Idiocracy looks more and more utopian
I just want the Carl's Jr. vending machines.
Are We Idiocracy Yet?
211–220 of 582 posts
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#212I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy before the film's final edit. I could not believe my eyes and ears, I loved it unlike anything I'd seen before, it was the hardest US culture satire I'd seen up to that point. Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember makin…
It breaks my heart when I hear people outraged about Onion stories, not because that they fall for them, but because they know they have a hard time telling truth from fiction.
There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate fact/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. On the Right they really could not differentiate Fact/Fiction.. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are living in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence.
If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#213I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy before the film's final edit. I could not believe my eyes and ears, I loved it unlike anything I'd seen before, it was the hardest US culture satire I'd seen up to that point. Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember makin…
> They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. That is sort of the point of the movie. It is a satire, but it is also a documentary packaged as a satire and the wrapping paper isn't all that thick.
It's no longer satire it's really a documentary.
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#214I just watched a new dinosaur cartoon made for kids and it has cartoon dinosaurs that farts a lot and I looked it up and in reddit people are saying "duh..farts are funny..why do you have a problem with it?"
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#215Idiocracy hit a lot of superficial/thematic nails on the head with its silliness. "Don't Look Up" captures a lot more of the actual dynamics. Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble, the people are just normal humans made stupid by their cultural environment, incentives and suchlike.
> Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble, I didn't read Idiocracy as eugenics/anti-eugenics. It wasn't saying that stupid people breeding made the population stupid, it was saying that the less educated breeding resulted in the more educated being pushed to the periphery and eventually fading out. The people of the film's future were not stupid, just massively uninformed and misinformed. They were able to gras…
> Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it.
They literally show IQ numbers in that scene.
> Trevor: IQ 138, Carol: IQ 141
vs:
> Clevon: IQ 84
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#216I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy before the film's final edit. I could not believe my eyes and ears, I loved it unlike anything I'd seen before, it was the hardest US culture satire I'd seen up to that point. Then the lights came up and the audience started giving their reviews, in an open mike fashion. They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry. I remember makin…
I feel Idiocracy is irresistible bait for 'not like the other girls'-types. Everytime this movie comes up, droves of people mention how they get it, while others don't. It's becoming a trope in itself.
Agreed. It’s cited so often on Reddit by people who want to establish their superiority over the masses. “It’s a documentary!!” is a meme unto itself.
It’s also got a kind of weird eugenics-y vibe to it (like establishing “stupid people breeding makes stupid people” as incontrovertible fact) when you step back and examine it as a movie that’s making Serious Statements. But it isn’t. It’s not a bad movie. But it’s a comedy, the satirical elements are heavily over exaggerated by fans.
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#217I think in some ways we are past it; unfortunately not the funny ways. Some examples:
1. The presidents response to bombing of school girls was basically "stop hitting yourself"
2. Fox news host Dept. of Defense head and the "Dept. of War" name "change"
3. Building a grand ballroom while taking benefits away from hungry kids
4. Elon musk on stage with the chainsaw bragging about acts that save no money but did harm the poorest people on earth.
5. The fact that our media does not really care about any of this unless they get a ratings bump from it
Obviously we all could go on and on.. but the biggest loss IMO is objective truth. There are and will always be things that are true and I feel that we are losing a hold of that so that bad actors can just say to us: "no thats not what your seeing".
Its like in the movie, if they had looked at the plant growing and said: "Thats FAKE NEWS" then run to the field and claimed they did it all.
he claimed they did it to themselves
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#218As I got older, I always wondered if everyone thought they were the smart one and everyone else must be the idiocracy. I seem to remember Homer Simpson thinking something to that effect (“Boy, everyone is stupid except me”). I can imagine that happening today, esp politically.
You've just described MAGA in a nutshell.
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
i couldn't finish "Don't Look Up", it felt like sitting through a political lecture. all i wanted from a comedy was some laughs.
I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore. It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true. If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th…
>It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans
So it's a documentary?
Even the basic reproductive instinct has become "ineffective on humans".
>There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true
No, there are countless jokes in the movie that don't depend about how the world became stupid (be it cultural or genetics or combination) at all. Literally all of them are like that.
>If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why, did the movie say it's the result of "property and currencies"? And even if somebody said so, who said it's just about "property and currencies" merely being a thing that starts this decline, and not surpassing some level of development of property and currencies (e.g. late capitalism), which prevents mitigating factors from working?
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions. It is curious that there's no reported disgenic effect though - that seems counter to evolutionary theory? Perhaps it's only limiting the rate of growth of IQ/intelligence. There's a classic sci-fi story in which we rely on computers, the population gets dumber to the point noone knows how to make/fix the computers. I think in that…
Are you talking about the one called "The Machine Stops", published like a hundred years ago?
That story is incredible, with insights into what technology would mean.