If you wanted any proof we are living in a post-satire era

I've noticed a few times this year pieces in websites specialising in satirical, parody and "spoof" news articles, like News Thump and the Daily Mash, in which the author was attempting to write a parody of real events but ended up simply describing them.

A good example is the recent piece in News Thump which argued that

"The nation is finally united behind the common belief that the sort of person who shouts at the children of an MP, regardless of that MP’s political beliefs, is clearly a massive bellend."

The thing is, like most of the rest of the article, that isn't a parody - it's what almost everyone I know actually does think.

Life in general, and political life in particular, is becoming so absurd that it's quite difficult to tell where reality ends and parody begins.

For similar reasons I am finding it increasingly challenging to tell the difference between some "parody accounts" on social media and the "real" people they are spoofing.

How do you parody some of the wilder and woolliest supporters of Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, or the SNP?

This has of course, not escaped the notice of the people who run the satirical websites.

This week another piece in News Thump which isn't really parody at all was called

World enters new post-satire era

and it begins

"The world has entered a new era where it has become impossible to distinguish between satire and reality."

and includes the line

If a merry online japester makes up something utterly outrageous and unbelievable about, say, Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the odds are now 50/50 that it will come true within 48 hours."

The frightening thing is that they're not entirely kidding. That line appears to have been partly inspired by an instance of something of the kind actually happening: the article is illustrated by a partial screenshot of their own article dated 12th September,

"Skripal poisoning suspects ‘just massively into Salisbury’, insists Vladimir Putin."

alongside a screenshot of a real breaking news report from the following day, when the poisoning suspects appeared on the Russian government news agency RT, to say that they went to the wonderful town of Salisbury to visit its' famous cathedral.

The similarities between the spoof article published on 12th September and the real interview broadcast on 13th September are uncanny.

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