domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
I'm frankly disappointed in Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Going back on their initial mockery of climate change; keeping their mouths shut on the frankly ridiculous clown world tier state of dems/ zombie Bidden. Where were they for the four years of nonstop gaslighting and censorship we endured?
Facing Covid disruptions and then streaming deal agreement issues. They were still able to make some but it was limited and messy.
"This merger is a shitshow and it's fucking up South Park. We are at the studio working on new episodes and we hope the fans get to see them somehow."
"We’ve tried to do South Park through four or five presidential elections, and it is such a hard thing to—it’s such a mind scramble, and it seems like it takes outsized importance,” Stone told Vanity Fair.
Stone said that the election is "obviously...f---ing important, but it kind of takes over everything and we just have less fun."
Plus, as Parker pointed out, the pair "don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump.”
Even the first episode this season was delayed due to all the streaming rights fuckery.
I think this is part of why the new season's first episode was "incoherent" as the OP put it, a lot of people didn't follow along with the show so the meta commentary on the process and their anger at Paramount being expressed through targeting the Trump deal didn't make sense to them. Part of the bait isn't just to get the Trump admin mad, it's to get them more mad at Paramount.
It's actually really funny if you understand the metaphor. Cartman and Butters in the car represents the "suicide" of Matt and Trey going down this path, trying to upset the executives. They don't know what if anything will come from it, but fuck it they're bringing the fight. The anger and freakouts at them from the right are not just icing on the cake, they're part of the formula
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
16hr ago
I am usually the last one to figure it out, like with Darwin or Impassionata or Julius, so I assumed that's what was happening there too, otherwise I would have said something.
Dean
Flairless
16hr ago
Too late- Amadan banned him on suspicion of being Hlynka and thus ban evasion. Not this post, just ban evasion.
SnapDragon
16hr ago
Ahhh, you know, this makes perfect sense. His AI-skeptical post here, which had serious technical errors but somehow got a QC, matched very well with the arguments I've had with him before. Even down to the dubious (and prideful) claims of technical expertise. And the comparison of AI to animal intelligence (one heron, one orangutan).
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
16hr ago
I mean, I strongly oppose public school teachers being required, or even permitted, really, to hang the Ten Commandments in a classroom. Public schools should not endorse an establishment of religion.
The point of the Satanic Temple stuff is as a protest against religious impositions on public spaces — you say you’re just endorsing good morals, well here’s ours, how do you like it? It’s a good troll, and I think it makes its point.
You also have to separate the Satanic Temple people — who are trolling atheists, from the LeVeyan Satanism people — who are somewhat more trolly atheists who admire Satan as a literary figure (he brought the light of true choice to man!) while not believing in the literal existence of Satan, from the actual, ritual and sacrifices to Satan people. The latter are considered dangerous even among practicing occultists.
The Satanic Temple stuff is just a more edgy version of the Pastafarians trying to wear pasta strainers in their drivers license photos. I think they need to be careful, because yelling “hail Satan” as they like to do sometimes is both upsetting to normies and spiritually stupid, but based on my experiences with the type they’re just edgy atheists and their personalities aren’t much different.
I don’t like any of them, and my view on existing religious references in public spaces is to roll my eyes at people making a big deal of them, but the teachers have a legitimate constitutional complaint that being required to hang religious texts in their classrooms is inappropriate.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
16hr ago
@EverythingIsFine I'm getting hammered in a gay bar (no, not that way), so if you do wrote back, I'll check in when I'm sober
Now, the problems are (and we know now, as hindsight is 2020) 100% factually caused by one side- the side that calls itself "left"-
Most of the people watching South Park don't think this.
What's left to mock?
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.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
We know for a fact he's done it repeatedly. I am only 95% sure this was him.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
Hah. I remember thinking at the time he was very sus, but for some reason he just didn't trigger my radar. Well played, I guess.
Tree
17hr ago
I didn't mean to suggest anything untoward in your steadfast support for this writer of beloved children's books. I tried and failed to think of a softer alternative to the word 'idol'. Your 'pal', jk rowling?
aqouta
17hr ago
they were suspiciously hands off the low-hanging fruit that was the Biden administration.
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.
ABigGuy4U
17hr ago
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.
Jiro
17hr ago
The object level is important. Geeks have an easily exploited habit of trying to make rules that are agnostic to circumstances.
What's a good way to treat criminals? Put them in jail. What's a good way to treat accused criminals? Figure out if the accusation is correct, and put them in jail if they are. What's the best way to treat accused criminals if you don't want to figure out if they're correct? There isn't one. Anything you do has to have the step "figure out if the accusation is correct".
If Hlykna is unjustly accused, almost anything he does in response is okay. If he's justly accused, almost anything except submitting to jail is wrong. If he's justly accused and thinks he isn't, that doesn't change what responses are right and wrong, which depend on the true situation, not on what's in his head.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
You expressed skepticism earlier that it would inflict guilt-ridden nightmares upon the executioners - but supposing it provably did, would your stance change?
Well, now we're deep into hypotheticals having nothing to do with the original example.
If I knew that undignified groveling and blubbering would make my killers feel bad, but not save my life, would I do it? I like to think not. If it would serve some instrumental purpose - like making a martyr of myself that would stir public pity such as to prevent future killings? Assuming I was capable of making such a rational and strategic decision in such a moment, maybe?
Notably, this needn't take the form of whining and blubbering; you could also try and make an impression on the basis of fighting spirit, struggling and cursing your murderers until your last breath, to try and inspire others to show the same rebellious courage - even if you have ~0 odds of actually freeing yourself or injuring your captors. Much manlier, but also very different from "facing death with dignity".
Fighting them and cursing them seems much more dignified than begging and crying. At least I wouldn't die ashamed.
ZanarkandAbesFan
17hr ago
I always thought Dr Nick in The Simpsons was Asian. It happens to the best of us.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
17hr ago
I am greatly amused. You talk like you know who I am, yet very little is recognizable. ("My feminist idol"? My gosh.)
wayfarer
17hr ago
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?
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
17hr ago
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.
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 country label, 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?
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
17hr ago
You weren't kidding about that subreddit. Just browsed a thread where they were complaining about having to hand the ten commandments in the classroom, and a commenter literally recommended hanging the 7 tenets of the Satanic 'faith'. You can't make this stuff up. https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1miopbb/its_over/n76x3d5/
quiet_NaN
18hr ago
Friedliche DeBoer
On substack, he calls himself Freddie deBoer, while WP calls him Fredrik deBoer.
"friedliche" would be a declination of the German adjective meaning peaceful. If this is a honest mistake, please fix. If this is meant to mock him, I do not think it will land for most people.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
18hr ago
I don't see any exposed flame near the flag. That's the only potential issue, if the queens don't stop grinding on each other.
Holy fucking shit
Right as I write, one of them mentions that the fluorescent lights are heating up the drinks to unpleasant levels. Time to call the fire department, or the police, due to impersonation of Royalty.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
18hr ago
or better yet, a skilled human editor
I'm not made out of money! The day I can expect to make more than pocket change from my Substack is not clear, and it only just crossed the hundred-subscriber threshold. But I would use an LLM to help me figure out what to trim and keep, so I was planning to do that myself.
"It reads like AI and I don't like it" is equivalent -- I'm trying to be more constructive than that, but you don't want to hear it.
I appreciate that, thank you, but I still genuinely disagree. We will have to chalk that down to a difference of opinion.
You have not -- as practice for your next draft, can you explain this in four sentences or less, such that your thesis is clearly distinguishable from those of Messrs. Scrooge and Swift?
"Some deaths appear imminent and inevitable, and involve a great deal of suffering before they bury you. In the event that we can't actually resolve the problem, it is laudable to make the end quick and painless. Most people die complicated and protracted deaths (as will be illustrated downstream), and hence, among many other recommendations, I say it is in your best interest to support euthanasia, and will aim to reassure you regarding some common concerns. I think this is a public good, but even if the government doesn't enter the business itself, it should, like in Switzerland, hurry up and get out of the way."
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
18hr ago
There are some fun similarities between Cicero’s Rhetorica Ad Herennium (90bc), which is a treatise on rhetoric and memorization, and the Passion narrative in the gospels. Cicero explains how to craft the most memorable mental scene, one that can be recalled with fidelity in the future:
since in normal cases some images are strong and sharp and suitable for awakening recollection, and others so weak and feeble as hardly to succeed in stimulating memory, we must therefore consider the cause of these differences, so that, by knowing the cause, we may know which images to avoid and which to seek.
If we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember a long time.
All normal stuff. Now the examples he provides next:
A sunrise, the sun's course, a sunset, are marvellous to no one because they occur daily. But solar eclipses are a source of wonder because they occur seldom, and indeed are more marvellous than lunar eclipses, because these are more frequent
We ought, then, to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but doing something; if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us; or if we somehow disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking, or by assigning certain comic effects to our images, for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily.
These elements are all explicit in the Crucifixion:
-
the solar eclipse (the earliest manuscripts actually specify that it was a solar eclipse, rather than a darkening of the sky)
-
the crown
-
the purple cloak
-
the disfigurement (“many were astonished at you— his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the children of mankind”)
-
the blood (the beating, scourge, then crucifixion)
-
the comic effect: the irony of the actual king being mocked as a fake king
-
all the things which Cicero mentions earlier, combined (and the usual subject of sermon): base, dishonourable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable
The crown and robe are also brought into the narrative in a very peculiar way in John:
Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Behold the man”
The word behold here is ἰδοὺ, can be is translated as see!, or look!, remember! and similar interjections. Essentially a call to pay attention.
You've said that begging here CAN save you, even rescue you from a permaban. Which encourages begging, which is why you shouldn't do it.
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