Everytime this movie comes up, droves of people mention how they get it, while others don't. It's becoming a trope in 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.
“Stupid people vote for stupid guy” is exactly the kind of analysis I’m critical of Idiocracy for.
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.
Critical of what exactly?
People choose policies that will actively harm themselves and their family/friends:
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)
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
The fact that it's been repeated so often kind of makes it a tragedy at this point.
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 it’s useful to know, that all Onion jokes start with the headline, and the rest of the article is sometimes bit of filler.
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.
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.
lol. yeah, carlin and bruce can go fuck themselves, I guess. hilariously unserious take, bruh.
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.
Do you see the difference?
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 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.
Who are you to declare what satire and and cannot criticize?
Some want to ban all guns outright, to which some rightly object "well the criminals don't follow the law" which is followed by "it will make it harder to find guns" which is followed by countless examples where guns are completely banned and the criminals still seem to end up with guns, ak-47s, etc.
Some want to arm teachers, have armed security guards, which is followed up with the impact to the children, the personal objections of teachers, union dynamics and lawyers, the fact that a lot of LEO's are just quite frankly bad shots and don't train all that much, and the cowardice that we have unfortunately seen in the case of Uvalde, so that's no silver bullet either (no pun intended).
And then all of that is bound up in a completely nonfunctional political system (nonfunctional in the sense that we have basically seemed to have given up on solving foundational problems like homelessness, affordability, injustice, etc), in lieu of just talking points on red/blue meat issues, and theres almost no political capital or will.
So as you can see, despite there being jokes about it, its actually much more nuanced and complex.
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.
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...
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.
What is the school shooting by weapon type? The 'general' mass shooting by weapon type?
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.
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".
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 couldn't care less about "winning".
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.
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.
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.
Wild.
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".
If you live in a fantasy land, anything can happen.
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...
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...
I have a feeling these people are the same as the ones you're talking about.
If you have to explain satire to someone, you might as well give up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
like that?
"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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 black?
What gene makes someone native American?
What do you propose as a replacement metric 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.
What do you think intelligence actually is? What effects do you think it has when it goes up or down in mass?
You may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.
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).
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.
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.
Besides the declining groups have the same education with the earlier ones.
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?
What do you propose as a replacement?
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?
> 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.
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.
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
Or centralized SOTA LLMs.
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.
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!
You are misremembering; they had a scene of an intelligence test that had adults matching shapes (stars -. tars, squares -> squares) and getting it wrong.
[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.
They literally show IQ numbers in that scene.
> Trevor: IQ 138, Carol: IQ 141
vs:
> Clevon: IQ 84
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.
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.
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.
Why? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?
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.
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"?
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 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!
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?
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?
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.
> 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!"
It felt way 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.
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
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?
Like the bit where the crazy VC tells them that the last thing they need is revenue.
"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.
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 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.
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.
A decent litmus test is whether someone understands that the Starship Troopers movie is satire or not.
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.
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.
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.
Upgraydd was from our time wasn't he
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.
His nephew 'watered' their plants with Coke. Not quite Mountain Dew, but also not far off.
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.
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.
Without also making us famous or taking care of our daily needs.
I don't know of anyone else changing everything to gold by touch.
He deserves credit fot South Park too if only by osmosis.
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
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.
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.
We are not so lucky in reality.
Comancho saw the green shoot at the end and changed his mind.
That to me is what makes it utopian
/s
- "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.
Haha, so funny. Best joke ever.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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".
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...
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.
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
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
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.
(Really—there are far more salient points that promot that conclusion about myself.)
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.
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.
...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.
The opposite direction?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
Trump isn’t just a bumbling fool. He is a vicious evil one
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.
The answer is to be your own survivorship bias. Go dig and find good stuff.
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.
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.
Have they changed their advertising to un-hitch from being a part of the "American Dream"?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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!
You may disagree with what this film shows, but the results of the last US election speak for themselves."