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Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

theguardian.com

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Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#281

Post by caylus »

8note wrote: post #252
champagnois wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Summarizing the event from memory, it seemed during the BLM virtue signalling craze -- he told his staff, "Coinbase exists to make money and not to be political. If you are unhappy about the lack of political expression and you need to leave because of discomfort over this -- the employer will apologize with a parting gift of a large sum of money." Essentially, he bribed the toxic political radicals to leave and take…

It's kinda strange that coin base would choose such a political sphere to make money in if they don't want to be political.

Perhaps they want to limit their corporate position on political issues to the ones directly relevant to them, so as to not repel people who disagree on an unrelated issue.

Their original memo (https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-comp...) puts it this way:

> We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#282

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

mullingitover wrote: post #219
chrsig wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let me take a couple of specific examples. Upon being told that an asteroid large enough to destroy human civilization was on course to hit the earth in 6 months, the President decided that it would make strategic sense to delay announcing or acting on the threat until after the midterms - a month or so later. This was conspicuous for the fact no reason was given, which had to be the case as it makes no sense. Coun…

> Counter example: Trump new about the severity of covid and downplayed it for quite some time instead of trying to rally the country. The irony is that the pandemic was such a slam-dunk easy win politically. Handled with the minimum level of political savvy, this was a dead simple way to send his approval ratings into the van allen belt, just like Bush post-9/11. I think his personal financial stake in the hospitali…

Mulling it over, he could have made sooo much by reconfiguring them into humane quarantine centers, without the need to have FEMA-camps, or things like that.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#284

Post by kentm »

millzlane wrote: post #227
Emma_Goldman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to disagree. It attempts to satirise today's mass media by exaggerating its influence on politics to the point at which it revolves around little else, succumbing to what it is supposed to be objecting to: the idea of politics and politicians as trivial. The plotline was so wildly implausible that it ended up saying little about the real world. Also, the asteroid threat is not a good analogy for climate change…

I always thought the asteroid threat was the pandemic.

It seems that way because it tracked how the pandemic played out really closely, but they wrote the script before the pandemic started. It was meant as commentary on climate change.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#285

Post by ramphastidae »

quacked wrote: post #155
netcan wrote: post #103

Idiocracy is fun, but the instinctive "OMG so true" is, IMO, wrong. The film riffs on a common fallacy more so than it's actually insightful. Statements like "people these days are so stupid/lazy/immoral" tend get an instinctive thumbs up. The slang, pop culture & consumerism of the future are the main way the film "demonstrates" that people got dumber. The premise of Idiocracy is that dumb people reproduce more and…

IQ is not rising; literacy rates are falling in the developed world. As an example, fewer people are literate in Massachusetts now than when it was founded.

Citation needed …

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#286

Post by fnord77 »

alphabettsy wrote: post #173
fnord77 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is where certain "smart" politicians completely drop the ball. Look at Hillary Clinton - she mocked and insulted nearly half of the US population by calling them "deplorables". Not the way to get them to follow her!

She was misquoted on this point so often that it’s even being repeated here. In hindsight she shouldn’t have said it that way or at all. Trump’s supporters were and are not the whole of the Republican Party and so it was never about half of the population even if that’s how it was understood and played up by conservative media. > “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters int…

ok, well she insulted 1/2 of 62,984,828 people directly. she directly contributed to the divisiveness in this country.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#288

Post by bryanrasmussen »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #201
chrsig wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do indeed disagree! I don't think it was saying that politics and politicians as trivial -- I think it was saying that they're not necessarily smart people, and they're certainly not necessarily acting in the best interests of the people they serve. I think they were also saying that the media serves to reinforce denial in the general population. The asteroid is just a plot device -- the message is that in the fac…

Let me take a couple of specific examples. Upon being told that an asteroid large enough to destroy human civilization was on course to hit the earth in 6 months, the President decided that it would make strategic sense to delay announcing or acting on the threat until after the midterms - a month or so later. This was conspicuous for the fact no reason was given, which had to be the case as it makes no sense. Collec…

>They went to the NYT, who inexplicably decided that they would forego running the biggest story in human history

My understanding was they ran the story and the morning tv show was part of a media tour they set up, the response on the tv show such that they did not really want to continue with the big media blitz and publishing more stories that they had planned.

>Returning to the NYT offices, they're told that the journalists were able to confirm their findings with well-respected third party scientists, but that because one of the astronomers got upset in air, they weren't going to run the story

They had ran it by other scientists in the initial meeting who said that the data looked credible. However after the disastrous media appearance one of the things that made the NYT not want to continue with writing more articles was that they had learned the science was not 100% and they were mad they had been lied to.

Who said the science was not 100%? Dr. Jocelyn Calder the head of NASA, later Calder resigns in disgrace to shield the administration when scientist with Ivy League credentials confirm the comet is coming.

on edit: formatting, grammar

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#289

Post by pojzon »

sershe wrote: post #275
pojzon wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> larger proportion of the part that disappears every year becomes better off than worse off I would hardly disagree with that statement. Larger portion of the middle class gets downgraded not upgraded. Some parts of their life get better due to advancements we make in science, but all other aspects are worse and worse. An example can be “property ownership” - the amount of ppl that own property and are part of the m…

There are actually numbers for this (that I'm sadly to lazy to look up on my phone), taking fixed inflation adjusted income thresholds, more people are moving into higher than lower brackets out of the shrinking middle, especially if you consider the starting sizes of these groups.

That might be true for developing countries like China but for sure its not the case in Europe and US.

China by itself can skew global average by a huge margin due to sheer amount of ppl living there.

But even in China market observes middle class crisis - slowing down or ppl getting back to lower class.

Re: Idiocracy: A disturbingly prophetic look at the future

#290

Post by michaelt »

Apocryphon wrote: post #124
michaelt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, shows like Jackass and Za gaman were around long before Idiocracy. It was certainly a mirror held up to society as it was at the time.

But the mirror is also temporal. There’s a lot of trash on TV these days but it’s probably not as lowbrow outright sensationally dumb as the shock jock reality TV era that Idiocracy was created in. We’re currently living in a highbrow era of television.

Personally I'd say we've still got just as much "Ow My Balls" today. But instead of calling it "Jackass" we call it "Epic Fails Compilation"
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