Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Are We Idiocracy Yet?

idiocracy.wtf

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 582 posts

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#551

Post by coldtea »

marxisttemp wrote: post #475
coldtea wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All kinds of people voted for the Nazi party, including very intelligent and respectable professors, and there was no special split in intelligence between either side voters (or measure of that). What's ironic is using nazi-like thinking (the idiot masses who vote far right vs the enlightened people who vote left), instead of treating it as a complex political matter, and accepting that perfectly intelligent people…

Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic. Not that most people on this site have ever dipped below PMC treatlerite comfort.

>Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic

Or not everybody shares your priorities and ideological outloook, or even pragmatic assessment of how more fucked they are with the right vs the left in power in the past, and it's the above that's naive.

Perhaps they're adverse to people so apolitical and self-righteous that think nobody can't vote anything else than what they're selling, unless they're stupid or immoral.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#553

Post by senectus1 »

afavour wrote: post #216
bdashdash wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

"Stupid people raise stupid people" is probably a better way to put it.

but even then thats entirely too simplistic as well.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#556

Post by Timon3 »

mmmmmbop wrote: post #477
wombat-man wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's hard for some to believe, but there are people in my family who are otherwise very intelligent but will not change their opinions on some things. Like climate change.

In Germany, for many years we had been told that climate change is the most important thing ever, that we need to change our habits or else the world will go down, that if we don't act now, we will all be doomed. Then the Ukraine war happened, and suddenly nobody was talking about climate change anymore. I'll admit, I'm a simple man and I don't know the science behind all of this. But as a citizen, it does feel confu…

Plenty of people in Germany (on all social/political levels) still talk about climate change, and have done so without pause before, during and since Ukraine.

If you think that everything "seems to be fine after all", you're in for a very rude awakening.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#557

Post by ModernMech »

Juliate wrote: post #438
ModernMech wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s where Idiocracy goes wrong; stupidity is indistinguishable from evil when deployed at scale. Living through 2026 I find the distinction meaningless -- Hanlon's razor needs refinement.

Evil has a motive (defensive or offensive). Stupidity has none. You can derail stupid towards something. Even de-stupid it. That does not work with motivated people, even less evil ones.

Neither evil nor stupidity have motives, motives are attributed to people.

Why isn't it evil to have ultimate power and use it to be just be greedy, self absorbed, and vain in the face of pain and suffering? That's the prime motive of most stupid people I know. How do you derail that towards something positive and de-stupid it? People have thought they could do that with Trump to achieve their objectives for years, only for them to end up disgraced, diminished, and discarded.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#558

Post by marxisttemp »

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?

The film wasn't about education, it was about genetics, as the intro makes abundantly clear. And the Redditors who get themselves hot and bothered about this film aren't laughing, they're congratulating themselves on being the intelligent ones instead of the dysgenic stupids while crowing about how "Idiocracy is a documentary" -> stupid people are overbreeding.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#559

Post by marxisttemp »

wiseowise wrote: post #552
marxisttemp wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nazi Germany and America, for two, lmao

America didn’t mandate eugenics in the movie and what does this even have to do with Nazies?

> America didn’t mandate eugenics in the movie

Correct! It mandated eugenics in real life, in the early 20th century. I didn't say that the movie shows eugenics happening. I said "the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike." Work on your reading comprehension.

Re: Are We Idiocracy Yet?

#560

Post by marxisttemp »

coldtea wrote: post #551
marxisttemp wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic. Not that most people on this site have ever dipped below PMC treatlerite comfort.

> Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic Or not everybody shares your priorities and ideological outloook, or even pragmatic assessment of how more fucked they are with the right vs the left in power in the past, and it's the above that's naive. Perhaps they're adverse to people so apolitical and self-righteous that think nobody can't vote anything else than what they're selling, unles…

Every single quality of life improvement for the working class, from minimum wage, to overtime, to weekends, was delivered by the left. Please tell me one thing that the right has accomplished for laborers.
Post reply on HN