Trey Parker and Matt Stone Are Changing the Name of South Park to South America
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“We especially want to thank our parent company Paramount -- a Skydance Capitulation.” (née 'Corporation')
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.
ManBearPig lambasted the very idea of climate change as laughable, and anyone who cared about it was a pussy liberal loser. They have recently walked this back, but the damage is done.
Overall they contributed to the perception that sincerity and earnestness are lame and the only way to appear cool and enlightened is to be a cynic.
idk I feel like an election boiling down to “Which Bonesman would you like?” is a valid thing to question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_and_Bones#Notable_member...
> In the 2004 presidential election, both the Democratic and Republican nominees were members of Skull and Bones. When asked what it meant that both he and George W. Bush were Bonesmen, former presidential candidate John Kerry said, "Not much, because it's a secret."[46][47]
Senator Kerry voted for the iraq war.
Al Gore was the guy to get elected and not invade Iraq. Kerry was the following election. The south park episode about that election was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapper_Keeper_(South_Park) but it came out after and was boring.
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Your example is an episode where they lampoon both candidates.
There are still a variety of subjects where I’m sure people on the other side of the aisle would take objection (i think of the ultra PC “pc principal” who demands that everyone honor everyone’s pronouns at the threat of violence). Last couple of years though, the tone has shifted, for example the depiction of trump as the literal duplicate of saddam Hussein and satans new boyfriend, who literally impregnates satan with the Antichrist, and then spends the season trying to abort it.
PC Principal has an interesting arc when he hooks up with strong woman and has pc babies who reject his transformation and then ultimately accept him.
Ah yes, Power Christian Principal
That's kinda good to hear - I suppose - but they only did that after the consequences of their destructive actions became clear to them, even though nearly every other intelligent person on the planet had been warning about that.
Impressionable baby techbros here on HN still quote them on that stuff, so the consequences of their 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.
“Trump has renamed Lake Ontario to the Lake of America. Of course, the left knows you can’t just rename things for political gain, just ask any Latinx birthing person.”
Latinx is attempting to provide an umbrella term for latino and latina, it's not renaming one of the two.
"Birthing person" is attempting to provide an umbrella term for people who can give birth that may or may not necessarily be female. (You can express your own feelings about the reality that this exists, but it does exist regardless of how you feel about it).
On the other hand Lake Ontario is a real lake that already had a name and now someone is trying to give it a new one.
I'm all for inclusivity, but there's a certain point/form of language policing where you're asking folks to perform a lot of mental labor to adjust their language to reflect an extremely rare edge case. Like why?
It's like if we insisted that people avoid the phrase "look at this" in general communication lest you offend/exclude a blind person who might be listening.
I've never heard 1 democrat politician say "birthing person".
This was never something "democrats" said and always something that rightwing media says that Democrats say.
There's nothing to drop or defend as this is completely a distraction from real issues.
Basically, rightwing media LOVES picking fringe individuals pushing a position and pretending like every democrat actually believes the same.
These word changes were real things that happened by government policy.
Literally the first sentence in the guidelines that talk about birthing person.
The entire paragraph says "it's fine if you want to" and isn't prescriptive.
This is a fake controversy. You are literally just mad that some people recognize and want to be accommodating to trans people.
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.
I can't even humor your assumption that there are only two sexes and one birthing sex, because intersexed people exist, as do people with unusual chromosomes. Some of them have wombs and can give birth. Language like "birthing persons", while awkward, admits the existence of those people into a larger group without requiring even more awkward phrasing akin to "women, and men with wombs, and intersexed people with wombs".
My point is, our interpretation of these observable biological processes and facts, and our response to them, is socially constructed. There are many Doctors and Scientists who do very much agree with this complex view, just as I'm sure there are those who believe in a strong binary like you. I see the complex view here as much more useful, especially in navigating things like human dynamics and healthcare needs in ways that benefit us all
The term that Hispanic queer and non-binary communities use is latine, which is pronounceable, follows normal Spanish grammatical rules, actually arose from the communities being discussed, and pluralizes easily to "les latines".
There is no person that can give birth and is not female.
Only about 4% of the US Hispanic population uses it, 75% say it should not be used, and half have never even heard of the word. It doesn't fit Spanish grammar or pronunciation rules which makes it look even out of place.
Maybe I just live in a red area, but I see a lot of people judge liberals based on wild Twitter takes and random think pieces — which aren't actually policies/rule of law.
If Joe Biden signed an EO denouncing the use of the phrase "pregnant woman" in government documents as a queerphobic slur or mandating Gov employees add their pronouns to their email signatures, I'd find this take more compelling.
But he didn't.
She was eventually fired in part for yelling at a guy in a huge meeting when he answered a question about to a hypothetical boss as “he” instead of she or they.
So I understand your skepticism and would also be a skeptic if I didn’t live it.
There are much better examples where the 2 parties are frustratingly aligned to a large extent. For example, datacenters, ICE, and foreign policy. You can find a good number of democrats who are mad about Iran not because it's a dumb war, but because it wasn't done correctly by going through congress.
Both sides are aligned pretty closely in making their donors happy above their voters. That keeps democrats from regulating like they should and it keeps republicans focused on "the enemies within".
Latinx is a not particularly useful attempt by a tiny group of people to make another tiny group of oppressed people feel slightly more comfortable
Trump renamed lake ontario because he is a gigantic asshole.
How is that not changing?
They didn't go after Gore because he was wrong. They went after him because he committed the cardinal sin of really, earnestly taking a stand on a big issue. That is NEVER okay in South Park. There is never a correct side. Both sides must always be bad, on every issue. The "correct" view in South Park is always to not really take a stance on anything, and any character who is strongly on one side or the other on any issue will always be portrayed as wrong to do so.
That's not to say that South Park doesn't have some great episodes poking fun at some very deserving targets. They absolutely do. Some real gems in recent seasons.
And with Gore, it's not that he took a huge stance, it's that his messaging was goofy and ineffective.
Satire is dead, 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?
Shame. I wonder if they got "talked to."
Get real.
I don't think South Park ever implied both parties are equally bad. Just that they are both bad. And I don't think irreverent satire is prep work or psy-op propaganda for an authoritarian government. If anything, it's the inoculation.
It's quite clear that you haven't watched the series in the past decade. I'm sure you wouldn't be crowing the same tune if you'd watched the Mr. Garrison storyline.
What season is the Mr. Garrison storyline from?
Why is it insufficient to (assuming the poster isn't lying to us) watch SP for 20 years before drawing a conclusion about it and the creators? They owned up to not having watched recently before asking about whether things have changed. I don't understand the weird hostility in your post when they owned up to the limitations of their PoV.
It started about 10 years ago, when the person apparently stopped watching it, during the 2016 presidential campaign.
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.
For just one of them, ‘it never happened’ :p https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/south-park-gaslights-a...
just because the recent right/republicans were able to more effectively lean into the meme-heavy southpark-type (crude, male-targeted) humor as marketing doesn't really track with your last assertion (for me)
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
Cancel culture is literally censorship. Deplatforming is censorship. Debanked is censorship.
I don't know what the R word is but there is a group of people you can't even look down at because they have been deplatformed and cancelled.
The left has passed laws and people do get jail time for social media posts in the UK.
For a specific recent example democrat-leaning states had much stricter and longer-lasting covid lockdowns - preventing free association is a form of censorship.
??
Though surely to say a system or process is 'retarded' means something is holding it back?
To equate this to a derogatory term for a learning disability (worthy of self-censorship!) is, frankly, bizarre and rather smacks of virtue signalling.
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.
On the left, when someone uses a racial or sexist epithet, for example, the reaction is to exert social pressure against that individual. Social media escalates that to a giant dogpile, which, in some cases, results in some extreme cases where the individual loses their job in addition to becoming a social pariah.
However, all of this is merely an exercise in free speech and free association. The person in question suffers no legal consequences for their speech. Instead, it is a large number of onlookers who decide they disagree with the individual and choose to counter him/her with their own speech and/or dissolve any association they have with him/her.
I won't say I condone how little it takes for the crowd to react sometimes or the extent to which they do, but everything is well within First Amendment rights of free speech and association.
In contrast, when something the right doesn't like is discovered, they take legal action. Books are removed from public and school libraries. Laws are written to target anyone who is guilty of the offensive speech (e.g., Florida's Don't Say Gay law). More recently, it's been popular to write these laws such that the offending individuals are opened to civil suits by third parties rather than suffer jail time, as a loophole trying to avoid the Supreme Court striking them down as blatant First Amendment violations.
Not sure it’s correct to characterize that as a reaction of only the “left” - case in point, the reactions to Charlie Kirk’s death.
They handed a guy a seven month jail sentence for posting a joke that Hillary voters could text in their votes.
The last season made fun of ICE, Peter Thiel, Trump-gift-based-economy, shitcoins and so on (Labubus, 67, ...)
They also poked fun at themselves that South Park sucks now as it's all about politics, which I don't think they ever really wanted
I'm a big fan though
I think it's hard to say how much they are responsible for modern politics vs just a reflection of the attitudes that created it. This piece[1] from 2020 puts it pretty well I think. Either way it's hard for me to look at old episodes like "The Death Camp of Tolerance" without seeing a precursor to "anti-wokism".
>Political correctness is itself a fascinating term. Its elastic, capacious usage has grown to encompass just about anything conservative political culture would prefer not to talk about. Like South Park’s own essential premises, it judges the crime of bringing things up—grand injustices or just hurt feelings—to be worse than any unfairness, inequity, or simple rudeness. It is a sort of singular and universal commandment: Moses gone up the mountain to return with a single tablet that proclaims, “Stop complaining!”
[1]https://newrepublic.com/article/157066/watching-south-park-e...
They are still very good about not punching down and I think that is one of the nicer things to say about the show but their shtick got old during the 45th admin and I haven't tuned back since.
Your style of thinking in and of itself could be a SP episode
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.
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.
It would have been so easy for the Democrats to embrace economics and labour over culture war and scolding. To push for getting money out of politics (Citizen's United). They could have kept the Bernie crowd, Gen Z men, and maybe even Rogan (that guy went from left of centre to right of right so quick though... there's more to it for sure).
Losing in 2024 was insane though and it still feels like the Democrats might screw it up again. FFS people scolding South Park...
The right has owned the talk radio space for ever now. I'm rolling podcasts into that as well. I'm not familiar with many left talking heads, but I can name off many from the right. I'd suspect that Rogan noticed where the audience was and adjust programming based on that.
Here is a short clip of Obama, Hillary, and Bill Clinton supporting deporting illegal aliens, especially those who have broken laws. If they said this stuff today they’d be called maga.
If cities cooperated with ICE instead of fighting them, ICE could just go pick people up at the jail instead of ended up in this “gestapo” scenario. Federal and local governments fighting against each other is the problem here. 15-20 years ago they would have likely been on the same side of this issue and could have worked together to handle thing with more professionalism and tact.
The data doesn’t seem to support crime being localized to red or blue cities. Your characterization and Trump’s both seem incorrect.
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-donald-trump-claims-crime-u...
And you aren't even American based on your very obvious commonwealth spelling. Butt out of our political commentary.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/08/16/georgia-ev...
[1] - https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/biden-low-inc...
[2] - https://ballotpedia.org/Medicaid_work_requirements_during_th...
Don't be ridiculous. I'd love it if I didn't have to care about US politics, except it has infected the rest of the world. Telling someone to butt out when your dear leader is invading other countries, intentionally influencing foreign elections (Vance stumping for the AfD), and claiming others are 51st states, etc. I also have friends and family in the US that only ever want to talk politics these days.
For the record, I think Biden deserves kudos for pursuing a far more progressive and labour oriented strategy than people expected. The Bernie Bro's soured on Democrats in the 2016 elections. I'm not sure they were a real problem in 2024.
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...
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.
Sick burn.
I know a few people who have met and worked with Murdoch and all have said he is perfectly pleasant to be with and has a great sense of humor, just a shame about absolutely everything else he does.
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/588794-x-twitter-to-nitter...
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 as bad as the old Emarica versus Vimerica wars.
And no mention of the root cause of the lake fiasco, DistractEpsteinica.
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.