Discussion

yen223: "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

8-prime: 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.

beatthatflight: Love it. Although I'm not sure which is the darkest timeline given https://www.howclosetoblackmirror.com/

CodeCompost: The Idiotic Republic of America. There is no god but the Dollar.

einpoklum: 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.

Juliate: Because he was stupid, and not evil.

Juliate: The satire we need today is how we sort it out.

clejack: 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.

roysting: 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.

pezezin: Isn't it depressing that San Junipero, arguably the only happy episode, has the lowest progress score?

kombookcha: 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.

dudefeliciano: Yes he was. Or maybe he was a Nick Landian AI from the future facilitating its own creation

Hikikomori: They might have been stupid but did they do anything truly bad/evil like the current US regime?

Hikikomori: I'm afraid they're immune to it.

rkomorn: Why would he water plants with Coke? Coke doesn't have electrolytes, and that's what plants crave.

bayindirh: 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.

roysting: 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.

i_love_retros: 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

llbbdd: This epic comparison once again wins the internet for today, gentlesirs

gorbachev: It's a documentary

input_sh: Not quite sure "Ow My Balls" / "Jackass" should count, the Jackass franchise is older than Idiocracy and was most likely an inspiration for that bit.

mrweasel: There's a scene where Rita, in the future, tries to call Upgraydd, but there's 9726 listings for people called Upgraydd at that point.

bpavuk: 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.

froggiemeow: 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.

LatencyKills: > 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

jMyles: 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.

armada651: > 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.

simian1983: I present HTTP://TrumpCamacho.com without further comment.

no-name-here: Clickable link: https://trumpcamacho.com

A_D_E_P_T: > 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?

LightBug1: You never go full Idiocracy.(But never say never).

axegon_: Only 78%? That can't be right.

A_D_E_P_T: I think it hasn't been updated in a while. Seems to me that the past few days alone would take us to 90%+.

froggiemeow: 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.

jMyles: > 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.

armada651: 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.

gilrain: 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?

api: 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.The Internet in those days looked like an anti-idiocy revolt. The web had silliness but overall it was much smarter.That lasted maybe a decade at most. Honestly by 2005 the dumb meme culture and troll culture was taking over the net already.Mass media and any culture dominated by mass media tends to race to the bottom. There are many forces that drive it. One is that dumb triggering or cheap humor content tends to be the easiest way to grab attention. Another is that people don’t want to pay for media and media wants to maximize profit, creating a two sided squeeze, and that kind of content is extremely cheap.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.Yet we are still here. So somehow quality finds a way.

TiredOfLife: Birth rates are declining only among people who are smart enough to know and manage personal finances.

prerok: 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.

abirch: At least you have AI to fill out those TPS reports.

delis-thumbs-7e: 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.

jMyles: 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.

A_D_E_P_T: 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.

michaelermer: And he even missed crocs... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmSkqybtwBk

pluc: 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.

gaigalas: Demolition Man is the darkest timeline.

abhikul0: More at https://www.reddit.com/r/tragedeigh/

jbgt: 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.

hodgehog11: 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.

iso1631: Idiocracy looks more and more utopian

cbm-vic-20: 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

keybored: I watched the eugenicist trailer and decided that it wasn’t for me. I guess that makes me an idiot.[1]I’ll stick to King of the Hill. Thanks.[1]: Really—there are far more salient points that promot that conclusion about myself.

rickdeckard: 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 I'd say.

hodgehog11: 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.

jMyles: > 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.

Lio: 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.

freedomben: That was my first thought too. The site is overall excellent, but that one was a pretty clear circular reasoning.

agys: Such a shame that it was cancelled!

AndroTux: I saw a TikTok of someone recommending to put cut roses in Sprite instead of water. Apparently it keeps them fresh much longer.

gilrain: I can remember what past presidents Tweeted, and it was civil. Were you born yesterday?

DontchaKnowit: 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

cheschire: Mike Judge definitely has an ability to hit the comedy nail on the reality head. That’s for sure.

blamestross: 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.

rickdeckard: 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

xtiansimon: 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.

mentos: The music for that episode still takes me galaxies/dimensions awayhttps://youtu.be/IYpO3EbvMK4?si=n70N7hi8v29NiZvr

netcan: 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.

davemp: 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.

bsenftner: 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.

thousand_nights: 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.

LatencyKills: 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.

froggiemeow: tweeted 100 years ago?

sidewndr46: I'm in the same category. The film is so awfully written and acted it isn't something that can be watched.

seydor: "Brought to you by Carl's Jr. They pay me every time i say it"vs"Mysterious trading patterns follow Trump into war"

anonymars: Fair point, but why jump to genetics instead of culture (upbringing)?

marxisttemp: Because the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike

throwaway27448: 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.

marxisttemp: Why do Redditors and tech people love comparing things to this weird, pro-eugenics movie so much?

dintech: I love this, thank you.

sidewndr46: I guess that explains the lack of promotion around this film?

lionkor: 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.

anonymars: What is so special about tweets as though we don't have copious other writings to reference?

roysting: 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.

darkwater: That didn't end well, unfortunately.

tgv: 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 IMOIt'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.

jacquesm: 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.

froggiemeow: 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.

Froztnova: 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!

deadbabe: 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.

alpineman: You're assuming we started at zero, we didn't (unfortunately)

nemo44x: 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.

deadbabe: 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.

progbits: I actually think it's ripe for an extra season because the stuff that happened in last few years is comedy goldmine.

mwcampbell: 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.

rickdeckard: But does it have e-lec-tro-lytes? That's what plants crave, you know.

fifilura: Isn't this the point the OP was trying to make?

m_mueller: so you want us to reed furst? wat ar u dumb?

xattt: 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.

AllegedAlec: 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".

spacebacon: [delayed]

m_mueller: imagine how it would hit today. I'd guess a vast majority would feel insulted by it...

FlufferTheGreat: How many felt insulted by Don't Look Up--I'm guessing that Venn is a circle.

jfengel: 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.

ndneighbor: 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.)

everdrive: Not claiming that Idiocracy is accurate, however IQ scores have been declining. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/search/research-news/3283/

Rygian: Is there any strong relationship between IQ scores and innate intelligence, as opposed to mental agility gained through education?

coldtea: 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.

ben_w: After a while of going up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effectWhile 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.

froggiemeow: 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.

api: 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.

mwcampbell: 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.

jacquesm: Why stop at eugenics? Spoil your environment enough and it will definitely have an effect on the individuals in that environment.

FlufferTheGreat: Every scrotum on this forum has microplastics and phthalates in them, things shown to have effects on the endocrine and reproductive systems.

permalac: 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

HexPhantom: As a cultural mirror, it's pretty entertaining

unleaded: am i the only one that sees the irony in this website being made entirely with AI? Especially as it's so simple.

bdashdash: 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.

coldtea: The outrageous "impossible/sarcastic" Onion stories from decades ago are hardly fiction these days.

actionfromafar: And the President in Idiocracy, for all his faults, actually wants to do the right thing, once he has the facts.

amalcon: 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.

MSFT_Edging: Verhoeven makes some extremely heavy handed satire.A decent litmus test is whether someone understands that the Starship Troopers movie is satire or not.

fainpul: There is no eugenics angle in Idiocracy. Nobody tries to achieve some "genetic ideal" by manipulating people. It's just a process that happens in the movie: people with low education have more children than people with high education. Which is exactly what we can observe in the real world as well.

seydor: 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?

mvdwoord: 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.

mike_hearn: 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

pbhjpbhj: 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

coldtea: >but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.Or centralized SOTA LLMs.

aristofun: 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.

qsera: >majority of population has always been dumbBut 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..

tovej: 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.

coldtea: Nazis also thought smoking is bad. The problem is their applied genocidal eugenics. Not whether they thought IQ is hereditary.

lelanthran: 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.

lifestyleguru: 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?

hulitu: You forgot of McDonalds.

throwaway173738: 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.

justin66: [delayed]

MidnightRider39: Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at best

lelanthran: > Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence, it’s very shaky science at bestWhat do you propose as a replacement metric to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?

MidnightRider39: No idea. Why do we need to determine if humans are getting dumber or not?

BoxFour: 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.

fuglede_: 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

kombookcha: 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.

coldtea: >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?

altmanaltman: 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 isAlso 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?

names_are_hard: [delayed]

jfengel: 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.

wombat-man: 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.

singpolyma3: The premise of the movie is that smart people stop having kids and dumb people have lots. It's "reverse eugenics"

spaceman_2020: Nah, Idiocracy wasn’t so blatantly evil as what the Americans are nowTrump isn’t just a bumbling fool. He is a vicious evil one

lapcat: I suspect it depends on how hopeful or hopeless you feel about the world.If you already believe that humanity is doomed to self-destruction, then there's nothing left to do but make fun of it and laugh, enjoy the ride to hell. George Carlin is a perfect example of this, rooting for the disasters.

singpolyma3: In general the methodology for IQ is highly questionable

jacquesm: > 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...

pbhjpbhj: 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.

lelanthran: Are you talking about the one called "The Machine Stops", published like a hundred years ago?

actionfromafar: That story is incredible, with insights into what technology would mean.

soblemprolver: 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.

coldtea: >It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humansSo 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 trueNo, 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?

Esophagus4: 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.

whalesalad: You've just described MAGA in a nutshell.

arionhardison: 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 kids4. 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 itObviously 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

afavour: 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 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.

dspillett: > 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!

dist-epoch: > 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 141vs:> Clevon: IQ 84https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA

qsera: 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?"

bko: 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...

ndsipa_pomu: 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.

azangru: Have they edited stuff out because of the audience reaction? Do you own an unedited copy?

bsenftner: 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.

throwawy0353: There are studies where 93% of drivers believe they are better than average drivers...

anal_reactor: 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 place2. 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

croes: 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

BLKNSLVR: The Running Man, with Arnie, was released in 1987 as well as Robocop.

21asdffdsa12: 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.

Intermernet: 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.

lpcvoid: Because it would explain what's happening in the world after 2019.

flanked-evergl: "Everyone who disagrees with me is an idiot!"Haha, so funny. Best joke ever.

pbhjpbhj: 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.

dspillett: 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.

unsupp0rted: I’m sure they did demand that

api: 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.

numitus: 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.

phtrivier: 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/

qsera: 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...

HexPhantom: The tricky part is that once everything becomes "obviously absurd,"it gets harder to separate signal from noise

bsenftner: 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.

jacquesm: > 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.

cucumber3732842: Eh. I think it's just your typical Hollywood filter bubble. They tinged it with too much ivory tower crap. 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 fancy themselves smarter than that.That said I think it's a great movie and they struck a good balance.

semiquaver: Unless you are 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.

FrustratedMonky: 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 1992Was 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"Snow Crash Chapter 39 (Hiro's observation as he drives along the Alaska Highway)"

RajT88: 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.

Gigachad: I was never in a startup and I found the show incredibly stressful to watch.

Intermernet: 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.

shoxidizer: > 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".

reliabilityguy: > Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligenceYou may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.

orwin: 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).

ordu: 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.

coldtea: Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.

Frieren: > 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.

ndsipa_pomu: 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.

btreecat: I like money

benterix: > I like moneyI'm sorry, I might be a bit stupid but I haven't understood your comment.

asah: DLU captured the decisions better, but Idiocracy explained how we got there.

vintermann: 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.

scp3125: You intentionally or unintentionally described the plot of Wall-E

oe: 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.

UncleMeat: 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.

pixl97: 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?

babycheetahbite: Read through this comment section to get a glimpse.

singpolyma3: Yes but this is not the genetic argument this is a "school system sucks" argument

cryptonym: 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.

input_sh: 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.

EternalFury: 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.

cyjackx: 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

justin66: I bet. Holy hell…

dostick: 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.

catapart: > "[...]but don't put activism over comedy."lol. yeah, carlin and bruce can go fuck themselves, I guess. hilariously unserious take, bruh.

speedster217: 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.

mike_hearn: 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.

soared: The apprentice is literally reality tv competition though.

Waterluvian: 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.

Goronmon: 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.

bko: 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.

JKCalhoun: Yeah, pretty sure it's not expected to be funny. If at all, it has entered absurdist territory.

j-kent: Same goes with Starship Troopers - Clearly biting satire, but at the time was considered to be a dumb action movie by most.

red-iron-pine: 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.

ern_ave: > Maybe if there was work done to stop the shootingsIt'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.

bko: 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 typeHandguns: ~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 digitshttps://www.criminalattorneycolumbus.com/which-weapons-are-m...

VectorVault: Most politics now smacks of satire and performative outrage. "I can solve the problems I created with more of someone else's money..."

breakyerself: I love Idiocracy, but I have come to sympathize with criticism that it's a bit pro-eugenics.

relativeadv: 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."

spiderfarmer: And they're mostly correct.

malfist: 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.

t1234s: People from the future will find Idiocracy and think it was some sort of instructional video on how to build a society.

throw0101d: > The 'Maga' movement existed before Trump. This is 1992Anti-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...

jkestner: 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...

VectorVault: Snow Crash came to mind, but so did several other Neal Stephenson books!

bko: 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 Societybut instead you get non joke headlines like:> ICE Agents Hurl Pregnant Immigrant Over Mexican Border To Prevent Birth On U.S. SoilIt's just cringe.

youarecringe: 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.

cooper_ganglia: "Public education" is exactly the thing that will guarantee Idiocracy, that was practically the whole point of the movie

pixl97: 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?

bena: 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.

ndsipa_pomu: > 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.

FrustratedMonky: 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.

ern_ave: 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...

yodsanklai: It's primarily a movie about fascism and propaganda. The fact that most viewers missed it is actually concerning.

BoxOfRain: 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.

HarHarVeryFunny: There's obviously some truth to the premis, but no need to take it any more seriously than Beavis and Butthead.

JKCalhoun: "…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.

zetanor: Military-style ARPANET designed primarily for nuclear warfare?

ndsipa_pomu: I agree. RoboCop also belongs to the not-obvious-to-some-satire club.

GJim: In the words of Barry Humphries:If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up.

IAmBroom: That is... so very nearly a sentence.

lelanthran: > 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.

bko: They were funny. Do you see the difference?

catapart: 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.

bko: It's amazing how much leftist discourse is just them pretending not to understand things, thus making discourse impossible.

catapart: it's amazing how much asking someone to actually explain what they are trying to imply will completely shut them up. Thanks for playing! I hope your next one is so pithy that I'll rue the day I spoke against you. fingers crossed

econ: 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.

cestith: If you think watching Idiocracy feels too on point for current events, try giving a (re)watch to The Hunger Games movies, too.

lelanthran: > 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.

input_sh: Come on, use your brain a little: does that scene imply that we should do something to tilt the scales in the opposite direction? Is that implication not a clear sign of someone clearly advocating in favour of eugenics (whether intentionally or 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.

afavour: 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.

MisterTea: > “Stupid people vote for stupid guy” is exactly the kind of analysis I’m critical of Idiocracy for.Critical of what exactly?

HardwareLust: I just want the Carl's Jr. vending machines.

bakies: I've seen a White Castle vending machine at the airport!

justin66: [delayed]

catapart: 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.

whamlastxmas: 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 distrustingEven 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

ern_ave: > I would think that the right to life would take precedenceWell, 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 movementThat'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 ownershipAnd 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.

lelanthran: > 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?

tremon: 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".

t-3: 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.

cwillu: The joke will continue until the populace finally gets it.

FinnKuhn: It's a quote from the movie.

fifilura: Ok, TIL :)

pixl97: 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.

dgroshev: "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".

ern_ave: > "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.

dgroshev: 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".

justin66: Which is part of why the reuse of the headline still works as grim comedy.

Froztnova: 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.

anonymars: Did the movie ever say anything about genetics or IQ?

Froztnova: 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.

shinjitsu: 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.

justin66: [delayed]

pluc: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

AllegedAlec: Today it's Trump, yesterday it was something else. Tomorrow it'll be a third thing.

seydor: what was yesterday

justin66: [delayed]

drcongo: Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades

ModernMech: 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.

Juliate: 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.

ern_ave: > you ignored everything else that I saidWell, 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!"