Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's no longer satire it's really a documentary.
It's a utopia at this point.
Ha love this comment
Are We Idiocracy Yet?
371–380 of 582 posts
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Was thinking the same thing
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any strong relationship between IQ scores and innate intelligence, as opposed to mental agility gained through education?
In general the methodology for IQ is highly questionable
> In general the methodology for IQ is highly questionable
What do you propose as a replacement?
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#374I 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…
Same goes with Starship Troopers - Clearly biting satire, but at the time was considered to be a dumb action movie by most.
I thought it was just the opposite: people recognized it as satire but what they really wanted was the dumb action movie. Spare us the social commentary and show us some power armor with jump jets.
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " [...] but don't put activism over comedy." lol. yeah, carlin and bruce can go fuck themselves, I guess. hilariously unserious take, bruh.
They were funny. Do you see the difference?
Millions of people find The Onion funny; you do not.
Do you see the difference?
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the intent of Mike Judge's joke was less so an outright promotion of eugenics and more so mocking the upper crust of American society's approach to family planning. (That of which Judge was intimately familiar with during his time in SV when he worked for a graphics card company.) A lot of his work with KotH analyzed the same dynamics of educated and uneducated America and the interplay and I think Idiocracy…
I mean yes but the point at the end of the day was that the people who were breeding in Idiocracy had genetically inferior intelligence.
Did the movie ever say anything about genetics or IQ?
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#377Idiocracy 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.
You are misremembering; they had a scene of an intelligence test that had adults matching shapes (stars -. tars, squares -> squares) and getting it wrong.
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proofs anyone could invent your life ordering fiction.
That is... so very nearly a sentence.
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if the creator specifically had eugenics in mind, I think he stumbled upon a greater truth. Consider this. You can take anyone from any group in your nation, place them in a different nation, with a different culture, and they will adopt the mannerisms and accents of that culture. We focus on race constantly, but it's clear that culture drives the norms that we see in any group. And culture may be persistent (es…
nailed it. I see this odd "eugenics" framing all the time, and all I can think is 'ooh la la, somebody's gonna get laid in college." you can argue the academia until you are blue in the face, but the real-world statistics show that less educated people have more children and that education quality in the US has been declining. It's not a foregone conclusion that one causes the other, but there's a cogent argument to…
I agree the eugenics thing is tangential. It's just there as an easy way to advance the plot to the point where the real story can start without too much work.
You could drop the eugenics thing, replace it with cultural indoctrination of some sort, re-frame it to instead of shitting on white trash culture, shit all over the college educated white collar white people culture and have the same movie down to the "culture has so thoroughly run amuck that even the black president is white in a bad way" trope, the trash piling up because we don't know what to do with it and the heroes being a hooker and a lazy army private. Maybe you'd have to replace the demo derby with a committee hearing full of say nothing corporate speak and some other minor details.
Good thing I'm not a producer or I'd do it.
Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, most of the arguments have been basically "do anything" hysterics that are divorced from reality. For instance, much focus is given on rifles, specifically big black scary looking rifles. In reality if you look at murder rates by weapon type Handguns: ~45–50% Firearm (type unknown): ~20–25% Rifles: ~2–3% Shotguns: ~1–2% Knives / cutting instruments: ~10–12% Blunt objects (clubs, hammers, etc.): ~3–5% Hands,…
> In reality if you look at murder rates by weapon type What is the school shooting by weapon type? The 'general' mass shooting by weapon type?
> Many school shootings in the United States result in one non-fatal injury.[63] The type of firearm most commonly used in school shootings in the United States is the handgun. Three school shootings (the Columbine massacre, the Sandy Hook massacre, and the 2018 Parkland High School shooting in Florida), accounted for 43% of the fatalities; the type of firearm used in the most lethal school shootings was the rifle.[62]
Note that this is shootings, so excludes murders by non guns. Rifles are not any more effective at murder than handguns. It's much easier to control, conceal, reload and attain a handgun. They're the preferred weapon of choice for practical reasons.