A Babylon Bee article was just cited in Great Debates, and rather than derail that thread, I decided to start a new one. The site is the Cargo Cult equivalent of humor and good writing written by the Far Right who think that they understand the concepts, but don’t. For instance, in the cited article, on top of being loosely written and meandering all over the place they write:
A sentence that is almost well written, except that rather than allowing the audence to understand what is implied through subtext they have to raise to all the subtilty of pounding you in the head with a hammer by including “full-grown” and “like children.” (Granted, their main audience is probably far too stupid to grasp subtlety.) Another example comes from this recent article, where the mentions of bad hygene and jazz hands contribute nothing to the story other than hammering the reader over the head. The writers at The Babylon Bee are incapable of telling lighting from a lightning bug.
Thank you for linking, not quoting. It streamlines your post and allows the readers to choose which chunks of idiocy appeal to them, which is none for me at the moment because I am half asleep, but I’ll be back with loins girded, prepared to get mad at the writers.
I saw that vaping article linked thru the vaping thread here. Low budget Onion, missing the biting satire and wit. A look at the side of the page and the other headlines and I thought: Holy shit, these guys really want to be the Onion. There’s already an Onion, and they do it right.
The joke is pretty much all there in the headline. And it’s comparing an actual historical policy that discriminated against black people with a parody policy about discriminating against white people. In order to remind people that white people are the real victims.
And just to drive the point home that prejudice never happens anymore, we have this:
I respect their attempts to gore oxen on both left and right, though it’s true their heart may be somewhat more in the left-goring. Not everyone can be The Onion. Hell, even The Onion isn’t The Onion these days, According To Folks
Sure thing. But I just knew I’d be able to find some curmudgeon on here talking about how some well-beloved humour site had all gone to shit and boom! Google Was My Friend. Guess I coulda gone for “Cracked” instead…
The Bee is quite blatantly pro-conservative/right-wing, but they will mock Trump and the GOP every now and then, to try to seem balanced. Some examples:
Cracked was in a downward quality and financial spiral for a long time. One sure symptom of it was when they locked up the comments section (usually one of the funnest things about Cracked articles, even funner than the articles themselves) and allowed only paying subscribers to leave comments. That instantly dried up the comments and destroyed a good reason for their readership.
If Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal today, Snopes would probably need to explain it because sheep would be sharing it on social media platforms and frothing about how offensive it is.
As far as I can tell from clicking on the links in this thread and the site main page, they’re just not very good at satire. The anti-Trump stuff isn’t any better than the pro-Trump or anti-Democrat stuff. Just bad and lazy writing.
This is more a commentary on the intelligence of the typical Babylon Bee reader than it is on Snopes. The typical Onion reader doesn’t need somebody to explain to him that the things he reads on the website aren’t real.