As a few have already said in here, President Camacho saw a problem and actively tried to find the smartest person on the planet to fix the problem.
We’re a couple of years past comparing our current situation to Idiocracy. That ship has already sailed. We’re so fucked that the basic premise of Idiocracy appears quaint at this point.
“Haha people got stupider” is so much better than “people got stupider and are filled with hate, malice, greed, and selfishness”
Not only Idiocracy, but Silicon Valley gives perfect insight into our train wreck of a tech industry and the type of personalities that sink to the top in it.
Idiocracy,
They will vote maga again,
They abuse children
Stupid is to Idiocracy as malice is to real life.
I mean, there’s plenty of stupid to go around in this hellhole we’ve created, but that isn’t what’s driving humanity into the dirt. Our issue is that humans are fucking evil, and we’d crank up our neighbor’s suffering for a quick buck.
Idiocracy is a utopia compared to the future we’re spiraling into.
People have a good nature and cooperation is in our DNA, but it gets ruined by the high-control systems most get indoctrinated into, also often abuse, neglect and trauma, it’s all damaging and wrong. Raises angry, low-level thinking, just obey, do out of fear, not understanding and knowledge why to do/not do, conditional acceptance, etc. They don’t learn how to raise healthy humans, just do what was done to them, which continues the dysfunctional cycle, enmeshment, etc. and untreated mental health issues, they call what’s unhealthy, good and right, and never learn how to do better, it’s sad.
I stopped reading at “degeneracy”. Slimy author sneaking puritanism under the rug.
At least Camacho cared about the people and wanted them to have food.
Mystery beef anyone?
Camacho had good intentions. He tried to surround himself with the best people. He listened to the advice of those people and put it into action. He wasn’t the ideal president, but he’s way ahead of the thing we’ve got in the oval office right now.
I’d take President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho above basically any government head right now
But I’d rather be living in the world of Idiocracy.
In that world they listened to the smart person and did what he said eventually, even though it was inconvenient for them. So they’re kind of doing better than us in that way.
Exactly!
President Camacho put the smartest person he could find in charge! Utopia compared to what’s going on in the USA now.
Exactly.
“Ow my balls” isn’t a downgrade in tv entertainment these days.
Reading this in a Starbucks is not lost on me.
I trust your are enjoying a “gentleman’s latte”?
I’ve only watched it once because it scared the shit out of me so badly, ain’t no comedy, that shit is horror.
It might be more precise to say that both the movie and the president are merely natural consequences of the human nature Judge is so famous for astutely observing
As inescapable as the divine right of kings, they cry. This is not human nature, this is capitalism applying pressures and running the gambit.
Predicted or inspired.
Funny seeing Beavis and Butthead mentioned given the thread we’re in
Predicted.
Blaming today’s polical landscape on a movie would be, ironically, idiotic. We’ve been hearing in this direction for more than 20 years.
fftt… and I’m all like “yo, you gotta be shittin’ me…” but check this out man…
Every time I hear someone repeat “Idiocracy was a documentary” what I hear is “Brawndo’s got what plants crave.” Mostly because of the number of times I’ve heard it but I guess also because it feels like a part of concentrated apathy? I’m probably just irrationally sick of the phrase, but the frequency and mindlessness of it being said seems kinda hypocritical.
You hear it so often because it’s an apt over the top depiction of what’s been happening since the beginning of the nation. Every generation dealt with absolute fucking morons gaining power and doing horrific, dumb shit, and devolving into base instincts and bread and circuses while ignoring experts, even mocking and considering them an undesirable class. Mike Judge wasn’t predicting the future, he was using a man out of water trope in the way of a time traveler to point out the absurdity of the conversion of public servants into showmen with an evangelical and side show circus flair, and the dumbing down of the average citizen as our institutions adopted more and more thoughtless technology while deriding and undermining professions and professionals that had to have actual expertise and somewhat relied on apprenticeship traditions to continue the lineage of advanced and critical knowledge.
But we are those idiots as a culture, so people mistook his message as one of simple absurdity that happened to become more true in the future from the point at which it was written and released.
as our institutions adopted more and more thoughtless technology
Crypto, NFT, and now AI… much for capricious uses.
Except most of that isn’t true and the average citizen has been getting consistently smarter every generation.
People can’t focus on a tv anymore and scroll their phones, can’t discern expert based information from blatantly absurd disinformation, people have seemingly gone feral in public interactions, trust in the CDC plummeted among Democrats (dropping to 34%), while rising among Republicans (reaching 67%), so it is more complex than “most of that isn’t true”. Crime has nearly consistently gone down, but we’ve almost entirely lost 3rd spaces, so socialization critical to development has been lost or has dwindled more and more for each successive generation. Teachers report having less control over their students, less productive conversations with their students parents, more hostility and distrust from both. Social media algorithms have been tuned to push above all other opinions that are the most divisive and least backed by evidence or expert opinion. That leads to real issues in leadership and a draining of resources and highly skilled workers that are lost due to avoidable attacks on systems caused by disinformation on said networks.
Developed nations have seen a slowing or halting of the Flynn affect (increasing intelligence), and several have reverse, which means they are in fact become less intelligent.
“For most of the 20th century, human IQ scores rose steadily across the globe. Researchers called this upward trend the Flynn Effect.
Recent studies show that this progress has stopped or reversed in countries like Norway, Denmark, Britain, France, and the Netherlands. This new downturn is called the Reverse Flynn Effect. Standard tests show drops in logic, vocabulary, and math problem-solving.”
I will not be shocked to find this reverse effect is happening in ALL red states, and rural areas of America in general, but the reversal has been masked by flawed testing and held up by metropolitan areas that are still seeing a traditional Flynn effect in place.
So it is true, and it’s always been this way, it’s just that it happens faster now, and we all hear about it faster.
So they’ve actually done science on this, and while your vibes are vibing, actual data shows that average IQ goes up by about 3 points for every decade. This is known as the Flynn effect, and is partly why the IQ scale constantly has to be adjusted.
Idiocracy’s entire plot is driven by the idea that average IQ goes down over time, which just isn’t true in the real world.
you might be proving their point since they discussed the flynn effect, and then the reverse flynn effect
but. iirc, there are issues with using iq as a measure of intelligence anyway
Then who’s voting for Trump?
People that generally make more money than you?
eating and excreting have all collapsed into a singularity of the human condition.
Did this article’s author just say we eat shit? 🥺
Can people stop promoting the “truth” of this pro rich sexist eugenicist slop.
Low IQ people shouldn’t breed and I believe this 100% at this point
E: this is literally the argument of Idiocracy btw
Maybe we could ALL use a little pause on the breeding for a mo lol. While the movie does open on the premise that “dumb people having more kids than smart people is what caused this world”, I really don’t think that ends up being the point of the film. It’s pretty obvious that unrestrained corporations, popularity politics, and entertainment that relies on cheap sex and violence are the actual villains of the film, not the poor idiots caught in the web of all that.
Ah yes, eugenics, famously a position that has proven helpful in the past. /s
considering you can bump your score by like 20 percentiles by practicing before an iq test i don’t think that’s a useful metric.
What’s an IQ, where does it come from, who decides what it is, and why is it important?
It actually changes all the time. It uses mostly questions and time constraints that someone with little education can accurately take and the median score of 100 is adjusted based on the average of recent (ish) people who have taken the tests.
It does only test specific things of “intelligence” and isn’t all encompassing. Hypothetically speaking, Mozart would be considered a genius in regards to music, even if he would have scored an 80 on an IQ test, because what an IQ tests checks has fuck all to do with music composition and wouldn’t tell you a thing about it.
IQ is just a data point.
Its whatever I say it is to get rid of people who annoy me
Honestly, same. Someone asks me what my IQ is, or however it comes up in conversation, and I say it’s ninety-six. I actually have no idea what the real answer is, or if it’s an idea worth chasing, but ninety-six is right on the small side of average that it just stalls that discussion out, and then we can talk about more interesting things, like turtles.
Go the other way. “IT’S OVER 9000!”
Lmao okay smooth brain. I tested in the 99th percentile on my last test. I wasnt even at my peak cognitive powers and I wasnt mentally challenged at all.
Smooth as an egg! :D
People who care about IQ don’t get laid, which is really handy because they shouldn’t breed.
You’re about halfway down the slippery slope there, friend.
We all stand somewhere on the slope.
Speak for yourself. I’m firmly in the gutter.
Terrible opinion but people are ignoring that this is what the movie says. The movie sucks because of this.
Yes! People keep on thinking that they’re so smart by saying “see, idiocracy was riiiight” when the movie basically tries to say that stupidity is hereditary, and that dumb people (understand: the sub-race) need to be eradicated through eugenics.
That is such a nazi stance, and there’s a gigantic amount of morons that don’t see it and keep on screaming “idiocracyyyyy” anytime they can.
mike judge hasn’t really expressed those opinions in his other works so i don’t think the movie tries to express that. it just does, perhaps unintentionally. you can equally make the case that it’s a great replacement allegory, or a meritocratic argument, or criticism of institutions that neglect the lower classes.
point being, i’d like to know what the writers room tried to actually make it express.
No one should breed. Cheers! - From a Misanthropic Anti-Natalist that sees his own species as literal monsters.
I really don’t get how people with this take… exist long enough to express it (it’s an awkward idea to word). At that point it would seem to me that the next “logical” goal would be to take yourself and as many others out as you could. Unless you count yourself securely among the monsters and don’t care about your own monstrosity, which begs the question why you would feel strongly enough about it to label yourself this way or care that others are monstrous.
It just feels from the outside like a circular logic trap with only two “outs”: either everybody sucks except for you (elitist as all hell), or what I said earlier.
