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Anyone following the new South park season? You can get a sneak peak here.
https://youtube.com/@southpark/videos
Unsurprisingly they are going after Trump's administration and hard. So far the first episode was offensive incoherent mess, the second is offensive coherent mess. I hope the rise in quality will improve. They are obviously trying to bite Trump administration into retaliating and seems to be succeeding - seem to have the uncanny ability to find the snowflakes - starting with the snowflake in chief. Vance is playing it cool, so I suppose his mocking will diminish.
I am confused what is better for USA now - Trump to die now and Vance to take reigns now and only have 2 mandates or to die after the midterms and have two and 1/2.
I laughed at both episodes quite a bit, even as a twice-voter for Trump. This guy summed up a lot of my internal thoughts though. For a show that famously "goes after everybody", they were suspiciously hands off the low-hanging fruit that was the Biden administration.
I really hope they don't make the entire season about Trump. It's already way overdone and feels beneath them.
That's easy enough to explain. Low hanging fruit is kind of boring. They might have had a bit about biden like literally falling asleep in the middle of speeches but then they'd have to set up speeches that anyone cared about for him to fall asleep during. Trump is obviously a bigger fountain of controversy and slots in as a b plot more easily.
I mean, the onion making fun of biden’s age was a recovery of their old charm; their article on him greeting dead European leaders was absolutely hilarious and I’m surprised South Park had nothing like ‘I see Jaques Mitterand regularly, beckoning me into the light’ given its reputation.
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I've never understood Parker and Stone when it comes to their politics, or at least not over the last 13 years since they moved on from their early episode libertarian leanings. Why have they gone easy on leftists so much since the rise of wokeness (note: I haven't consistently watched the last few seasons of South Park, so I may be wrong about recent years. But I remember them soft balling progressives from 2013 through 2017ish), and repeatedly claim that Trump is the worst person ever, then turn around and awkwardly claim they're Republicans. And most of the episodes I've seen of South Park over the last 5 years just seem so random and incoherent. I almost feel like they don't really have any convictions, don't really understand the current issues, and are just randomly throwing whatever elements they feel like together in episodes, while trying to pass it off as relevant political commentary.
What are the current issues?
Well, I mean to say they don't really understand the current issues that they try to tackle on their show. They always seem to misunderstand the core issues. I remember when they had an episode about safe spaces where they were fighting a complete straw man. Their main argument seemed to revolve around people using safe spaces to avoid having to think about starving 3rd world countries. That's just so off the mark.
No, that subplot was mostly mocking celebrities for their performative charity.
The episode was primarily about how safe spaces insulate people from any criticism of their worldview. It was basically saying that people should stop being pussies and offended at everything. That's seems about right to me.
In that episode, they were specifically showing everyone who wanted safe spaces being guys who don't want to feel bad about living in the first world, and don't want to be asked to donate to charity at the supermarket. And "Reality's" argument against it was you should feel bad about living in the first world sometimes. It seemed way off the mark to me, just like they're missing anyone and everyone's points on the issue.
That is just an attempt at absurd humor, intentionally juxtapositing things that are usually thought unrelated (concept of safe space with , first world citizen Randy wants safe space against charity shaming which feels bad). South Park does it often, sometimes it lands, sometimes it doesn't
The scriptwriters clearly attempted to interrogate wider concept of safe space. Episode starts with Cartman disliking comments about his weight, eventually Butters has to censor all the social media to make it safe from criticism. In the end, Reality almost gets the point, and the adults proceed to comically misunderstand (something that South Park also does often).
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I mean, they already had Cartman as their mouthpiece literally saying as such. The low-hanging political commentary is dead- how could it not be, when it's been 10 years since left and right changed places? It's all very confusing. Add the fact that pop culture took a 5 year sick day, and now, what's left? Even the Tegridy arc was more coherent than this, which is probably why they went in that direction in the first place.
The problem for them, much as it is for everyone else, is that traditional/what is popularly referred to as right-wing thought definitively died in late 2016. Nobody knows what to call themselves any more; partially because we're fighting over the labels (and partially because, as the woke showed, the way you win a [culture] war is not by dying for your
countrylabel, but by making the other poor bastard die for theirs- it is not in either faction's interest to relabel at this time, which is why you see a lot of extremely conservative/fortifying legislation from 'liberal' parties in countries that are not the US).You see, the 2010s were a cutover point: the people born in the 1930s were the last generation to come of age before the Civil Rights Era- I call these people "traditionalists" instead of "conservatives", and most people use "conservative" as shorthand for people who are [either these people directly, or those who uncritically align themselves with them]. And in 2015 they were all dead.
Now, what's the actual definition of conservatism? Preserving power structures that worked in your youth and expanding them. They made you rich, after all. What were the power structures that worked for Boomers? Academics and education above all else, anti-racism, feminism, sexual liberation, and environmentalism- things that labelled themselves as left-wing, since they were in opposition to what the right-wing was at that time.
But the problem is that, as always, age and establishment power perverts. "Go to college" became "feed your youth to the system", "anti-racism and feminism" became "axiomatically, black > white and woman > man", "sexual liberation" became "castrate your children", and "environmentalism" became "degrowth".
It didn't help that '50s conservatism did have a bit of a resurgence in the '80s and '90s (generation in power turned 20 in the 1930s-1940s, so WW2 vets), since most of what those who call themselves left-wing today also tack that on even though the two really didn't have much to do with each other.
So how's any of that relevant to South Park? Well, South Park is fundamentally a 90s show, and thrives under a healthy/competitive political environment, and a healthy media ecosystem, so you had both lots of material and both sides could reasonably be mocked for its excess. Now, the problems are (and we know now, as hindsight is 2020) 100% factually caused by one side- the side that calls itself "left"- and the media ecosystem is no longer healthy for other reasons.
What's left to mock?
Most of the people watching South Park don't think this.
MAGA. I think South Park is overcorrecting after 4-5 years of mocking "woke", but mainstream conservatism as expressed through MAGA is content rich when it comes to parody.
Why does mocking ICE work? Because the average illegal immigrant isn't a gangbanger or a rapist; it's some poor guy with a family mowing a lawn or scrubbing a hotel toilet after Cartman takes a massive shit. The Trump administration implicitly understands this and it's why they have to continuously emphasize ICE is deporting the "worst of the worst" or whatever.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't deport every single illegal. I don't watch South Park to form my political opinions but I can acknowledge that the substance of their critique is correct.
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You can see a similar paradox in the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union. The coup plotters wanted to overthrow Gorbachev to instate a more hard-line interpretation of Marxist-Leninism than what Gorbachev had in mind. So that would make them left-wing revolutionaries right? But at the same time, the reason the coup plotters wanted to do that is because hardline Marxist-Leninism was the old, established order and they were old established figures that had a large stake in the old order. So in a lot of ways Gorbachev is the young left-liberal reformer and the coup plotters that want more Marxism are the reactionary conservatives.
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"Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame" was pretty good, though, and I say this as someone who has no sympathy at all for Parker and Stone's politics (whatever they may be).
Yeah, that's true, but did they really have anything to say about that? If I recall, that episode still ended with the "real" Kathleen Kennedy coming back and her viewpoint being mostly vindicated. I'm just throwing this out there, but I feel like maybe their worldview these days skews towards, leftists are right but take it too far, and conservatives are just wrong.
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Old age and actually having status to lose has made them cowardly. The new school principal character South Park introduced in 2015 was basically a meta-textual admission that they just can’t do the same kind of jokes that they did in the 90s for fear of getting cancelled. Even with their criticism of Trump, they spent 10 years walking on eggshells and are only being really vicious in their parody now that much of controversy over Trump has died down and he has safely solidified into a semi-establishment figure.
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The "anti-vaxxers" and “conspiracy theorists” were not "right about everything".
Apart from Biden's senility, what other low-hanging fruit were there from the administration? South Park didn't attack Dems per se, but it did mock Dem-adjacent policies. And what other show makes fun of fat black women?
MAGA and its menagerie of spokespersons are, unfortunately, cartoonishly easy to lampoon. There are "serious" right-wing intellectuals on Twitter and Substack, but these people are not represented as the public face of MAGA.
Sam Brinton, Karine Jean-Pierre, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Rachel Levine, and just general DEI out the ass. Vaccine Mandates paired with fear-mongering/demonizing White House statements directed at people refusing to vaccinate. Pressuring social media sites to toe the prescribed line. Phoning a convicted felon's family because he was black and shot by the police (while committing a felony). Having a literal crackhead of a son appear alongside the president in public settings while other crackheads sat in prison for the same crime. Expanding protections for asylum seekers that allowed millions of people to flow into the country and rush the border. Attempting to, and almost succeeding in imprisoning their primary political opponent. An entire media apparatus going to bat for nearly cause the Democratic party supported. There was so much of it going on that if they had done less it might have stood out more. But, because the ideological insanity was such a regular occurrence, it all just blended together into one cloudy nightmare of political correctness and "accountability" toward those who had dissenting views and opinions.
Maybe these things weren't low-hanging fruit to the average person, but they were to me.
There is a lot of material to work with when it comes to MAGA and the Trump admin, but that is the cost of taking necessary actions over "appropriate" ones. The optics are terrible when viewed through liberal eyeballs, I get that. But our country's fatigue with political correctness has gotten to the point where drastic action feels inevitable.
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Where to even start, the government used its tendrils in twitter and youtube/google/facebook to do its damndest censoring right wing voices/ gaslighitng the public about the origin of covid. They entirely suporessed biden's son's laptop shenanigans and the corrupt dealings with Borisma.
These mother fuckers tried to unperson and ruin Alex Jones. Hilldawg is still not in prison for the e-mail server and use of the state apparatus to try and paint Trump as a Putin controlled puppet.
very worthwhile goal
and if Alex Jones is alternative then I am taking modern mass media as preferable
even Hamas press releases are better
wait, has it sadly not worked?
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Alex Jones is a professional liar. If anyone deserves to be unpersoned, he does.
Nah, they are making the frogs gay, the elite ARE fully bought into the Malthusian catastrophe meme and would love to slash birthrates and start disposing of large swathes of the population if they could (what he refers as soft kill), and finally you can't convince me hilldawg isn't a literal demon smelling of Sulphur.
What about government steering tornadoes, Sandy Hook shooting as a hoax that involved child actors, secret network of FEMA concentration camps, global warming being hoax etc?
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