381–390 of 582 posts
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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 c…
This thread is a sort of extension to that, eh? Hacker News knowing the truth of a matter while observing Reddit down the barrel of a nose.
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After a while of going up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect While genes must play a part in this (if they didn't, all non-humans would also share our IQ*), genetics shift on a much slower timescale than the entire history of IQ tests. * This pattern matches to the Motte-and-Bailey rhetorical technique, ergo I am suspicious of people who try to tie genetics and IQ until they're clear they're not making a rac…
How can human races not be a meaningful genetic category? Aside from the phentoypical differences, the prevalence of some diseases varies by race.
To an American, race may be e.g.: {White, Black, Hispanic, Native American, Arabic, Asian}.
To most Europeans, everyone who an an American would call Hispanic, we'd probably either call "Caucasian" (i.e. white) if their heritage is more from the Spanish side or Native American if their heritage is more from the pre-Columbian (Aztec?) side.
If you're Chinese, they may say the ethnicities are "Han, Zhuang, Hui, Manchu, Uyghur, …" where those are all ethnic groups within China.
Rwanda, infamously, would get you a distinction between Hutu and Tutsi; if you show me a picture of two people and ask me which was which, I wouldn't be able to answer, or even know if I was being pranked with any of the other ethnic groups in Africa.
But more broadly, while skin colour is easy to spot from the outside, it's about as useful as hair or eye colour when it comes to correspondence with the huge range of invisible genetic variation.
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They were funny. Do you see the difference?
not quite; spell it out for me. are you suggesting that the onion has never, under any circumstances, been funny and therefore are guilty of having pretentious opinions that are "not funny", which makes them bad? Or is it that you're suggesting that you are the sole arbiter of what is and isn't funny, so you're the only person who gets to determine the worth of specific types of humor? Sorry, I have a hard time disti…
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Can't remember in details that part of the film. Was it explicitly eugenics? Otherwise it could be seen as not getting the same education, depending on parental situation.
It's in the opening scene, where poor, "low IQ" couple complains about getting another child again by accident while a suburban "high IQ" couple was hesitant to start making children until it was too late (the husband dies). "Low IQ" couple's son grows up into a stupid, sexy jock and it goes on from there for generations. So yes, eugenics was pretty much an integral part of the premise. IQ bubbles even pop up on the…
Is that really how we use the word "eugenics", though? That scene you refer to explicitly explained that Natural Selection does not necessarily select for intelligence.
So while some people are calling it "Eugenics", it's what we more typically call Natural Selection, Evolutionary Pressure, etc.
Eugenics implies that the selection criteria was not natural. The scene you mention makes it clear that, in-universe anyway, the selection criteria was entirely natural and not a pressure imposed by humans.
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I'm not in the USA, but I think the issue is not so much the joke getting tiresome, but the repeat school shootings. Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootings, then the joke wouldn't keep getting repeated.
> Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootings It's odd that you seem to believe no work has been done. Lots of work has been done. Lots more work is blocked by people who steadfastly refuse to punish criminals - claiming instead that it's not their fault that they're violent. I'd love to hear any additional ideas you have other than violating the rights of citizens.
The answer is trivial and well-known: federal-level gun controls (because anything state-level is a joke without hard borders between states), coupled with a buy-back program, amnesties, and real enforcement. There are no school shootings in the UK or Australia.
Unfortunately, there are too many people who'd rather have more guns and more dead kids (and adults) than fewer dead kids and fewer guns around. They'd justify that by talking about "preventing tyranny" or something, ignoring that paramilitaries executing people in broad daylight on camera with no consequences is already the reality of the US today, and guns played zero to negative role preventing that. Coincidentally, there are no such paramilitaries in the UK or in Australia either.
As for "the rights of citizens": there is no such thing as an immutable unconditional right. American citizens don't have a right to own nuclear weapons, neither should they, even though it's perfectly possible to have a very expansive definition of "bearing arms". Plus, the Constitution itself was amended many times in the past, and by now is clearly in need of a major overhaul, as evidenced by the US sliding down in various democracy indices (for example, World Press Freedom Index puts the US under Romania in 2025). So there is nothing impossible or uniquely oppressive about the reforms necessary to stop children being shot in schools, but because it's such a foundational element of identity for so many with a lot of money behind it (the NRA is exceptionally well funded), in practice there's indeed "No Way to Prevent This".
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I'm not in the USA, but I think the issue is not so much the joke getting tiresome, but the repeat school shootings. Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootings, then the joke wouldn't keep getting repeated.
> Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootings It's odd that you seem to believe no work has been done. Lots of work has been done. Lots more work is blocked by people who steadfastly refuse to punish criminals - claiming instead that it's not their fault that they're violent. I'd love to hear any additional ideas you have other than violating the rights of citizens.
I 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…
Many US citizens didn't get that Starship Troopers was a black comedy. There are serious video reviews taking it seriously as an action movie where the characters are true US heroes. I have a feeling these people are the same as the ones you're talking about.
I don't know of anyone else changing everything to gold by touch.
He deserves credit fot South Park too if only by osmosis.
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not quite; spell it out for me. are you suggesting that the onion has never, under any circumstances, been funny and therefore are guilty of having pretentious opinions that are "not funny", which makes them bad? Or is it that you're suggesting that you are the sole arbiter of what is and isn't funny, so you're the only person who gets to determine the worth of specific types of humor? Sorry, I have a hard time disti…
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