Satire

[gh0st]

Ok. Satire. My task is to write 8-10 paragraphs, using satire. Theres a ton of bright minds in this forum, and a lot of you have good grasps on satire (or at least can provide me with some humorous ideas). It can be about anything.

Also, since I probably wont do this assignment but need ideas anyway, post your favorite political cartoons.

 

[Hazar]

Our history teacher gave us a funny satire paper titled "the bureau of caucasion affairs," it was rather humerous

 

[gh0st]

Hazar, you are a brilliant human being. Thank you, thats perfect.

 

[Hazar]

I hope you're not being sarcastic with me.....

 

[MilkMan12]

You can do it on all the burocracy (however you spell it) there is in this country. you can do it on so many things its insane. Within satire there are infinite sub genres you can do. You can do a parody on protestors. On Bush's blindness towards the war. There are endless possibilities.

 

[staticprimer]

There's always the classic, "A modest proposel" by John... something... His last name escapes me at the moment, but his satire was about curbing the population in England during the industrial revolution. His solution? Why eating babies, of course!

The whole idea behind satirical writing is to point out obsurdities in contemporary society, where ever they may be. It doesn't even have to be political.

 

[Ikerous]

There's always the classic, "A modest proposel" by John... something... His last name escapes me at the moment, but his satire was about curbing the population in England during the industrial revolution. His solution? Why eating babies, of course!

The whole idea behind satirical writing is to point out obsurdities in contemporary society, where ever they may be. It doesn't even have to be political.

Johnathon Swift, that was a good essay

I just wrote a satirical essay on conservative marijuana laws last week

 

[Calanen]

I saw a post that was a modern form of Yes Minister, which I reproduce here.

Its quite long, but pretty funny:


To : The New Minister

From : Sir Humphrey, Department Head

1st April

My Very Dear Minister,

Let me be the very first to congratulate you on your appointment to be Minister of this wonderful Department. Your leader has shown great loyalty in rewarding your long service to him by appointing you to this Department, and I am sure that he has great expectations that this Department will not cause himself, nor yourself, any adverse publicity. Please be assured that this is also my main priority in supporting you through the months and years ahead. Tiptoe is the word.

To this end, I would now like to give you a first briefing on my, I mean your, Department. We currently spend about $5b a year, employ about 1,000 people, and deliver about 200 programs to the public, although no-one is sure of these exact numbers. Our funding currently goes up by CPI, about 3% per year, but this will need to rise if we are to avoid hiccups in the smooth delivery of the services we provide to the community.

I am very keen to add new programs that you may desire, but I must warn you that more funding will be needed for them, to avoid the unthinkable alternative of shutting down some of our existing vital programs. I will give you very early cost estimates of your new programs, once you tell me what you would like. I have already hired consultants from my Golf Club to start scoping and pricing the programs you committed to in your recent superbly-successful election campaign. I will take great care to ensure that none of our current programs are compromised, keeping in mind that many of them were, and are, the personal hobbyhorses of the Ministers who preceded you in this portfolio, most of whom I note still sit with you in your party room. To allow them to monitor their hobbyhorses, I have of course been very careful to ensure that each program is managed quite separately from any other program in the Department, each one reporting up to me alone, something which we are very proud to call Management By Silos.

To further cement my control, your control, over the programs, I have ensured that in all cases there are at least nineteen tiers of management in each program. In this way, any proposed changes will have to successfully navigate about five of the tiers, of course overseen by a Steering Committee of my trusties, who then report through to me, and via me, to you. This will certainly weed out any changes that do not suit your party room, something I am very proud of. It will also give predictability and steadiness to the programs, and avoid any unsettling friction in the Department. I know that you will be as keen as I am to avoid unnecessary and unsettling change, this Department having run smoothly now for many years, and without any of this modern management rubbish talk of best practice. And besides, if you make changes, some-one loses face, and we don't want that do we ?

There has been talk recently that the Department is bloated and inefficient, that there are massive meaningless convoluted internal procedures and interminable milling activity but no outcomes, that many or most managers are just passive dull time-serving chatty long-winded obstructive defensive bloated puffed-up tentative half-hearted risk-averse heirarchical ceremonial self-important posturing overpaid over-cautious timid low-achieving dim-witted ponderous status-conscious paper-shuffling static obedient administrative drones who watch our existing feeble systems drift along aimlessly at their own pace rather than making things happen, that many or most managers just administer the status quo like amiable casual-observer caretakers, that promotion is by seniority and agreeableness rather than merit, mostly to reward long obedient service rather than to put the right person into the job, and mostly to time-servers and obedient drones, that there is no communication within the Department, that there is far too much meaningless report-writing, that everyone is too busy with internal process to ever actually get around to satisfying our customers, that no-one answers the phone, that all internal meetings involve vast herds of our Departmental people, and last forever without agenda nor structure nor minutes, and that there are many instances of poor programs, program overlaps, program redundancies, poor morale, poor staff training, poor project management, virtually non-existent cost control, no goal-setting, no accountability, high absenteeism, high staff turnover, poor timekeeping, massive uncontrolled and even unknown cost overruns, endemic unexplained project slippage, lots of bureaucracy but no control, and primitive IT systems and accounting systems. Why, someone even described the Department as an amorphous bowl of jelly. Can you believe that ! They just don't understand that we are so busy supplying our services to the community, that we just don't have the time to work out ways of actually doing it efficiently, for God's sake !

Please be assured that I am cautiously and delicately inching ahead in all of these areas, consistent with not creating ripples in the organisation, which could put stress on my people, and could also come back to bite you, its Minister. It is a very complicated Department, and aggressive single-minded efficiencies such as are evidenced in the private sector are not appropriate for our kind of complicated multi-faceted service delivery. It is important that we have continuity, comfort, and stability rather than improvement. That's my slogan. Believe me, we have been doing things in the same way for many many years now, so we know what we are doing.

Our critics say that there are only two types of people in the Department, and that the two groups have very little contact with each other. They are right, and this arrangement is deliberate, in order to let individual people work independently without having to worry about what is happening elsewhere in the organisation. The first group is the practitioners, and they make up perhaps the bottom half of the Department. They actually do things, they actually provide our services to the public. They generally work completely alone and unsupervised, because higher managers either do not know or do not care what they do, and it would be bad manners to ask, wouldn't it, not to mention embarrassing for the poor sensitive managers.

The second group is the managers, who make up the top half of the Department. They collate information and statistics about what the practitioners do, and go to vague policy meetings with each other, or meetings with our political masters, to chat about their latest whims. These managers are deliberately not held accountable for what their underlings, the practitioners, do, because that might be stressful, and might upset smooth operation, and might overload them, and it is all too complicated anyway. And they are too busy at all of their policy and politician meetings anyway. The managers are there as passive clerical statistics-gatherers. Everyone is happy with this arrangement, and there are few ripples.

And I am proud to report to you that virtually no-one in the Department has the authority to do anything on his own initiative, without clearing it through at least five higher rungs of management, and eight appropriate overseeing committees. Further, I aim to lock this whole thing down into a series of templates, or procedures, so that everything we do will become predictable, and God willing there won't be any surprises. I want all of my people to do things in exactly the same way, without variation, much like airline pilots. We want conformity, even if it means doing things in a way that even the slowest practitioner or slowest manager can keep up with. We are proud that we manage to the lowest common denominator, and do not push anyone, and that no-one thinks outside the box

I know that you are a very busy man, and you would be aware that the people in the Department are also very busy performing their onerous duties on your behalf, so might I suggest that you postpone coming to visit the Department. I will ensure that all relevant material is sent to you at your Parliamentary office.

I am,

Your very obedient and attentive Public Servant,

Sir Humphrey




To : Sir Humphrey (For Your Eyes Only)

From : The New Minister

2nd April

My Very Dear Sir Humphrey,

Thank you for yesterday's mail, and your good wishes. I will chew over your email very carefully. In the meantime, please carry on running your programs, and your Department, as you have done in the past. I will get back to you if I ever take an interest in any of this ongoing activity, your $5b spend, but this is unlikely unless something blows up in the newspapers. By contrast, I look forward to hearing early and detailed news on the progress of my proposed new election-pledge programs, as you alluded to in your email of yesterday. The voters and I are far more interested in these programs than they are in your background $5b spend.

The priorities I would like you, and the Department, to follow (discreetly of course) are, in order of priority :

1. Get me re-elected. This is far more important than anything else you do. To be blunt, the country needs me more than it needs another round of Departmental efficiency-drives.

2. Maximise opportunities for me to open new factories, new schools, etc, especially in marginal seats. Lots of photos, lots of gushing press releases, to be written by your own journalists on your payroll, not by outsiders.

3. Minimise adverse publicity for me, and for the government. This is one area where I can always find extra funding. You will need lots of lawyers for this.

4. Hire a large group, under your personal control, to dissect and badmouth any programs suggested by, or initiated by, our political opponents.

5. Hire another large group to match and duplicate similar programs being undertaken by other tiers of government, particularly if those tiers are controlled by our political opponents. If we can make our programs larger than theirs, we should be able to dominate them.

There are some things I most specifically do not want you to do :

1. Do not carry out objective reviews of any programs initiated by this government. I am sure that you can manage to fudge this into the backroom of your $5b spend somewhere. Let me know if you need my help on this. I can very easily appoint a Committee to review such things, in order to get them deferred until after the next election. If you hear me make noises in public about cost-cutting and Departmental efficiency, ignore the noises.

2. Do not allow talk of government accountability, openness, transparency, and efficiency to enter your arena and distract you and your people. Many of your programs have been initiated by very senior members of my party, who would be humiliated if subjected to something like this. You can take it from me they are experienced fund-raisers, and many have sat on the Boards of Child Care Centres, Community Clean-Up Drives, and even regional Golf Clubs, that great pool of potential consultants. Besides, the voters are more interested in seeing someone in their own community being helped by a government official than they are in how much it cost, or whether it took three, or even three hundred, government officials to do the helping.

Yours in Government solidarity,

The Minister

 

[The Monkey]

I posted this in a thread a while back...

Axis of Evil
Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil", Libya, China and Syria today announced that they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil", which they said would be "more evil than that stupid Iran-Iraq-NorthKorea axis" President Bush warned of in his State of the Union address. Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new Axis as having, "for starters, a really dumb name". "Right. As if they are just as evil ... in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. "Everybody knows we're the best evils? evilest? that we're the best." Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, Although they conceded they had asked if they could join the Axis of Evil. "They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. "An axis can't have more than three countries", explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So, you can only have three. And a secret handshake. Ours is wickedly cool."

International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered. Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what has become a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan and Serbia announced that they had formed the "Axis of Somewhat Evil", forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the "Axis of Occasionally Evil", while Bulgaria, Indonesia And Russia established the "Axis of Not So Much Evil Really as Just Generally Disagreeable".

With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the "Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics". Canada, Mexico and Australia formed the "Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Some Nasty Thoughts About America", while Scotland, New Zealand and Spain established the "Axis of Countries That Want Sheep to Wear Lipstick". "That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do", said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.

While wondering if the other nations of the world weren't perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axis, although he rejected the establishment of the "Axis of Countries Whose Names End in 'Guay", accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Norguay denied the charges. Norguays king Harald can't understand the rejection "I filled out the application myself"

 

[Mith']

Norguays king Harald can't understand the rejection "I filled out the application myself"

Remove that or I'll buy Sweden with my oil money

 

[CptStern]

I posted this in a thread a while back...

Axis of Evil
Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil", Libya, China and Syria today announced that they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil", which they said would be "more evil than that stupid Iran-Iraq-NorthKorea axis" President Bush warned of in his State of the Union address. Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new Axis as having, "for starters, a really dumb name". "Right. As if they are just as evil ... in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. "Everybody knows we're the best evils? evilest? that we're the best." Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, Although they conceded they had asked if they could join the Axis of Evil. "They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. "An axis can't have more than three countries", explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So, you can only have three. And a secret handshake. Ours is wickedly cool."

International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered. Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what has become a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan and Serbia announced that they had formed the "Axis of Somewhat Evil", forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the "Axis of Occasionally Evil", while Bulgaria, Indonesia And Russia established the "Axis of Not So Much Evil Really as Just Generally Disagreeable".

With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the "Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics". Canada, Mexico and Australia formed the "Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Some Nasty Thoughts About America", while Scotland, New Zealand and Spain established the "Axis of Countries That Want Sheep to Wear Lipstick". "That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do", said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.

While wondering if the other nations of the world weren't perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axis, although he rejected the establishment of the "Axis of Countries Whose Names End in 'Guay", accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Norguay denied the charges. Norguays king Harald can't understand the rejection "I filled out the application myself"

pretty freakin hilarious :thumbs:

I'm officially part of: "Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Some Nasty Thoughts About America" ...sorry un-officially

 

[The Monkey]

Remove that or I'll buy Sweden with my oil money

Do you want to go back to the union? Fine buy me, but you will have to give us Narvik, Oslo and Svalbard.

pretty freakin hilarious :thumbs:

I'm officially part of: "Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Some Nasty Thoughts About America" ...sorry un-officially

Can't take the credit for it though... a freind send it to me, I don't know who wrote it...

 

[CptStern]

Can't take the credit for it though... a freind send it to me, I don't know who wrote it...

I'll just ignore that way to go The_Monkey :thumbs:

 

[The Monkey]

I'll just ignore that way to go The_Monkey :thumbs:

Yay! I can write things that people don't mind reading!

Actually you've read this before: http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?t=58420

 

[gcomeau]

Ok. Satire. My task is to write 8-10 paragraphs, using satire. Theres a ton of bright minds in this forum, and a lot of you have good grasps on satire (or at least can provide me with some humorous ideas). It can be about anything.

Also, since I probably wont do this assignment but need ideas anyway, post your favorite political cartoons.

For satire there is no source greater than... the onion:

http://www.theonion.com/

There's some absolute classics in their archive.

 

[Direwolf]

Yeah, that the problem with political satire. 90% chance the Onion already did it.

 

[Raziaar]

For satire there is no source greater than... the onion:

http://www.theonion.com/

There's some absolute classics in their archive.

Heh. Funny http://www.theonion.com/images/432/image_article2811.jpg

 

[gcomeau]

Heh. Funny http://www.theonion.com/images/432/image_article2811.jpg

I like the pictures they have of the new "Fox Terror Alert Van" myself... "Honk If You See TERROR Happening!"

In other news... CRAP! I just discovered all my favorite old stories from more than a few weeks ago have become subscriber only! The whole archive used to be free...

Goodbye, "God diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder."
Goodbye, "Nation's Poor Win Election For Nation's Rich."
Goodbye, "U.N. Orders Wonka To Submit To Chocolate Factory Inspections."

You will be missed... ;(