@goodgrammaritan / goodgrammaritan.tumblr.com
A reminder that Gene Roddenberry's intent of Star Trek was that it was always meant to be a commentary of modern society.
Conservatives who think that Star Trek never used to be "woke" are simply bad at paying attention or have really really bad memory (if not both).
for a satire news site they hit the nail on the head
Holy fuck
Something I learned in my brief experience with a journalism class is that The Onion is a prime example of truly successful satire.
All the times they “hit the nail on the head”, they are in fact achieving satire’s ultimate goal. To examine something free of bias, in a way that people are less likely to be sensitive toward a harsh reality.
Under the frame of a joke. Don’t discredit the work of the people behind The Onion just because they make you laugh. They know what they’re doing. And what they’re doing is important. They’re forcing people to rethink the way our system works without wasting the energy on big explanations, and it’s working.
Every time you see a “child prodigy” think about this please
[ID. First image is a tweet from @DrHaroldNews saying “Leo Varadkar warns introducing a rent freeze could create a 'nightmare scenario', where landlords would be forced to sell their extra houses, which would then drive house prices down, allowing low-income people to get on the property ladder."
Second image is a screenshot of Chidi from The Good Place with subtitles edited to say “Okay. But that's better. You do get how that's better, right?” End ID.]
it's from a satire blog, but the fact we all just shake our heads thinking, "Sounds about right. Landlords are leeches," tells you something
From the site:
okay, I'll bite... I need to check something
as I suspected (thank Dog):
(spoiler alert: it's a satire site created by vegans)
The real reason you couldn’t make Airplane! today is that it’s a parody of a type of movie that doesn’t exist anymore in part because Airplane! made fun of it so hard
The 70s-style disaster film was already dying but Airplane becoming, by far, more known, more watched, and more liked than any real example of the genre even though it was the most popular type of movie right up until Star Wars is one of the most magnificent examples of Weird Al-ing something
The jester mocking the court advisor so deftly, the curse on the king breaks because His Majesty realizes that guy does suck.
To quote Daniel Craig: “We had to destroy the myth because Mike Myers fucked us.”
One unbelievable fact I learned looking for that quote: the Austin Powers sequels outgrossed both of the last two Pierce Brosnan James Bond movies.
Man those Brosnan Bond movies are such a weird transitional moment in pop culture. People tend to analyze that by going “well the Brosnan Bond films were Bond trying to figure things out after the Cold War ended, Craig is post-9/11 Bond” when the actual dividing line is the start of the Austin Powers Era of History
The best satire self destructs.
Satire that lasts 50 years and still elicits “OMG so true"s ain’t worth SHIT to me. If it’s still true after that long, it’s just snark with no bite. Real satire is a knife (or sometimes a scalpel) that dispatches the target of its criticism and in so doing makes itself irrelevant (if not incomprehensible). It’s Jon Stewart getting Crossfire cancelled, it’s Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin so seamlessly that her ticket was unelectable, it’s Duchamp mocking the art scene so hard he irrevocably changed its course.
If satire is still relevant long after its creation, it has failed at its mission. It might be funny, it might be good comedy, but it’s not good satire.
A lot of satire is of its time and one of the better signs of that is how many satirical works just. Outlast what they were parodying and no one knows they’re a parody anymore
Obviously that describes 90% of Weird Al’s songs, but like, Lord of the Flies is a parody of a specific type of British adventure novel (and a specific novel, even) and it’s outlasted it so long that people bring up the satirical aspects of Lord of the Flies to criticize Lord of the Flies.
The city of Atlanta is facing backlash after announcing plans to bulldoze 85-acres of forest to build a $90 million replica of the city for police to train. The Onion asked several Atlanta police officers why they support ‘Cop City,’ and this is what they said.
Patrolman Reggie Burke
“This training will come in handy the next time I need to fire a rocket launcher into a crowd of people.” [...]
Officer Dean Gregory
“How can we serve the community without a fortified stronghold miles away from civilization?”[...] Officer Lesley Finch
“I still can’t tell the difference between my gun and taser, but with eight or nine more training courses I should be able to figure it out.”
Officer Tyrell Lee
"How can you have a military without a base?"[...]
Officer Anthony Coleman
“Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.”
and in related news:
Hugh Cullen
“How can we have a functional society if citizens don’t have the constant fear of being violently brutalized with no recourse?”
Why are you wearing glasses?
No, seriously. Why the fuck are you still wearing glasses?
The epidemic is over. I don’t know anyone who worries about nearsightedness anymore. Do you hear anyone talking about it? Do you see nearsightedness germs flying around? No, because it’s OVER.
Look, I don’t know how to break it to you, but a thin piece of glass in front of your eyes isn’t going to help protect you from macular degeneration. It’s a false sense of security, an illusion; like if you just keep looking through them you can pretend that the world has crisp sharp edges. Well, guess what? The world is blurry. You don’t know where empty space ends and your body begins. In fact, it doesn’t. Your body is mostly empty space.
Everything happens for a reason, anyway; so if you get into an accident because you can’t drive without your glasses? Tough cajones; take your punishment like God intended. It’s your fault for having bad genes, which you got because of… original sin, or something. I don’t know, I didn’t actually read the Bible. I just believe vehemently in every word of it, except the words you use to disagree with me. Because that’s wrong.
I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong by yelling at glasses-wearers on the street. It just fills me with such visceral, incandescent rage when I see a pair of pince-nez balancing on someone’s nose. It’s like they’re sending a direct fuck-you to people like me, who choose not to wear glasses. So of course I have to yell at them; it’s just simple self-preservation - if I don’t, pretty soon everyone will be wearing glasses, and ganging up on those of us that don’t, because we’re “jeopardizing public safety” or “a danger to the common good.” I don’t need to listen to that.
When you declare you’re on the opposite side from me with that flag you wear right on your face, you shouldn’t be surprised when I treat you like an enemy. "What sides?“ you ask? "There’s no ‘sides’ here; everyone is just choosing-” oh, shut up. You’re so naive. Of course there are sides. There’s sides to everything. What about a circle? you say. Inside and outside. There. Now don’t you feel stupid.
And those circles you wear on your face mark you as being on the inside. I don’t like that. Nobody likes being left on the outside. So stop wearing them. That way I can find something else to be angry about, like freckles. I think I’ll take on freckles next. If you have them, stop having them. You’re being too different from me and I don’t like it.
So regarding A-Town, how do the people working on it feel about it? Everyone has to make a living, but are any of them uncomfortable making a low budget show that somewhat trivializes the people who save the human race?
I think they would say that the history of comedy has always been the history of mocking the unacceptable and exposing the taboo. All in the Family responded to the Civil Rights era by creating the world's most bigoted bigot and then inviting everyone to laugh at him, even knowing a nonzero percent of viewers were going to agree with him. The Chair and Abbott Elementary are 2020s efforts to point and laugh and cry at terrible current events. There's specifically a tradition of "war is absurd" as a comedy premise: Catch-22 for World War II, Blackadder Goes Forth for World War I, Dr. Strangelove for the Cold War, so on.
So part of why Marco appears on A-Town, why Tom doesn't mind the show, why some Santa Barbara residents watch it, is that it's letting you laugh at something that would otherwise make you scream in horror. Blackadder Goes Forth has a scene where a WWI general sets a 12"x12" square of sod on a table and says "took a lot of turf today"; the conversation reveals that the square foot of grass on the table is the entirety of the ground taken that day. It's mocking a horrific reality — that the British regularly sacrificed 1000s of lives for a few yards of battlefield, and that "winners" of WWI battles often had to be determined with a yardstick — but it's making a sharp critique of the powerful, and it's a solid bit of shock comedy.
Most people watching A-Town know that Daisy A. fixing her manicure in line to be reinfested, only to be sent home due to a paperwork error, is not an accurate depiction of being a controller. But its point, about the yeerks' kidnappings being arbitrary and their leadership being incompetent, would land well with a lot of ex-hosts. And the fact that the show takes the time to distinguish that Daisy and Zeptron 420 are two completely different people — something that I suspect some other postwar movies would neglect — is at least part of the reason for Tom's tolerance for the show. It's not great that the show chooses to convey that point with the Girly = Evil; Goth = Good trope, but at least the dramatic costume changes convey that Daisy's personality is not Zeptron's.
That said, Jean and Jake and everyone else who hates the show also has a point. Jean especially finds it so upsetting because half the jokes rest on an enthymeme of "Obviously Jake Berenson's parents are the most clueless idiots ever to breathe air." A-Town aspires to, like The Americans, show the hollowness of the suburban American ideal — that's why its sets look straight out of Leave It to Beaver — but that leaves Dr. and Mr. A mostly being the butt of the joke for their negligent and incompetent parenting. For Jean, that hits a little too close to home, in a way it wouldn't for Marco watching his fake-self fight taxxon puppets by holding up a stuffed skunk, or Tom watching his fake-self swap lipstick colors every time someone new controls her body.
So if A-Town aspires to be Blackadder Goes Forth, it lands closer to being South Park: sometimes funny and pointed, sometimes lending support to the bigoted views it tries to critique. Like South Park, the conversation about it will probably acknowledge its real social contributions (exposing Scientology, excoriating nationalism) while also showing the real harms to vulnerable people from the show's brand of comedy (turning "gay" into a catchall insult, resurrecting antisemetic myths). Like South Park, A-Town tries to mock things that need mocking, but it also spends almost as much time punching down as it does punching up.
always punch up at power, not down at those life has knocked down
Real lawyer plays Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney
Japanese law doesn't require evidence to be presented for review by both parties. "SURPRISE!!! I have facts you weren't aware of!" is very much a thing there.
The entire game was written to show how messed up the Justice System is there.
Japanese courts have a 99% conviction rate. In essence, if you are accused of a crime you are already considered to be guilty and it is up to you to prove otherwise if you can. Remember in the end of Persona 5, where the person who falsely accused you of assaulting them confessed to everything on national television but you were still in prison until your friends tracked down every witness and got them all the recant their testimonies individually? That was in no way exaggerated.
Also Japanese police have a 90+% rate of successfully arresting a “suspect” for every crime they investigate. At first this sounds really impressive, how they always track down the criminal, until you realize that they do it through a combination of refusing to investigate crimes which seem hard to solve or are likely to involve organizes crime or politicians (lots of “suicides” and “accidents” which are very blatant murder), and any time they do open a case but fail to figure everything out in the first day or two they just grab a convenient scapegoat (usually poor, frequently an immigrant or ethnic minority).
There are also very few restrictions on how long you can be “interrogated” for after arrest, or what they can do to you during the interrogation. Almost all the accused confess to everything... eventually. Regardless of whether they were actually anywhere near the incident in question.
Yeah no, death note was also about how fuck up japanese police are. The reason the death note causes people to have heart attacks if you dont put a cause of death is because thats the go to excuse cops use if they dont want to investigate a case or cant solve it fast enough. And giving the death note to the police chiefs son and then exposing that son to be a fuckin freak and mass murderer was very much extremely intentional. The japanese justice system is extremely fucked up
Ok I know this has been said but
I love this post
people who say offensive things and then go “it’s okay! it’s just satire” really need to look at these two images
Say hello to mechanically separated chicken. It’s what all fast-food chicken is made from—things like chicken nuggets and patties. Also, the processed frozen chicken in the stores is made from it. Basically, the entire chicken is smashed and pressed through a sieve—bones, eyes, guts, and all. it comes out looking like this. There’s more: because it’s crawling with bacteria, it will be washed with ammonia, soaked in it, actually. Then, because it tastes gross, it will be reflavored artificially. Then, because it is weirdly pink, it will be dyed with artificial color. But, hey, at least it tastes good, right? High five, America!
oh my god
bitch that’s the tubby custard machine
date of origin: 2012
A classic
this just makes me wanna get some nuggets from mcdonalds for some reason
the fact op thought they could even get away with that blatant misinformation in the first place when the graphic they used was the fucking Tubby Custard machine amuses me like.
Even if you didn’t know what Teletubbies was that thing does not at all look like something you’d find in a factory, it’s colorful and colors cost extra.
that’s because OP’s post is a joke
I feel weird that I’m been here long enough to remember the original context–OP is mocking this post:
the picture clearly looks like some sort of strawberry ice cream, so OP did a copypasta of the original text and replaced with picture with something even funnier.
Both posts went around a lot, but it’s funny that the second, mocking post is now being reposted like OP is some kind of idiot instead of a comedic genius
the original post is actually still here: https://early-onset-of-night-blog.tumblr.com/post/1206666159/say-hello-to-mechanically-separated-chicken-its and apparently the original OP is a satire blog, anyway. So nobody was serious in the whole exchange
Getting new context for this ancient meme in the year of our lord 2021 is giving me whiplash.
satire is dead
[ID start: Tweet by John Fugelsang. The tweet says: "I won't get vaccinated. I won't wear a mask. I oppose universal healthcare. I ignore infant mortality rates in the poorest states. Migrants are "illegals". We need more guns on the street. I'm fine with cutting WIC & SNAP. I think the death penalty is just swell. I am pro-life"
Emily Miller answered with her own tweet. The tweet states: " I read this and thought, oh someone who has all my same positions. Then I realised you're mocking us." /ID End]
Excellent retelling of the Chicken Little story by Alexandra Petri
