I also have to give a shout out to the time they predicted the five blade razor a year before it came out: https://www.theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-bla...

Truly champagne comedy.

https://www.theonion.com/monk-gloats-over-yoga-championship-...

I also frequently mention I don't watch television. In fact, I don't even own one.

https://www.theonion.com/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-d...

Wish it had gone this way. From 1998:

https://www.theonion.com/clinton-threatens-to-drop-da-bomb-o...

the only thing it tells me is that time moves forward and a 70+ year old Vietnam veteran can't fit the role.

if you're saying that it indicates that the conflicts had a large impact, I would argue that actually it's because the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts lasted a long time and had an impact on Americans specifically, and Americans specifically have a large impact on television/movies/media.

Go ask Albanians and Serbs about their 'tiny intervention'.

The Americans lost 4500 in Iraq and 2400 in Afghanistan.

10000ish were killed in the Kosovo War, and 200,000 people ( at least ) were displaced.

Now, this pales in comparison to the casualties of the two hosting countries.. but I doubt we're talking about movies and media that feature veterans of the Iraq war from that side of the conflict.

They are still hilarious. My favorite is one where they pretended a Chinese ceo of a fish company bought the paper. It was filled with articles with bad statistics trying to get the common American to eat more fish, how wonderful the ccp is, and how weak and decadent the American people are. They also made the grammar terrible. Definitely riding the line with seeing what they could get away with!

After all, they've just been bought. Usually this results in changes, despite new owner's loud promises that nothing will change.

Was this edited at any point after the listed publish date? Did it survive intact during the backend migrations since? Is that formatting supposed to be a bit weird? Is there originally supposed to be an image after that oddly placed paragraph break?

What did it look like back when `<blink>` and `<marquee>` were still a thing? Did it look better at 800x600? Did it show the same page to all user-agents?

Hard copies, physical reality (or at least rasters), are still the ultimate form of immutability.

Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help Uninsured Sick People

https://www.theonion.com/mitt-romney-haunted-by-past-of-tryi...

…

Is it still there?

One of my favorites.

Taking a shot: Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles?

I also have the complete Jim’s Journal, but alas I never got a t-shirt. “I went to class even though I didn’t real want to” was my favorite

“This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t”

https://www.theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entir...

Why Republicans Have Little Cachet Amongst the Educated In The Past 2 Decades A Total Fucking Mystery

I spent years homeless. I try to write about meaningful ways to help the homeless while preserving their agency. I try to write about systemic issues I feel contribute to the problem.

I don't find that second link funny or relatable or anything that makes sense to me.

https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-na...

https://www.theonion.com/the-onion-stands-with-israel-becaus...

I assumed all the other "board member signatures" were similarly infamous bad guys but I can't figure out what they all are and when I search on Steve Hannah, he apparently actually was the CEO of The Onion at one time.

I agree with some of their points about it being a conflict going back hundreds of years. I personally think it's inevitable that war broke out given how psycho controlling Isreal is about Gaza's water supply.

I still probably am not the target audience for The Onion and won't really understand a lot of it. I was full-time homemaker a lot of years for an American woman my age. I did well in school. I value HN and have participated here a lot, but have zero friends, professional contacts etc via HN.

I don't generally "go along to get along." I try to avoid social friction by other means and the result appears to be I don't ever really fit in anywhere because I'm not willing to mouth empty agreement with the group consensus.

And, I mean, there's likely other reasons I fail to fit in anywhere but I strongly suspect that's a really large factor.

Not the Onion, but a list of H. T. Zweibel articles: https://muckrack.com/t-herman-zweibel/articles

Publisher Emeritus, T. Herman Zweibel, writes frequent editorials, growing more and more erratic until he's removed from power by the board of directors in the 1950s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Dumb_Century

As a Canuck, US politics is typically indecipherable, eh! Most news makes no sense, until I found The Onion. Now you are telling me, you bunch of hosers made it all up!

Signed "Bob Jenkins, Canadian Minister of National Affairs"

"You made it all up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!”, Charlton Heston, a Great Canadian

Honestly, I think the disconnect is that you pay very close attention while you read, while the Onion's style caters more to a quick glance-through. They rarely have every point nailed down completely, because they're expecting you to just be moving on quickly anyway.

It's incredible commentary on the fact these things keep happening in completely predictable ways.

If you want balance, feel free to post equally funny satire with a right-wing slant.

Though it might be harder to find anything equivalent, since biting political humor and satire can be politically asymmetric.

(That's a deliberate Christian meta-joke).

This is a recent Onion classic.

The thing about the Onion is, once you’ve got a great headline - and maybe a photo, which will usually be a head shot - the text of the article sometimes seems largely superfluous. They actually ought to be doing better in the age of Twitter and so on, but it didn’t work out that way.

I think the de facto purpose of the article text when shared online is to make it more plausible to someone who doesn't know the site is parody.

Also, I'm not 100% sure, but perhaps there are some SEO boosts from having long form article content that wouldn't be gained from just having a title and a blurb (though they do also do those very short form articles as well, where it's a few sentences with the headline)

>> "Report: We Don’t Make Any Money If You Don’t Click The Fucking Link"

https://www.theonion.com/israel-assures-it-doing-everything-...

"Israel Assures It Doing Everything Possible To Minimize Civilians"

P.S. Yeah, the onion is pretty hit-or-miss, tho the ratio is pretty good IMHO. YMMV but one of my all-time favorites was about Harry Potter being a sinister secret recruiting vehicle for satan worship -- and I learned about it from a friend whose parents were among the huge number of christianists who thought it was legit journalism and forwarded it in one of the biggest ~early-internet-days chainmail events ever.

https://www.theonion.com/harry-potter-books-spark-rise-in-sa...

“Never mind that Dr. Glickman screwed up and bought this colossal ditz of a receptionist more computer than she could ever possibly need for record-keeping at a small dentist's office.“

They tell you...

FYI, The Onion is from Madison WI, not Cambridge...

They had an issue with a banner headline: W A R

And when you unfolded it, the subhead was “C’mon! Let’s have one!”