]
> It's on Paramount+
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].
Additionally, you don't see the same degree of memes, zeitgeist, and discourse for South Park that you would see a decade ago, let alone 2 decades ago (remember ginger kids - it got so bad that multiple kids committed suicide due to bullying arising from kids misinterpreting the episode. Or ManBearPig turning into an epithet for climate change denialism for over a decade until the writing staff retconned it).
This isn't to say it's a bad show. It's just older, and Paramount+ distribution is difficult to access for the 18-34 demographic, amongst whom Family Guy and American Dad remained the two dominant streamed adult cartoons in 2025 [1] despite there also being a South Park season last year.
Frankly, South Park mismanaged the COVID transition - they basically took an almost 5 year hiatus which dropped viewership in a now very competitive adult animated market.
> 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...
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
al_borland 9 hours ago [-]
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.
karmakurtisaani 5 hours ago [-]
Do you have any examples of such positions?
alephnerd 11 hours ago [-]
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 that a portion of American voters do not care about their pocketbook, and would rather vote based on culture war topics.
And you aren't even American based on your very obvious commonwealth spelling. Butt out of our political commentary.
They backtracked on "ManBearPig" (climate change) a long time ago.
dktp 2 days ago [-]
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
I'm a big fan though
ipython 2 days ago [-]
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.
a34729t 1 days ago [-]
Which is still the best satire on American foreign policy, ever
23 hours ago [-]
kyboren 2 days ago [-]
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.
kg 2 days ago [-]
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.
kyboren 1 days ago [-]
> Why is it insufficient
It's not the voters, the party apparatchiks, (social) media barons, big-dollar donors--no, it's those pesky artists who are responsible for "normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation"!
Besides that, they indeed "owned up" that they hadn't watched it in over a decade. Not only would they plausibly have drawn a different conclusion if they had, but it's just a bit ridiculous to blame some TV series 10+ years ago for "the current situation".
Hence my comparison to Jon Stewart's contemporaneous departure from The Daily Show, which is a "media butterfly effect" I see more frequently blamed in Democrat-leaning circles.
Jtsummers 2 days ago [-]
> What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from?
It started about 10 years ago, when the person apparently stopped watching it, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
brailsafe 1 days ago [-]
I thought Turd Sandwich fairly accurately captured what was and still is often a common sentiment that hasn't gone away just because the U.S federal government is conducting itself in such an uncommonly (although not that uncommonly) abhorrent way. A similar sort of election plays out every year and many levels of government in many countries. It's usually between some douche and some turd, and things rarely change for the better as a consequence, so people who feel apathetic and forgotten about don't bother, while people who fear what the other side will do try to convince everyone else theirs is correct. Tale as old as any two-party system.
I never felt as though it was a "both sides are equally stupid" sort of perspective, but rather more like "both sides are at least worth making fun of" along with the people who religiously feel that only their side isn't worth mocking. As in, whichever group seems to be trying to be the most pious, most sanctimonious, the most evidently rediculous, is effectively the one most worth mocking.
I think they have a lot of good material to work with going into this next season, and some of it will hit, and some will miss, for varying reasons, as is the way of all previous seasons. I personally worry that it'll be too politically oriented, because as a subject it just gets boring, but as a Canadian I've always got a kick of out the stupidity that is whatever comes out of the U.S. We're facing the side-effects of our own internal misgivings and trusting the U.S too much, but the U.S seems to be burning itself to the ground.
why_at 2 days ago [-]
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!”
Am I out of touch?
No, no, it's the satirists who have changed
Gimpei 9 hours ago [-]
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.
liveoneggs 2 days ago [-]
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)
atmavatar 1 days ago [-]
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.
cr1895 1 days ago [-]
> On the left, when someone uses a racial or sexist epithet, for example, the reaction is to exert social pressure against that individual. Social media escalates that to a giant dogpile
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.
adamsb6 12 hours ago [-]
The Biden administration created a coordinated censorship apparatus with the major social networks.
They handed a guy a seven month jail sentence for posting a joke that Hillary voters could text in their votes.
edoceo 2 days ago [-]
The US-Left is pro-censorship? My recent memory of headlines was the US-Right attempting to ban books. What am I missing?
liveoneggs 1 days ago [-]
Tipper Gore targeted music and Hilary Clinton targeted video games (remember - 1990s)
k12sosse 1 days ago [-]
The PMRC. Megadeth even wrote a song about it.. in '88
Warrant’s “Ode to Tipper Gore” is something of a classic
2 days ago [-]
henryfjordan 2 days ago [-]
The perception is that the left is in favor of censoring slurs and hate symbols. As a reaction, Trump/MAGA has brought back the R-word for instance.
Saying the Left are "pro-censorship" is not factually incorrect but definitely has a different connotation.
GJim 1 days ago [-]
> the R-word
??
nosioptar 18 hours ago [-]
The r-word is "retard".
coloneltcb 1 days ago [-]
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)
henryfjordan 1 days ago [-]
> Censorship is the government controlling what information the public can access
Wikipedia and the ACLU both use a more expansive definition, where your definition is only 1 type of censorship. The "Left" uses empathy to convince people to self-censor and less often uses "Cancel Culture" to pressure companies into private censorship.
There are more subtle forms of censorship, continuously employed by the government to prop up or push down various things. Covid had many such examples of pressure tactics from the government come to light but I'm sure it happens constantly.
For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.
ipaddr 1 days ago [-]
Political correctness, woke/cancel culture, whatever you want to call it, is not censorship
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.
joquarky 1 days ago [-]
If Tipper Gore weren't such a prude, there might have been enough votes to overcome that butterfly ballot issue.
Whoppertime 2 days ago [-]
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?
ipaddr 1 days ago [-]
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.
liveoneggs 1 days ago [-]
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"!
kyboren 20 hours ago [-]
Indeed.
I remember taking a California statewide essay exam in middle school whose prompt was specifically to argue for or against banning Harry Potter from the school library. I wrote a stridently anti-censorship piece extolling the virtues of literary freedom and calling out the censorious right for attempting to use schools not to educate, but to transmit catechism.
The essays were graded by (obviously heavily left-leaning) teachers from all over the state, with two teachers independently assigning a score and if their scores differed by more than one grade, another teacher would be tiebreaker.
I got the top score from both teachers--one of only a handful in the (large) school district. I even got an award from the local newspaper.
Now I see the same demographic take the polar opposite view and it's disappointing to say the least. Especially after the "anti" racism struggle session era, it seems to me that their real issue with the book bans wasn't the censorship; they just wanted to transmit the "right" catechism.
aftbit 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Lammy 2 days ago [-]
> Have the creators ever reconned with their role in normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation?
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
plussed_reader 2 days ago [-]
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.
lobf 2 days ago [-]
This is why I stopped watching as well. They really set the table for conservative populists to feast. I resent them tremendously.
liveoneggs 2 days ago [-]
please expand
2 days ago [-]
lobf 2 days ago [-]
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.
liveoneggs 1 days ago [-]
John Kerry seemed like a nice guy and I found (and continue to find) the republican attacks on his (and other) military service to be very very distasteful.
Senator Kerry voted for the iraq war.
Al Gore was the guy to get elected and not invade Iraq. Kerry was the following election. The south park episode about that election was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapper_Keeper_(South_Park) but it came out after and was boring.
---
Your example is an episode where they lampoon both candidates.
Lammy 1 days ago [-]
> Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich, the epitome of "both sides are the same."
> In the 2004 presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members of Skull and Bones. When asked what it meant that both he and George W. Bush were Bonesmen, former presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."[46][47]
lobf 1 days ago [-]
Is their membership in this silly club the defining characteristic of either man? What does this have to do with their presidential platforms?
Lammy 1 days ago [-]
How could I know? He literally said it's a secret.
lobf 19 hours ago [-]
I don’t think you understood the question.
xingped 2 days ago [-]
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.
In order to rename the east coast to New America we first need to rename England to America - sorry Brits!
tim333 30 minutes ago [-]
Calling England America would be ambiguous. Maybe West America?
shawn_w 1 days ago [-]
I thought New Mexico was being renamed to New America.
irishcoffee 2 days ago [-]
Are you trying to make a joke about New England/New York/New Jersey?
I’m trying to understand and I just don’t get it.
unrented7977 1 days ago [-]
The joke is renaming/annexing England so that the name New England now properly becomes New America
It isn't funny, it's just dark
euroderf 1 days ago [-]
I think Toronto would do just fine as New Buffalo.
grebc 2 days ago [-]
Pretty clear there’s a lot of people here without a sense humour.
ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago [-]
I have been informed that a common HN practice, is to have your sense of humor extracted, when getting your first colonoscopy.
justin66 2 days ago [-]
They tell you it's a diagnostic procedure but if they see a sense of humor in there they just zap it.
krapp 1 days ago [-]
Hacker News is serious business.
brailsafe 1 days ago [-]
> when getting your first colonoscopy
This must be why MAANGO companies require 24hrs of fasting prior to the on-site
euroderf 1 days ago [-]
MAANGO - this is the first time I've seen this.
Decisions, decisions. Microsoft/Meta Amazon/Apple/Alphabet Netflix/Nvidia Google Oracle ?
brailsafe 18 hours ago [-]
Something like that, I just looked up whether there was a newer one and added an A for Apple since they try to present perhaps the most sterile public image in all of their dev videos and presentations. Maybe we need 3 As and two Ms
Microsoft Meta Anthropic Apple Amazon Netflix Google OpenAI
XorNot 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Johnny555 1 days ago [-]
>It's not clever satire because unlike say, the Gulf of Mexico, South America is an actual real geographical designator in common usage.
It's almost as dumb as renaming lake Ontario to Lake America to "punish" Canada (presumably because it shares its name with the province of Ontario), when that lake has had its name since the 1600's (before the USA or Canada even existed) and is based on a Native American Iroquoian word. And the province of Ontario was named after the lake, not the other way around.
But at least with South Park, I can understand their motivation.
XorNot 1 days ago [-]
My point is that the satire doesn't work because it doesn't understand the issue at hand. A fictional American town being renamed to to South America doesn't actually capture the absurdities or issues of the current American administrations actions and directly undermines the message because the name they picked is another actual place name, rather then a made up vapid one (which is the case with "Gulf of America" and "Lake America").
anonymars 1 days ago [-]
The pattern is "take a place name and change the last word to America" (Gulf of America, Lake America, New America)
The fact that applying that to produce "South America" which is a real place--and a continent at that--precisely amplifies the absurdity
I have to say, though: inverting the trope of "you can't make people laugh at a joke by explaining why it's funny" by trying to stop people from laughing at a joke by explaining why it isn't funny is a truly Kaufman-esque bit of comedy
GJim 1 days ago [-]
> My point is that the satire doesn't work
"If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up"
-Barry Humphries
1 days ago [-]
mdp2021 2 days ago [-]
> South America is an actual real geographical designator in common usage
Hence naming something that is absurd. That is the joke. The renaming is preposterous - that is the message.
Edit: and maaany other "short-circuits" around that idea are suggested.
antonvs 2 days ago [-]
Have you considered that you just don't understand why it's funny or clever?
readdit 2 days ago [-]
Name one funny and clever thing por favor.
kannanvijayan 2 days ago [-]
Nonsense, it's clearly tremendously Al-Adeen.
aaron695 2 days ago [-]
[dead]
2 days ago [-]
guywithahat 2 days ago [-]
Really brave of them to do something so courageous and stunning
mdp2021 2 days ago [-]
> Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google
Fricken 1 days ago [-]
"Stunning and Brave" is the episode in which PC Principal makes his debut, at the start of season 19.
bena 2 days ago [-]
To be fair, they don't have many levers to pull
sethops1 2 days ago [-]
They're both billionaires. That's enough to swing a few elections and not even notice.
tt24 2 days ago [-]
Interesting that Bloomberg couldn’t swing his own election
bliteben 2 days ago [-]
turns out all you need is a botnet like Elon has
gmuslera 2 days ago [-]
So instead of Blame Canada they will sing Blame Brazil?
When names collide everything start to lose meaning.
cyanydeez 2 days ago [-]
which benefits fascists, generally speaking. degrading global social communication enables the basal ganglia into the local us vs them.
As much as I find satire amusing, a lot of it does not do what people think it does as effectively in this context.
Sacha baron cohen, sining throw the jews down the well had a bunch of racists singing it with zero care what it's satiring. Dave chapelle did similar to black culture. South park gets pretty close to the same.
theres a bit overeliance on satirization. Paul ryan wasn't satirically listening to "Rage against the machine"; he was actively trying to redefine it for his own delusion.
ryandrake 2 days ago [-]
> Sacha baron cohen, sining throw the jews down the well had a bunch of racists singing it with zero care what it's satiring. Dave chapelle did similar to black culture. South park gets pretty close to the same.
I worked with people who totally missed the sarcasm and satire in Parker & Stone's Team America World Police and legit thought it was just a cool action movie about America kicking the world's ass. I had to double check before it dawned on me that they were serious.
croon 1 days ago [-]
It's the same reason I can't watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia or Rick & Morty anymore, despite them being great shows. The parts they're lampooning are the parts most celebrated.
Or another example is Springsteens "Born in the USA" being played at so many political rallies: Reagan, Dole, Buchanan, Trump (without permission).
mulderc 2 days ago [-]
Knew many conservatives that loved the Colbert report and clearly didn’t get the satire
etempleton 1 days ago [-]
I remember feeling at the time that the Colbert Report’s satire was too on the nose for my tastes.
philipallstar 2 days ago [-]
It benefits all sorts of types of people.
behringer 2 days ago [-]
Sarcasm wasn't designed for these people. They're simple people that will never allow themselves to be educated. Sarcasm is not for them, it's for the people around them.
You will never be able to stop the simple minded racist with your educational movie. He only consumes media that appeals to him. "Go woke go broke!" as they say. If you want to get through to him you need to appeal to his smarter friends and family. You can bring them together with sarcasm more than any other tool, because two people of opposing views can relate to the same media.
aristofun 1 days ago [-]
What difference does it make? They stopped being funny and original 10+ years ago
“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.
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.
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 multiple 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.
Essentially, Matt Stone and Trey Parker are enthusiastic heralds of the idiocracy.
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.
Shame. I wonder if they got "talked to."
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, I guess.
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?
“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.”
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 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.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19155947/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8762399/
tl;dr: All boy moms will have some proportion of XY cells lodged in their bodies until they die. And this can result in them showing up as genetically male on a DNA test, simply because they once gave birth to a boy. When you get down to a cellular or molecular level, notions of "sex" or even "individuality" are far more blurry than our mental models admit. Sorta like recent findings that by cell count, humans are only about 43% human, and the rest is the bacteria making up our microbiome, and that our microbiome can have significant impact on our behavior.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-43674270
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".
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".
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.
There is no person that can give birth and is not female.
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.
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.
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.
Anyhow, it doesn't matter what Matt Stone and Trey Parker do now. South Park is boomer media and not easily accessible on modern streaming.
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].
Additionally, you don't see the same degree of memes, zeitgeist, and discourse for South Park that you would see a decade ago, let alone 2 decades ago (remember ginger kids - it got so bad that multiple kids committed suicide due to bullying arising from kids misinterpreting the episode. Or ManBearPig turning into an epithet for climate change denialism for over a decade until the writing staff retconned it).
This isn't to say it's a bad show. It's just older, and Paramount+ distribution is difficult to access for the 18-34 demographic, amongst whom Family Guy and American Dad remained the two dominant streamed adult cartoons in 2025 [1] despite there also being a South Park season last year.
Frankly, South Park mismanaged the COVID transition - they basically took an almost 5 year hiatus which dropped viewership in a now very competitive adult animated market.
[0] - https://flixpatrol.com/streaming-services/subscribers/united...
[1] - https://www.cartoonbrew.com/streaming/nielsen-end-of-year-st...
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.
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...
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
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.
It's not the voters, the party apparatchiks, (social) media barons, big-dollar donors--no, it's those pesky artists who are responsible for "normalizing and popularizing.. the current situation"!
Besides that, they indeed "owned up" that they hadn't watched it in over a decade. Not only would they plausibly have drawn a different conclusion if they had, but it's just a bit ridiculous to blame some TV series 10+ years ago for "the current situation".
Hence my comparison to Jon Stewart's contemporaneous departure from The Daily Show, which is a "media butterfly effect" I see more frequently blamed in Democrat-leaning circles.
It started about 10 years ago, when the person apparently stopped watching it, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
I never felt as though it was a "both sides are equally stupid" sort of perspective, but rather more like "both sides are at least worth making fun of" along with the people who religiously feel that only their side isn't worth mocking. As in, whichever group seems to be trying to be the most pious, most sanctimonious, the most evidently rediculous, is effectively the one most worth mocking.
I think they have a lot of good material to work with going into this next season, and some of it will hit, and some will miss, for varying reasons, as is the way of all previous seasons. I personally worry that it'll be too politically oriented, because as a subject it just gets boring, but as a Canadian I've always got a kick of out the stupidity that is whatever comes out of the U.S. We're facing the side-effects of our own internal misgivings and trusting the U.S too much, but the U.S seems to be burning itself to the ground.
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...
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)
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.
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=7-XVbLmexU8
https://genius.com/Megadeth-hook-in-mouth-lyrics
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)
Wikipedia and the ACLU both use a more expansive definition, where your definition is only 1 type of censorship. The "Left" uses empathy to convince people to self-censor and less often uses "Cancel Culture" to pressure companies into private censorship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship https://www.aclu.org/documents/what-censorship
For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.
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.
I remember taking a California statewide essay exam in middle school whose prompt was specifically to argue for or against banning Harry Potter from the school library. I wrote a stridently anti-censorship piece extolling the virtues of literary freedom and calling out the censorious right for attempting to use schools not to educate, but to transmit catechism.
The essays were graded by (obviously heavily left-leaning) teachers from all over the state, with two teachers independently assigning a score and if their scores differed by more than one grade, another teacher would be tiebreaker.
I got the top score from both teachers--one of only a handful in the (large) school district. I even got an award from the local newspaper.
Now I see the same demographic take the polar opposite view and it's disappointing to say the least. Especially after the "anti" racism struggle session era, it seems to me that their real issue with the book bans wasn't the censorship; they just wanted to transmit the "right" catechism.
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.
For just one of them, ‘it never happened’ :p https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-a...
Your style of thinking in and of itself could be a SP episode
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.
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.
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.
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]
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/588794-x-twitter-to-nitter...
I’m trying to understand and I just don’t get it.
It isn't funny, it's just dark
This must be why MAANGO companies require 24hrs of fasting prior to the on-site
Decisions, decisions. Microsoft/Meta Amazon/Apple/Alphabet Netflix/Nvidia Google Oracle ?
Microsoft Meta Anthropic Apple Amazon Netflix Google OpenAI
It's almost as dumb as renaming lake Ontario to Lake America to "punish" Canada (presumably because it shares its name with the province of Ontario), when that lake has had its name since the 1600's (before the USA or Canada even existed) and is based on a Native American Iroquoian word. And the province of Ontario was named after the lake, not the other way around.
But at least with South Park, I can understand their motivation.
The fact that applying that to produce "South America" which is a real place--and a continent at that--precisely amplifies the absurdity
I have to say, though: inverting the trope of "you can't make people laugh at a joke by explaining why it's funny" by trying to stop people from laughing at a joke by explaining why it isn't funny is a truly Kaufman-esque bit of comedy
"If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up"
Hence naming something that is absurd. That is the joke. The renaming is preposterous - that is the message.
Edit: and maaany other "short-circuits" around that idea are suggested.
When names collide everything start to lose meaning.
As much as I find satire amusing, a lot of it does not do what people think it does as effectively in this context.
Sacha baron cohen, sining throw the jews down the well had a bunch of racists singing it with zero care what it's satiring. Dave chapelle did similar to black culture. South park gets pretty close to the same.
theres a bit overeliance on satirization. Paul ryan wasn't satirically listening to "Rage against the machine"; he was actively trying to redefine it for his own delusion.
I worked with people who totally missed the sarcasm and satire in Parker & Stone's Team America World Police and legit thought it was just a cool action movie about America kicking the world's ass. I had to double check before it dawned on me that they were serious.
Or another example is Springsteens "Born in the USA" being played at so many political rallies: Reagan, Dole, Buchanan, Trump (without permission).
You will never be able to stop the simple minded racist with your educational movie. He only consumes media that appeals to him. "Go woke go broke!" as they say. If you want to get through to him you need to appeal to his smarter friends and family. You can bring them together with sarcasm more than any other tool, because two people of opposing views can relate to the same media.