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 making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!" It was an early screener and I think that reaction was a surprise to the film team. I own a copy and watch it more than once a year. One of my favorite hard satires.
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 comedy, the satirical elements are heavily over exaggerated by fans.
It's kind of funny when you say the movie isn't making serious statements when the highest of our publicly elected officials isn't a serious person. We elect people that are actively harmful to our well being. These people say things so incredibly stupid it can be painful. And then you wonder why people look at the movie like it's a documentary?
He might not present as a serious person but he is. The nativist impulses, the gutter racism, the “F you I’ve got mine” attitude, the party establishment that enabled him despite all that… these are all serious things worth serious analysis.
“Stupid people vote for stupid guy” is exactly the kind of analysis I’m critical of Idiocracy for.
I think you may misunderstand what the term "not a serious person" means. Just because someone is an ego driven performer doesn't mean their actions don't have consequences, it means you've fucked up if you follow them and take them for face value.
There has been a ton of analysis for why said stupid people vote for stupid people, but very little of it can prevent said behaviors.
Just to be clear, the smartest person is still a minister in Idiocracy, and the whole premise hinges on the idea that the elite still recognizes intelligence as something desirable.
It's not a eugenics-y vibe. The inciting incident is dysgenics, and the in-narrative apocalypse would have been prevented by eugenics.
It doesn't preclude the movie from being enjoyed or appreciated. The movie also came out at a time when test scores, literacy rates, and whatnot were all _increasing_, so that was the more salient lens to criticize it by.
That trend has reversed now, though. I don't agree with the dysgenic narrative, but I have often found myself thinking, "Gotta hand it to the movie Idiocracy, it's feeling familiar".
For all its flaws, I was a child at the time saturated in post-Y2K optimism that tomorrow would always be better than the day before. It was one of the first things that made me seriously consider, "What if humanity is not on a linear path of improvement"?
Given the number of people in this thread saying “it’s a documentary” I don’t think there’s a significant difference. And there’s also plenty of criticism of Idiocracy on Reddit too.
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 species". The characters dramatizing the inciting incident in the introduction are introduced with their IQs. It's very explicitly a dysgenic apocalypse narrative, which could have been avoided with earlier eugenicist intervention. (They attempt "genetic engineering" later on, but they fail, as the unintelligent are able to win by sheer numbers.)
It's okay to like the movie, and it is fiction. But it's certainly a dysgenic narrative which has eugenicist implications.
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.
This is one of those threads that's making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Like, I don't think enjoying Idiocracy makes someone a bad person or anything like that, but it's pretty clearly making a eugenics argument without any mitigating counter-hypothesis.
It's particularly amusing because there are people quoting Neal Stephenson in this thread, ignoring the fact that when Stephenson tackles similar subject matter, he's very careful to make it clear that he's talking more about the cultural axioms which have a long-term effect on how people value learning and intellectualism. It's not even subtext, I've been reading The Diamond Age recently and very early on there's a line where a character clearly states that there's no coherent genetic theory of human intelligence, and the entire thesis of the book runs counter to that notion that intelligence is primarily genetic.
I hadn't seen it since it came out, but had a that kind of general movie recollection that it was as funny as it was prescient. Watched it again with my wife who had not seen it before: it's not funny. Maybe I'm getting too old.
> like establishing “stupid people breeding makes stupid people” as incontrovertible fact
That’s based on environment and not on genes. You might not be born “stupid”, but if you’re surrounded by retards (like in the movie), chances are you won’t be splitting atoms.
It definitely activates something within people. Maybe I'm just terminally online, but there is always _always_ someone who will say "Idiocracy isn't satire, its a documentary."
I don’t think that when people say “it’s a documentary” they mean that it’s literally a “documentary”, more like “this satire is so close to reality, that you can call it documentary”.
Not just 'other girls'. That happens, but also, it's a theme that has been around a long time. The 'Maga' movement existed before Trump. This is 1992
Was also in Snow Crash.
"All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice…With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.
But as long as you have that fourwheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream.
"
Snow Crash
Chapter 39 (Hiro's observation as he drives along the Alaska Highway)
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.
Eh. I don't really see anything wrong with that. Every industry flubs things because the people creating the product aren't the same demographics consuming it. No big deal IMO. I think it's just a product of your typical Hollywood filter bubble. The Average American(TM) isn't so stupid as to not see the glaring "left to it's own devices middle america would turn the whole country into white trash, also with literal trash everywhere" undertone even if they can't quite put their finger on it.
You could make essentially the same movie about how impenetrable and unaccountable bureaucracy and abstraction of responsibility away to 3rd parties is going to make society grind to a halt (e.g. trash piling up because all disposal methods have been declared not environmentally friendly enough, etc, etc) and someone who just doesn't give enough shits to ask permission can be the hero of the story and frame it to offend all the people who specifically identify as the opposite of the dumb people in idiocracy.
That said I think it's a great movie and they struck a good balance.
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.
A little more punctuation would have made it easier, and it took me a little while.
Once it finally clicked for me, I actually found it an interesting point I haven't heard before. That the main cause of the satanic panic was a fear that world-building becoming too popular would expose the likelihood that Christianity was also a fiction.
Personally, I think I find the idea more interesting, than I find it convincing.
>The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proves that anyone could invent your life-ordering fiction.
I’m honestly not sure whether I believe these comments, or understand how to put them in context. Not for the first time I’m aware I do live in a cultural bubble, but: it’s hard for me to image anyone getting outraged by an Onion story (other than a religious right person stumbling across the “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” piece, or something like that). Similarly, hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.
> hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.
Presumably they identify with cultural elements (e.g. amateur football, professional wrestling) and then interpret the rest as "this is how dumb I think you are" and "you are not fit to rule yourselves".
Hence the "WTF" shared glances between myself and the filmmakers at that Idiocracy screening. The audience reaction was more memorable than the film, it was like the film did not end and the audience picked up the storyline.
There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate fact/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. On the Right they really could not differentiate Fact/Fiction.. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are living in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence.
If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.
I'm interested to see any studies you can find on this topic. Here are some studies that I have:
Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias [1] - in study 6, liberals were shown to be ...pretty racist.
You claimed the Right believes fake news. I wont dispute that. I'll just reply that there's a lot of that going around. Here are some examples that debunk fake news you yourself might fervently believe:
Girls Who Code: A Randomized Field Experiment on Gender-Based Hiring Discrimination [2] - leftists tend to believe that women are discriminated against in STEM.
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force [3] - debunks the common belief, on the Left, that police are more likely to shoot people of color. Quote: "we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, ocer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics"
Rathje et al. (2023), Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information, Nature Human Behaviour. This one emphasizes that misinformation judgments are shaped by both accuracy motives and social/identity motives, which helps explain why partisan gaps are not simply about intelligence or total inability to separate truth from fiction.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_sourc...
Pennycook et al. (2022), Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing online misinformation, Nature Communications. This paper discusses baseline sharing discernment and notes worse baseline discernment among conservatives in the samples they studied, while also showing that simple accuracy prompts can help.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_sourc...
summary is: there are studies showing conservatives, on average, perform worse on certain misinformation/truth-discernment tasks, but the strongest scholarly version of the claim is narrower and more conditional than the popular retelling
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc...
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 bias. But did it? They don't list the questions that participants were asked. I checked the list of supporting documents, and couldn't find it.
Without that list, I can't accept this source. Sorry.
If I went out and asked a bunch of Liberals, "did Trump say that Neo-Nazis are 'very fine people?'" I suspect that upwards of 90% of Liberals would answer "yes" ...and they would swear they heard him do it! You may (falsely) believe this yourself!
I could ask, "did Trump advise people to drink bleach?" and many Liberals would swear he did.
He didn't do either of those things. But many Liberals emphatically believe he did. I could very easily design a study that included only these sorts of questions - questions that Liberals will get wrong.
The only way to spot this bias would be if I included the questions in the study, so that you could vet them yourself. Without such a list, it is completely reasonable for me to reject your source.
Should I continue to the next one, or are they all like this?
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.
I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political.
For instance, their famous 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens article they post all over their page whenever there is some high profile gun related crime. It's all over their page and no doubt they get a bump in traffic from smug people who feel it's clever. It's just so exhausting. It was a great headline, but by the time the joke gets its own Wikipedia, it might be time to retire it. You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
Look at their trending article: Critics Outraged By Flippant School Shooting Plotline In ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’. Where's the joke? There is obviously no school shooting plotline. It's not clever or creative. I guess the joke is school shootings are a thing, and Mario is a popular movie?
It's basically South Parks criticism of Family Guy where they write jokes by having a seal put together random words from popular culture. School shootings + Mario = funny. And this stuff gets clicks because people think they're clever or subversive when it's just lazy and unoriginal.
You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
The "joke" in this case is people's reactions to school shootings. And people's reactions haven't changed, so I don't see why the article should change.
It's just so exhausting.
This has some real "The worst thing about school shootings is knowing that The Onion is going to repost that article I personally am tired of seeing" energy to it.
That article has some real "The best thing about school shootings is we get to have literally every article on our website be this clever headline we wrote 10 years" energy to it.
A joke does not stop being a joke because of how often it’s repeated. You may no longer find it funny, but it’s still a joke. More importantly, it’s still satire, and The Onion is a satirical news website.
> That article has some real "The best thing about school shootings is we get to have literally every article on our website be this clever headline we wrote 10 years" energy to it.
If that’s what you take from it, you have completely missed the point. The headline works because it’s social commentary, being funny is secondary. The fact they keep reposting it over and over is itself part of the criticism, it shows disapproval for an easy resolvable situation and removes teeth from the arguments of those opposed to it.
> 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 make, it's not so funny.
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.
> You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
As Jon Stewart put it in the Crossfire interview where they asked him “which candidate do you supposed would provide you better material if he won?” because he has “a stake in it that way, not just as citizen but as a professional comic”, the citizen part is much more important.
The point of satire is social criticism first, funny second. I have little doubt everyone at the Onion responsible for reposting that headline would a million times prefer that they didn’t have to do it ever because the situation were resolved.
> It's just so exhausting.
It really says something about the state of society when an atrocity is perpetrated over and over and the complaint is that someone keeps talking about it rather than the atrocity continuing to happen.
Its okay to find things not funny that other people do find funny. Not everyone agrees or has the same sense of humor. Bko is not the final arbiter in deciding if something is funny or not.
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 distinguishing which type of childish, smug bullshit I'm dealing with, so any help you can provide would be appreciated.
In any case, I've never laughed as hard at anything Lenny fucking Bruce said as I did at The Onions "Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work" bit. So if you've got some favorite bruce bits, I'd love to get educated on what is hilarious about 60 year old observational standup.
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' with each other by pretending the other side doesn't exist. This strategy doesn't work, and will hit in the face like a boomerang.
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.
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.
> 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 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
> 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.
"…much focus is given on rifles, specifically big black scary looking rifles"
Military-style rifles designed primarily for killing humans? That's called a low hanging fruit. If the U.S. can't even restrict those I expect everything else to be a wasted effort.
"I'd love to hear any additional ideas except those that work everywhere because that'd require big changes"
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".
> "I'd love to hear any additional ideas except those that work everywhere because that'd require big changes"
When you pretend to quote someone, but you alter the quote, you're being dishonest. What you just did suggests that you don't really have any good arguments on your side - that you don't have any arguments that would stand on their own, without requiring a lie.
So, if we were having a debate, I'd say that you lost.
> I'd love to hear any additional ideas you have other than violating the rights of citizens.
That's a strange take. There's citizens' rights involved in not being shot at and also the right to own guns, but when people are being killed, I would think that the right to life would take precedence over introducing some rule over gun ownership.
Here in the UK, we have strict rules on gun ownership (which I'm not particularly familiar with) which involve some kind of assessment (to prevent unstable people from owning them) and the guns have to be kept in a suitable locked cabinet. It's entirely possible for people to own guns for sport or for culling animals etc. and yet we have a very small amount of gun crime.
> I would think that the right to life would take precedence
Well, let's do a thought experiment to test this. Which of these two rights takes precedence: (1) life (specifically in this case, the right to not be murdered) or (2) freedom of movement
That's an easy question, isn't it? (1) takes precedence. But how many 9's of protection are you willing to "purchase" at the expense of (2)? How much of (2) are you willing to give up in order to get a little more of (1)?
If we reduce (2) to 0 ...by locking every person in a padded cell, then we can achieve 99.99% protection of (1).
Presumably though, you don't like that idea. Presumably, you'll want to be let out of the padded cell, and get a bit of right (2) back. But giving you a bit of (2) back is going to cost someone their life! If we let you and others out of the padded cell, someone somewhere is going to get murdered.
What this thought experiment demonstrates is that the issue is not as simple as, "(1) takes precedence over (2)" - the thought experiment demonstrates that there is an amount of (2) that you will not spend in order to purchase a marginal increase in (1) - a situation where (2) actually takes precedence.
> Here in the UK, we have strict rules on gun ownership
And I totally respect that. Just to be clear though, "gun ownership" isn't really the issue. Gun ownership is a proxy for the actual right: self defense. You place a low value on the right to defend yourself and your family. Again, I totally respect that. You've "spent" that right to purchase lower gun crime. Have I mentioned how much I respect your personal decision?
As for me, I value the right to self defense above all. I've looked at the data, and I've realized that I'm much more likely to be stabbed or beaten to death than I am (well, was when I was in school) to be in a school shooting.
So to me, having actually looked at that data, it seems obvious that the right to self defense should take precedence. I think that my way of thinking is perfectly rational, and I think you're way of thinking is not ...but I totally respect your personal decision. I'm sure you also respect mine.
I have no clue what I just read or what kind of mental gymnastics are required to say that a right to a weapon overrides a right to live.
It used to blow my mind when I moved here (Netherlands) that I wasn't allowed to use a weapon to defend myself... but then you realize ... basically nobody has weapons.
An irony is that guns are vastly more often used for self harm than for self defense. These supposed defenders of rights are often losing their own lives and the lives of family members with the instruments they demand to have a right to have.
I'm having a hard time understanding your point. Here's what I think just happened:
Me: I value the right to self defense
You: Guns are used for self harm more often than self defense [as an aside, I don't disagree that this is true - I've heard this stat many times]
You: This is ironic!
Please help me to understand why you think that's ironic. What do you feel would be a non-ironic position? Is it this....
Me: I value the right to self defense, but one day I might want to kill myself, so I guess I'd better give up the right to self defense.
Is that a non-ironic position? To me that seems like an irrational position. Those two issues (self defense and self harm) seem orthogonal, and conflating them because of a superficial similarity (they both involve guns) seems odd.
Ok. Now this is logic I understand. Nobody is saying you don’t have a right to self defense. The question should be: why do you have a right to bring a gun to a fist fight?
A lot of people are incapable of contending with hypotheticals or thought experiments. It's okay.
If you'd like to try again, I encourage you to read up to the point where something doesn't make sense. Quote only that sentence, and ask me to explain.
Notice how I'm not even asking you to read the whole thing - just to the point where you have trouble. This is very reasonable.
Reader's Digest: What pleases you more, applause or laughter?
Tina Fey: Laughter. You can prompt applause with a sign. My friend, SNL writer Seth Meyers, coined the term clapter, which is when you do a political joke and people go, "Woo-hoo." It means they sort of approve but didn't really like it that much. You hear a lot of that on [whispers] The Daily Show.
Obviously we can't see that people aren't genuinely falling out of their seats laughing when that headline get rolled out again. There's no way argue that someone doesn't earnestly think bad (or tired) jokes make effective satire.
I don't think a whinge is a joke just because it has the shape of a joke and a point I like. Overall, I agree with you. But you'll never convince anybody.
a famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act III, Scene II). It means that someone's overly emphatic or frequent denial of a situation suggests they are hiding the truth, are insincere, or actually guilty of what they deny. It implies their defense is covering up a secret desire or truth.
> You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
Ok, who made you arbiter of what people can do? Have you missed entirely the point of repeating this little bit of dark humor is to perhaps SPUR THE PEOPLE TO ACTION THAT NEED TO TAKE ACTION?
You're right, it isn't a joke. Its very serious. Children are being killed at school. Kids are anxious about going to school because they don't want to be shot. How is that OK? And how is the thing you're taking issue with the repeated headline in a rag that is pure satire? Its like taking issue with the people who point out the Catholic church has a problem with pedophilia. Maybe direct your ire at the people taking no actions on gun control, eh?
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.
As a fan of Heinlein's book, the movie flattened the exploration of the political themes from the book and turned it into said black comedy. It would be like turning Animal House or Lord of the Flies into a black comedy.
I read the book, was very interested by the points he made, but I completely understand and support Verhoeven's take on it as a naive utopia that will get completely derailed. Just look at how the "veterans" of the "forever war" are foaming at the mouth at the idea of war-criming and sending others to die in Iran. Heinlein's central idea that people who offered their service to the rest of society are better qualified to vote doesn't survive the slightest encounter with reality.
it was a dumb action movie, with a bit of satire and some non-trivial nudity.
the book is a political science treatise about the role of the citizen in government and draws heavily from Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber, basically invented the "space marine" concept that we see in 40k or Starcraft or Doom, and touched on things like haptic feedback and non-traditional UI and how it could be C2.
The nudity is also part of the point. American will heavily restrict movies with nudity or swear words, but see far less problems with showing gore and violence on screen to youngsters.
Seen from Europe (Verhoeven is Dutch), this is completely deranged.
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.
I own the official release, and upon first viewing I do remember slight changes from that screener version, but nothing material. I half expected all or at least some of the brand names to be replaced because the film was so insulting towards them, but that all remained. Starbucks whores were okay, I guess, with Starbucks.
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.
Indignant behavior may have been a result of a perceived attack on viewers belief system. Possibly combined with no 2nd order awareness of thought. Additionally, a subtle “critique” framing from the screening host or “open mic” framing may prime the participants to command attention. Outrage is the easiest when one has no conceptual lens to add interpretive value.
I did feel that the use of an open mic encouraged the negative opinions to cascade. Once one of them voiced negativity, it really turned into a "me too! I was insulted by..."
I wasn't insulted, but it did feel a bit too on the nose to really work as satire.
Idiocracy got there just in time, before things became so stupid that satire wasn't possible any more. You have to exaggerate so hard that it lacks the feeling of cleverness required by satire.
The Onion struggles on. They've always been true masters of the form. I wrote my own news satire back in the 80s and quit when I saw The Onion; they were far better than I would ever be. Practically nobody else can still pull off satire here in the worst timeline.
Armando Iannucci - creator of The Thick of It and Veep - has said this in public statements. Politics is so ridiculous now on both sides of the Atlantic that he finds political satire impossible to pull off anymore. His last show for HBO Avenue 5 had to take place on a space liner for rich people with Hugh Laurie as a faux-captain who can’t keep his accent straight.
Texas Monthly (“The National Magazine of Texas”) covers local news with a straight face, letting the absurdity speak for itself. Read the recent article about ranchers and rabbis searching for the perfect heifer to bring about the end of the world - you can see the movie coming (Coen Brothers or The Daniels?) https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/red-heifer-prophe...
A straightforward rendition of the last 10 years wouldn't even pass the smell test for a satire. It might work as some kind of experimental dark slapstick.
I guess I see why, though. Taken from the perspective of tropes of middle Americans, it's pretty condescending and claims everything they are is idiotic and responsible for the state of the world, when it is more complicated than that and the ivory tower has its own culpability
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.
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
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 (especially now with technology allowing every culture to potentially spread everywhere), but it's not intrinsic.
With this framing, I interpreted Idiocracy's intro as being about a culture of intelligence or learning being harder to maintain in a modern world, than a culture of apathy or fun.
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 be made that it's about the culture of poorer people vs the culture of richer people - and they even spell out that angle in the movie. They show how reticent the rich couple is to have a child, and how eager the poor couple is to do the same. It's about what their cultures value about children and legacy. It's not "dumb people make dumb kids", it's "dumb people won't educate their kids past their own knowledge who, in turn, won't educate their kids past their own knowledge." The movie even goes on to resolve with the "dumb" descendants learning (from the protagonist) when they have anyone willing to make that a point of the culture. So I can't read a clean "eugenics" take from the film; I only find that take in misreadings of the intro, personally.
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.
I think you all understood my point but for the sake of clarity, I said "take anyone from any group," and I was really thinking along the lines of "take a new born from any group."
I wasn't going for pro or anti-eugenics, just expressing that the Flynn effect has been reversing. At least from what I've read the trend is true _within_ families, which downplays potential pro-eugenics arguments.
I'd be curious to know the average IQ of, say, climate deniers.
I suspect it's still a perfect 100. I don't think it's about general intelligence. In some ways just the opposite: very smart people have a talent for convincing themselves that they are right.
Unfortunately I fear it's more like EQ than IQ. The driver is more about the people. They do not like the kind of people who are trying to prevent climate change, and will apply their intelligence as hard as they can to avoid agreeing with them.
One other thing that's interesting -- at least in my personal observations, climate deniers don't usually actually argue the science. They might do this when publishing or speaking publicly. But, at least when you're talking with them and they're at ease and speaking freely, they seem to offer a different argument.
The argument I've seen, which really sticks with me, is that climate change is false, yes, but that's sort of a given that we don't investigate. Climate change was cooked up so that "the other side" could impose all sorts of horrible restrictions on "us."
I obviously don't agree with the argument, (ie, I think climate change is real and quite urgent) but I think it's an interesting framing. It's an argument from tribalism most obviously, but I also think it does what so many people do when attempting to understand complex events; it transforms the problem into more of a personal drama. The "real issue" is that "those people" are "against us." You see this sort of framing all the time; complex problems boiled down into personal dramas because people intuitively understand personal dramas and seek them out, but not necessarily because a personal drama has the best explanatory power.
A lot of beliefs are cultural and not directly related to intelligence. From an outsider's perspective, it can be difficult to tell which beliefs are merely fact-based and which are rooted in culture.
I think an important thought experiment here would be to really imagine people going to war, killing each other over whether or not biblical transubstantiation is literal or metaphorical. who had the "intelligent" belief in this case? I'd argue neither side and that this was pure tribalism.
I don't think that's what the GP was going for... rather, implying that flat-eartherness is uncorrelated to IQ and, thus, the average IQ of flat-earthers is the same as that of the general population.
Flerfers seem to be a somewhat different problem. In my experience, the vast majority of flat earthers are trolls, pretending to be stupid for the purpose of angering people.
I'm sure there are some genuine flat earthers out there, and I imagine that their IQs do average near 100 (perhaps a little lower). But I'm basing that on a general understanding of how people come to stupid beliefs, rather than from observations of individuals, because I'm not sure I've ever met a flat earther who actually believed what he was saying.
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.
Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done. Those actions involve contested subjects like economical aspects (both national and global), fairness among population demographics, historical fairness (such as indigenous populations), border politics and wars, as well as what methods and technology is scientifically proven to be effective measures. Denialism in this aspect is very broad concept, and if we define it that anyone who disagree with the politician actions are idiots, and everyone who agree with them are intelligent, then a large portion of people will be idiots even if a large number of them are very intelligent in other areas.
> Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done.
It would be great if what you said is true, and people were just arguing about what to do about it.
It's not, though. "It's a hoax" is both the start, and the end point for a large portion of the population, the media, and the politicians that represent it.
How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
In absolute terms, the portion of the worlds population that deny that the climate is changing is a single digit percentage, and that include the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_chan...). The portion is a bit larger if you include people who think that the climate is changing but that is mostly caused by natural causes, but it is still a small minority compared to the wast majority that see climate change as either caused exclusively by human activity or as a mix between human activity and natural causes.
The "It's all a hoax" is a popular talking point but their followers are fewer in real life. It much more commonly to find that people with opposing view who actually agreeing that climate change is real, but that they disagree on policy. As an example, creating environmental policy based on per capita create a complete different policy compared to absolute emissions. The later is no more climate change denial than the first, and yet the later generally get labeled as denial.
> How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
I don't need to trust what the media tells me about them, I can just listen to what those people and the politicians elect actually say, and what they say is flippin' 'Climate change is a chinese hoax' lunacy.
There's no need to sanewash them, or make excuses for them. It's not a matter of 'disagreement of what to do', it's that they are either really fucking stupid, or are disingenuously courting people who are really fucking stupid.
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 confusing how one day you're being told that we're all going to die unless we change something, and then suddenly even though nothing changed, it seems to be fine after all.
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.
Is that your perception, or do you have data to back this up?
For context, here's one source saying public concern for climate change has fallen in Germany from 42% to 34% from 2022 to 2025, in line with other European countries. [0] This was a study done by a German sustainability non-profit.
Here's another source stating that globally, news coverage about climate change has diminished by 38% from 2021 to 2025. [1]
Here's a third source stating that the share of German citizens who claim to be "very concerned" about climate change has dropped from 50% to 33% from 2019 to 2025. [2]
Unless you are a scientist directly engaging with the literature, you and your relative are both doing the same thing: trusting the opinion of peers and high-status people in your political clan about what is happening in the world. It just happens that people in your clan are telling the truth while the other one is lying.
Neither side’s behavior can be considered “more intelligent” when you consider the vast majority of people on both sides are “opinion-takers” simply conforming to received social norms about what to believe about the world. The “opinion-makers” on both sides are undoubtedly intelligent, although you might prefer to call one side “cunning” instead.
I think choosing reliable authority requires a little intelligence. I don’t know how to build a robust house, but I can understand that should be on the solid base (scientific method) upon stable field, instead of mysterious objects from thousand years ago.
you don't have to be a scientist to directly engage with the literature. from mathematical proofs to directly observed phenomena to statistical certainties - it's all out there for you to engage with and feel secure in your findings just by having an internet connection. there's a qualitative difference in that evidence from the "sides" and therefore there is a qualitative and practical difference in the "more intelligent" side. "truth" is not incidental to the situation, it's the entire point of making claims at all. So a side that is making claims that turn out to not be true - whether you personally verify that or not - is a worse side, intellectually, than another.
That’s a pretty weak argument. What percentage of people actually have the qualifications to understand and verify a research paper? And how much can you even trust the raw data? At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of faith—whether you choose to believe the guy in the church or the guy at the university.
You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level.
Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.
We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.
The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.
If the side you follow says the science community is political and biased, then "just look at the literature" isn't going to help. It's like telling an atheist they'd believe in Jesus if they'd just read the bible.
We are lied to constantly by people who influence our lives. You can't even go to the grocery store without being lied to - being told breakfast cereals are healthy, that low fat options will make you less fat, shrinkflation, misleading unit pricing. It's no wonder people are so distrusting
Even if you're a democrat you still have to admit that democrats lie, a ton, and it's super obvious. Maybe if our leadership in general, on both sides, was capable of being decent humans then we'd be able to build trust and stop doing dumb shit as a civilization
Unfortunately at some level, as usual, it comes down to game theory
If you tell the nuanced truth and lose, and your opponent tells simplified untruths and wins, where does that leave you?
As I understand it (obviously a gross simplification), Jimmy Carter attempted to treat Americans like adults, but Americans did not want to inconvenience themselves by wearing sweaters
please engage in good faith. if you think mathematical proofs will be an issue when I tell someone to "look at the literature", you either don't know what a mathematical proof is, or are too far abstracted from reality to influence any practical action. yes, we're being lied to. no, they don't fuck up the science in order to lie to you. they just expect you not to read the science. because, truthfully, it's rare that the people who are lying to you would even know how to fuck up the science in their favor. so they bet on your ignorance, based on their ignorance, and they usually win the bet. but not if you just go look it up and engage with it. it's not about reading a single paper; it's about always reading every paper (on topics you have decided you are going to have an opinion about) with a keen and unshakeable focus on practical effect. anything else is an academic boondoggle.
I really love the way you communicated this and wish HN posters could more routinely invite curious conversations like this. Which isn't to say I'm perfect at it either
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 racially charged claim. Last I checked, there is no real evidence that human races are a meaningful genetic category, let alone that anything usually described as "race" correlates to any genes connected to IQ scores.
Because where you draw the lines for "race" is down to your own culture, not a constant dividing line that all cultures agree upon.
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.
>Mild cognitive decline was noted after infection with the wild-type virus and with each variant, including B.1.1.529 (Omicron). Relative to uninfected participants, cognitive deficit (3-point loss in IQ) was seen even in participants who had had completely recovered from mild COVID-19.
>Participants with persistent symptoms had the equivalent of a 6-point loss in IQ, while those who had been admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) experienced the equivalent of a 9-point loss in IQ.
> No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
It seems to me, then, that your primary objection is not that IQ scores are inaccurate, but that intelligence shouldn't be measured in the first place?
Which makes me think that you don't want anyone doing research into whether human intelligence is changing at all.
No I think that our tools to measure and our definition of intelligence are lacking and are causing more problems than actually helping with anything.
Or can you point to any obvious improvements that result from having measured “intelligence” for the last 100+ years?
When my grandpa was a kid they would measure your skull and decide if you are smart or a subhuman based on that. Makes about as much sense as our current IQ tests…
I think it’s an essential question.
I wouldn’t even know how to describe what intelligence means exactly. I’ve experienced very “smart” people make horribly stupid decisions and the other way round.
Since I don’t know a way to describe what intelligent actually means I can’t tell if it’s good or not to have more or less of it.
For some this seems to be a very “finished” topic, but we don’t have any widely accepted definitions of intelligence, not even for “less complex” organisms
The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
The first IQ test was developed by Binet and Simon in France, and it was all about predicting academic success of children. Virtually all IQ tests are predicting academic success. Cultural component is a big part of it. For example music education is associated with better grades. Maybe no one knows how it works, but it does.
No one knows what intelligence is, all the tests are like "lets identify a group of smart people (normally it is something like a group of high performing students), find correlates and build a test measuring correlates". No good definition of intelligence and no casual reasoning, just a correlative one.
How IQ 100 becomes a median? Lets take a big enough sample, get their test score and then normalize numbers so median will be 100 exactly. The creators of tests know that you can't compare IQ numbers from different populations. You can investigate the difference, but a direct comparison is nonsense. Even comparisons between different age cohorts of the same population are questionable at very least.
It doesn't mean that iq numbers are meaningless, but we shouldn't confuse them with intelligence, and we definitely shouldn't treat them as absolute numbers. They are relative measure.
Not a sufficient measure of different kinds of mental agility (including emotional/social) maybe.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
All of these effects are explained much better by social factors. If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
Could you please elaborate on why measuring the same group somehow eliminates social effects?
Are you claiming social factors have remained constant during the measuring period? Because they very obviously haven't.
If you're aware of the Peter principle, and how inequality compounds over time, then you know that the rate at which social factors change is correlated with their quantile values.
This to me is one of the most apparent failures of modern taboo infecting people's ability to communicate, or even reason.
Eugenics is not ethical, for a variety of very good reasons; that does not mean that it's unscientific.
We know that intelligence is heritable; we have observed epigenetic group trends like the Flynn effect to the point where they plateau...
The biggest unknown in my opinion is how stable the gains we have made are. If we have our education systems disrupted, or some nutrition crunch, does the population average drop to the point where the complex systems we depend on are not maintained?
No, it's taboo because actually trying to implement it requires invalidating individual human rights... And requires creating an authority who decides what traits should be passed on or removed.
So people hear the word, and react to the word at some toddler level "it's yucky!", and stop reasoning altogether.
But it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.
Is that because of some heritable presence/lack of intelligence or because scientists feed their children well early in life, have books in the home, and take the time to follow up on their children's education?
The ugly thing about eugenics is that someone has an artificial ideal of how people should be and then tries to enforce that. If something just happens without interference (a process), that's basically just evolution.
Hold on.
Turns out some scientists found out the amount of plastic was over measured because it included the plastic of their own gloves.
I've read it last week, can not found the source now. Sorry
> It’s important to note that even if the microplastic abundance in the environment is lower than researchers originally thought, any amount of microplastics can be troublesome, given their negative effects on human health and ecosystems.
No, they showed that the gloves could have introduced microplastic-like particles in some samples depending on how they are handled. It just feels like one of those studies secretly funded by an oil company to throw shade.
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 is essentially the terminus of the observations he would make where if the idiots got their way. (A semi-common plot point with Hank in KotH where he would be pit against rediculous circumstances.)
> 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 think that the movie makes it really, really obvious that the intellectual degradation goes beyond just culture. The people are presented as being borderline mentally disabled.
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
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 there's a computer glitch that then wipes out humanity; but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
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.
If most people in the thread have different takeaways, and you're laser-focused on seeing eugenics and superiority (especially when you keep making condescending remarks like "hope this helps" or "work on your reading comprehension"), I don't think that reflects on the film
Yeah, the consensus of a plurality of users of a Silicon Valley startup incubator heavily associated with the right wing is definitely the only opinion that matters about the subtext of a film.
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.
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.
That's ironic seeing that nazis (or the far right in general) usually need stupid people to vote for them so they get into a position where they can undermine a democratic system...
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 can just as well fall for that shit.
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.
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.
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 grasp the problem and solution in the end.
Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. It is a good few years since I last watched it. There is the title, of course, but educationally-disasavantaged-ocracy would not have been catchy enough!
> 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.
I'm afraid you are misremembering. The movie is explicitly eugenicist. The people of the future are explicitly biologically stupid. The opening transcript is unambiguous:
[Man Narrating] As the 21st century began… human evolution was at a turning point.
Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest… the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest… a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man… now began to favor different traits.
[Reporter] The Joey Buttafuoco case-
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized… and more intelligent.
But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.
A dumbing down.
How did this happen?
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 species.
What is "explicitly eugenicist" in observing that the unprecedented way mankind has dominated its environment has changed the selection pressures we are subject to?
My quest to survive to adulthood and pass on my genes looked nothing like the gauntlet an Homo erectus specimen would have run.
Fair criticism. It was very lecturing. Beyond that, it was also quite funny, but really, there was nothing funny about the end. I don't think it was meant as a comedy.
Same here. There was something feeling so obviously off with Don't Look Up.. for me at least. Idiocracy did not suffer from this.. but Mike Judge is somewhat of an acquired taste I guess.
I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly.
How about the British "Till Death Do Us Part" from the 1960s/70s?
That had a similar irony in that people complained about the racist character of Alf Garnett, but the series very much used his bigotism/racism as the butt of the jokes.
> Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.
Yes. It was nice when corporate taxes were high, xenophobia was seen as something bad, and movies could focus on smaller problems satire.
I hope that we go back to the socialist era of the USA with unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires. Movies could just be silly again.
Was that supposed to trigger me? Not from there, but I'm in favor of "unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires" and higher corporate taxes!
But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea).
Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.
I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore.
It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
But there is no need to disproof this because there is no evidence that it has any truth to it.
I think there's so much ill-founded assumptions in eugenics BS that it's hard to know where to start, but as a genealogist, I can personally verify that upper or middle class, wealthier people, presumably the sort eugenicists identify with, clearly had at least a 2-3 generations head start on the demographic transition where I come from.
There are other trends, there's always some groups of people who started having fewer kids earlier or later for reasons not obviously related to class - but class is the big one.
> It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)
I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?
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 screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.
> So yes, eugenics was pretty much an integral part of the premise. IQ bubbles even pop up on the screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.
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.
I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.
I still like the movie, but like with any 20+ years old comedies, I can recognise issues with its premise which would be more-or-less unacceptable today. In 2006... not as much. The future is now, old man!
> does that scene imply that we should do something to tilt the scales in the opposite direction?
No, it did not.
> I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.
And, to you, "Do something about this" means only one thing - forcefully stopping classes of people from reproducing?
That's like being angry at Star wars because the very first title text says "long time ago", and we know humans didn't go into space long time ago duh.
>It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans
So it's a documentary?
Even the basic reproductive instinct has become "ineffective on humans".
>There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true
No, there are countless jokes in the movie that don't depend about how the world became stupid (be it cultural or genetics or combination) at all. Literally all of them are like that.
>If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why, did the movie say it's the result of "property and currencies"? And even if somebody said so, who said it's just about "property and currencies" merely being a thing that starts this decline, and not surpassing some level of development of property and currencies (e.g. late capitalism), which prevents mitigating factors from working?
tbf its not "letting the stupid people breed" and more that smart ppl stop breeding. still wrong and like other comments said, Dont Look Up is more practical bc its people with money, power, influence dooming us with greed
while i loved it, i’ve noticed a ton of people despised Don’t Look Up for the same reason some of the theater goers complained in a siblings comment.
> I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy … 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 making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!"
I watched this movie really late. Let's say within the past 2 years or so. After watching it, all I could think was, "This isn't a comedy, it's a tragedy."
I couldn't watch Silicon Valley when I was working in tech. It constantly triggered rage as it was way too close to my actual experience. After I left tech, I found it to be amazing.
i wouldnt say it triggers me but its not fun to watch after a long day of stupid IT bs
same with mr robot. like i'm going crazy because of cybersec issues, i dont want to spend my free time watching a guy go crazy because of cybersec issues
I mean, Office Space and Silicon Valley are legit funny. I doubt how I can be "frustratingly sad" after watching either of the two because in Office Space, (spoilers ahead) but the ending is actually quite happy and more about realizing life's about what you want and it might not be a desk job and Silicon Valley is hilarious in terms of how it parodies the 2010s tech culture but its more about "look what tech has become" rather than "oh my god everything sucks, all idiots everywhere, we're doomed" type energy.
Also a lot of Silicon Valley stuff is kindda bs esp the arc where one single dude figures out such a massive leap in tech so quickly and then solves P=NP using freaking AI and then doesn't sell out to Hooli. You gotta suspend a lot of disblief for that but people don't talk about how unrealistic the main plot is
Also the episode where Jared has to explain scrum to vet developers like Dinesh and Gilfoyle. Like you seriously think they didn't know what scum was before meeting Jared?
That'd leave even more room for drama. I'm imagining Gavin hiring thousands of cheap, unskilled laborers ("Hooli's industry-leading AI research team") to mash keys until they rediscover the prompt that generated middle-out compression with a patent-free clean room process. He never reproduces it because Gilfoyle's self-hosted LLM improved its own memory efficiency when when Dinesh got upset and started unplugging GPUs.
I refuse to watch it. I really like most Mike Judge’s stuff, but this I just don’t want to see and think those thoughts. I know we live in a dystopic satire of existence, you don’t have to show me. Now please let me take these new cybernetic info drugs and let me crawl into a hole sleep shielded from the Neon-Tokyo’s toxic rain.
"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 universities. Ignorance does not drive our politics. Resentment does.
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.
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.
It’s what happens when you let people get what they want.
Like children, adults need guidance. Kids would eat candy and drink OJ till their baby teeth rot off and they are riddled with onset of many diseases if left to their own devices. Adults have similar tendencies and if you remove the guardrails (perhaps to distract from other dysfunction), you get adults who seek short term pleasure whether that be food, perversion, laziness, etc. That’s why culture and taboos matter. They keep people from undermining themselves. Obviously things can go in the other direction too far like North Korea and Iran, etc.
I like to say "adults are children without teachers". It feels like this in many contexts, but I started to say it during covid. When people looked at statistics, made wrong conclusions (because they don't know how to read statistics), and genuinely believed they were right. When children do that, they have a figure of authority (the teacher) who can tell them that they actually did not understand it at all.
I was in highschool with a guy who absolutely sucked at maths. Everybody knew it, he knew it, nobody could deny it because he was clearly struggling in class. I have no problem with that and I was actually trying to help when I could. But years later when covid hit, he was one of those very vocal people claiming complete nonsense based on "the numbers". He did not have a teacher at this point to give him bad grades and telling him that he was completely wrong. Being an adult, he felt like he was right.
"A character is literally named 'Upgraydd' with creative spelling. In the future, names have become increasingly absurd — just random syllables, product names, and numbers."
He was! Frito Pendejo (Joe's lawyer) and the cop Beef Supreme are better examples. Or of course the wrestler-president Camacho whose middle name is literally Mountain Dew.
I don't remember if it's ever explicitly stated, but I certainly took that to be the implication. Maybe it's actually funnier if they're doing it pro bono, now I am suddenly unsure.
The irony is that it only implies we have be in the proto-Idiocracy stage for a while, regardless of whether people who live in bubbles do not understand that “Upgraydd” type characters are not exactly a new or invented thing.
Not quite sure "Ow My Balls / Jackass" argument should count, the Jackass franchise is older than Idiocracy and was most likely an inspiration for that bit.
And I’m reminded of The Dark Knight Returns (1986) graphic novel. There are grotesque parodies of talking head news anchors and even a caricature of then-president Ronald Regan. Situation all fracked up.
Reality TV shows are a HUGE HUGE HUGE segment; most of them aren't too far off. (Reality TV as a concept precedes Idiocracy but was refined in the 2010s.)
"Ow! My Balls" was less about the Jackass part of it but more about the "numbing your brain and consuming mindless entertainment" commentary. Reality TV fits this category extremely well. See also: Housewives of _x_.
Brawndo is considered a match with "Nestlé CEO says water isn't a human right". Beyond that it has nothing to do with agricultural malpractice, the Nestlé guy is just correct. It doesn't make sense to talk about human rights that way.
"Ow my balls" is considered a match because "YouTube's most popular content is often people hurting themselves", which is just wrong. It's stuff like music videos, children's songs and MrBeast. All quite wholesome.
"Costco law degree" is considered a match because ... there are companies that offer credentials which aren't universities. That isn't evidence of stupidity.
"Trash piles are massive" is considered a match because third world countries have giant trash piles. But they always did. Idiocracy was a film about America.
Even the first match is a giant stretch. Elizondo was only a TV star, and he did that work whilst in office. Trump wasn't (just) a reality TV star, he was first and foremost pre-politics a real estate developer. Quite different levels of challenge and respectability. And I don't think the show he did could be described as reality TV anyway.
There's no inherent contradiction with a majority of drivers rating themselves above average: each driver is free to prioritize "good driver"-traits differently; e.g. if I value road safety and my neighbour values total travel time, we are probably both objectively better drivers according to our own metrics.
That said, 93% of car drivers are worse than me. Obviously.
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 90% towards being right and away from being Homer.
I don't mean you should spend endless amounts of time arguing with people. Lots will just try to waste your time and exhaust you. It's more a hypothetical for when you're thinking about your beliefs/position on your own time.
> 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.
I feel like there are clear signs, but either people have cognitive blind spots or are just obstinate. For example, you hear people complain that they've been for a bajillion interviews and still don't get hired (hint: the problem is you), or they're always single even though they go on countless dates (hint: the problem is you) or they're overweight and can't lose weight no matter what they try (hint: the problem is you). Maybe an inability to introspect yourself in an objective way? Maybe a deep seated belief that the problem cannot actually be _you_, it must be an external factor, so you seek that. Maybe you're not being gaslit, maybe the ever-present smell of shit really does emanate from under your shoe.
I bought some actual Brawndo back in the day. An energy drink company had licensed the brand. Did not share with my plants, having learned better from the movie.
I always saw black mirror as explicitly a near-future satire of the present, not commentary on where humanity is headed. I think something like Children of Men would fill the british angle better.
A handful of Black Mirror episodes land on a more optimistic (or at least not entirely bleak) note, though "happy" might be overstating it for any of them. Bittersweet, maybe.
Eulogy and Hotel Reverie from the newest season are at 70-75%, and I think they both end on a similarly bittersweet note like San Junipero. The one with Miley Cyrus is at 65% and is about as happy an ending as Black Mirror episodes get.
Black Mirror likes to show us the most-important thing as a kind of punctuation or statement of message even when it's not what the episode has encouraged us to believe is the most important thing (see also: the focus of the camera in the very first episode during A Certain Event—we've been primed for a grand, disgusting spectacle, and the camera chooses to show us none of that, and instead shows us something much more disgusting: the faces of people watching it, which is the actual show, and the point of the "artist" in the episode).
San Junipero ends by showing us the entirety of what is actually happening, for-real, which is an automated computer-maintenance system keeping itself running. It's highlighting the unreality of the virtual world, I think suggesting that even the apparent experiences we've been watching aren't happening in any real sense.
What's really happening? 100% of what's really happening? As you see. A computer system maintaining itself, to keep electricity flowing through its various circuits. Doing what? Doesn't matter, could be endlessly calculating digits of pi, that'd be just as much a "real" experience as what you've been so invested in. This is all that's really going on.
I just finished up Pluribus S01; to me this could have been a take on AI.
The AI could have been The Joined; a population of beings who want only to make the remaining humans happy, by giving humans what they want, but they (The Joined) also acknowledge that in the long run their approach will result in an almost an Extinction-Level , mass starvation, etc.
The profusion of LLMs with secret weights and prompts will also give us the The Truman Show's false-friendships, product placement, and fraudulent recommendations.
Without also making us famous or taking care of our daily needs.
I just watched a new dinosaur cartoon made for kids and it has cartoon dinosaurs that farts a lot and I looked it up and in reddit people are saying "duh..farts are funny..why do you have a problem with it?"
Unpopular framing: it's less about "dumb masses" than incentive systems that make spectacle cheaper than competence—and we keep mistaking engagement metrics for neutral feedback.
I think in some ways we are past it; unfortunately not the funny ways. Some examples:
1. The presidents response to bombing of school girls was basically "stop hitting yourself"
2. Fox news host Dept. of Defense head and the "Dept. of War" name "change"
3. Building a grand ballroom while taking benefits away from hungry kids
4. Elon musk on stage with the chainsaw bragging about acts that save no money but did harm the poorest people on earth.
5. The fact that our media does not really care about any of this unless they get a ratings bump from it
Obviously we all could go on and on.. but the biggest loss IMO is objective truth. There are and will always be things that are true and I feel that we are losing a hold of that so that bad actors can just say to us: "no thats not what your seeing".
Its like in the movie, if they had looked at the plant growing and said: "Thats FAKE NEWS" then run to the field and claimed they did it all.
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho tried to find smart people to get their input, I wish we had President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho…
Man, that font used for the individual attribute evaluation percentage badge is horrible.
I’m guessing based on the color coding that what could also be a slanted and italicized 1 is actually slanted and italicized 7, but talk about a horrible font, on top of what looks like about 10 different other fonts used on the site.
I guess that is in keeping with the theme; the Idiocracy status tracking site is also Idiocracy.
so, I'm not the only one who was scrolling it and thinking, "damn, it's so horrible and illegible, it must be on-brand with the topic." I even thought that the Dark Reader extension messed things up yet again.
The real score should be around 50% or less. The scoring system is done as a joke without much thought and compares a lot of apples to oranges. Like “aw my balls” equals Jackass, even describing what’s different about them it counts them as equal.
Costco degree is not equal to Microsoft degree, etc.
- "Brought to you by Carl's Jr. They pay me every time i say it" vs "Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war"
- "Florida's in Georgia, dumbass" vs "We setled Aberbaijan and Albania"
- "Secretary of education is kinda stupid, but he 's president's brother" vs "Donald Trump's White House is a family affair"
I ve been watching Idiocracy over and over for years, as a documentary.
In many ways the movie is more merciful than reality. Frito , a really dumb man who purchased his "lawyer degree" in costco, could afford his own comfy apartment and car. He was not addicted on his phone all day , constantly worried about what others think of him. The govt would take care of your neglected kids. Employment by brawndo kept the world quiet. Leaders were too dumb to make wars. People too dumb to make culture wars. Their president was smarter.
The misspellings in signage though, is comedically reminiscent of AI image generators.
The movie was made before handheld devices were a plague. Though you get a similar sense of it in the way that Frito is addicted to TV surrounded by ads.
Public education is important. Without it, it’s harder to stay above average. But there are those who say “it is not my duty to fund the education of anyone else.”
Hence, here we are.
I always thought the comparison to real life falls a bit flat. In the movie there’s a scene where Camacho has a town hall and the audience yells something about everything bad. Camacho fires his gun in the air for silence and acknowledges things are bad and says he’s going to ask the smartest person in the world to help.
So in this scenario the people are allowed to voice real concerns directly to the president without fear of retribution. The president acknowledges things are bad. He describes a plan, with real actionable steps, to help the situation. And to wrap it all up follows through with it and is genuinely interested in making the country / world a better place. None of these things apply to America’s current situation.
At the core of it, in the movie everyone is dumb but well meaning, while in real life most of the idiots are also malicious. They keep voting for the same thing because it hurts their perceived enemies, not because they think their vote will make the country better.
Every time Idiocracy comes up, I feel obligated to point out that it is WILDLY optimistic. The people are dumb, not evil. They struggle to adapt and learn, but are willing to try and willing to accept new information with evidence.
To be a proper prophecy, Idiocracy is also missing the entire society ON TOP of the one portrayed, which has infinite amount of wealth and is probably isolating with servants on some island for decades already...
A series that hits even closer is BrainDead, about an alien that gets into politicians' heads and polarizes them completely. It's very fun, and each episode recap at the beginning is done via lyrics of a folky song.
Worth a watch and laugh. And cry.
In Idiocracy, president Camacho actually had the decent idea of trying listen to (somewhat) reasonable people with relevant abilities or skills rather than insisting that his failures are actually successes and just trying to force it until that worked. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
I'd like to bring your attention to the fact that society had deteriorated to the point of imminent famine before Camacho thought to try and listen to the smartest person around in an attempt to avert disaster. We are not quite there yet.
You haven’t internalized what “the fertilizer the world uses to grow food is missing, this spring, because of a needless war” actually means, have you?
I'd argue that as soon as Camacho became aware of Not Sure's IQ test, he reached out. He didn't call on him before because he didn't know he existed (and/or he wasn't around), so he couldn't have helped prior.
If Trump spots a mentally capable person that is also stupid enough to eat his slop (or evil enough), he gets a job.
> 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 Epstein so the train could keep running.
Musk is evil. But he's clever, he knew to over pay for Twitter so he could use it to help swing elections and put himself in political power. He failed to get the response to his salute he expected, and knew enough to slink off into the background (or listen to his advisors telling him that). Amazingly he's still making money hand-over-fist from USA's regime. You'd think standing on a dais and thinking you're Hitler reincarnate would have been enough to make tax-payers rise up; clearly not.
They've absolutely destroyed USA, there is no Constitution now, there's not even lip service to war crime treaties. But there's a lot of intelligent people onboard that we underestimate at our peril.
> he knew to over pay for Twitter so he could use it to help swing elections and put himself in political power.
I currently believe this was accidental on his part, that he was manoeuvred into overpaying by the previous owners.
Nevertheless, I would still count Musk as "intelligent". Not as intelligent as his boosters like to claim (obviously, given the boosters treat him as a god amongst men), but intelligent.
> You'd think standing on a dais and thinking you're Hitler reincarnate would have been enough to make tax-payers rise up; clearly not.
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:
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:
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:
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.
I've generally held that Camacho is actually a model political leader. Despite growing up in a society that apparently didn't value education, he managed to rise to the top. He made legitimate, albeit ineffective attempts to address issues the country's problems. When someone showed up who had better ideas he promptly delegated both authority and responsibility.
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.
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.
A good movie makes you love the people more. Such moves are rare. "Idiocracy" or "Don't Look Up" are not like that. (Satire is a low genre in general.)
If you are at least tiny bit curious about looking beyond your IT bubble you know that the majority of population has always been dumb. It’s just biological fact of life.
For better or worse hundreds years ago they didn’t get any power. Today they got internet, got exposure and got power. Nothing is changing on a fundamental human nature or statistical level.
But idiocracy is not about that majority. It is about the thought leaders becoming dumb. Internet, instead of elevating the majority to the level of intellectuals, dragged the intellectuals to the level of the dumb majority.
If you mix poison in milk, milk becomes poison and not the other way. Pretty obvious in hindsight..
I feel this won't necessarily be a popular take here but I really don't like things like Idiocracy. To me it comes across as deeply misanthropic, and kind of ignorant of what human nature actually looks like outside of our very specific cultural window. It's the same deep misanthropy that makes me really dislike most post-apocalyptic fiction, look at actual how actual humanity behaves in disaster conditions for five minutes and you'd see most of it is just misanthropic nonsense. We haven't let go of this Victorian idea all that separates man (particularly working-class man) and beast is a thin veneer of civilisation that can collapse at any minute. To me Idiocracy is a product of that mentality, it's a satire of Western consumer culture but this idea is not presented satirically, Idiocracy seems to believe this earnestly.
You can look at skeletons of prehistoric man and see bone healing which can only have occurred if the group decided to look after someone who couldn't work at that point. Humans are inherently stupid and selfish, but they're also inherently clever and cooperative; it's all so dependent on material and cultural context. It's true in my view that the general culture of late capitalism makes people inclined towards stupid and selfish ideas, but the idea this could actually do serious long-term damage to humanity's actual nature until everyone is a bumbling moron is absurd. Not just absurd either, but fundamentally insulting to all of us in my view.
Culture is often a product of material conditions, if Idiocracy's premise that it's possible to make humanity dumber on a lasting basis had the slightest merit then it would have happened already a hundred times over. Not least from the amount of lead we were pouring into the environment from the 1930s onwards! In reality if humanity did get dumber for cultural reasons, the material conditions associated with that culture would soon collapse and there'd be a new selection pressure to avoid the same kind of stupidity.
I don't think so. Trump is exceptional compared to political tradition for a very long time, as evidenced currently by most developed world leaders shunning his illegal war campaign. In fact, who else can be comparable?
I mean, you could probably make these comparispns in 2006 when the movie came out. Perhaps it wasnt prophetic but rather just a sature of the general human condition
People keep saying this is the US as if anything about this regime is in any way legitimate, let alone abides by the Constitution, regardless of whether you like that or not. The founders of America tried to set up a system that would prevent the very thing that this thing still called America has become. Washington warned about foreign entanglements, now that’s basically all America is. It’s an extremely complicated story, but calling it America is basically “deadnaming” it. No founder of America would in any way agree with anything going on today and would be horrified of what it has become.
The repeated, systemic manner in which the Constitution is and long has been inherently violated in every possible way for many decades now, makes it self-evidently not a legitimate government; which would require having abide by the foundational supreme law that would confer actual legitimacy.
It’s like signing a contract and then not only not abiding by it, but committing all kinds of other offenses/crimes on top of that. The contract is clearly no longer valid.
Not only due to the duration of the violation of the Constitution, but the near impossibility of restoring and reversing all the violations at this point makes this thing we still call America something, but a legitimate USA based on the Constitution it is not, no matter how you look at it.
People may have a hard time accepting that because of various mental conditioning structures, but regardless of whether people are willing to accept that or not… this is simply not the USA. It’s basically identity theft, regardless of who the actual person behind the fake identity is.
Is Mexico still an Aztec empire? No. Would China still be China if Russia conquered China but still called it China? No. The closest analogue from history seems to be when Britain controlled India and still kept its name and used certain aspects of India’s culture for control to facilitate the exploitation.
Just because the hostile takeover by a kind of parasitic civilizational private equity firm through a leveraged buyout called the national debt has kept the branding of “USA”, does not mean it’s not been gutted.
Even the “right” is equally merely holding onto something that does not actually exist anymore, kind of like an old guy in an old steel mill that some private equity firm has taken over to financially plunder, vehemently defends the new management without understanding one bit of what’s going on, because all he has left after 50 years of working there is delusional hope.
I’m not sure what else to call it, but it sure is not the USA anymore than an ant infected with the “ zombie ant fungus”, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, is still an ant from the second it is infected with the spore that then spreads and controls the ant in ways that are not yet fully understood.
It is like any abusive or parasitic relationship, you may not realize you’re in for abuse and parasitism, but the abusers and the parasites sure know that about you.
Sorry, but no. It is the USA. But now without the veneer, this rot was there for a long time, it's just that people no longer feel any need to pretend they're respectable. Other places have similar problems, where I live, in NL, there are a lot of things that would not have passed in public in the 80's or the 90's that people routinely engage in now because it has been normalized. The only difference though is that it is public rather than said behind closed doors. No country is immune from this. The only way to fix it is to own it.
I hear people make this comparison all the time, and while it is facially a bit funny I guess, I really don't think it holds up in any serious way.
What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.
* The primary plot point of idiocracy is that poor (and thus, stupid - the film never explains why this correlation exists in that universe, though) people are the only ones who reproduce. For this reason, there is evolutionary pressure toward decreased intelligence. It's an odious premise on its face IMO, and certainly not what is happening in the USA: our birth rates are declining _because_ people are not economically stable.
* President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn. And he seems to be sincere and transparent. Trump's illusion runs precisely counter to this: he has every resource he can possibly need, but chooses to enrich himself and his friends instead of advancing the public interest.
Virtually every plot point of Idiocracy can be broken down this way. I see very, very little of the film universe that is consistent with our sociopolitical trajectory.
If you want a Mike Judge film that shines light on uncomfortable truths about 21st-century America, the obvious choice is Office Space.
This feels like nitpicking. Idiocracy was never supposed to be accurate; the important part is how it seems less ridiculous as time goes on.
The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time. The source of this is irrelevant. In reality, it turned out that the source of the stupidity was an increasingly poor education system, increasing inequality, and carefully designed injection of addictive technologies and medicines into the general populace.
Where idiocracy really failed in its predictions was in the development of AI, as that appears to increasingly substitute for lack of common understanding.
Also all of this only really holds for the US and maybe the UK.
> The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time.
...and in doing so, it depicts a world that is not at all reminiscent of the one in which we live.
The white house is not occupied by idiots, but by thieves and murders and sexual predators. The American landscape is not a Brawndo-dustbowl, but a highly profitable, productive, and delicious-but-toxic bounty of subsidized factory farms, stemming not from a misunderstanding of botany, but a misapplication of that understanding.
The same is true of the medical industry, the justice system - literally every institution portrayed in the entire film, with the possible exception of waste disposal / the trash avalanche.
Yes, the opposite direction. I pointed out two examples, but I think you can watch the film front to back and find them in every scene. The doctor, lawyer, judge, the storyline about the plants/electrolytes (which has a big opportunity to point to greed and factory farming and utterly whiffs), the Brawndo/unemployment subplot, the intensity of public interest in civic affairs - literally every major plot point runs in the opposite direction of today's realities.
Seems to me like two different paths to the same end. One stupid, the other more evil or at least rapacious, but the destination is ultimately the same.
It's not about Trump, but society as a whole. The president was a symptom, as is Trump.
> It's an odious premise on its face IMO
It's estimated that 1/3 of your intelligence is hereditary. A modern problem is that classes separate more from each other than before: white collar doesn't really mingle with blue collar, ethnic boundaries galore, etc. Before, people were educated and put on the social ladder according to birth. That made that a lot of smart people stayed in their community. Nowadays, they tend to move away. That means there's a development towards stratification of intelligence. Add LLMs to education, and we're on the fast track.
> President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn.
Camacho does so because he literally has no other option, there is an imminent famine he has to deal with. If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump, then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
> If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump,
That's exactly the point: the world of the film is, in every way that matters, the opposite of the reality in which we live. So how are these strained comparisons useful?
> then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
Obviously we can't know, because the universe of Idiocracy is on rails toward stupidity and poverty, and never even considers greed and abundance as features of its janky political lens. In the first few minutes of the film, it establishes that poor, stupid people are to blame for every societal ill, and then it depicts a future in which no character ever even grapples with any other antagonist than the poverty and stupidity of his ancestors.
Is that today's world?! For who? Are the poor people in Iran and Gaza and Yemen who are dealing with explosives raining down on them (rather than Brawndo) stupid? Do you think their fate is attributable to the proclivity of previous generations to breed in inverse proportion to their material wealth?
It's just such an asinine premise it's hard to even understand what would qualify as a sound comparison, but it's certainly not any of those listed on this website.
For thousands of years people were unsure if they’d have food the next day and still had a lot of kids. This happens today in the poorest parts of the world.
People are not having kids because they don’t want them. Those that can use birth control and failing that access abortion, etc.
People stopped having kids precisely the moment they had the option to.
I think you could have done this in the 1980s and 1990s and found a lot of fits: MTV, reality shows, daytime TV, junk food everywhere, pop music becoming increasingly trite and simple, newspapers and commentary declining toward grade school level vocabulary.
In the 50s you would have had suburban conformity and doctors recommending cigarettes. In the 60s you had people trying to become enlightened by taking drugs and listening to con men claiming to be Eastern gurus. In the 70s you had dumb new age cults and a lot of very bad movies and ugly fashion.
Mass media and any culture dominated by mass media tends to race to the bottom. There are many forces that drive it. Dumb culture is loud and viral. Lies and bullshit cost zero to produce and are expensive to debunk. Quality takes time and cost to make and drowns in quantity.
Attempts to frantically fight these forces normally turn into their own dystopias, usually taking the form of authoritarian nightmares or moralistic crusades. These often end up looking deeply stupid in retrospect too.
Yet we are still here. So somehow quality finds a way.
As you look back in time things look less dumb because of survivorship bias. The dumb shit is forgotten.
Our age will be remembered as when we taught the sand to think, made rockets that land vertically, returned to the Moon, and developed quantum computers.
Nobody will remember that we used AI to make TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR, that the guy with the rocket company acted like a thirteen year old 4chan edgelord, or that our president during the return to the moon couldn’t speak complete sentences.
That's fine, if we only care about ourselves. I guess the harder part is convincing everyone else to unplug from mass media and not raise their kids on it.
Eh. While I do believe that most people are really stupid and this is the core problem with democracy, this website is too sensational. Example:
> Medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.
Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Imagine:
1. Medieval times -> literally zero deaths attributed to medical errors because there's no medical practice in the first place
2. We can cure all diseases and eliminated all traffic accidents using autonomous cars -> obviously 90% of deaths will be medical errors because that's literally the only thing you can realistically die from
I can't take this seriously - blaming Trump but not Joe Biden, though latter had obvious symptoms of cognitive decline AND many "smart" people claimed otherwise. If you are literally tricked to doubt your own eyes, your natural judgements and being constantly gaslighted to think otherwise - then this should be called out as well. If this does not fullfil the criteria for "Idiocracy", then nothing does.
The thing about Biden was that the bureaucracy was still intact, so most government functionality carried on just fine regardless what Biden himself was doing. Trump gutted the bureaucracy in favor of autocracy, replacing the domain experts with sycophantic yes-men. So when Biden got a terrible idea that would unquestionably harm the country, the response would have been something like "We'll look into that" or even an outright "no". Whereas when Trump gets a terrible idea (which lets be honest is a few times a week), the only answer is "yes sir".
If you're comparing dementia styles, Biden was effectively the type that is happy to sit on the couch and stare off into space while his family does things around him. Trump is the combative kind that is always trying to find the keys to the car to drive away and assert his own independence, and violently rejects help and concern.
As for your larger comment, you're probably closer to right in that bureaucratic authoritarians were much more like Idiocracy. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho had better leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism than the piece of pig shit currently staining our White House could ever hope for. He also didn't rape trafficked underage girls or pardon Upgrayedd for a bribe. The movie makes me long for simpler times.
I don't know what you are talking about. I said - "Biden had problems unrightfully covered up" - and obviously we can't agree on that. So this is Idiocracy already - independent of Trump. If you are unable to speak truth independent of your own attitudes, wishes, ideas, etc. - that's idiocracy.
It's called adding context to keep the directionality correct. "Biden had problems unrightfully covered up" - I do agree with that.
But one of the pillars of Grumpism/destructionism is taking valid factual criticisms, but presenting them in a way that leads to a conclusion of normalization/nihilism/etc. For example, yes from when it was made Idiocracy has been a satire of the very real anti-intellectualism that has been everpresent in American society. But that doesn't justify dismissing its application to the current situation, as you started off your original comment doing.
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.
Aren't you all proud that anywhere in the world you go there is a fridge with coca cola, so it's a sound and solid investment? Smart people of HN and reddit?
This is just silly to portray idiocracy as a prediction of the future.
Yes the current president of America is a movie actor, this was not idiocracy predicting the future, Ronald Reagan was a movie actor president before idiocracy came out.
The movie satirised what was already happening, there is nothing special about nowadays.
In the sense of the word "prediction", it is certainly one. It was forecasting a future by painting a dotted line from the data they had, and they made a satire out of it.
They took Reagan being an actor and on their satirical dotted line they saw a president being a Wrestler. So not a 100% prediction but not that far off from a reality-show personality with "WWE experience" I'd say.
Nothing special? A sitting US President posted the following on Easter Sunday.
> Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
There was a point in time when Trump would have been instantly impeached or sent to a hospital for observation for making that post. Today? It will fall out of the news cycle the next time he says something insane.
Can you imagine what past presidents would have typed if twitter existed 100 years ago? we had 2 world wars roughly that time, trump is only insane by modern standards, but modern time is if anything unusually sane, not unusually stupid, we are not living in the most special time.
As I said, if a previous President started saying things like "Praised be to Allah!" on Easter Sunday, they would have been removed from office instantly. We are watching one of the most immoral people on the planet have a full-on mental breakdown. And Trump supporters don't care.
Tweets are low effort and short, you can even do it while taking a dump, there is a lot more friction to being unhinged when you are writing a book or taking an interview, for reference trumps most unhinged stuff is tweets, not interviews and not books. Not all forms of writing are equal.
Trump's tweets are low effort. Just like most of his rally speeches, which are also unhinged. Other presidents, especially e.g. FDR, put effort into all of their communications. Including speeches and, when available, tweets.
I cant reply to jacquesm for some reason, cap on reply chain length maybe? anyway
>There are multiple years of archives of presidential tweets and Trump's stand out, and not in a good way.
When I refer to modern times I mean multiple dozens of years, not mere "multiple years", I already stated these times are unusually sane by historical standards.
Not being able to reply is to stop people coming here, making new accounts and then spouting lots of unhelpful messages, messages intended to downplay insane fascists evil portents of their war crimes, say.
Maybe the world was fed up with puppets who are controlled by PR agencies so that they (at least in US) welcomed someone who just speaks to them without middlemen...
It isn't really the fact that the president is a movie actor that's damning there. It's the fact that the president uses wrestling catch phrases and behavior (Trump was even in WWE). Back when Idiocracy came out, the very idea of President Camacho seemed absurd. Nobody would bat an eye at that anymore.
Yes, the movie was a satire and took the current observations to their logical extreme. The point is that we're pretty darn close to the extreme right now.
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 making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!" It was an early screener and I think that reaction was a surprise to the film team. I own a copy and watch it more than once a year. One of my favorite hard satires.
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 comedy, the satirical elements are heavily over exaggerated by fans.
It's kind of funny when you say the movie isn't making serious statements when the highest of our publicly elected officials isn't a serious person. We elect people that are actively harmful to our well being. These people say things so incredibly stupid it can be painful. And then you wonder why people look at the movie like it's a documentary?
> We elect people that are actively harmful to our well being.
People choose policies that will actively harm themselves and their family/friends:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_of_Whiteness
He might not present as a serious person but he is. The nativist impulses, the gutter racism, the “F you I’ve got mine” attitude, the party establishment that enabled him despite all that… these are all serious things worth serious analysis.
“Stupid people vote for stupid guy” is exactly the kind of analysis I’m critical of Idiocracy for.
I think you may misunderstand what the term "not a serious person" means. Just because someone is an ego driven performer doesn't mean their actions don't have consequences, it means you've fucked up if you follow them and take them for face value.
There has been a ton of analysis for why said stupid people vote for stupid people, but very little of it can prevent said behaviors.
> “Stupid people vote for stupid guy” is exactly the kind of analysis I’m critical of Idiocracy for.
Critical of what exactly?
Just to be clear, the smartest person is still a minister in Idiocracy, and the whole premise hinges on the idea that the elite still recognizes intelligence as something desirable.
Trump voters identify with the idiots.
It's not a eugenics-y vibe. The inciting incident is dysgenics, and the in-narrative apocalypse would have been prevented by eugenics.
It doesn't preclude the movie from being enjoyed or appreciated. The movie also came out at a time when test scores, literacy rates, and whatnot were all _increasing_, so that was the more salient lens to criticize it by.
That trend has reversed now, though. I don't agree with the dysgenic narrative, but I have often found myself thinking, "Gotta hand it to the movie Idiocracy, it's feeling familiar".
For all its flaws, I was a child at the time saturated in post-Y2K optimism that tomorrow would always be better than the day before. It was one of the first things that made me seriously consider, "What if humanity is not on a linear path of improvement"?
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.
It’s a “I’m not like the other ‘not like the other’” virtue game.
Given the number of people in this thread saying “it’s a documentary” I don’t think there’s a significant difference. And there’s also plenty of criticism of Idiocracy on Reddit too.
Right, because you see the situation so much better than them ;)
No no no, see I’m at the very top of the hill. There’s no hill above me. No definitely not…
Oh gee, here he comes. Another person prepared to admit that what he knows is that he knows nothing.
Was thinking the same thing
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 species". The characters dramatizing the inciting incident in the introduction are introduced with their IQs. It's very explicitly a dysgenic apocalypse narrative, which could have been avoided with earlier eugenicist intervention. (They attempt "genetic engineering" later on, but they fail, as the unintelligent are able to win by sheer numbers.)
It's okay to like the movie, and it is fiction. But it's certainly a dysgenic narrative which has eugenicist implications.
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.
This is one of those threads that's making me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Like, I don't think enjoying Idiocracy makes someone a bad person or anything like that, but it's pretty clearly making a eugenics argument without any mitigating counter-hypothesis.
It's particularly amusing because there are people quoting Neal Stephenson in this thread, ignoring the fact that when Stephenson tackles similar subject matter, he's very careful to make it clear that he's talking more about the cultural axioms which have a long-term effect on how people value learning and intellectualism. It's not even subtext, I've been reading The Diamond Age recently and very early on there's a line where a character clearly states that there's no coherent genetic theory of human intelligence, and the entire thesis of the book runs counter to that notion that intelligence is primarily genetic.
> It’s not a bad movie.
I hadn't seen it since it came out, but had a that kind of general movie recollection that it was as funny as it was prescient. Watched it again with my wife who had not seen it before: it's not funny. Maybe I'm getting too old.
(I do still laugh at the "Ow! My balls!")
"Stupid people raise stupid people" is probably a better way to put it.
but even then thats entirely too simplistic as well.
> like establishing “stupid people breeding makes stupid people” as incontrovertible fact
That’s based on environment and not on genes. You might not be born “stupid”, but if you’re surrounded by retards (like in the movie), chances are you won’t be splitting atoms.
It definitely activates something within people. Maybe I'm just terminally online, but there is always _always_ someone who will say "Idiocracy isn't satire, its a documentary."
And they're mostly correct.
It's satire. It's effective satire because it's not all that much more extreme than the thing it's satirizing.
I don’t think that when people say “it’s a documentary” they mean that it’s literally a “documentary”, more like “this satire is so close to reality, that you can call it documentary”.
But we have a term for that and the term is "satire".
for the uninitiated: the message is that serious pimping requires two D's, for a double-dose of that pimpin'
chortle i know that reference
I like money
> I like money
I'm sorry, I might be a bit stupid but I haven't understood your comment.
Its a famous dialogue from the movie
I can't believe you like money too!
(For anyone that has not seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZHCVyllnck)
Not just 'other girls'. That happens, but also, it's a theme that has been around a long time. The 'Maga' movement existed before Trump. This is 1992
Was also in Snow Crash.
"All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice…With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.
But as long as you have that fourwheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream.
"
Snow Crash Chapter 39 (Hiro's observation as he drives along the Alaska Highway)
> The 'Maga' movement existed before Trump. This is 1992
Anti-intellectualism has a long and storied in the US (and other countries):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism#In_the_Un...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
Snow Crash came to mind, but so did several other Neal Stephenson books!
yes, I think his book "Reamde" had the concept of "Ameristan" which was the redneck-Idaho equivalent of many racial/religious/socioecon tropes.
Ackshually this is "Fall, or Dodge in Hell"
also
If the "Right/Left" or "Liberal/Conservative" is too hot button for any kind of discussion.
He also wrote "Anathem"
Which is fictional world, with fictional sides, that can be used to explore similar concepts a little less triggering.
> They all identified with the "idiots" and were indignant insulted, and angry.
That is sort of the point of the movie. It is a satire, but it is also a documentary packaged as a satire and the wrapping paper isn't all that thick.
It's no longer satire it's really a documentary.
It's a utopia at this point.
Ha love this comment
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.
Eh. I don't really see anything wrong with that. Every industry flubs things because the people creating the product aren't the same demographics consuming it. No big deal IMO. I think it's just a product of your typical Hollywood filter bubble. The Average American(TM) isn't so stupid as to not see the glaring "left to it's own devices middle america would turn the whole country into white trash, also with literal trash everywhere" undertone even if they can't quite put their finger on it.
You could make essentially the same movie about how impenetrable and unaccountable bureaucracy and abstraction of responsibility away to 3rd parties is going to make society grind to a halt (e.g. trash piling up because all disposal methods have been declared not environmentally friendly enough, etc, etc) and someone who just doesn't give enough shits to ask permission can be the hero of the story and frame it to offend all the people who specifically identify as the opposite of the dumb people in idiocracy.
That said I think it's a great movie and they struck a good balance.
You intentionally or unintentionally described the plot of Wall-E
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 outrageous "impossible/sarcastic" Onion stories from decades ago are hardly fiction these days.
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades
It’s no Spishak Mach 20.
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.
A little more punctuation would have made it easier, and it took me a little while.
Once it finally clicked for me, I actually found it an interesting point I haven't heard before. That the main cause of the satanic panic was a fear that world-building becoming too popular would expose the likelihood that Christianity was also a fiction.
Personally, I think I find the idea more interesting, than I find it convincing.
I think it's read like this:
>The whole D&D vs Christianity vs Tolkien mess of the 90s grew on this inability to tolerate fiction that proves that anyone could invent your life-ordering fiction.
I’m honestly not sure whether I believe these comments, or understand how to put them in context. Not for the first time I’m aware I do live in a cultural bubble, but: it’s hard for me to image anyone getting outraged by an Onion story (other than a religious right person stumbling across the “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?” piece, or something like that). Similarly, hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.
Wild.
> hard to imagine someone identifying with the over-the-top stupid people in Idiocracy.
Presumably they identify with cultural elements (e.g. amateur football, professional wrestling) and then interpret the rest as "this is how dumb I think you are" and "you are not fit to rule yourselves".
Hence the "WTF" shared glances between myself and the filmmakers at that Idiocracy screening. The audience reaction was more memorable than the film, it was like the film did not end and the audience picked up the storyline.
I bet. Holy hell…
There have been studies on Right/Left ability to differentiate fact/fiction. The Right is in a bad place. On the Right they really could not differentiate Fact/Fiction.. The Right has grown up on Religion and Fake news, they are living in a completely different world view that doesn't have any internal coherence.
If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.
I'm interested to see any studies you can find on this topic. Here are some studies that I have:
Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias [1] - in study 6, liberals were shown to be ...pretty racist.
You claimed the Right believes fake news. I wont dispute that. I'll just reply that there's a lot of that going around. Here are some examples that debunk fake news you yourself might fervently believe:
Girls Who Code: A Randomized Field Experiment on Gender-Based Hiring Discrimination [2] - leftists tend to believe that women are discriminated against in STEM.
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force [3] - debunks the common belief, on the Left, that police are more likely to shoot people of color. Quote: "we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, ocer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics"
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325033477_Equalitar...
[2] https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/marley_finley...
[3] https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-an...
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 to online misinformation: A systematic meta-analysis, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2409329121?utm_source=...
Rathje et al. (2023), Accuracy and social motivations shape judgements of (mis)information, Nature Human Behaviour. This one emphasizes that misinformation judgments are shaped by both accuracy motives and social/identity motives, which helps explain why partisan gaps are not simply about intelligence or total inability to separate truth from fiction. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01540-w?utm_sourc...
Lyons et al. (2021), Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2019527118?utm_source=...
Pennycook et al. (2022), Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing online misinformation, Nature Communications. This paper discusses baseline sharing discernment and notes worse baseline discernment among conservatives in the samples they studied, while also showing that simple accuracy prompts can help. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30073-5?utm_sourc...
summary is: there are studies showing conservatives, on average, perform worse on certain misinformation/truth-discernment tasks, but the strongest scholarly version of the claim is narrower and more conditional than the popular retelling https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf1234?utm_sourc...
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 bias. But did it? They don't list the questions that participants were asked. I checked the list of supporting documents, and couldn't find it.
Without that list, I can't accept this source. Sorry.
If I went out and asked a bunch of Liberals, "did Trump say that Neo-Nazis are 'very fine people?'" I suspect that upwards of 90% of Liberals would answer "yes" ...and they would swear they heard him do it! You may (falsely) believe this yourself!
I could ask, "did Trump advise people to drink bleach?" and many Liberals would swear he did.
He didn't do either of those things. But many Liberals emphatically believe he did. I could very easily design a study that included only these sorts of questions - questions that Liberals will get wrong.
The only way to spot this bias would be if I included the questions in the study, so that you could vet them yourself. Without such a list, it is completely reasonable for me to reject your source.
Should I continue to the next one, or are they all like this?
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.
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.
I think people don't like Onion stories because they're not funny, they're just pretentious and political.
For instance, their famous 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens article they post all over their page whenever there is some high profile gun related crime. It's all over their page and no doubt they get a bump in traffic from smug people who feel it's clever. It's just so exhausting. It was a great headline, but by the time the joke gets its own Wikipedia, it might be time to retire it. You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
Look at their trending article: Critics Outraged By Flippant School Shooting Plotline In ‘The Super Mario Galaxy Movie’. Where's the joke? There is obviously no school shooting plotline. It's not clever or creative. I guess the joke is school shootings are a thing, and Mario is a popular movie?
It's basically South Parks criticism of Family Guy where they write jokes by having a seal put together random words from popular culture. School shootings + Mario = funny. And this stuff gets clicks because people think they're clever or subversive when it's just lazy and unoriginal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'No_Way_to_Prevent_This%2C'_Sa...
https://theonion.com/critics-outraged-by-flippant-school-sho...
You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
The "joke" in this case is people's reactions to school shootings. And people's reactions haven't changed, so I don't see why the article should change.
It's just so exhausting.
This has some real "The worst thing about school shootings is knowing that The Onion is going to repost that article I personally am tired of seeing" energy to it.
It's not a joke if you repeat it 100 times.
That article has some real "The best thing about school shootings is we get to have literally every article on our website be this clever headline we wrote 10 years" energy to it.
> It's not a joke if you repeat it 100 times.
The fact that it's been repeated so often kind of makes it a tragedy at this point.
Yeah, pretty sure it's not expected to be funny. If at all, it has entered absurdist territory.
> It's not a joke if you repeat it 100 times.
A joke does not stop being a joke because of how often it’s repeated. You may no longer find it funny, but it’s still a joke. More importantly, it’s still satire, and The Onion is a satirical news website.
> That article has some real "The best thing about school shootings is we get to have literally every article on our website be this clever headline we wrote 10 years" energy to it.
If that’s what you take from it, you have completely missed the point. The headline works because it’s social commentary, being funny is secondary. The fact they keep reposting it over and over is itself part of the criticism, it shows disapproval for an easy resolvable situation and removes teeth from the arguments of those opposed to it.
The joke is specifically that they can repost it without changing it each and every time.
It's not the joke's fault.
The joke will continue until the populace finally gets it.
Americans are so used to school shootings they complain about the Onion's reaction to it rather than the failure of politics that led them here.
Indeed, the comment could be spun into an Onion headline itself! "American Man Exhausted by Frequent Mass Shooting Reporting"
Which is part of why the reuse of the headline still works as grim comedy.
The joke is of course that they are hoisting the 'No Way to Prevent This' all the time. The (new) punchline is that nothing has changed.
To be sure it became gallow's humor sometime after the 2nd or 3rd run. And, no, I don't think it is intended to be funny at all anymore.
> 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 make, it's not so funny.
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.
Part of the joke is that the new Super Mario movie has been criticized for being overly violent. So it’s partly commenting on that discussion.
I think it’s useful to know, that all Onion jokes start with the headline, and the rest of the article is sometimes bit of filler.
II know, right? If you let "activism" into comedy, you might stop thinking Joe Rogan is funny. Tragic.
> You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
As Jon Stewart put it in the Crossfire interview where they asked him “which candidate do you supposed would provide you better material if he won?” because he has “a stake in it that way, not just as citizen but as a professional comic”, the citizen part is much more important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE&t=599s
The point of satire is social criticism first, funny second. I have little doubt everyone at the Onion responsible for reposting that headline would a million times prefer that they didn’t have to do it ever because the situation were resolved.
> It's just so exhausting.
It really says something about the state of society when an atrocity is perpetrated over and over and the complaint is that someone keeps talking about it rather than the atrocity continuing to happen.
Its okay to find things not funny that other people do find funny. Not everyone agrees or has the same sense of humor. Bko is not the final arbiter in deciding if something is funny or not.
> "[...]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?
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 distinguishing which type of childish, smug bullshit I'm dealing with, so any help you can provide would be appreciated.
In any case, I've never laughed as hard at anything Lenny fucking Bruce said as I did at The Onions "Sony Releases Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work" bit. So if you've got some favorite bruce bits, I'd love to get educated on what is hilarious about 60 year old observational standup.
Millions of people find The Onion funny; you do not.
Do you see the difference?
TBF millions of people are going to demand that you respect their claim that they are not "political."
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' with each other by pretending the other side doesn't exist. This strategy doesn't work, and will hit in the face like a boomerang.
I evidently erroneously omitted the /s but really it's more snark
Wasn't evident to me.
Most politics now smacks of satire and performative outrage. "I can solve the problems I created with more of someone else's money..."
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.
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 attempt to be funny or original.
Who are you to declare what satire and and cannot criticize?
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.
> 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.
When I talk to my niece in the US and she says they have shooting drills instead of fire drills ... I think the US might be doing the wrong work.
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, fists, feet (“personal weapons”): ~3–5%
Other (poison, fire, etc.): low single digits
https://www.criminalattorneycolumbus.com/which-weapons-are-m...
Plenty of people worked to ban handguns only to have it shut down by SCOTUS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting
"…much focus is given on rifles, specifically big black scary looking rifles"
Military-style rifles designed primarily for killing humans? That's called a low hanging fruit. If the U.S. can't even restrict those I expect everything else to be a wasted effort.
Military-style ARPANET designed primarily for nuclear warfare?
What work? We have more guns than ever.
"I'd love to hear any additional ideas except those that work everywhere because that'd require big changes"
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".
> "I'd love to hear any additional ideas except those that work everywhere because that'd require big changes"
When you pretend to quote someone, but you alter the quote, you're being dishonest. What you just did suggests that you don't really have any good arguments on your side - that you don't have any arguments that would stand on their own, without requiring a lie.
So, if we were having a debate, I'd say that you lost.
I'm not being dishonest, I'm being sarcastic. Although I can see that you ignored everything else that I said.
I couldn't care less about "winning".
> you ignored everything else that I said
Well, you started by altering a quote. Is it unreasonable for me to call that out and stop there??
Try to imagine that this comment you're reading now said:
> > you ignored the irrelevant things I said
> yes, of course I did!
Try to imagine how you would respond to that. Then, try to imagine how you'd react if I said, "I was just being sarcastic bro!"
> I'd love to hear any additional ideas you have other than violating the rights of citizens.
That's a strange take. There's citizens' rights involved in not being shot at and also the right to own guns, but when people are being killed, I would think that the right to life would take precedence over introducing some rule over gun ownership.
Here in the UK, we have strict rules on gun ownership (which I'm not particularly familiar with) which involve some kind of assessment (to prevent unstable people from owning them) and the guns have to be kept in a suitable locked cabinet. It's entirely possible for people to own guns for sport or for culling animals etc. and yet we have a very small amount of gun crime.
> I would think that the right to life would take precedence
Well, let's do a thought experiment to test this. Which of these two rights takes precedence: (1) life (specifically in this case, the right to not be murdered) or (2) freedom of movement
That's an easy question, isn't it? (1) takes precedence. But how many 9's of protection are you willing to "purchase" at the expense of (2)? How much of (2) are you willing to give up in order to get a little more of (1)?
If we reduce (2) to 0 ...by locking every person in a padded cell, then we can achieve 99.99% protection of (1).
Presumably though, you don't like that idea. Presumably, you'll want to be let out of the padded cell, and get a bit of right (2) back. But giving you a bit of (2) back is going to cost someone their life! If we let you and others out of the padded cell, someone somewhere is going to get murdered.
What this thought experiment demonstrates is that the issue is not as simple as, "(1) takes precedence over (2)" - the thought experiment demonstrates that there is an amount of (2) that you will not spend in order to purchase a marginal increase in (1) - a situation where (2) actually takes precedence.
> Here in the UK, we have strict rules on gun ownership
And I totally respect that. Just to be clear though, "gun ownership" isn't really the issue. Gun ownership is a proxy for the actual right: self defense. You place a low value on the right to defend yourself and your family. Again, I totally respect that. You've "spent" that right to purchase lower gun crime. Have I mentioned how much I respect your personal decision?
As for me, I value the right to self defense above all. I've looked at the data, and I've realized that I'm much more likely to be stabbed or beaten to death than I am (well, was when I was in school) to be in a school shooting.
So to me, having actually looked at that data, it seems obvious that the right to self defense should take precedence. I think that my way of thinking is perfectly rational, and I think you're way of thinking is not ...but I totally respect your personal decision. I'm sure you also respect mine.
I have no clue what I just read or what kind of mental gymnastics are required to say that a right to a weapon overrides a right to live.
It used to blow my mind when I moved here (Netherlands) that I wasn't allowed to use a weapon to defend myself... but then you realize ... basically nobody has weapons.
An irony is that guns are vastly more often used for self harm than for self defense. These supposed defenders of rights are often losing their own lives and the lives of family members with the instruments they demand to have a right to have.
I'm having a hard time understanding your point. Here's what I think just happened:
Me: I value the right to self defense
You: Guns are used for self harm more often than self defense [as an aside, I don't disagree that this is true - I've heard this stat many times]
You: This is ironic!
Please help me to understand why you think that's ironic. What do you feel would be a non-ironic position? Is it this....
Me: I value the right to self defense, but one day I might want to kill myself, so I guess I'd better give up the right to self defense.
Is that a non-ironic position? To me that seems like an irrational position. Those two issues (self defense and self harm) seem orthogonal, and conflating them because of a superficial similarity (they both involve guns) seems odd.
Ok. Now this is logic I understand. Nobody is saying you don’t have a right to self defense. The question should be: why do you have a right to bring a gun to a fist fight?
> I have no clue what I just read
A lot of people are incapable of contending with hypotheticals or thought experiments. It's okay.
If you'd like to try again, I encourage you to read up to the point where something doesn't make sense. Quote only that sentence, and ask me to explain.
Notice how I'm not even asking you to read the whole thing - just to the point where you have trouble. This is very reasonable.
Reader's Digest: What pleases you more, applause or laughter?
Tina Fey: Laughter. You can prompt applause with a sign. My friend, SNL writer Seth Meyers, coined the term clapter, which is when you do a political joke and people go, "Woo-hoo." It means they sort of approve but didn't really like it that much. You hear a lot of that on [whispers] The Daily Show.
Obviously we can't see that people aren't genuinely falling out of their seats laughing when that headline get rolled out again. There's no way argue that someone doesn't earnestly think bad (or tired) jokes make effective satire.
I don't think a whinge is a joke just because it has the shape of a joke and a point I like. Overall, I agree with you. But you'll never convince anybody.
"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"
a famous line from Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act III, Scene II). It means that someone's overly emphatic or frequent denial of a situation suggests they are hiding the truth, are insincere, or actually guilty of what they deny. It implies their defense is covering up a secret desire or truth.
> You can have a message and point of view, but don't put activism over comedy.
Ok, who made you arbiter of what people can do? Have you missed entirely the point of repeating this little bit of dark humor is to perhaps SPUR THE PEOPLE TO ACTION THAT NEED TO TAKE ACTION?
You're right, it isn't a joke. Its very serious. Children are being killed at school. Kids are anxious about going to school because they don't want to be shot. How is that OK? And how is the thing you're taking issue with the repeated headline in a rag that is pure satire? Its like taking issue with the people who point out the Catholic church has a problem with pedophilia. Maybe direct your ire at the people taking no actions on gun control, eh?
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.
As a fan of Heinlein's book, the movie flattened the exploration of the political themes from the book and turned it into said black comedy. It would be like turning Animal House or Lord of the Flies into a black comedy.
I read the book, was very interested by the points he made, but I completely understand and support Verhoeven's take on it as a naive utopia that will get completely derailed. Just look at how the "veterans" of the "forever war" are foaming at the mouth at the idea of war-criming and sending others to die in Iran. Heinlein's central idea that people who offered their service to the rest of society are better qualified to vote doesn't survive the slightest encounter with reality.
> like turning Animal House or Lord of the Flies into a black comedy
Animal Farm, probably ?
I agree. RoboCop also belongs to the not-obvious-to-some-satire club.
In the words of Barry Humphries:
If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up.
Or the Prince.
Same goes with Starship Troopers - Clearly biting satire, but at the time was considered to be a dumb action movie by most.
I watched this movie as a teenager and I did miss the satire (although I could see something was off and there was a message beyond the action).
It's a bit the opposite of "don't look up" in that sense that the message isn't in your face. But in the current times, this movie really resonates.
it was a dumb action movie, with a bit of satire and some non-trivial nudity.
the book is a political science treatise about the role of the citizen in government and draws heavily from Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber, basically invented the "space marine" concept that we see in 40k or Starcraft or Doom, and touched on things like haptic feedback and non-traditional UI and how it could be C2.
The nudity is also part of the point. American will heavily restrict movies with nudity or swear words, but see far less problems with showing gore and violence on screen to youngsters.
Seen from Europe (Verhoeven is Dutch), this is completely deranged.
It's primarily a movie about fascism and propaganda. The fact that most viewers missed it is actually concerning.
Both are very valued in the USA
Every country values its own propaganda and national myths.
It's just that some countries coalesce around ones that are somewhat less... Blatantly offensive to thinking people.
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.
Satire really breaks when the target doesn't recognize itself as the target
The Boys is a modern example of this.
I have met Trumpers that think The Boys is a liberal attempt to make strong men look weak and psychotic.
Have they edited stuff out because of the audience reaction? Do you own an unedited copy?
I own the official release, and upon first viewing I do remember slight changes from that screener version, but nothing material. I half expected all or at least some of the brand names to be replaced because the film was so insulting towards them, but that all remained. Starbucks whores were okay, I guess, with Starbucks.
I tried to (re)watch it on Disney+ and the "militaristic ads" were cut.
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’m sure they did demand that
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.
Indignant behavior may have been a result of a perceived attack on viewers belief system. Possibly combined with no 2nd order awareness of thought. Additionally, a subtle “critique” framing from the screening host or “open mic” framing may prime the participants to command attention. Outrage is the easiest when one has no conceptual lens to add interpretive value.
I did feel that the use of an open mic encouraged the negative opinions to cascade. Once one of them voiced negativity, it really turned into a "me too! I was insulted by..."
imagine how it would hit today. I'd guess a vast majority would feel insulted by it...
How many felt insulted by Don't Look Up--I'm guessing that Venn is a circle.
I wasn't insulted, but it did feel a bit too on the nose to really work as satire.
Idiocracy got there just in time, before things became so stupid that satire wasn't possible any more. You have to exaggerate so hard that it lacks the feeling of cleverness required by satire.
The Onion struggles on. They've always been true masters of the form. I wrote my own news satire back in the 80s and quit when I saw The Onion; they were far better than I would ever be. Practically nobody else can still pull off satire here in the worst timeline.
Armando Iannucci - creator of The Thick of It and Veep - has said this in public statements. Politics is so ridiculous now on both sides of the Atlantic that he finds political satire impossible to pull off anymore. His last show for HBO Avenue 5 had to take place on a space liner for rich people with Hugh Laurie as a faux-captain who can’t keep his accent straight.
In Australia the satire Utopia has now predicted several major pointless government projects, including a stadium in Tasmania that no one wanted. https://www.news.com.au/sport/sports-life/abc-comedy-series-...
Texas Monthly (“The National Magazine of Texas”) covers local news with a straight face, letting the absurdity speak for itself. Read the recent article about ranchers and rabbis searching for the perfect heifer to bring about the end of the world - you can see the movie coming (Coen Brothers or The Daniels?) https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/red-heifer-prophe...
A straightforward rendition of the last 10 years wouldn't even pass the smell test for a satire. It might work as some kind of experimental dark slapstick.
"this so called planet killer doesn't matter to us, and we live in a free speech country! checkmate scientists"
like that?
Read through this comment section to get a glimpse.
I guess I see why, though. Taken from the perspective of tropes of middle Americans, it's pretty condescending and claims everything they are is idiotic and responsible for the state of the world, when it is more complicated than that and the ivory tower has its own culpability
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.
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
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 (especially now with technology allowing every culture to potentially spread everywhere), but it's not intrinsic.
With this framing, I interpreted Idiocracy's intro as being about a culture of intelligence or learning being harder to maintain in a modern world, than a culture of apathy or fun.
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 be made that it's about the culture of poorer people vs the culture of richer people - and they even spell out that angle in the movie. They show how reticent the rich couple is to have a child, and how eager the poor couple is to do the same. It's about what their cultures value about children and legacy. It's not "dumb people make dumb kids", it's "dumb people won't educate their kids past their own knowledge who, in turn, won't educate their kids past their own knowledge." The movie even goes on to resolve with the "dumb" descendants learning (from the protagonist) when they have anyone willing to make that a point of the culture. So I can't read a clean "eugenics" take from the film; I only find that take in misreadings of the intro, personally.
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.
I think you all understood my point but for the sake of clarity, I said "take anyone from any group," and I was really thinking along the lines of "take a new born from any group."
Not claiming that Idiocracy is accurate, however IQ scores have been declining. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/
Invoking IQ is not really a good way to dismiss pro-eugenics concerns.
Edit: This is a brief video explaining why.
https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo
I wasn't going for pro or anti-eugenics, just expressing that the Flynn effect has been reversing. At least from what I've read the trend is true _within_ families, which downplays potential pro-eugenics arguments.
> Edit: This is a brief video explaining why.
I knew what it was before even clicking on it. The “brief video” was a strong enough clue.
I'd be curious to know the average IQ of, say, climate deniers.
I suspect it's still a perfect 100. I don't think it's about general intelligence. In some ways just the opposite: very smart people have a talent for convincing themselves that they are right.
Unfortunately I fear it's more like EQ than IQ. The driver is more about the people. They do not like the kind of people who are trying to prevent climate change, and will apply their intelligence as hard as they can to avoid agreeing with them.
One other thing that's interesting -- at least in my personal observations, climate deniers don't usually actually argue the science. They might do this when publishing or speaking publicly. But, at least when you're talking with them and they're at ease and speaking freely, they seem to offer a different argument.
The argument I've seen, which really sticks with me, is that climate change is false, yes, but that's sort of a given that we don't investigate. Climate change was cooked up so that "the other side" could impose all sorts of horrible restrictions on "us."
I obviously don't agree with the argument, (ie, I think climate change is real and quite urgent) but I think it's an interesting framing. It's an argument from tribalism most obviously, but I also think it does what so many people do when attempting to understand complex events; it transforms the problem into more of a personal drama. The "real issue" is that "those people" are "against us." You see this sort of framing all the time; complex problems boiled down into personal dramas because people intuitively understand personal dramas and seek them out, but not necessarily because a personal drama has the best explanatory power.
A lot of beliefs are cultural and not directly related to intelligence. From an outsider's perspective, it can be difficult to tell which beliefs are merely fact-based and which are rooted in culture.
I think an important thought experiment here would be to really imagine people going to war, killing each other over whether or not biblical transubstantiation is literal or metaphorical. who had the "intelligent" belief in this case? I'd argue neither side and that this was pure tribalism.
100 is not a perfect score on an IQ test! 100 is the mean score. It's not a percentage.
I don't think that's what the GP was going for... rather, implying that flat-eartherness is uncorrelated to IQ and, thus, the average IQ of flat-earthers is the same as that of the general population.
Flerfers seem to be a somewhat different problem. In my experience, the vast majority of flat earthers are trolls, pretending to be stupid for the purpose of angering people.
I'm sure there are some genuine flat earthers out there, and I imagine that their IQs do average near 100 (perhaps a little lower). But I'm basing that on a general understanding of how people come to stupid beliefs, rather than from observations of individuals, because I'm not sure I've ever met a flat earther who actually believed what he was saying.
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.
Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done. Those actions involve contested subjects like economical aspects (both national and global), fairness among population demographics, historical fairness (such as indigenous populations), border politics and wars, as well as what methods and technology is scientifically proven to be effective measures. Denialism in this aspect is very broad concept, and if we define it that anyone who disagree with the politician actions are idiots, and everyone who agree with them are intelligent, then a large portion of people will be idiots even if a large number of them are very intelligent in other areas.
> Climate change and climate change denial is not just about the scientific facts about what is happening to the climate, it is also the political opinion about what actions should be done.
It would be great if what you said is true, and people were just arguing about what to do about it.
It's not, though. "It's a hoax" is both the start, and the end point for a large portion of the population, the media, and the politicians that represent it.
How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
In absolute terms, the portion of the worlds population that deny that the climate is changing is a single digit percentage, and that include the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_on_climate_chan...). The portion is a bit larger if you include people who think that the climate is changing but that is mostly caused by natural causes, but it is still a small minority compared to the wast majority that see climate change as either caused exclusively by human activity or as a mix between human activity and natural causes.
The "It's all a hoax" is a popular talking point but their followers are fewer in real life. It much more commonly to find that people with opposing view who actually agreeing that climate change is real, but that they disagree on policy. As an example, creating environmental policy based on per capita create a complete different policy compared to absolute emissions. The later is no more climate change denial than the first, and yet the later generally get labeled as denial.
> How would you know if its a large portion of the population if media and politicians label people deniers just because they have a difference in opinion about what actions should be done?
I don't need to trust what the media tells me about them, I can just listen to what those people and the politicians elect actually say, and what they say is flippin' 'Climate change is a chinese hoax' lunacy.
There's no need to sanewash them, or make excuses for them. It's not a matter of 'disagreement of what to do', it's that they are either really fucking stupid, or are disingenuously courting people who are really fucking stupid.
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 confusing how one day you're being told that we're all going to die unless we change something, and then suddenly even though nothing changed, it seems to be fine after all.
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.
Is that your perception, or do you have data to back this up?
For context, here's one source saying public concern for climate change has fallen in Germany from 42% to 34% from 2022 to 2025, in line with other European countries. [0] This was a study done by a German sustainability non-profit.
Here's another source stating that globally, news coverage about climate change has diminished by 38% from 2021 to 2025. [1]
Here's a third source stating that the share of German citizens who claim to be "very concerned" about climate change has dropped from 50% to 33% from 2019 to 2025. [2]
[0] https://fsc.org/en/newscentre/general-news/climate-change-fa...
[1] https://mecco.colorado.edu/summaries/special_issue_2025.html
[2] https://carbon-pulse.com/482517/#entry-482802
Seems like you've answered your own question.
Unless you are a scientist directly engaging with the literature, you and your relative are both doing the same thing: trusting the opinion of peers and high-status people in your political clan about what is happening in the world. It just happens that people in your clan are telling the truth while the other one is lying.
Neither side’s behavior can be considered “more intelligent” when you consider the vast majority of people on both sides are “opinion-takers” simply conforming to received social norms about what to believe about the world. The “opinion-makers” on both sides are undoubtedly intelligent, although you might prefer to call one side “cunning” instead.
I think choosing reliable authority requires a little intelligence. I don’t know how to build a robust house, but I can understand that should be on the solid base (scientific method) upon stable field, instead of mysterious objects from thousand years ago.
you don't have to be a scientist to directly engage with the literature. from mathematical proofs to directly observed phenomena to statistical certainties - it's all out there for you to engage with and feel secure in your findings just by having an internet connection. there's a qualitative difference in that evidence from the "sides" and therefore there is a qualitative and practical difference in the "more intelligent" side. "truth" is not incidental to the situation, it's the entire point of making claims at all. So a side that is making claims that turn out to not be true - whether you personally verify that or not - is a worse side, intellectually, than another.
That’s a pretty weak argument. What percentage of people actually have the qualifications to understand and verify a research paper? And how much can you even trust the raw data? At the end of the day, it’s just a matter of faith—whether you choose to believe the guy in the church or the guy at the university.
You don't need any advanced science to understand climate change. The basic chemistry and physics of it are readily accessible at a high school level.
Current research papers are far more advanced, but they're about the details of climate change. The basic facts of it were established two centuries ago.
We know that we are putting CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that CO2 absorbs heat. That's not a matter of believing an expert. At this point, anybody still denying it is deliberately choosing what somebody else tells them.
The economic effects of that are harder to model, but denialism is still stuck on whether the effect is real. There is no way to include them in any coherent discussion of what to do about it.
If the side you follow says the science community is political and biased, then "just look at the literature" isn't going to help. It's like telling an atheist they'd believe in Jesus if they'd just read the bible.
We are lied to constantly by people who influence our lives. You can't even go to the grocery store without being lied to - being told breakfast cereals are healthy, that low fat options will make you less fat, shrinkflation, misleading unit pricing. It's no wonder people are so distrusting
Even if you're a democrat you still have to admit that democrats lie, a ton, and it's super obvious. Maybe if our leadership in general, on both sides, was capable of being decent humans then we'd be able to build trust and stop doing dumb shit as a civilization
Unfortunately at some level, as usual, it comes down to game theory
If you tell the nuanced truth and lose, and your opponent tells simplified untruths and wins, where does that leave you?
As I understand it (obviously a gross simplification), Jimmy Carter attempted to treat Americans like adults, but Americans did not want to inconvenience themselves by wearing sweaters
please engage in good faith. if you think mathematical proofs will be an issue when I tell someone to "look at the literature", you either don't know what a mathematical proof is, or are too far abstracted from reality to influence any practical action. yes, we're being lied to. no, they don't fuck up the science in order to lie to you. they just expect you not to read the science. because, truthfully, it's rare that the people who are lying to you would even know how to fuck up the science in their favor. so they bet on your ignorance, based on their ignorance, and they usually win the bet. but not if you just go look it up and engage with it. it's not about reading a single paper; it's about always reading every paper (on topics you have decided you are going to have an opinion about) with a keen and unshakeable focus on practical effect. anything else is an academic boondoggle.
I really love the way you communicated this and wish HN posters could more routinely invite curious conversations like this. Which isn't to say I'm perfect at it either
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 racially charged claim. Last I checked, there is no real evidence that human races are a meaningful genetic category, let alone that anything usually described as "race" correlates to any genes connected to IQ scores.
How can human races not be a meaningful genetic category? Aside from the phentoypical differences, the prevalence of some diseases varies by race.
Because where you draw the lines for "race" is down to your own culture, not a constant dividing line that all cultures agree upon.
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.
What gene makes someone Asian?
What gene makes someone black?
What gene makes someone native American?
Can't forget the new favorite:
>Mild cognitive decline was noted after infection with the wild-type virus and with each variant, including B.1.1.529 (Omicron). Relative to uninfected participants, cognitive deficit (3-point loss in IQ) was seen even in participants who had had completely recovered from mild COVID-19.
>Participants with persistent symptoms had the equivalent of a 6-point loss in IQ, while those who had been admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) experienced the equivalent of a 9-point loss in IQ.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/even-fully-recovered-sur...
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2311330
Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best
> Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best
What do you propose as a replacement metric to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
> No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?
It seems to me, then, that your primary objection is not that IQ scores are inaccurate, but that intelligence shouldn't be measured in the first place?
Which makes me think that you don't want anyone doing research into whether human intelligence is changing at all.
No I think that our tools to measure and our definition of intelligence are lacking and are causing more problems than actually helping with anything.
Or can you point to any obvious improvements that result from having measured “intelligence” for the last 100+ years?
When my grandpa was a kid they would measure your skull and decide if you are smart or a subhuman based on that. Makes about as much sense as our current IQ tests…
What an odd question.
What do you think intelligence actually is? What effects do you think it has when it goes up or down in mass?
I think it’s an essential question. I wouldn’t even know how to describe what intelligence means exactly. I’ve experienced very “smart” people make horribly stupid decisions and the other way round.
Since I don’t know a way to describe what intelligent actually means I can’t tell if it’s good or not to have more or less of it.
For some this seems to be a very “finished” topic, but we don’t have any widely accepted definitions of intelligence, not even for “less complex” organisms
Because it would explain what's happening in the world after 2019.
> Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence
You may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.
Depends on the IQ test i guess?
The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).
The first IQ test was developed by Binet and Simon in France, and it was all about predicting academic success of children. Virtually all IQ tests are predicting academic success. Cultural component is a big part of it. For example music education is associated with better grades. Maybe no one knows how it works, but it does.
No one knows what intelligence is, all the tests are like "lets identify a group of smart people (normally it is something like a group of high performing students), find correlates and build a test measuring correlates". No good definition of intelligence and no casual reasoning, just a correlative one.
How IQ 100 becomes a median? Lets take a big enough sample, get their test score and then normalize numbers so median will be 100 exactly. The creators of tests know that you can't compare IQ numbers from different populations. You can investigate the difference, but a direct comparison is nonsense. Even comparisons between different age cohorts of the same population are questionable at very least.
It doesn't mean that iq numbers are meaningless, but we shouldn't confuse them with intelligence, and we definitely shouldn't treat them as absolute numbers. They are relative measure.
Not a sufficient measure of different kinds of mental agility (including emotional/social) maybe.
But when it comes to intelligence needed for doing maths and physics and such, it's a very good proxy. And geniuses like Tao, also happen to scope very highly.
Yea and there have been tons of Nobel price winners who have scored low.
It’s a completely useless measure
Is there any strong relationship between IQ scores and innate intelligence, as opposed to mental agility gained through education?
Yes. Which is why there are also IQ tests for pre-school kids.
Besides the declining groups have the same education with the earlier ones.
All of these effects are explained much better by social factors. If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
>If you're poor or discriminated against, you get less nutrition, less education, and face barriers in trying to improve both.
Which doesn't matter, since they measured rich and middle class, and poor and discriminated against both before and after.
Did you think the new measurements were done at some ghetto and the earlier higher ones at Martha's Vineyard?
Could you please elaborate on why measuring the same group somehow eliminates social effects?
Are you claiming social factors have remained constant during the measuring period? Because they very obviously haven't.
If you're aware of the Peter principle, and how inequality compounds over time, then you know that the rate at which social factors change is correlated with their quantile values.
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?
IQ is a poor yard stick to measure intelligence with
This to me is one of the most apparent failures of modern taboo infecting people's ability to communicate, or even reason.
Eugenics is not ethical, for a variety of very good reasons; that does not mean that it's unscientific.
We know that intelligence is heritable; we have observed epigenetic group trends like the Flynn effect to the point where they plateau...
The biggest unknown in my opinion is how stable the gains we have made are. If we have our education systems disrupted, or some nutrition crunch, does the population average drop to the point where the complex systems we depend on are not maintained?
Eugenics is a taboo because there is a tempting trap to over simplify and make assertions that are not actually supported by the data.
We know that IQ is hereditary to an unknown degree. We have some evidence that IQ relates to intelligence.
We don’t know really know which genetic variables are responsible. Even simple features like height are thought to have ~12k variables.
We don’t even really have a good definition of intelligence (see any AGI comment chain).
I would say that assuming we have good enough data or models to base important decisions on is unscientific.
Decisions like improving education and nutrition don’t really need to help.
No, it's taboo because actually trying to implement it requires invalidating individual human rights... And requires creating an authority who decides what traits should be passed on or removed.
So people hear the word, and react to the word at some toddler level "it's yucky!", and stop reasoning altogether.
> Even simple features like height are thought to have ~12k variables.
But you wouldn't deny that there are groups of people who are tall and groups who are short.
There is no eugenics angle in Idiocracy. Nobody tries to achieve some "genetic ideal" by manipulating people.
The premise of the movie is that smart people stop having kids and dumb people have lots. It's "reverse eugenics"
But it's a proven fact. Less educated people are poorer. The less educated tend to have more children. And children who grow up in poor families receive a lower quality of education.
Yes but this is not the genetic argument this is a "school system sucks" argument
In every country, if your parents are scientists, you will be in average smarter, than if your parents are peasants.
Is that because of some heritable presence/lack of intelligence or because scientists feed their children well early in life, have books in the home, and take the time to follow up on their children's education?
Woah, woah, stop right there with your facts Mr. Eugenics. /s
The ugly thing about eugenics is that someone has an artificial ideal of how people should be and then tries to enforce that. If something just happens without interference (a process), that's basically just evolution.
Why stop at eugenics? Spoil your environment enough and it will definitely have an effect on the individuals in that environment.
Every scrotum on this forum has microplastics and phthalates in them, things shown to have effects on the endocrine and reproductive systems.
Hold on. Turns out some scientists found out the amount of plastic was over measured because it included the plastic of their own gloves. I've read it last week, can not found the source now. Sorry
https://theconversation.com/scientists-may-be-overestimating...
> It’s important to note that even if the microplastic abundance in the environment is lower than researchers originally thought, any amount of microplastics can be troublesome, given their negative effects on human health and ecosystems.
No, they showed that the gloves could have introduced microplastic-like particles in some samples depending on how they are handled. It just feels like one of those studies secretly funded by an oil company to throw shade.
One group covering some cases. Others?
Fair point, but why jump to genetics instead of culture (upbringing)?
Because the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike
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 is essentially the terminus of the observations he would make where if the idiots got their way. (A semi-common plot point with Hank in KotH where he would be pit against rediculous circumstances.)
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?
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 think that the movie makes it really, really obvious that the intellectual degradation goes beyond just culture. The people are presented as being borderline mentally disabled.
https://youtu.be/jbmq9P-8FiM
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
I disagree. I can't imagine any sort of cultural influence that can make grown adults incapable of performing basic tasks that a child could do.
https://youtu.be/jbmq9P-8FiM
...the most important part [of the movie]
Similarly, buildings will probably not topple over and be tethered together with oversized packaging tape
Meanwhile although there's no monster trucks on the White House lawn yet, get ready for UFC Freedom 250
> Meanwhile although there's no monster trucks on the White House lawn yet, Not /currently/... https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/trump-musk-tesla-whit...
Eugenics is artificial. Who’s forcing smart stupid to not breed in the movie and stupid to breed?
Nazis also thought smoking is bad. The problem is their applied genocidal eugenics. Not whether they thought IQ is hereditary.
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 there's a computer glitch that then wipes out humanity; but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence - it says 'fertility' but I think it means fecundity/actual reproduction
Are you talking about the one called "The Machine Stops", published like a hundred years ago?
I think there are lots of sci-fi stories on this topic, one I can think of is "Pump Six" by Paolo Bacigalupi (https://books.google.de/books?id=HoSXDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT125&sourc...), which is from this century...
That story is incredible, with insights into what technology would mean.
>but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
Or centralized SOTA LLMs.
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?
That education is a general good?
I'll have to watch it again, all I remember it as was a goofy movie. It didn't make me think "we have to kill all the stupid people".
Actually I'm inclined to think it's more like My Fair Lady and that much of what we call intelligence is down to opportunity and motivation.
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.
If most people in the thread have different takeaways, and you're laser-focused on seeing eugenics and superiority (especially when you keep making condescending remarks like "hope this helps" or "work on your reading comprehension"), I don't think that reflects on the film
Yeah, the consensus of a plurality of users of a Silicon Valley startup incubator heavily associated with the right wing is definitely the only opinion that matters about the subtext of a film.
"The people who disagree with my interpretation must be right-wing" says nothing about the film
Good luck in your quest of persuasion-by-bludgeon
Is Darwin natural selection eugenic? Was the rise of humans from chimps an eugenic like event?
Humans didn't "rise" from chimps, and natural selection doesn't promote "rising".
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.
Which authoritarian government, lmao.
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.
But is it true or false?
That's ironic seeing that nazis (or the far right in general) usually need stupid people to vote for them so they get into a position where they can undermine a democratic system...
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 can just as well fall for that shit.
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.
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.
How is it unlikely? Several researchers has pointed to the Flynn effect reversing since the turn of the millennium.
> 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 grasp the problem and solution in the end.
Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. It is a good few years since I last watched it. There is the title, of course, but educationally-disasavantaged-ocracy would not have been catchy enough!
> 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.
I'm afraid you are misremembering. The movie is explicitly eugenicist. The people of the future are explicitly biologically stupid. The opening transcript is unambiguous:
[Man Narrating] As the 21st century began… human evolution was at a turning point.
Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest… the fastest reproduced in greater numbers than the rest… a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man… now began to favor different traits.
[Reporter] The Joey Buttafuoco case-
Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized… and more intelligent.
But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.
A dumbing down.
How did this happen?
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 species.
What is "explicitly eugenicist" in observing that the unprecedented way mankind has dominated its environment has changed the selection pressures we are subject to?
My quest to survive to adulthood and pass on my genes looked nothing like the gauntlet an Homo erectus specimen would have run.
> Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it.
They literally show IQ numbers in that scene.
> Trevor: IQ 138, Carol: IQ 141
vs:
> Clevon: IQ 84
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
Don't Look Up feels closer to how things actually break in practice
It’s a less extreme satire for sure.
i couldn't finish "Don't Look Up", it felt like sitting through a political lecture. all i wanted from a comedy was some laughs.
Fair criticism. It was very lecturing. Beyond that, it was also quite funny, but really, there was nothing funny about the end. I don't think it was meant as a comedy.
Same here. There was something feeling so obviously off with Don't Look Up.. for me at least. Idiocracy did not suffer from this.. but Mike Judge is somewhat of an acquired taste I guess.
I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up
To be honest, I think it's about whether someone feels like they are making fun or being made fun of.
Thereby proving the point of the film.
Don't look!
I'm in the same category. The film is so awfully written and acted it isn't something that can be watched.
Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.
How about the British "Till Death Do Us Part" from the 1960s/70s?
That had a similar irony in that people complained about the racist character of Alf Garnett, but the series very much used his bigotism/racism as the butt of the jokes.
> Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.
Yes. It was nice when corporate taxes were high, xenophobia was seen as something bad, and movies could focus on smaller problems satire.
I hope that we go back to the socialist era of the USA with unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires. Movies could just be silly again.
Was that supposed to trigger me? Not from there, but I'm in favor of "unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires" and higher corporate taxes!
But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea).
Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.
I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore.
It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
But there is no need to disproof this because there is no evidence that it has any truth to it.
> If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?
I think there's so much ill-founded assumptions in eugenics BS that it's hard to know where to start, but as a genealogist, I can personally verify that upper or middle class, wealthier people, presumably the sort eugenicists identify with, clearly had at least a 2-3 generations head start on the demographic transition where I come from.
There are other trends, there's always some groups of people who started having fewer kids earlier or later for reasons not obviously related to class - but class is the big one.
> It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans and thus intelligence declines unironically. There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true.
you seem pretty convinced that intelligence plays an important role in natural selection. I'd argue that decisiveness, confidence, looks, social skills all play a more important role. (I'm not saying that's a good thing)
I'm interested in understanding your point of view, can you elaborate on what you mean by "There is no joke in that"?
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 screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.
> So yes, eugenics was pretty much an integral part of the premise. IQ bubbles even pop up on the screen during those scenes, just to remove any shadow of a doubt.
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.
I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.
I still like the movie, but like with any 20+ years old comedies, I can recognise issues with its premise which would be more-or-less unacceptable today. In 2006... not as much. The future is now, old man!
> Come on, use your brain a little:
Classy
> does that scene imply that we should do something to tilt the scales in the opposite direction?
No, it did not.
> I agree that it doesn't explicitly show someone tilting the scales, but that doesn't mean that eugenics are not an integral part of the premise in a "if we don't do something about this, this is what the world will look like" kind of way.
And, to you, "Do something about this" means only one thing - forcefully stopping classes of people from reproducing?
That's like being angry at Star wars because the very first title text says "long time ago", and we know humans didn't go into space long time ago duh.
>It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans
So it's a documentary?
Even the basic reproductive instinct has become "ineffective on humans".
>There is no joke in that - all jokes build upon the assumption of this being true
No, there are countless jokes in the movie that don't depend about how the world became stupid (be it cultural or genetics or combination) at all. Literally all of them are like that.
>If it were true, then decline wouldn't have begun in the 19th or 20th century but around the time that property and currencies emerged.
Why, did the movie say it's the result of "property and currencies"? And even if somebody said so, who said it's just about "property and currencies" merely being a thing that starts this decline, and not surpassing some level of development of property and currencies (e.g. late capitalism), which prevents mitigating factors from working?
DLU captured the decisions better, but Idiocracy explained how we got there.
Eugenics, you mean? Letting the stupid people breed?
Haven't watched it so I wouldn't know, but from what I hear of it that sounds like a pretty serious strike against it.
tbf its not "letting the stupid people breed" and more that smart ppl stop breeding. still wrong and like other comments said, Dont Look Up is more practical bc its people with money, power, influence dooming us with greed
while i loved it, i’ve noticed a ton of people despised Don’t Look Up for the same reason some of the theater goers complained in a siblings comment.
> I attended an audience testing screener for Idiocracy … 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 making eye contact with Mike Judge like "WTF!"
I watched this movie really late. Let's say within the past 2 years or so. After watching it, all I could think was, "This isn't a comedy, it's a tragedy."
It felt way too close to home.
Yeah, same. I also felt like this when watching Office Space and Sillicon Valley. Hits too close to home.
I know that through comedy you are supposed to get a sense of catharsis and a sort of relief, but to me it was just frustratingly sad.
I guess I just take life too seriously.
Mike Judge definitely has an ability to hit the comedy nail on the reality head. That’s for sure.
At least you have AI to fill out those TPS reports.
Can't help with the printer though...
I know one guy who can't watch Silicon Valley because it triggers him. He had a tech startup himself in the valley back in the day.
I was never in a startup and I found the show incredibly stressful to watch.
Krazam is starting to have this effect on me.
Kai Lentit on YouTube has been doing these mock interviews and some of them hit too close to home for me.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@programmersarealsohuman5909
Oh my. I just watched "Interview with 90s Computer Nerd" and am laughing so hard at the deadpan line "soundblaster 16 IRQ conflicts are a way of life"
I couldn't watch Silicon Valley when I was working in tech. It constantly triggered rage as it was way too close to my actual experience. After I left tech, I found it to be amazing.
i wouldnt say it triggers me but its not fun to watch after a long day of stupid IT bs
same with mr robot. like i'm going crazy because of cybersec issues, i dont want to spend my free time watching a guy go crazy because of cybersec issues
I mean, Office Space and Silicon Valley are legit funny. I doubt how I can be "frustratingly sad" after watching either of the two because in Office Space, (spoilers ahead) but the ending is actually quite happy and more about realizing life's about what you want and it might not be a desk job and Silicon Valley is hilarious in terms of how it parodies the 2010s tech culture but its more about "look what tech has become" rather than "oh my god everything sucks, all idiots everywhere, we're doomed" type energy.
Also a lot of Silicon Valley stuff is kindda bs esp the arc where one single dude figures out such a massive leap in tech so quickly and then solves P=NP using freaking AI and then doesn't sell out to Hooli. You gotta suspend a lot of disblief for that but people don't talk about how unrealistic the main plot is
Also the episode where Jared has to explain scrum to vet developers like Dinesh and Gilfoyle. Like you seriously think they didn't know what scum was before meeting Jared?
Yes, Silicon Valley has some bits that don't quite match real life. But every now and then there's some true insight in it.
Like the bit where the crazy VC tells them that the last thing they need is revenue.
https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo?si=fU3Y3-ucHqgoBDLU
Silicon Valley probably wouldn’t work as well today since they would vibe code everything and a lot of the drama would be removed that way.
That'd leave even more room for drama. I'm imagining Gavin hiring thousands of cheap, unskilled laborers ("Hooli's industry-leading AI research team") to mash keys until they rediscover the prompt that generated middle-out compression with a patent-free clean room process. He never reproduces it because Gilfoyle's self-hosted LLM improved its own memory efficiency when when Dinesh got upset and started unplugging GPUs.
I actually think it's ripe for an extra season because the stuff that happened in last few years is comedy goldmine.
I refuse to watch it. I really like most Mike Judge’s stuff, but this I just don’t want to see and think those thoughts. I know we live in a dystopic satire of existence, you don’t have to show me. Now please let me take these new cybernetic info drugs and let me crawl into a hole sleep shielded from the Neon-Tokyo’s toxic rain.
There's obviously some truth to the premis, but no need to take it any more seriously than Beavis and Butthead.
It's a documentary
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 universities. Ignorance does not drive our politics. Resentment does.
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.
It’s what happens when you let people get what they want.
Like children, adults need guidance. Kids would eat candy and drink OJ till their baby teeth rot off and they are riddled with onset of many diseases if left to their own devices. Adults have similar tendencies and if you remove the guardrails (perhaps to distract from other dysfunction), you get adults who seek short term pleasure whether that be food, perversion, laziness, etc. That’s why culture and taboos matter. They keep people from undermining themselves. Obviously things can go in the other direction too far like North Korea and Iran, etc.
I like to say "adults are children without teachers". It feels like this in many contexts, but I started to say it during covid. When people looked at statistics, made wrong conclusions (because they don't know how to read statistics), and genuinely believed they were right. When children do that, they have a figure of authority (the teacher) who can tell them that they actually did not understand it at all.
I was in highschool with a guy who absolutely sucked at maths. Everybody knew it, he knew it, nobody could deny it because he was clearly struggling in class. I have no problem with that and I was actually trying to help when I could. But years later when covid hit, he was one of those very vocal people claiming complete nonsense based on "the numbers". He did not have a teacher at this point to give him bad grades and telling him that he was completely wrong. Being an adult, he felt like he was right.
"A character is literally named 'Upgraydd' with creative spelling. In the future, names have become increasingly absurd — just random syllables, product names, and numbers."
Upgraydd was from our time wasn't he
There's a scene where Rita, in the future, tries to call Upgraydd, but there are 9726 listings for people called Upgraydd at that point.
Fun movie trivia: Maya Rudolph (Rita) is the daughter of Minnie Ripperton.
This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in the movie, wherein our protagonist is given his new identity credentials.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAUcSb3PgeM
He was! Frito Pendejo (Joe's lawyer) and the cop Beef Supreme are better examples. Or of course the wrestler-president Camacho whose middle name is literally Mountain Dew.
I forget; did he receive anything in turn for taking that name? These folks did: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6157612.stm
I don't remember if it's ever explicitly stated, but I certainly took that to be the implication. Maybe it's actually funnier if they're doing it pro bono, now I am suddenly unsure.
More at https://www.reddit.com/r/tragedeigh/
The irony is that it only implies we have be in the proto-Idiocracy stage for a while, regardless of whether people who live in bubbles do not understand that “Upgraydd” type characters are not exactly a new or invented thing.
Yes he was. Or maybe he was a Nick Landian AI from the future facilitating its own creation
Not quite sure "Ow My Balls / Jackass" argument should count, the Jackass franchise is older than Idiocracy and was most likely an inspiration for that bit.
For some reason that also reminds me of the TV shows in Robocop.
e.g. Climbing for Dollars and It’s Not My Problem!
When I first saw Robocop these looked so crass it was obvious satire.
Now...? Well, I'd buy that for a dollar.
Climbing for Dollars is from The Running Man[0], the Arnie version from 1987 - same year as Robocop.
Then in 2001 was "Series 7"[1] (which I got flashbacks of from the 2013 White Bear[2] episode of Black Mirror).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(1987_film)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_7:_The_Contenders
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Bear_(Black_Mirror)
Trivia for music nerds like me: Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa are in The Running Man.
Very good point. My brain is just one big 80s mashup at this point.
Verhoeven makes some extremely heavy handed satire.
A decent litmus test is whether someone understands that the Starship Troopers movie is satire or not.
And I’m reminded of The Dark Knight Returns (1986) graphic novel. There are grotesque parodies of talking head news anchors and even a caricature of then-president Ronald Regan. Situation all fracked up.
Based.
And also, just because crass shows exists, it does not mean they are the only or dominant thing.
People still enjoy quality, even for entertainment.
Sure, teenagers will rot their brain, but the most watched shows in the US are The Bridgerton, The Night Agent, and The Pitt - not exactly jackass.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/h/charts/
Reality TV shows are a HUGE HUGE HUGE segment; most of them aren't too far off. (Reality TV as a concept precedes Idiocracy but was refined in the 2010s.)
"Ow! My Balls" was less about the Jackass part of it but more about the "numbing your brain and consuming mindless entertainment" commentary. Reality TV fits this category extremely well. See also: Housewives of _x_.
You're assuming we started at zero, we didn't (unfortunately)
That was my first thought too. The site is overall excellent, but that one was a pretty clear circular reasoning.
Upgraydd was also the guy's name in the present. He traveled to the future to be there with them.
You missed the documentary angle. Getting rid of jackass would be a move in the right direction (and all of the jackass derivatives).
probably 1/4 of tiktok is now Ow My Balls
There are quite a lot of dubious matches.
Brawndo is considered a match with "Nestlé CEO says water isn't a human right". Beyond that it has nothing to do with agricultural malpractice, the Nestlé guy is just correct. It doesn't make sense to talk about human rights that way.
"Ow my balls" is considered a match because "YouTube's most popular content is often people hurting themselves", which is just wrong. It's stuff like music videos, children's songs and MrBeast. All quite wholesome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most-viewed_YouTube_vi...
"Costco law degree" is considered a match because ... there are companies that offer credentials which aren't universities. That isn't evidence of stupidity.
"Trash piles are massive" is considered a match because third world countries have giant trash piles. But they always did. Idiocracy was a film about America.
Even the first match is a giant stretch. Elizondo was only a TV star, and he did that work whilst in office. Trump wasn't (just) a reality TV star, he was first and foremost pre-politics a real estate developer. Quite different levels of challenge and respectability. And I don't think the show he did could be described as reality TV anyway.
I always looked at the Costco law degree as more of a commentary on Costco/price clubs than of degree mills.
Like Costco sells everything and eventually that includes education.
The apprentice is literally reality tv competition though.
It's a TV show. It's not reality TV as the term was originally used.
As I got older, I always wondered if everyone thought they were the smart one and everyone else must be the idiocracy.
I seem to remember Homer Simpson thinking something to that effect (“Boy, everyone is stupid except me”).
I can imagine that happening today, esp politically.
There are studies where 93% of drivers believe they are better than average drivers...
There's no inherent contradiction with a majority of drivers rating themselves above average: each driver is free to prioritize "good driver"-traits differently; e.g. if I value road safety and my neighbour values total travel time, we are probably both objectively better drivers according to our own metrics.
That said, 93% of car drivers are worse than me. Obviously.
The tricky question is: how do you tell when you're actually right vs just doing the same thing Homer was
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 90% towards being right and away from being Homer.
I don't mean you should spend endless amounts of time arguing with people. Lots will just try to waste your time and exhaust you. It's more a hypothetical for when you're thinking about your beliefs/position on your own time.
> 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.
I feel like there are clear signs, but either people have cognitive blind spots or are just obstinate. For example, you hear people complain that they've been for a bajillion interviews and still don't get hired (hint: the problem is you), or they're always single even though they go on countless dates (hint: the problem is you) or they're overweight and can't lose weight no matter what they try (hint: the problem is you). Maybe an inability to introspect yourself in an objective way? Maybe a deep seated belief that the problem cannot actually be _you_, it must be an external factor, so you seek that. Maybe you're not being gaslit, maybe the ever-present smell of shit really does emanate from under your shoe.
You've just described MAGA in a nutshell.
Funny, just today I talked with a co-worker about how be both feel like we are approaching Idiocracy.
His nephew 'watered' their plants with Coke. Not quite Mountain Dew, but also not far off.
I saw a TikTok of someone recommending to put cut roses in Sprite instead of water. Apparently it keeps them fresh much longer.
Yeah that works and I remember learning that in the 90s so it's pretty old.
Why would he water plants with Coke? Coke doesn't have electrolytes, and that's what plants crave.
It's a liquid. It's fine. Plus it's colored, so it must be more than water. Water is transparent. What can it contain? d'uh.
But does it have e-lec-tro-lytes? That's what plants crave, you know.
Isn't this the point the OP was trying to make?
It's a quote from the movie.
Brawndo.
Ok, TIL :)
so you want us to reed furst? wat ar u dumb?
I bought some actual Brawndo back in the day. An energy drink company had licensed the brand. Did not share with my plants, having learned better from the movie.
Love it. Although I'm not sure which is the darkest timeline given https://www.howclosetoblackmirror.com/
I always saw black mirror as explicitly a near-future satire of the present, not commentary on where humanity is headed. I think something like Children of Men would fill the british angle better.
Isn't it depressing that San Junipero, arguably the only happy episode, has the lowest progress score?
The music for that episode still takes me galaxies/dimensions away
https://youtu.be/IYpO3EbvMK4?si=n70N7hi8v29NiZvr
A handful of Black Mirror episodes land on a more optimistic (or at least not entirely bleak) note, though "happy" might be overstating it for any of them. Bittersweet, maybe.
Eulogy and Hotel Reverie from the newest season are at 70-75%, and I think they both end on a similarly bittersweet note like San Junipero. The one with Miley Cyrus is at 65% and is about as happy an ending as Black Mirror episodes get.
I don't read San Junipero as happy.
Black Mirror likes to show us the most-important thing as a kind of punctuation or statement of message even when it's not what the episode has encouraged us to believe is the most important thing (see also: the focus of the camera in the very first episode during A Certain Event—we've been primed for a grand, disgusting spectacle, and the camera chooses to show us none of that, and instead shows us something much more disgusting: the faces of people watching it, which is the actual show, and the point of the "artist" in the episode).
San Junipero ends by showing us the entirety of what is actually happening, for-real, which is an automated computer-maintenance system keeping itself running. It's highlighting the unreality of the virtual world, I think suggesting that even the apparent experiences we've been watching aren't happening in any real sense.
What's really happening? 100% of what's really happening? As you see. A computer system maintaining itself, to keep electricity flowing through its various circuits. Doing what? Doesn't matter, could be endlessly calculating digits of pi, that'd be just as much a "real" experience as what you've been so invested in. This is all that's really going on.
San Junipero is a SAAS hedonistic treadmill for your mind, for perpetuity, designed to siphon all your estate into corporate profits.
Maybe it's not so bad after all, I think one can interpret it positively or negatively depending on your current state of mind.
Demolition Man is the darkest timeline.
I just finished up Pluribus S01; to me this could have been a take on AI.
The AI could have been The Joined; a population of beings who want only to make the remaining humans happy, by giving humans what they want, but they (The Joined) also acknowledge that in the long run their approach will result in an almost an Extinction-Level , mass starvation, etc.
“You cannot give me anything, because all that you have is stolen.”
Shocking that the show predates AI.
The profusion of LLMs with secret weights and prompts will also give us the The Truman Show's false-friendships, product placement, and fraudulent recommendations.
Without also making us famous or taking care of our daily needs.
And he even missed crocs... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSkqybtwBk
I just watched a new dinosaur cartoon made for kids and it has cartoon dinosaurs that farts a lot and I looked it up and in reddit people are saying "duh..farts are funny..why do you have a problem with it?"
Unpopular framing: it's less about "dumb masses" than incentive systems that make spectacle cheaper than competence—and we keep mistaking engagement metrics for neutral feedback.
I think in some ways we are past it; unfortunately not the funny ways. Some examples:
1. The presidents response to bombing of school girls was basically "stop hitting yourself"
2. Fox news host Dept. of Defense head and the "Dept. of War" name "change"
3. Building a grand ballroom while taking benefits away from hungry kids
4. Elon musk on stage with the chainsaw bragging about acts that save no money but did harm the poorest people on earth.
5. The fact that our media does not really care about any of this unless they get a ratings bump from it
Obviously we all could go on and on.. but the biggest loss IMO is objective truth. There are and will always be things that are true and I feel that we are losing a hold of that so that bad actors can just say to us: "no thats not what your seeing".
Its like in the movie, if they had looked at the plant growing and said: "Thats FAKE NEWS" then run to the field and claimed they did it all.
he claimed they did it to themselves
The tricky part is that once everything becomes "obviously absurd,"it gets harder to separate signal from noise
I don't think Starbucks offering happy endings is a 55% match to their current offerings.
Only 78%? That can't be right.
I think it hasn't been updated in a while. Seems to me that the past few days alone would take us to 90%+.
President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho tried to find smart people to get their input, I wish we had President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho…
I've watched Idiocracy more than once, but only just realized that Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead) was the director! Ow my balls!
Don't forget Silicon Valley!
Awesome show, but didn't realize Mike Judge was behind that too!
Man, that font used for the individual attribute evaluation percentage badge is horrible.
I’m guessing based on the color coding that what could also be a slanted and italicized 1 is actually slanted and italicized 7, but talk about a horrible font, on top of what looks like about 10 different other fonts used on the site.
I guess that is in keeping with the theme; the Idiocracy status tracking site is also Idiocracy.
so, I'm not the only one who was scrolling it and thinking, "damn, it's so horrible and illegible, it must be on-brand with the topic." I even thought that the Dark Reader extension messed things up yet again.
I guess, as the meter is above 50%, you're not supposed to read it.
The real score should be around 50% or less. The scoring system is done as a joke without much thought and compares a lot of apples to oranges. Like “aw my balls” equals Jackass, even describing what’s different about them it counts them as equal. Costco degree is not equal to Microsoft degree, etc.
- "Brought to you by Carl's Jr. They pay me every time i say it" vs "Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war"
- "Florida's in Georgia, dumbass" vs "We setled Aberbaijan and Albania"
- "Secretary of education is kinda stupid, but he 's president's brother" vs "Donald Trump's White House is a family affair"
I ve been watching Idiocracy over and over for years, as a documentary.
In many ways the movie is more merciful than reality. Frito , a really dumb man who purchased his "lawyer degree" in costco, could afford his own comfy apartment and car. He was not addicted on his phone all day , constantly worried about what others think of him. The govt would take care of your neglected kids. Employment by brawndo kept the world quiet. Leaders were too dumb to make wars. People too dumb to make culture wars. Their president was smarter.
The misspellings in signage though, is comedically reminiscent of AI image generators.
And the President in Idiocracy, for all his faults, actually wants to do the right thing, once he has the facts.
The movie was made before handheld devices were a plague. Though you get a similar sense of it in the way that Frito is addicted to TV surrounded by ads.
Public education is important. Without it, it’s harder to stay above average. But there are those who say “it is not my duty to fund the education of anyone else.” Hence, here we are.
"Public education" is exactly the thing that will guarantee Idiocracy, that was practically the whole point of the movie
What are you talking about? The opening framing is a pseudo eugenic critique of class reproduction. Did you even watch the movie?
I always thought the comparison to real life falls a bit flat. In the movie there’s a scene where Camacho has a town hall and the audience yells something about everything bad. Camacho fires his gun in the air for silence and acknowledges things are bad and says he’s going to ask the smartest person in the world to help.
So in this scenario the people are allowed to voice real concerns directly to the president without fear of retribution. The president acknowledges things are bad. He describes a plan, with real actionable steps, to help the situation. And to wrap it all up follows through with it and is genuinely interested in making the country / world a better place. None of these things apply to America’s current situation.
At the core of it, in the movie everyone is dumb but well meaning, while in real life most of the idiots are also malicious. They keep voting for the same thing because it hurts their perceived enemies, not because they think their vote will make the country better.
Idiocracy is an utopia - they voted for the smartest person.
If you think watching Idiocracy feels too on point for current events, try giving a (re)watch to The Hunger Games movies, too.
Scary. I'm not familiar with the work. Though, it strikes me as a lot like a Neal Stephenson novel unfolding in our faces.
Mike owes us a second docu.
I don't know of anyone else changing everything to gold by touch.
He deserves credit fot South Park too if only by osmosis.
Every time Idiocracy comes up, I feel obligated to point out that it is WILDLY optimistic. The people are dumb, not evil. They struggle to adapt and learn, but are willing to try and willing to accept new information with evidence.
We are not so lucky in reality.
> willing to accept new information with evidence.
Comancho saw the green shoot at the end and changed his mind.
That to me is what makes it utopian
To be a proper prophecy, Idiocracy is also missing the entire society ON TOP of the one portrayed, which has infinite amount of wealth and is probably isolating with servants on some island for decades already...
/s
People from the future will find Idiocracy and think it was some sort of instructional video on how to build a society.
A series that hits even closer is BrainDead, about an alien that gets into politicians' heads and polarizes them completely. It's very fun, and each episode recap at the beginning is done via lyrics of a folky song. Worth a watch and laugh. And cry.
Such a shame that it was cancelled!
I love Idiocracy, but I have come to sympathize with criticism that it's a bit pro-eugenics.
More than "a bit" - it's the entire premise of the film.
In Idiocracy, they didn't ask if they're in Idiocracy or not, so no.
I think all we need to close the gap is for Starbucks to become brothels.
In Idiocracy, president Camacho actually had the decent idea of trying listen to (somewhat) reasonable people with relevant abilities or skills rather than insisting that his failures are actually successes and just trying to force it until that worked. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
I'd like to bring your attention to the fact that society had deteriorated to the point of imminent famine before Camacho thought to try and listen to the smartest person around in an attempt to avert disaster. We are not quite there yet.
You haven’t internalized what “the fertilizer the world uses to grow food is missing, this spring, because of a needless war” actually means, have you?
Emphasis on the word "quite"
I'd argue that as soon as Camacho became aware of Not Sure's IQ test, he reached out. He didn't call on him before because he didn't know he existed (and/or he wasn't around), so he couldn't have helped prior.
If Trump spots a mentally capable person that is also stupid enough to eat his slop (or evil enough), he gets a job.
> 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 Epstein so the train could keep running.
Musk is evil. But he's clever, he knew to over pay for Twitter so he could use it to help swing elections and put himself in political power. He failed to get the response to his salute he expected, and knew enough to slink off into the background (or listen to his advisors telling him that). Amazingly he's still making money hand-over-fist from USA's regime. You'd think standing on a dais and thinking you're Hitler reincarnate would have been enough to make tax-payers rise up; clearly not.
They've absolutely destroyed USA, there is no Constitution now, there's not even lip service to war crime treaties. But there's a lot of intelligent people onboard that we underestimate at our peril.
> he knew to over pay for Twitter so he could use it to help swing elections and put himself in political power.
I currently believe this was accidental on his part, that he was manoeuvred into overpaying by the previous owners.
Nevertheless, I would still count Musk as "intelligent". Not as intelligent as his boosters like to claim (obviously, given the boosters treat him as a god amongst men), but intelligent.
> You'd think standing on a dais and thinking you're Hitler reincarnate would have been enough to make tax-payers rise up; clearly not.
Well, they literally did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Tesla_vandalism
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
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.
I've generally held that Camacho is actually a model political leader. Despite growing up in a society that apparently didn't value education, he managed to rise to the top. He made legitimate, albeit ineffective attempts to address issues the country's problems. When someone showed up who had better ideas he promptly delegated both authority and responsibility.
Because he was stupid, and not evil.
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.
and he hired the smartest of the smart
As a cultural mirror, it's pretty entertaining
A good movie makes you love the people more. Such moves are rare. "Idiocracy" or "Don't Look Up" are not like that. (Satire is a low genre in general.)
Idiocracy looks more and more utopian
I just want the Carl's Jr. vending machines.
I've seen a White Castle vending machine at the airport!
Boston or Fort Myers?
The satire we need today is how we sort it out.
I'm afraid they're immune to it.
I love this, thank you.
I don’t share any of the pessimism.
If you are at least tiny bit curious about looking beyond your IT bubble you know that the majority of population has always been dumb. It’s just biological fact of life.
For better or worse hundreds years ago they didn’t get any power. Today they got internet, got exposure and got power. Nothing is changing on a fundamental human nature or statistical level.
>majority of population has always been dumb
But idiocracy is not about that majority. It is about the thought leaders becoming dumb. Internet, instead of elevating the majority to the level of intellectuals, dragged the intellectuals to the level of the dumb majority.
If you mix poison in milk, milk becomes poison and not the other way. Pretty obvious in hindsight..
> It is about the thought leaders becoming dumb
As i said “they are getting power”. Through exposure, normalization, through all the dumb people getting vote rights (and voting guess how) etc.
Nothing is poisoned in tge human nature. It just plays out differently in this age.
I feel this won't necessarily be a popular take here but I really don't like things like Idiocracy. To me it comes across as deeply misanthropic, and kind of ignorant of what human nature actually looks like outside of our very specific cultural window. It's the same deep misanthropy that makes me really dislike most post-apocalyptic fiction, look at actual how actual humanity behaves in disaster conditions for five minutes and you'd see most of it is just misanthropic nonsense. We haven't let go of this Victorian idea all that separates man (particularly working-class man) and beast is a thin veneer of civilisation that can collapse at any minute. To me Idiocracy is a product of that mentality, it's a satire of Western consumer culture but this idea is not presented satirically, Idiocracy seems to believe this earnestly.
You can look at skeletons of prehistoric man and see bone healing which can only have occurred if the group decided to look after someone who couldn't work at that point. Humans are inherently stupid and selfish, but they're also inherently clever and cooperative; it's all so dependent on material and cultural context. It's true in my view that the general culture of late capitalism makes people inclined towards stupid and selfish ideas, but the idea this could actually do serious long-term damage to humanity's actual nature until everyone is a bumbling moron is absurd. Not just absurd either, but fundamentally insulting to all of us in my view.
Culture is often a product of material conditions, if Idiocracy's premise that it's possible to make humanity dumber on a lasting basis had the slightest merit then it would have happened already a hundred times over. Not least from the amount of lead we were pouring into the environment from the 1930s onwards! In reality if humanity did get dumber for cultural reasons, the material conditions associated with that culture would soon collapse and there'd be a new selection pressure to avoid the same kind of stupidity.
This epic comparison once again wins the internet for today, gentlesirs
Yes
We've had this discourse happen again and again over the last... Christ, 20 years fuck me.
At some point people have to start realizing "oh wait, maybe the current situation isn't unique and people have felt like this since forever".
I don't think so. Trump is exceptional compared to political tradition for a very long time, as evidenced currently by most developed world leaders shunning his illegal war campaign. In fact, who else can be comparable?
Today it's Trump, yesterday it was something else. Tomorrow it'll be a third thing.
what was yesterday
Hot take: if you think LLMs could be or will become AGI, have some more Brawndo
I mean, you could probably make these comparispns in 2006 when the movie came out. Perhaps it wasnt prophetic but rather just a sature of the general human condition
The one thing that still should give you hope is that the Idiocracy is reversible, unlike other things such as climate change or nuclear Armageddon.
You never go full Idiocracy.
(But never say never).
I don't think it mentions the hot new sport we have in our reality where two men run full pelt into each other. Yeah boi
Sumo?
Lol no that new sport in new Zealand and Australia. Its mental.
They might have been stupid but did they do anything truly bad/evil like the current US regime?
People keep saying this is the US as if anything about this regime is in any way legitimate, let alone abides by the Constitution, regardless of whether you like that or not. The founders of America tried to set up a system that would prevent the very thing that this thing still called America has become. Washington warned about foreign entanglements, now that’s basically all America is. It’s an extremely complicated story, but calling it America is basically “deadnaming” it. No founder of America would in any way agree with anything going on today and would be horrified of what it has become.
The repeated, systemic manner in which the Constitution is and long has been inherently violated in every possible way for many decades now, makes it self-evidently not a legitimate government; which would require having abide by the foundational supreme law that would confer actual legitimacy.
It’s like signing a contract and then not only not abiding by it, but committing all kinds of other offenses/crimes on top of that. The contract is clearly no longer valid.
Not only due to the duration of the violation of the Constitution, but the near impossibility of restoring and reversing all the violations at this point makes this thing we still call America something, but a legitimate USA based on the Constitution it is not, no matter how you look at it.
People may have a hard time accepting that because of various mental conditioning structures, but regardless of whether people are willing to accept that or not… this is simply not the USA. It’s basically identity theft, regardless of who the actual person behind the fake identity is.
Is Mexico still an Aztec empire? No. Would China still be China if Russia conquered China but still called it China? No. The closest analogue from history seems to be when Britain controlled India and still kept its name and used certain aspects of India’s culture for control to facilitate the exploitation.
Just because the hostile takeover by a kind of parasitic civilizational private equity firm through a leveraged buyout called the national debt has kept the branding of “USA”, does not mean it’s not been gutted.
Even the “right” is equally merely holding onto something that does not actually exist anymore, kind of like an old guy in an old steel mill that some private equity firm has taken over to financially plunder, vehemently defends the new management without understanding one bit of what’s going on, because all he has left after 50 years of working there is delusional hope.
I’m not sure what else to call it, but it sure is not the USA anymore than an ant infected with the “ zombie ant fungus”, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, is still an ant from the second it is infected with the spore that then spreads and controls the ant in ways that are not yet fully understood.
It is like any abusive or parasitic relationship, you may not realize you’re in for abuse and parasitism, but the abusers and the parasites sure know that about you.
Sorry, but no. It is the USA. But now without the veneer, this rot was there for a long time, it's just that people no longer feel any need to pretend they're respectable. Other places have similar problems, where I live, in NL, there are a lot of things that would not have passed in public in the 80's or the 90's that people routinely engage in now because it has been normalized. The only difference though is that it is public rather than said behind closed doors. No country is immune from this. The only way to fix it is to own it.
Idiocracy had the better US president.
When they found the smartest man in the US, they gave him a job to solve their problems.
Trump & Co. wouldn’t do that, quite the opposite
Most of these comparisons do not make sense. Dare I say--AI slop?
"Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot!"
Haha, so funny. Best joke ever.
am i the only one that sees the irony in this website being made entirely with AI? Especially as it's so simple.
I watched the eugenicist trailer and decided that it wasn’t for me. I guess that makes me an idiot.
(Really—there are far more salient points that promot that conclusion about myself.)
I hear people make this comparison all the time, and while it is facially a bit funny I guess, I really don't think it holds up in any serious way.
What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.
* The primary plot point of idiocracy is that poor (and thus, stupid - the film never explains why this correlation exists in that universe, though) people are the only ones who reproduce. For this reason, there is evolutionary pressure toward decreased intelligence. It's an odious premise on its face IMO, and certainly not what is happening in the USA: our birth rates are declining _because_ people are not economically stable.
* President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn. And he seems to be sincere and transparent. Trump's illusion runs precisely counter to this: he has every resource he can possibly need, but chooses to enrich himself and his friends instead of advancing the public interest.
Virtually every plot point of Idiocracy can be broken down this way. I see very, very little of the film universe that is consistent with our sociopolitical trajectory.
If you want a Mike Judge film that shines light on uncomfortable truths about 21st-century America, the obvious choice is Office Space.
This feels like nitpicking. Idiocracy was never supposed to be accurate; the important part is how it seems less ridiculous as time goes on.
The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time. The source of this is irrelevant. In reality, it turned out that the source of the stupidity was an increasingly poor education system, increasing inequality, and carefully designed injection of addictive technologies and medicines into the general populace.
Where idiocracy really failed in its predictions was in the development of AI, as that appears to increasingly substitute for lack of common understanding.
Also all of this only really holds for the US and maybe the UK.
> The primary point of idiocracy was to imagine a world where people were acting in increasingly stupid ways over time.
...and in doing so, it depicts a world that is not at all reminiscent of the one in which we live.
The white house is not occupied by idiots, but by thieves and murders and sexual predators. The American landscape is not a Brawndo-dustbowl, but a highly profitable, productive, and delicious-but-toxic bounty of subsidized factory farms, stemming not from a misunderstanding of botany, but a misapplication of that understanding.
The same is true of the medical industry, the justice system - literally every institution portrayed in the entire film, with the possible exception of waste disposal / the trash avalanche.
> What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.
The opposite direction?
Yes, the opposite direction. I pointed out two examples, but I think you can watch the film front to back and find them in every scene. The doctor, lawyer, judge, the storyline about the plants/electrolytes (which has a big opportunity to point to greed and factory farming and utterly whiffs), the Brawndo/unemployment subplot, the intensity of public interest in civic affairs - literally every major plot point runs in the opposite direction of today's realities.
Seems to me like two different paths to the same end. One stupid, the other more evil or at least rapacious, but the destination is ultimately the same.
Thanks for that. Good to see a well reasoned argument and another HN nod for Office Space you made me watch the trailer!
It's not about Trump, but society as a whole. The president was a symptom, as is Trump.
> It's an odious premise on its face IMO
It's estimated that 1/3 of your intelligence is hereditary. A modern problem is that classes separate more from each other than before: white collar doesn't really mingle with blue collar, ethnic boundaries galore, etc. Before, people were educated and put on the social ladder according to birth. That made that a lot of smart people stayed in their community. Nowadays, they tend to move away. That means there's a development towards stratification of intelligence. Add LLMs to education, and we're on the fast track.
> President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn.
Camacho does so because he literally has no other option, there is an imminent famine he has to deal with. If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump, then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
> If he was living in an era of abundance like Trump,
That's exactly the point: the world of the film is, in every way that matters, the opposite of the reality in which we live. So how are these strained comparisons useful?
> then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.
Obviously we can't know, because the universe of Idiocracy is on rails toward stupidity and poverty, and never even considers greed and abundance as features of its janky political lens. In the first few minutes of the film, it establishes that poor, stupid people are to blame for every societal ill, and then it depicts a future in which no character ever even grapples with any other antagonist than the poverty and stupidity of his ancestors.
Is that today's world?! For who? Are the poor people in Iran and Gaza and Yemen who are dealing with explosives raining down on them (rather than Brawndo) stupid? Do you think their fate is attributable to the proclivity of previous generations to breed in inverse proportion to their material wealth?
It's just such an asinine premise it's hard to even understand what would qualify as a sound comparison, but it's certainly not any of those listed on this website.
For thousands of years people were unsure if they’d have food the next day and still had a lot of kids. This happens today in the poorest parts of the world.
People are not having kids because they don’t want them. Those that can use birth control and failing that access abortion, etc.
People stopped having kids precisely the moment they had the option to.
Birth rates are declining only among people who are smart enough to know and manage personal finances.
is it just me learning that donald trump is a wwe hall of famer??!
Look at who the Secretary of Education is in the US.
I think you could have done this in the 1980s and 1990s and found a lot of fits: MTV, reality shows, daytime TV, junk food everywhere, pop music becoming increasingly trite and simple, newspapers and commentary declining toward grade school level vocabulary.
In the 50s you would have had suburban conformity and doctors recommending cigarettes. In the 60s you had people trying to become enlightened by taking drugs and listening to con men claiming to be Eastern gurus. In the 70s you had dumb new age cults and a lot of very bad movies and ugly fashion.
Mass media and any culture dominated by mass media tends to race to the bottom. There are many forces that drive it. Dumb culture is loud and viral. Lies and bullshit cost zero to produce and are expensive to debunk. Quality takes time and cost to make and drowns in quantity.
Attempts to frantically fight these forces normally turn into their own dystopias, usually taking the form of authoritarian nightmares or moralistic crusades. These often end up looking deeply stupid in retrospect too.
Yet we are still here. So somehow quality finds a way.
As you look back in time things look less dumb because of survivorship bias. The dumb shit is forgotten.
Our age will be remembered as when we taught the sand to think, made rockets that land vertically, returned to the Moon, and developed quantum computers.
Nobody will remember that we used AI to make TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG TUNG SAHUR, that the guy with the rocket company acted like a thirteen year old 4chan edgelord, or that our president during the return to the moon couldn’t speak complete sentences.
Then maybe we need to kill mass media once and for all. Keep the global communication network, but let it be all small-scale communities.
You can do that yourself. Turn off mass media. I’ve done that almost entirely.
The answer is to be your own survivorship bias. Go dig and find good stuff.
That's fine, if we only care about ourselves. I guess the harder part is convincing everyone else to unplug from mass media and not raise their kids on it.
Impossible without totalitarianism, which is its own somewhat different form of stupid.
Also for parents the game is keeping kids away from it, which is time consuming, and parents are often overworked and don’t have that time.
Nah, Idiocracy wasn’t so blatantly evil as what the Americans are now
Trump isn’t just a bumbling fool. He is a vicious evil one
All is now about Trump - watch this thread devolve...
Eh. While I do believe that most people are really stupid and this is the core problem with democracy, this website is too sensational. Example:
> Medical errors are the 3rd leading cause of death in the US.
Is this supposed to be a bad thing? Imagine:
1. Medieval times -> literally zero deaths attributed to medical errors because there's no medical practice in the first place
2. We can cure all diseases and eliminated all traffic accidents using autonomous cars -> obviously 90% of deaths will be medical errors because that's literally the only thing you can realistically die from
I can't take this seriously - blaming Trump but not Joe Biden, though latter had obvious symptoms of cognitive decline AND many "smart" people claimed otherwise. If you are literally tricked to doubt your own eyes, your natural judgements and being constantly gaslighted to think otherwise - then this should be called out as well. If this does not fullfil the criteria for "Idiocracy", then nothing does.
The thing about Biden was that the bureaucracy was still intact, so most government functionality carried on just fine regardless what Biden himself was doing. Trump gutted the bureaucracy in favor of autocracy, replacing the domain experts with sycophantic yes-men. So when Biden got a terrible idea that would unquestionably harm the country, the response would have been something like "We'll look into that" or even an outright "no". Whereas when Trump gets a terrible idea (which lets be honest is a few times a week), the only answer is "yes sir".
If you're comparing dementia styles, Biden was effectively the type that is happy to sit on the couch and stare off into space while his family does things around him. Trump is the combative kind that is always trying to find the keys to the car to drive away and assert his own independence, and violently rejects help and concern.
As for your larger comment, you're probably closer to right in that bureaucratic authoritarians were much more like Idiocracy. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho had better leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism than the piece of pig shit currently staining our White House could ever hope for. He also didn't rape trafficked underage girls or pardon Upgrayedd for a bribe. The movie makes me long for simpler times.
I don't know what you are talking about. I said - "Biden had problems unrightfully covered up" - and obviously we can't agree on that. So this is Idiocracy already - independent of Trump. If you are unable to speak truth independent of your own attitudes, wishes, ideas, etc. - that's idiocracy.
It's called adding context to keep the directionality correct. "Biden had problems unrightfully covered up" - I do agree with that.
But one of the pillars of Grumpism/destructionism is taking valid factual criticisms, but presenting them in a way that leads to a conclusion of normalization/nihilism/etc. For example, yes from when it was made Idiocracy has been a satire of the very real anti-intellectualism that has been everpresent in American society. But that doesn't justify dismissing its application to the current situation, as you started off your original comment doing.
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.
It's not a "bad manner", but rather a question of what larger point a criticism is ultimately making.
Keep on at it if you're fine effectively supporting the current idiots. But don't be surprised when people call you out for it.
I present HTTP://TrumpCamacho.com without further comment.
Clickable link: https://trumpcamacho.com
That didn't end well, unfortunately.
The Idiotic Republic of America. There is no god but the Dollar.
Let's not forget our worship of Death
Aren't you all proud that anywhere in the world you go there is a fridge with coca cola, so it's a sound and solid investment? Smart people of HN and reddit?
I wonder how long that will last? Can they weather the storm of anti-USA sentiment?
Have they changed their advertising to un-hitch from being a part of the "American Dream"?
You forgot of McDonalds.
Why do Redditors and tech people love comparing things to this weird, pro-eugenics movie so much?
This is just silly to portray idiocracy as a prediction of the future.
Yes the current president of America is a movie actor, this was not idiocracy predicting the future, Ronald Reagan was a movie actor president before idiocracy came out.
The movie satirised what was already happening, there is nothing special about nowadays.
In the sense of the word "prediction", it is certainly one. It was forecasting a future by painting a dotted line from the data they had, and they made a satire out of it.
They took Reagan being an actor and on their satirical dotted line they saw a president being a Wrestler. So not a 100% prediction but not that far off from a reality-show personality with "WWE experience" I'd say.
> there is nothing special about nowadays.
Nothing special? A sitting US President posted the following on Easter Sunday.
> Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP
There was a point in time when Trump would have been instantly impeached or sent to a hospital for observation for making that post. Today? It will fall out of the news cycle the next time he says something insane.
Can you imagine what past presidents would have typed if twitter existed 100 years ago? we had 2 world wars roughly that time, trump is only insane by modern standards, but modern time is if anything unusually sane, not unusually stupid, we are not living in the most special time.
As I said, if a previous President started saying things like "Praised be to Allah!" on Easter Sunday, they would have been removed from office instantly. We are watching one of the most immoral people on the planet have a full-on mental breakdown. And Trump supporters don't care.
I can remember what past presidents Tweeted, and it was civil. Were you born yesterday?
tweeted 100 years ago?
What is so special about tweets as though we don't have copious other writings to reference?
Tweets are low effort and short, you can even do it while taking a dump, there is a lot more friction to being unhinged when you are writing a book or taking an interview, for reference trumps most unhinged stuff is tweets, not interviews and not books. Not all forms of writing are equal.
Trump's tweets are low effort. Just like most of his rally speeches, which are also unhinged. Other presidents, especially e.g. FDR, put effort into all of their communications. Including speeches and, when available, tweets.
There are multiple years of archives of presidential tweets and Trump's stand out, and not in a good way.
I cant reply to jacquesm for some reason, cap on reply chain length maybe? anyway
>There are multiple years of archives of presidential tweets and Trump's stand out, and not in a good way.
When I refer to modern times I mean multiple dozens of years, not mere "multiple years", I already stated these times are unusually sane by historical standards.
Not being able to reply is to stop people coming here, making new accounts and then spouting lots of unhelpful messages, messages intended to downplay insane fascists evil portents of their war crimes, say.
Maybe the world was fed up with puppets who are controlled by PR agencies so that they (at least in US) welcomed someone who just speaks to them without middlemen...
It isn't really the fact that the president is a movie actor that's damning there. It's the fact that the president uses wrestling catch phrases and behavior (Trump was even in WWE). Back when Idiocracy came out, the very idea of President Camacho seemed absurd. Nobody would bat an eye at that anymore.
Yes, the movie was a satire and took the current observations to their logical extreme. The point is that we're pretty darn close to the extreme right now.
Intelligence is watching Idiocracy and identifying with it profoundly when you're younger.
Wisdom is looking back at how much you liked Idiocracy and cringing at the fact that you gleefully and uncritically swallowed a eugenics tract.
Oops!