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Are We Idiocracy Yet?

idiocracy.wtf

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Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#491

Post by Fnoord »

Zigurd wrote: post #434
Fnoord wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demanding to respect a claim is a political act by itself. Something being 'political' or not is a red herring. Politics is deeply ingrained in our society. How much is it ingrained? It is a spectrum, not a binary proposition. Trying to portrait it as a proposition is trying to oversimplify, removing nuance. All it does is it wants people to ignore issues and let different political wings try to live in 'harmony' wit…

I evidently erroneously omitted the /s but really it's more snark

Wasn't evident to me.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#492

Post by wiseowise »

marxisttemp wrote: post #471
dist-epoch wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Darwin natural selection eugenic? Was the rise of humans from chimps an eugenic like event?

No, because that’s natural selection, not artificial selection by an authoritarian government. Hope this helps!

Which authoritarian government, lmao.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#493

Post by wiseowise »

HexPhantom wrote: post #210
netcan wrote: post #33

Idiocracy 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.

Don't Look Up feels closer to how things actually break in practice

It’s a less extreme satire for sure.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#494

Post by sdwr »

Waterluvian wrote: post #339
afavour wrote: post #216

Earlier 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.

Right, because you see the situation so much better than them ;)

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#495

Post by FrustratedMonky »

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…

If you don't want to accept sources you disagree with.

Then isn't that part of the problem?

The onus is on you, to tell me what would be acceptable sources for you.

You didn't really debunk any of these sources, just supplied some random sampling of your own creation. Interestingly, I have gone back and watched the full video of both of those quotes. He did say all of those things, but 'in-joking'. That is a common tactic. Everything he says can be re-cast as 'he was only joking'. The trick is, the right can always shift what was a 'joke' or 'not-joke', depending on the argument. Was it serious, or not serious? It really depends on shifting views, and the interpretation can change day to day.

I tend to agree liberals really piled on those examples too much, there were really so many better examples.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#496

Post by sidewndr46 »

dspillett wrote: post #144
sidewndr46 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that explains the lack of promotion around this film?

Yep. The studio didn't know what the hell to do with it. I'm guessing that we (those of us who have seen it despite the lack of promotion) are lucky that they didn't just can it completely, or demand it get cut to ribbons and reformed as something else.

I think director's in that era can avoid this by not doing extra takes for scenes that would never make it anyways. Mike Judge did not have the budget for that anyways.

Nowadays they just change the scenes in post anyways, leading to some of the worst and most atrocious continuity errors.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#497

Post by UncleMeat »

IAmBroom wrote: post #402
UncleMeat wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't. "Poor, dumb people outbreed rich, smart people and make the whole world dumb" is not real. And the mechanism by which our world harms people is not because everybody involved is an idiot. Executives of corporations that are destroying the environment aren't just doing it because they don't know better. Leaders within the Trump admin and the GOP more broadly are often extremely well educated at top un…

I agree it isn't a documentary. However, modern politics of the right absolutely prey upon, and encourage, ignorance. Ridicule of intelligentsia and advanced education (often by Ivy League graduates!) is a key part of the strategy. That smart people are cultivating an ignorant voting bloc doesn't negate the fact that ignorance is fundamental to the plan.

Sure, the GOP ridicules advanced education.

But Trump went to Wharton and Vance went to Yale. Educated people leveraging anti-intellectualism for political gain is not even remotely the same thing as what happens in Idiocracy.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#498

Post by anonymars »

wiseowise wrote: post #490
Froztnova wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does explicitly reference IQ and, at one point, shows an adult taking an intelligence test and trying to put a square peg into a round hole. There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education.

> There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education. Have you skipped start of the movie or did we watch different editions? They literally open the story with redneck family breeding and spreading their redneck ways through family ties while “smart” family waits for the perfect moment.

I rewatched the intro, and it is true that they label the character IQs. That said, I still don't think that the particular mechanism is the most important part

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#499

Post by mindslight »

nils-m-holm wrote: post #236
whalesalad wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's no longer satire it's really a documentary.

It's a utopia at this point.

Another way of looking at it is that Idiocracy illustrates what it will look like when we try to rebuild after the Grump catastrophe. The various sci-fi stories of advanced civilizations that depend on machines but have no idea how build them or of the first step to understanding them never really spell out how society would get there. Well, now we know. Eventually the ignorant taking-for-granted of Grumpism will turn into helpless appreciation as they realize how dependent they are on those technologies. Grumpism already has a strong contingent of mysticism and woo, which can just as easily be applied to real phenomena with solid technical explanations that few go looking for.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#500

Post by marxisttemp »

dist-epoch wrote: post #473
marxisttemp wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because that’s natural selection, not artificial selection by an authoritarian government. Hope this helps!

There was no artificial selection by a government in this movie.

The movie obviously doesn’t depict a eugenics program, but it makes the core argument of eugenics: if human breeding is left uncontrolled it will lead to “stupid” people breeding more.
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