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[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/51233/51233-h/51233-h.htm
(not to say that I agree with the premise of the claim, but I do think that we should be properly crediting our cultural references).
Also, smart people are often less likely to vote when both options seem bad, whereas people driven by propaganda have no such hesitation and will turn out in droves—a problem Bertrand Russell highlighted quite clearly [1].
[1]: https://economicsociology.org/2023/11/30/in-the-modern-world...
jdross: This is important context you strategically neglected to mention. You previously wrote:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42999628
>These are people I personally know working “at DOGE” (appointed in departments, but under DOGE umbrella)
You defended DOGE based on what those friends told you and contrasted their account with:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42993746
>Versus whatever the media is reporting
You have said those particular friends were not working on USAID, and I am not claiming they personally made those cuts. But you publicly defended the DOGE operation and discounted reporting about it based on your personal access to its operatives.
So this is not a disinterested anthropological observation based on having lived in four states. Invoking Texas as evidence of your cultural breadth does not make the aggressively racist and coercive policies enacted by its government and repeatedly endorsed by its voters morally neutral "different values".
You are defending your own personal and professional network and its political-religious program-cum-pogrom: Project 2025.
Your profile says:
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jdross
>I take the side of people who build.
DOGE dismantled USAID programs whose loss is projected to cause 14 million preventable deaths, including 4.5 million children under five. Meanwhile, Trump demolished the historic East Wing to build his ballroom and is planning a 250-foot triumphal arch which he says honors "Me".
What, precisely, are the "radically different values" that make any of that defensible?
doesn't that help everyone?
what am I missing?
To be fair, it was just a funny and easy to explain introduction to the movie's premise. If it was made today it may have had a montage of people outsourcing their thinking skills to AI or something along these lines.
They are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence
There are some confounding factors, like education and income also affecting fertility, and correlated with most measures of intelligence, but that doesn't actually affect the diagnosis - regardless of if intelligence directly lowers fertility, or if the effect is mediated by e.g. education, the net effect is that smarter people have fewer children (in our current environment).
This lets Americans off the hook far too easily. Trump won an absolute majority this time, and the GOP won the house too. For the Senate you will have to do your own research because I’m on mobile, but last time I checked the actual effect (estimated) on Senate outcomes is very modest.
They are stupid.
Now is where we are going atm perfect? No. But at least its a plan. A self repairing asbestos orphanage for retarded firestarters which allows for progress at a realistic pacr is the way forward. Everything else is retardation whorship, in booms and busts, where every "unforseeable" regression eats a little something from civilization. If you couldnt predict trump in the 2000s, your whole model of humanity is wrong and flawed, and shouldn't be anywhere near where futures are planned.
Personally I think the USA's problems go much deeper than some vague sense that rich people are the source of all problems. Compared the whole US economy, they're a drop in the bucket, and they're not the reason that American institutions are dysfunctional; those dysfunctions were present long before Trump took power and Google got rich.
My opinion is that progressive populists don't know how to fix our problems, let alone have they even come close to identifying them, so they just focus on everything as "us vs the elites." You can see this simply by observing that the actual places that are progressive controlled - major blue cities - are the most dysfunctional places in the country. The solution? Wealth taxes that will cover a tiny percent of expenditures for a year or two tops, and no mention of why things are so expensive and slow in the first place, which has almost nothing to do with those rich guys, and have a lot more to do with dumb bureaucratic requirements; irrational procurement processes; capture from groups that sometimes are tied to wealthy interests but also come from the people like unions, neighborhood and environmental organizations; watering down every project by lacking focus on what they're actually meant to solve; procedural issues that allow cynical political actors to selectively interpret and enforce laws; and so on.
I'm sympathetic to the feeling of unfairness, but I want actual solutions, most of which are too boring for the populists on either side to stay focused on.
The pipeline is be conservative -> realize conservatives are morons -> "both sides are bad"
All of this is preventable if only people voted Dem in 2024, but apparently voting against a convicted felon is too much to ask.
The society depicted in Idiocracy is the way it is by choice that turns into policy. I highly doubt Mike Judge wants to start culling the population of undesirable traits like birth defects, intellectual disablities, learning disabilities, etc.
And so much of it is so obviously absurd. Invokes everything from Gilliam's Brazil to Kids In The Hall.
As others have said, it's a reflection of what we currently are, magnified. Many aspects of which are not as implausible as they once were. That's where the continued buzz it gets comes from, I think.
I do think the eugenics stuff would be avoided if it were to be made today. If that turns out to be how Mike Judge actually thinks, well, I'd be very disappointed and would have to eat some words.
A trip to Buc-ee's would've been great inspo also
The Simpsons "predicted" a Trump Presidency. Not because Matt Groening is the Kwisatz Haderach but simply because our society was already idiotic, so it was a natural extension of that idiocy. The US elected a B-movie (Bedtime for Bonzo) actor in 1980, so there was certainly precedent to the President.
"We predicted this terrible state we're in..., no, we've always been like this."
I mean, who wrote this, and in what state of stupor? Whoever it is, forgot to add the "knuckle-dragging" epithet to make it complete.
It’s shitty, and using the movie as a canard for that old and tired view is shitty as well.
What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities.
You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar.
If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate."
I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.
How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?