Why does the SJW cult hate South Park so much?
In 2017 I was surprised to discover that GenYers and Millennials hate South Park with a passion that knows no bounds. This tweet (and make sure to read the raging comments too) is typical:
I never knew SJW Millennials hated South Park so much, so I immediately wondered, what the hell is wrong with these kids? How can they not like South Park? I thought that SJW Millennials would have loved South Park because it promotes the same “cure it with alcoholism” approach that SJW Millennials and their posterbois and postergirls promote. I always thought that South Park and SJW Millennials would have made the best of #drinking_buddies My first reaction was that SJW Millennials were probably hatin’ on Gen X as a proxy for hating on their older siblings, who are GenXers. You see, I am a GenXer myself (though at the very tail end of that generation) and I can tell you there was no safe space when I was growing up. There was anger space. There was the space to be legitimately angry. Back in the old days, when someone was mean on you, or if someone was spewing bullshit you didn’t agree with, you went into your hate space which was your happy space and you hated on them. You hated on them HARD. This song adequately explains what that was like for all you Millennials who have no idea what I’m referring to:
I don’t know what I like,
What I love,
But I know what I loath.
Up all night keeping track of my each and every hate
I paint on each a little face.
I line them up I give them names,
I invent games and play with all my negative space.
I hate to hate, but I know not how
to otherwise define my tastes.
A lot of the rock and rap songs in the 1980s and 1990s were about claiming your anger and celebrating it as a positive emotion, “your anger is a gift”, etc. Hating on assholes was considered a good thing back then.
The first song on Marilyn Manson’s very popular industrial metal album Antichrist Superstar (1996) was the “Irresponsible Hate Anthem”, which begins with a crowd chanting “we hate love, we love hate”.
Nowadays, being angry at legitamately destructive bad things is considered a bad manners amongst the safe space generation. Look at the way the word “hater” has become a pejorative amongst these kids. When I was young there was a French cult movie that we watched in French class in highschool in Amsterdam that was literally called La Haine, the Hatred. The movie did not celebrate hate but explained why hate was a legitimate emotion in response to injustice that could not be denied or disowned in the name of political correctness.
Unfortunately, I soon discovered that even older SJWs and SJWs my age have come to hate South Park (after watching it and appreciating it for years), so this wasn’t just a generational thing. It was clearly a Zeitgeist thing.
It’s cool amongst SJWs to hate South Park. Hating South Park is a way for an SJW to express their belonging to the SJW cult, especially if they denounce South Park as a “false idol” after having been a fan for years. I personally suspect this hatred of South Park is related to the SJWs’ intense fear of righteous anger. Nowadays being angry and hating someone for legit reasons, for example, hating someone who is straight-faced lying to you, is taken to means you must have assburgers, and having assburgers basically amounts to saying that you’re crazy with rage and no one should take you seriously.
I suspect that the main reason why Millennials are drugging and boozing themselves silly on their Youtube Livestreams, bragging about how many pills they’ve done and how many drinks they’ve had is because they are drowning and sedating their righteous anger so they don’t have to hear it, really listen to what that anger says. Because if they were to listen to that anger, they might agree with what the anger has to say, and since they have been raised with all of the feel-good American psychological bullshit about how “anger is a bad counsel” and how stuffing your anger supposedly leads to success, nothing is more terrifying to these kids than getting really in touch with that inner anger. What these Millennial kids do not realize is that sedating yourself with booze and drugs, and thinking you can just ignore your anger while it keeps screaming at you from insde is far far worse, and that’s this stuffing of legitimate anger how fatally frustrated American serial killers spraying a crowd are created. Caustic humour is a great way to channel anger productively in the arts, and that was also part of the genius of South Park. South Park dramatized anger and thus allowed people to laugh at their anger instead of forcing them to stuff it in the name of political correctness.
Let’s have a look again at that Twitter comment and thread I linked to above where South Park is accused of effectively brainwashing my generation into being complacent and not to caring. What does it even mean to “care” amongst this apathetic generation watching eachother on the Livestream self-destruct on drugs & booze while cheering eachother on? This is the generation that cared so much about politics that they stayed home and effectively got Trump elected with apathy. A lot of people don’t know this but Trump didn’t get elected because a lot of people voted for him, he got elected because enough people (white male leftwingers) hated Hillary Clinton enough to opt to stay home and refrain from voting at all. It was POLITICAL APATHY and PEOPLE STAYING HOME that got Trump elected, not a majority. Oh, so you Millenials hate South Park because supposedly “you care” so much? Only thing you kids “care” about is pushing eachother over the edge on the Livestreams for ego, libido & entertainment. You yourselves are the walking talking manifestation of that meme about how “zero fucks were given”. You give ZERO FUCKS about yourselves or anyone else, especially these Youtube “content creator” personalities you’ve put on a pedestal only to tear them down for fun. Your idea of “caring” is completely #laughable.
Take for example South Park popularizing the term “assburgers” in place of Asperger Syndrome. As a European I had never heard of the term “assburgers” before watching South Park.
This “assburgers” fixation is clearly an American thing. The SJW cult of course will virtue signal in the name of disability rights, like they always do, and suggest that you can kill off all opposition by accusing your ideological opponents of being autistic, which is a gentle way of calling the crazy crazy and dismissing anything they have to say. Coincidentally the chief liar in charge in the US through his president puppet is alleged to have assburgers, according to none other than the Pentagon under his command through the puppet.
I do not think that American and Anglo SJWs can ever understand how South Park registers with those of us outside the US and how fundamentally important it has been for us trying to understand American culture. For us at the other side of the globe, South Park is like an informal American Cultural Studies seminar. I dare to hazard a guess that many of us at this side of the globe wouldn’t know shit about pedestrian American everyday culture if it wasn’t for watch South Park. Everything from political trends to neologisms, we’ve learned it all through watching South Park. I myself was only able to understand what I was looking at when I first visited the US because of having watched South Park. It’s the quintessial American cartoon show for me, more than the Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-head, Duckman, or any other American adult cartoon I have ever seen. I have to wonder why Americans themselves don’t see it’s cultural value beyond the US. As for the charge that South Park is dangerous because it teaches complancency, I as a European consider a thematic neorealist show like House of Cards (originally imported from Europe!) immensely more sinister and manipulative than South Park. The first time a Greek friend showed me a couple of House of Cards episodes (with no explanation and no prior knowledge or awareness of the show, either in its American or European incarnation, on my part) I didn’t even understand that Kevin Spacey’s character Congressman Frank Underwood was a Democrat. “Is he Republican?”, I asked my Greek friend after watching the first show. “No, a Democrat! Crazy huh?” said my friend and burst out laughing. I firmly believe that House of Cards has played a greater role in cultivating the cynicism of the American left towards mainstream politics than did South Park cultivate political apathy in my generation. But I don’t see anyone complaining about House of Cards they way they complain about South Park. South Park can be easily dismissed as a joke or as satire because it is just a garish, badly drawn cartoon does doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it appears to be. House of Cards on the other hand aims for realism and is hence far more manipulative than any cartoon can ever hope to be. I don’t think that people on the left who matter and have actual political clout, the “symbol manipulators” as American sociologists call them, will ever bother wasting their time watching South Park. On the other hand, it is a documented fact these powerful American symbol manipulators will watch House of Cards, or a movie like The Ides of March (2011) (which is also a Julian Assange pick) and I personally suspect that’s where the real damage is done. Yet no one is blaming House of Cards of instilling a sense of fatalism and complacency in the American political left while justifying political corruption in the name of making strategic choices. What is honestly more dangerous, a TV show rationalizing political corruption in the name of strategy, or a cartoon teaching people around the world everything they need to know about American culture in a humorous way?
Resources:
If any Greeks out there are reading this blog article, you should definitely check out Greek antifascist researcher and documentary maker Aris Chatzistefanou’s podcast on South Park and political correctness, which you can listen to here:
In this podcast Chatzistefanou addresses from a progressive perspective the attacks on South Park in the US and the emergence of politically correct speech. He explains political correctness as a product of Western atomization & an example of the magical thinking that permeates a lot of Western SJW thought. He believes that societal processes change language and not the other way around. You cannot change language and expect society to follow suit. He is particularly concerned with the suggestion we see repeatedly in SJW magical thinking that societal change can be simply initiated by the automized individual rather than the social body. It’s a 40+ minute podcast which you should listen to if you know Greek, because I am not going to translate the whole thing for all you SJW Anglos right now, eventhough you people probably need to hear this message more than anyone else. Aris Chatzistefanou is the director of several anti-austerity documentaries such as Fascism Inc, Catastroika, This Is Not A Coup, all of which you can watch for free online with English subtitles. I must also point out that the name of his production company Infowar has nothing to do with the American hard right websites Infowars or Prison Planet. We Greeks do not need to model ourselves after Brits or Americans. We can think for ourselves and reach our own conclusions, thank you very much.
The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.
What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
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More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
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Depression and suicide have many causes; too much technology is clearly not the only one. And the teen suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before smartphones existed. Then again, about four times as many Americans now take antidepressants, which are often effective in treating severe depression, the type most strongly linked to suicide.
What’s the connection between smartphones and the apparent psychological distress this generation is experiencing? For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly — on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out has been swift and significant.
This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”
