As a history buff, sometimes people ask me: what's the most accurate history movie? (It gets asked on the reddit History forum a lot also) The answer: none of

As a history buff, sometimes people ask me: what's the most accurate history movie? (It gets asked on the reddit History forum a lot also) The answer: none of them. If you see it on a screen, it's been modified somehow for the medium of movies and to make movie audiences happy. That's not history, that's entertainment. We saw the first "fake" documentaries pop up in the late 80s. They looked like documentaries, sure, but really they were advocacy pieces disguised as documentaries. They weren't documenting something. They had an agenda. Eventually they also became entertainment. Now you can turn on the TV and see dozens of different documentaries about all sorts of topics. They churn them out like popcorn. It looks like a documentary, they say it's a documentary, but it's not. Back in the 70s and 80s, satire was just that: satire. It was humor first and foremost. Comedians picked on anybody and everybody. Don Rickles would famously insult anybody in the crowd. Don loved people, but he was a comedian. Because he loved people, audiences let him practice his craft: insult comedy. That changed, probably with the advent of political talk radio in the late 80s, although I'm not an expert. Humor became a way of solidifying whatever clan you were in. The art didn't come first any more, the clan did. This wasn't humor as fun, this was humor as a weapon, a social signal. The common use of satire now isn't to make fun of life, it's a form of ritualized mocking. It looks like humor, they say it's humor, but it's not. It's the same thing kids used to do when they made jokes and picked on disabled kids at school, only it's okay because it's somebody of the other political party. It's gotten so bad that many comedians don't do college appearances. Students are much more interested in belonging to a clan than simply enjoying art that joyfully makes fun of the world around us. You throw any kind of satire at them and they're much more interested in which side is this guy on, anyway? than whether it was funny or not. That's what they've been taught that satire is: signaling. That sucks. My point is this: everything is misinformation. Life is complex. We use art and narrative to take that complexity and make something cartoonish out of it so we can make sense of it. You have to be extremely careful using satire online because so many people view it is simply more of the same; it fits into some simplified narrative they have in their heads. There's no sense of making-fun-of-yourself humor. Instead it's misrepresenting people in the "other group" in order to get a few laughs at how superior you are. When others use satire, you can quite easily view it as confirmation that you were right all along instead of just being fun.