i can't make that assumption. i know very intelligent people who like watching terrible shows, without being affected by them at all. the idea that viewers of south park will be as impressionable as the 10 year old kids portrayed in this episode is unrealistic. like i said, you and i both saw the episode's ending, but…

i think south park is predominantly written by trey parker and matt stone. but you're right, they do have writing consultants (i think bill hader worked with them for a while).
earlier seasons though i think were very much a direct product of trey and stone

i can't speak for all television viewers, but i think people ARE mostly intelligent. i find it hard to believe that you and me got the message, but everyone else won't.
i think we've gone off topic, and we're now talking about your personal projections about the intelligence of south park's audience, and not the…

yeah this show is about elementary school kids. yes, there's an adult aspect to their personalities sometimes, like in home movies. but still, the protagonists are kids, and responded to the idealization of photoshop the way kids would.
i don't claim to know best about the intelligence of young people, i'm not…

i think it shows that trey parker and matt stone have confidence in the intelligence of their audience to make up their own mind about the episode's themes.
you certainly didn't walk away from the program suddenly believing in peer pressure, or with the impression that the show endorsed peer pressure. neither will…

you make really good points. but i'm not entirely sold on the whole butters thing being an indication of wendy being horrible. wendy wasn't telling lisa to randomly date butters as a crappy method of validation. she just found out about lisa's crush and the suggestion was a spur of the moment response. i read her…

i don't admire people who would take advantage of idiots, though. i view people like that as having something much more wrong with them than the idiots they manipulate

i don't mean to misread your comment. i was going by what i read. basically, it's good that you didn't comment on a scene from a film you haven't viewed. what i was trying to get across was just that not being familiar with someone's comparison should provoke you to ask for further explanation. if someone makes a…

the question was basically, do we excise very minor, but potentially controversial scenes from every movie? not: have you seen ghostbusters. a persons argument or example doesn't become invalid just because you say you aren't familiar with it.

right when you got to the part where you described fans of a movie you didn't like as having grown up "poor and stupid in the Midwest," i realized that you hadn't put any real thought into your opinions, and that i shouldn't put any thought into them either

you have a point. still, i've at least seen silly facial hair before. the porcelain wig stuck out to me because it seemed more like a bad attempt at prop comedy. star burns's starburns spoof people i've seen that obsess over sideburns or moustaches. it was at least an exaggeration of an existing thing; i think, on…

exactly. maybe the character addressed prejudice or satirized some archetype from racism. that didn't matter one bit, because television is a visual medium, and it took me less than a second to realize i was watching a man wearing a ridiculous porcelain wig