Whenever I see that one of my friends has posted a link from The Onion, my opinion of that person goes down. I am not talking about the onion that you cut up and put in food, I am talking about the lame website that writes articles which people call "satire".
The Onion first became the bane of my existence a few years ago when I first started writing satire, first at Christwire, then The Daily Bleach, and now National Report. Everyone has to say that if you write satire then it must be like The Onion.
NO. The Onion sucks.
People like The Onion because it is safe... and secure... everyone hates to look like a fool. That's why everyone likes The Onion... because people are stupid. Everyone knows The Onion is not real, so they like it. They feel smug and superior in the fact that someone wrote fake news and they knew it was fake. "Look at me! I am so god damned smart. I can see through your clever facade".
OH... but the fun comes along when you test people. Everyone knows The Onion is fake, but what about other sites? Are you smart enough to to really question something more cleverly written. It sounds real. It looks real. I think it's real. IT IS REAL. I KNOW IT!
Oh no it isn't.
People fall for satire because they want it to be real. They want to look at someone and say "look at this jack ass. I hate that jackass, this jackass has done something so stupid". It amazed me while I was at christwire the stupid shit that people would actually believe. We could write just insane stupid shit and we would think, no one will believe this. But they did...because they wanted to believe that we believed it.
I remember a friend actually wrote an article saying that we should blow up the moon. It was huge. People hate Christians so much they want Christians to be so stupid as to actually believe that we should blow up the moon. No one is that stupid. Except for the people that fall for it.
And that is what real satire is about. Poking fun at stupid people, and outing morons. I remember reading about Machiavelli's "The Prince" in school. Hundreds of years later and people still aren't sure if it was written seriously or as satire.
OF COURSE IT IS SATIRE. Machiavelli was poking fun at the morons that he wrote it for and knew that smart people would get it. Real smart people. Not the everyday Onion fan.
I love watching people share real satire articles only to have someone point out that it is satire... and then how quickly the post disappears. No one wants to look stupid. So real satire isn't shared in the sense that it should be. Instead people like to share articles by The Onion because they think it is satire and because they want to say "Look at me. I get it. I'm smart"
In conclusion... I fucking hate The Onion and the crap it puts out.
