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Are We Idiocracy Yet?

idiocracy.wtf

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Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#531

Post by akramachamarei »

youarecringe wrote: post #326
bko wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First and foremost you should attempt to be funny or original. This is neither. It's political. I would love headlines like: > Illegal Immigrant Finally Caught After 20 Years of Successfully Contributing to Society but instead you get non joke headlines like: > ICE Agents Hurl Pregnant Immigrant Over Mexican Border To Prevent Birth On U.S. Soil It's just cringe.

First and foremost you should endeavor to be a human, and The Onion does not owe you a thing. It's not a joke anymore, its a class ware and genocide that they are reporting on with headlines that make you cringe.

This is a repulsive, fallacious, and unproductive comment. Hackernews is not the place for emotional venting.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#532

Post by anonymars »

marxisttemp wrote: post #472
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #137

Earlier 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…

What sort of a response do you think a movie whose premise is “dumb people have overbred and made the world worse” is intended to provoke?

Laughter?

Is Dennis the Menace a treatise on corporeal punishment?

If we want to treat Idiocracy as a policy paper, why not take away as a lesson to think beyond merely themselves when the well-educated decide whether to raise children?

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#533

Post by cindyllm »

anonymars wrote: post #532
marxisttemp wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sort of a response do you think a movie whose premise is “dumb people have overbred and made the world worse” is intended to provoke?

Laughter? Is Dennis the Menace a treatise on corporeal punishment? If we want to treat Idiocracy as a policy paper, why not take away as a lesson to think beyond merely themselves when the well-educated decide whether to raise children?

[dead]

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#534

Post by einpoklum »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #221
jacquesm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Trump spots a mentally capable person that is also stupid enough to eat his slop (or evil enough), he gets a job. Isn't that a bit like a wooly mammoth? In theory it could exist but in practice you're not going to find anybody that is both mentally capable and at the same time stupid enough to eat his slop. That leaves evil enough and there are plenty of those...

There are plenty of intelligent people that are willing to ride on the back of the Trump regime. That seems mostly to be the problem, in fact. Whoever suggested that using Tariffs to provide a handle to move stocks that they could use to trade, I very much doubt it came from Trump. That was provided the means to keep all the greedy grubbers in the Republican party onside whilst they hid Trump's involvement with Epste…

There is Musk, like you said, and there are also Adelson (certainly an important influence on Trump's support for Israel's continued Gaza onslaught), the less-well-known Timothy Melon, and others still. Here's a list:

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/05/musk-trump-feud-2024-electi...

and they're pretty bad news. But - Trump is not unique in being ridden by interested parties, and in particular, powerful donors or groups-of-donors. His predecessor, Biden, used to be known as "The Senator from MBNA" (That's the large credit card company based in Delaware), due to his devotion to their interests:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2008/08/senator-mbna-byron-yo...

and his winning presidential campaign had plenty of funding from Billionaires, although not in such individually high numbers; and from the financial sector more generally:

https://www.investopedia.com/top-donors-to-biden-2020-campai...

and we could go back and look at how Obama's cabinet was pretty much picked by Citigroup:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/10/15/wiki-o15.html

etc.

Also, looking at war crimes and crimes against humanity - the US has done worse than it's doing now, in the past, even if we count Gaza as the responsibility of the Biden and Trump presidencies. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, East Timor indirectly, all of its South America meddling... yes, there used to be more lip service to the avoidance of international crimes, to the avoidance of outright unprovoked aggression, to the UN, and Trump has stripped most of those remains away, I'll grant you - but he stripped was was rotten and fractured already.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#535

Post by akramachamarei »

antisthenes wrote: post #482
duskdozer wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a guarantee of course, but I think if you can't steelman your opponents, have never gone into something with some hypothesis or bias and ultimately proved it wrong/insufficiently supported and accepted that, or wouldn't be willing to specify what evidence would be sufficient for you to change your mind (however unlikely you believe that to be), you're more likely to be Homer.

> Not a guarantee of course, but I think if you can't steelman your opponents There's no point in steelmanning opponents who would not do the same to you. There isn't enough time in the universe to argue against all of them and all of their gaslighting and logical fallacies. I think willing to admit one is wrong and maybe thinking for an extra second before opening their mouth to give another opinion would get people…

> There's no point in steelmanning opponents […] There isn't enough time […] to argue against […] gaslighting and logical fallacies.

I think there's a separation in how people are using "steelman". A steelman argument by definition contains no (or a minimal amount of) gaslighting and fallacies. As for the worth of the exercise, it's about personal knowledge seeking. If you're totally confident in your beliefs, than certainly, steelmanning will hold little value.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#536

Post by Vektorceraptor »

mindslight wrote: post #524
Vektorceraptor wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was referring to the author, not American politics in general. I added "then this should be called out as well." I thought this made it obvious.

No, it doesn't make it obvious - I don't see much difference between your first comment and one that goes on to conclude something something "both sides". There is plenty of criticism to go around when analyzing how we got to Grump, but keeping it in the right context is key.

To me is lying about the obvious more "idiotic", than acting in a "bad manner". Again - I don't see a point in arguing here. If I show you the color "red" and you claim "it's blue", for political reasons or what ever, that is already idiocracy. I don't know what you are defending or what you are attacking or what you are even talking about. I wont change my mind or change my comment. It is what it is - learn to deal with it.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#538

Post by justin66 »

akramachamarei wrote: post #530
justin66 wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political. After reading this comment thread I think this would best be rephrased as "Some people don't like Onion stories because they feel like they're the butt of the joke." Which is fair enough, but let's not over-intellectualize it.

That may be true in some cases, but not in all. In particular, the Onion school shooting joke strikes me as a satire of a strawman. Whatever humor can be derived from ridiculing a stupid version of a position (like "school shootings are unavoidable") is, at least for me, made flaccid by the counterproductive nature of the satire. In other words, when the satire ridicules a dumb argument that not many serious people m…

I don't pretend to be an expert on political satire but I never noticed that steelmanning, to use the modern vernacular, was ever a technique featured in high quality work like Tom Lehrer or George Carlin. I mean, literally never.

It sounds like you're describing something very boring, but if there's a political satirist (or Satanist, or Salafist, or whatever) you think is funny and an exemplar of what you're describing, drop it here.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#539

Post by fzeroracer »

ern_ave wrote: post #461
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Everyone is biased some. Going all the way back to the "1951 Princeton–Dartmouth football game" The Right, just happens to be in a bit in a slump right now with its anti-science religious activism. "Doing worse" Garrett & Bond (2021), Conservatives’ susceptibility to political misperceptions, Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc... Sultan et al. (2024), Susceptibility t…

Great! So, let's start with your first study. Note this quote: > it is possible that conservatives’ relatively low accuracy about political information is a by-product of the fact that issues used in forming this assessment were selected with an eye toward detecting misperceptions among the political group That's definitely a way to bias a study against conservatives. It's good that this study claims it avoided that…

So you don't have an argument, you just reject sources that you either can't understand or don't like. Which is just proving the parents point.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#540

Post by tremon »

lynndotpy wrote: post #519
tremon wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood that eugenics criticism of the movie. They make zero references to genetics in that opening sequence, and the nurture side of that argument is readily trotted out as a truism even here on HN: "people from affluent parents have easier access to education".

The introduction describes it as a "turning point in human evolution", and that "natural selection ... began to favor different traits". These are some of the very first sentences of the movie. The thesis is given: "Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered sp…

That's not a eugenics argument, that's merely an evolutionary argument (identifying a change in selection pressure). The eugenics argument would first have to make the case that the people are stupid/intelligent because of their genetic lineage rather than their upbringing.
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