Here we go again, another crop of [SATIRE!] wackaloon conservative students here have published their [SATIRE!] alternative newspaper, The North Star. As is their custom, they’ve splattered the cover with the bold declaration that this is [SATIRE!], which only tells me that some of our students have no literary understanding at all. Satire should poke holes in the conventional wisdom and be vaguely interesting, taking the status quo and extrapolating it out to a worrisome conclusion, but this is just a recitation of far right wing talking points with no self awareness at all. Maybe if this were put out by liberal students mocking the right, it could be called satirical…but even at that, it’s clumsy and heavy handed, and not at all entertaining.
The first article is a breakdown of the first amendment to the Constitution. It’s 3 paragraphs that simply restate the words of the amendment, and is [SATIRE!] anodyne, shallow, and boring, written by a [SATIRE!] student who is likewise anodyne, shallow and boring. Fine, keep it up. It’s the highlight.
The second article is intended to welcome freshmen, and warns them about the liberal professors who are going to try and indoctrinate them, makes the usual jokes about “safe spaces” and how conservatives don’t need them, babbles about “victim cards” and “blue hair”, and declares that if you’ve got a penis, you’re a boy, and that there are only two genders. The author is simply an [SATIRE!] ignorant nitwit.
The third article is more insipid reactionary nonsense, trying to explain why politics is treated like a football game. It explains that Obama was one of the most divisive presidents in history, and the Republicans simply elected someone even more divisive, and the Democrats are just as bad. [SATIRE!] Get stuffed, wingnut. That’s just stupid.
The fourth article…oh, boy. It’s titled Dixon’s Tranny Corner, by Dixon
. You can guess how bad it is. Being trans is either a mental illness, or you don’t deserve societal support. [SATIRE!] The author is a fuckwit trying to justify their contempt for a minority. They promise to continue this strain of hate speech in future issues.
The fifth article is about feminism. Did you know that many women who claim to be feminists think that having a baby and a career is impossible? True feminists don’t get married or have babies. [SATIRE!] The author really needs to learn what she’s talking about before she opines in a newspaper. [SATIRE!] Ignorance of this caliber ought to be embarrassing.
The final article is about how Tulsi Gabbard is bad because she wants is to reduce military aid to to Israel and withdraw from Middle East hotspots, and that under it all she’s just another far left Democrat like Bernie Sanders
. [SATIRE!] He almost convinces me to support her! Then I realize that this isn’t actually satire, it’s just another [SATIRE!] MAGA-hat wearing doofus declaring America Uber Alles.
Sorry, world. I just have to be honest and admit that [SATIRE!] some of our students are goddamned morons.
I never understood why college republicans need their own special paper. At my alma mater, the conservative paper was called “The Liberty”. I used to wait for them to deliver it at the beginning of the month and I would sneak around campus and slip pictures of gay porn in between the pages. The local porn store always had a “bargain bin”, and I would deliberately find the nastiest of the nasty and cut out the pictures just to piss off the campus conservatives.
Think of it as a
clubcult’s newsletter, generally intended for the already-convinceddeluded, but circulated more widely, presumably in the hopes of gaining additionaladherentsgullible marks. These sorts of things, from all sorts of weirdos, seem to be scattered like confetti or promotional brochures at the coffeehouses, etc., frequented by students near Universities I’ve attended, visited, or lived near. Also on the tables are (somewhat more slickly-produced) scams from the local hive of occultists, quacks (sometimes), and so on… sometimes mixed with far more legit brochures for yoga or whatever…Because after years of being indoctrinated by their parents, religious leaders, right-wing media personalities, and other folks who live in their insular small towns, they are convinced that academia is a Leftist echo-chamber and re-education camp out to convert them to their godless, socialist, sexual amoral ways. Therefore, every voice that does tow the right-wing party line must be part of the indoctrination effort and must be drowned out with the “truth.”
I should know. I wrote for my school’s right-wing screed (i.e. The UWM Times) when I was in college back in the early-mid 90s, and that was the general attitude.
Akira MacKenzie@3, I am not disputing you. But I find the following sentence baffling: “[… E]very voice that does tow the right-wing party line must be part of the indoctrination effort and must be drowned out with the ‘truth’.”
I am reading that as: “Every voice which does not tow the right-wing party line must be part of the leftists’ indoctrination effort and must be drowned out with the .” Is this is correct(-ish) reading?
Reminds me of when I was in college. There were three different conservative Christian groups for students on campus, zero groups for students of any other religious inclination (or disinclination).
blf @ 4
Yes, there should have been a “not” thrown in there. I’m at work and have to type fast in between calls and I don’t get much time to proofread.
@6, Thanks!
@5, Apropos of absolutely nothing, that reminds me of an amusing difficulty with my University’s xian club, which happened to have precisely the same initials / acronym as the bicycling club. This meant that if “the” club was referred-to by its initials (a common practice), it could often be confusing which of the two clubs was meant. The bicycling club solved this problem by having a “tradition” of changing its unofficial name every year such that that name’s initials / acronym were always distinct from the xians. (Of course, for the not clewed in, that could itself be confusing.) The official name, as I recall, remained unchanged for the purposes of registration with the University, University grants, bank account, and so on.
@Ray Ceeya #1:
Most of them would have been pissed off but a handful would have been quietly grateful.
That’s Curry College, not Curry University. (I have known a couple of people who worked there, and still occasionally drive past it.)
I’ll just be pedantic before anyone else to point out that it’s “toe the line,” not “tow the line,” as in, “put your toes up to the line.” https://grammartips.homestead.com/toetheline.html
Maybe the satire would come across better when read out loud in a Foghorn Leghorn voice, punctuating every few lines with “That’s a joke, son. Dontcha get it?”
No, I don’t get it. I thought satire was supposed to be humorous. This dreck isn’t even close. It doesn’t even come up to Poe level. Andrew Hall can be very clever from time to time, and I’ll admit to having fallen for his stories on occasion. The only folks who could fall for this shite are those so divorced from reality as to be MRAs and neoNazis.Even “Christian” comedians aren’t this bad; although, they aren’t funny either, but for different reasons.
“Conservatives” have a tough time with humor and satire. Most do not have a real understanding of irony and sarcasm. They would see nothing ironic in a Strib headline today, “Trump to focus on city crime at rally.” That could have been satire from The Onion.
I don’t get why fnord you didn’t fnord at least fnord declare your own fnord text satire at some fnord point.
“I never understood why college republicans need their own special paper.”
It’s called a safe space. And no, they don’t get the irony.
Is The North Star perpetuated by students who can’t manage to graduate, but enroll year and year to make microscopic incremental progress toward earning a degree in some nebulous major that accepts lots of Mickey Mouse electives?
These motherfuckers know that they’re wrong, and that their opinions are shitty. Otherwise they wouldn’t be trying to use humor as a shield. People who have courage in their convictions don’t do that, and they don’t blather about freedom either.
Never knew the First Amendment was written by a shallow anodyne and boring student. Maybe thats why conservatives get the Constitution wrong.
Without being able to read the actual words (and I am in no way sad about this) where I am, this right here would likely open them up for student disciplinary proceedings due to the transphobic nature of the comments. Remind me again why your vaunted freedom of speech is the better idea?
Ah yes, the famous conservative defenders of free speech (unless that includes kneeling in protest at football games) who don’t need safe spaces (but get upset if trans people use the right bathrooms).
Young people are stupid and are sponges — they are a reflection of the world around them. What’s sad is that this is their world. Hopefully some of these sponges will absorb some knowledge in college.
brucegee1962: thank you! That was like a stone in my shoe. :)
So they rail and rage against “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” and also warn students about indoctrination by nasty lübrul professors and they do not see any irony in this…
I believed a lot of dumb shit as a teenager. I like to think I am wiser now, but as I am incapable of a truly objective opinion of myself, I am not sure.
But most people were against gay marriage… until they weren’t Most people can change.
I believed a LOT of stupid shit when I was in college, and anyone who doesn’t think they did as well is someone who hasn’t changed their mind about anything important since they were in their early 20’s. (Maybe they got lucky and happened to have absorbed mostly correct ideas about the world when they were kids and haven’t had to change them since then, but more likely they’re ignorant assholes who think they’re right about everything – like the authors of the North Star.)
That said, even the dumbest shit I believed was rooted in ignorance. My brief Libertarian phase wasn’t caused by some deep-rooted hatred of poor and working class people – I just didn’t know enought to understand how the oh-so-perfect-in-theory policies I was advocating for would actually affect anyone who wasn’t a top 1%er.
People who espouse factually wrong and deeply harmful opinions out of ignorance can definitely change when they realize their expressed beliefs are in conflict with their actual values. I’m more than willing to accept that someone has learned better and changed their mind – I’ve done the same thing.
But I don’t think the author(s) of a column called “Dixon’s Trnny Corner” capable of change, because I don’t think their problem is that they’re ignorant of how their political position isn’t aligned with their core values. Their beliefs and their values are perfectly in line – it’s just that their values *fucking suck.
And it’s a lot harder to convince someone that their values are bad and should change than it is to convince someone to change their beliefs to match their values.
Southe@25
I was wrong about many things in my youth and will (I hope) continue to change my mind about things in middle age as I find them in error. But sitting down and writing a column called “Dixon’s Tranny Corner” requires effort I never had and can’t imagine applying to something like that. It’s all about opportunity cost. Somebody thought the half hour or whatever it took to write could not have been better spent doing something else, and that is not something I can comprehend at any age.