Idiocracy (2006)

[boriz]

Enjoyed the film. Just like I enjoyed the book 1984. At the time, I was reassured that it was fiction.

Spoiler

 

Edited Tuesday at 08:00 AM by boriz

[AlamoVampire]

Fiction turned blueprint. Scary stuff. 033502112025

[Superfluous J]

The most unrealistic part of the film is the time it took to get there.

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, boriz said:

 I was reassured that it was fiction.

They told me the same about Terminator and Planet of the Apes.

And I really starting to worry about  Omega Man and  Zero Population Growth - but I think we still have some decades before Soylent Green.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

Soylent

There are other flavors while you wait for the inevitable 

[Nuke]

i take the fact that there are no seashells in the bathroom as a good sign.

[Lisias]

4 hours ago, Nuke said:

i take the fact that there are no seashells in the bathroom as a good sign.

Uhhh... o.O

Spoiler

 

 

[Fizzlebop Smith]

This thought probably stems from my spiritual belief that the philosophers of old understood existence itself as divine. All myths and science were a result of trying to explain repeatable phenomenon.

The apple of Genesis does not represent a metaphor for disobeying the divine creator..  it was for questioning the authority. Humans do not understand "enough" as desirable.

If some is good, more is better.. our need to know drives us to advance. 

I feel there is a concentrated effort to prevent this form of development through enforce ideological lensing.

It saddens me that this bit of fiction is becoming realized.

I have a feeling most of use older folks that view this movie.. could witness the signs on the horizon.

Bread and Circus is something I recall reading once upon a time. 

 

 

[Nuke]

its ok, before that happens society will collapse. humans will survive but it will take another thousand years to rebuild. if we can rebuild to the same level. one of the great filters may be not having enough funds to pay for a space program because society has collapsed enough times that you need every available resource just to survive, and will do so until the sun expands or the biosphere becomes unable to support life. future humans will look back at us the way we look back at rome before the fall. they will call us ignorant and misguided, all while building up to the next fall as the lesson is forgotten. onward utopian mice!

 

the next fall will probibly look like the forever winter, the one after that will look like scorn.

Edited Tuesday at 11:20 PM by Nuke

[AlamoVampire]

All i can say is it also feels like they took the star wars prequels as a blueprint too. We are doomed. 172702112025

i am irritated I did not realize something. We missed one.

im going to be worried now. 173202112025

Edited Tuesday at 11:33 PM by AlamoVampire

[SunlitZelkova]

Idiots will always exist as long as there are those who declare themselves geniuses and others idiots.

Which is to say idiots don't exist. Nor do geniuses.

In the end, rats and corvids will jointly dig in to the last human corpse. And it will be like all of the others: it drank, it ate, it made waste, it rested, and it reproduced. And then it died.

The infant made for good eats too.

[Nuke]

7 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

All i can say is it also feels like they took the star wars prequels as a blueprint too. We are doomed. 172702112025

i am irritated I did not realize something. We missed one.

im going to be worried now. 173202112025

i kind of want to binge watch the old tv series again.

[Nuke]

2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Idiots will always exist as long as there are those who declare themselves geniuses and others idiots.

Which is to say idiots don't exist. Nor do geniuses.

In the end, rats and corvids will jointly dig in to the last human corpse. And it will be like all of the others: it drank, it ate, it made waste, it rested, and it reproduced. And then it died.

The infant made for good eats too.

people throw both terms around a bit to liberally. genius just mean "someone in my in group", or "like me", and idiot just means "somebody with a different opinion than mine". of course they think of themselves as geniuses because they have a couple skills they think are rare.  of course people today talk in hyperbole. you got to destroy the other person, if you say that i expect to see internal organs strewn about, not merely that they lost an argument, and whether or not they actually lost is not really investigated. i guess this is the modern newspeak. 

throw a clockwork orange reference in there too because the way the young generations feel a need to talk in a way that conveys nothing to bracketing generations. even though prior to the grunge era people had been using the same beatnik and surfer slang since the '50s with some '60s hippy speak thrown in. i guess yz,s wanted to be different, even to an x-y sandwicher that listens to metal from the 70s-80s back when everyone else was wearing flannel.  then the phone people seem to be talking in acronyms that have been reused so many times i have to look it up in the urban dictionary. i wont even touch on urban slang the same way i refuse to live in cities. people would rather sound cool (chill is not only the wrong tense, it is very derivative) than communicate effectively.

Edited Wednesday at 06:59 AM by Nuke

[DDE]

On 2/11/2025 at 10:55 PM, Nuke said:

people throw both terms around a bit to liberally. genius just mean "someone in my in group", or "like me", and idiot just means "somebody with a different opinion than mine".

Only partly so. Overall, society has become more intolerant of eccentricity and deviance. Previously, to retain respectability, you needed to avoid insults to the core ideology (religion included). Now, however, there is a tendency, a desire to establish a comprehensive range of opinions on "settled" science, politics and even cultural tastes that you need to adopt wholecloth to avoid being ostracized as a frothing at the mouth, brainwashed idiot. Note that there are a lot of different tribes doing that, and that it has no bearing on the validity of underlying opinions - although it does carry all the usual hazards of dogma. Sure, this dogma claims it's not dogma because it destroyed the previous dogma, but that's transparent manipulation, isn't it?

Now on to the orange elephant in the room. It's a scourge brought on by the growing calcification of the broader political system. Such loudmouths from the streets are the relative peaceful alternative to tearing it all down violently, because you have a huge segment of the population (as well as the elites) who think a system built to serve them no longer even pays lip service to them. Without being offered a way out through established political forces - something that generally keeps happening in Europe, where many far-right surges were defused through the "rightening" of moderate parites - they turn to releasing a bull in a china shop. Or a whole herd of them.

And a china shop it is. The driving impulse, for at least a year, will be the sheer schadenfreude of watching the cherished china of the aforementioned dogmatic beliefs and values being shattered. It is a gleeful vindication for those whose opinions were long-discounted as "idiocy", to the point of gaslighting, and whose suggestions were dismissed as "impossible" or "immoral". However, you may notice that it's an entirely negative message - and you'd be right, that's why it's not a lasting platform to build anything. Things that don't deserve to be broken will be broken in the pell-mell, and it must be emphatically not fun to be somewhere where the fallout will be felt. I can see how the schadenfreude is in bad taste... but it is tempting.

Edit: It's also worth considering the cathartic effect of embracing the boorish, threatening stereotype. For outsiders, it's certainly refreshing to see the pig without lipstick and acting like the bully we always considered it to be - but it's also refreshing for someone on the inside, who's accustomed to being accused of being a violent bully, when they think they're being moderate and could've achieved more by being more assertive, to finally abandon civility and start collecting skulls for the Skull Throne. Take that from a post-2022 Russian.

P.S. Guys, I already got out my bingo card out and we've got a 1984 and a Star Wars reference. Can we get a Harry Potter one now?

P.P.S. Also, speaking of idiocy and unpredictability, mark this down - Snowden will be pardoned by the end of this week as part of a delayed "spy" swap for Fogel. No mention will be made of [snip] earlier ridicule of trading Booth for Griner

Edited yesterday at 08:06 PM by Vanamonde
Avoid politics, please.

[AlamoVampire]

19 minutes ago, DDE said:

S. Guys, I already got out my bingo card out and we've got a 1984 and a Star Wars reference

You forgot the Robocop OCP reference I made with a single image. And its terrifying. I want so much to not be witness to it but here we are. I mean it is happening with thunderous applause bought with a dollar. 060902122025

[DDE]

2 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

You forgot the Robocop OCP reference I made with a single image. And its terrifying. I want so much to not be witness to it but here we are. I mean it is happening with thunderous applause bought with a dollar. 060902122025

It's not on the list of references that are tired, or attempts to misapply non-political or politically non-specific references to current Earth politics. Robocop knows exactly what it's about.

And it's definitely the future that is here, and has been here for quite a while.

[AlamoVampire]

55 minutes ago, DDE said:

It's not on the list of references that are tired, or attempts to misapply non-political or politically non-specific references to current Earth politics. Robocop knows exactly what it's about.

And it's definitely the future that is here, and has been here for quite a while.

I see where youre pointing. My view is its like all that is wrong in the fictions as well as history got chucked into a blender giving us what we have. And OCP/Old Detroit kinda feel like the closest analogue to the reality we face which is horrifying. It scares me how much these fictions seem to be predicting whats coming. If that makes sense. Am i making sense? 073202122025

[DDE]

37 minutes ago, AlamoVampire said:

My view is its like all that is wrong in the fictions as well as history got chucked into a blender giving us what we have.

I think we're talking past each other in a way.

I think there are three types of political fiction. There's fiction that is very clearly a parable for a certain political issue, with the actors clearly recognizable. Because of that, it doesn't age too well. That is does it's a bad omen. Then there's fiction that tries to be ageless, and it usually does so by being more generic, throwing many political baddies into a blender. That's why Lucas couldn't decide if the Empire were Imperial Rome, the Soviets, the British, or Bush Jr. - they were all of that once.

And then there's settings that don't really have politics, but get held up as political anyway. There's a Russian phrase "stretching an owl onto a globe..."

Spoiler

 

[Fizzlebop Smith]

I think there is a natural gravitational toward the dystopia side of things due to constraints in energy. Really this boils down to resources in general.

Solving a safe endless energy would allow us to rise above a deal of other resource limitations and then the incentive to exploit.

I truly think free enterprise and a dose of capitalistic ideals are needed, but there needs to be other acceptable forms of capital. 

I think this is why we are moving toward the more negative tropes of science fiction.

We drowned all the futurists in vats of oil.

I greatly like what Nuke said about building to the next great "lesson". 

[Nuke]

i figure if we every blow ourselves up in some global thermonuclear war, humans will suffer, survive and for a time it will be a harsh lesson. one that will slowly be forgotten as time goes by. there are many other failure modes though. we had to have two world wars to learn that lesson, and here we are forgetting that and acting like they did before it all started. they stuck around a little longer than the ones learned in subsequent proxy wars. must be proportional to scale. the final lesson we learn will be "schools out, you flunked".

[SunlitZelkova]

18 hours ago, Nuke said:

people throw both terms around a bit to liberally. genius just mean "someone in my in group", or "like me", and idiot just means "somebody with a different opinion than mine". of course they think of themselves as geniuses because they have a couple skills they think are rare.  of course people today talk in hyperbole. you got to destroy the other person, if you say that i expect to see internal organs strewn about, not merely that they lost an argument, and whether or not they actually lost is not really investigated. i guess this is the modern newspeak. 

throw a clockwork orange reference in there too because the way the young generations feel a need to talk in a way that conveys nothing to bracketing generations. even though prior to the grunge era people had been using the same beatnik and surfer slang since the '50s with some '60s hippy speak thrown in. i guess yz,s wanted to be different, even to an x-y sandwicher that listens to metal from the 70s-80s back when everyone else was wearing flannel.  then the phone people seem to be talking in acronyms that have been reused so many times i have to look it up in the urban dictionary. i wont even touch on urban slang the same way i refuse to live in cities. people would rather sound cool (chill is not only the wrong tense, it is very derivative) than communicate effectively.

I think this is true in some cases and less so in other cases.

The funny thing about nations and cities, or really any big "cultural group" is that it is all imaginary. I live in Portland, but I might as well live in the Paleolithic. If I only really know ten people in total and just briefly interact with the millions of other people living around me, I'm basically living the same experience as a small Paleolithic hunter-gatherer group. Except instead of running into people who I briefly interact with after traveling hundreds of kilometers only relatively infrequently, I do it after traveling a few kilometers every day.

So has there been any change in that kind of interaction at all? Basically none, IMO.

Where there is a change is in the "charismatic warrior" community; the people who make grand ideas about the entire world and then shout from the highest peaks that it is that way (and often that they are the apex of the world). To a big extent this involves having a sort of psychotic (as in, being in a state of psychosis) view of the world. Big assumptions and big omissions need to be made to create these grand ideas, because of course, in reality, these people have that same Paleolithic-level interaction (really only knowing a number of people in the tens). One would kind of have to take the humans out of humanity and make it a sort of "mass of jelly" to even make an assertion about the entire human race. Because realistically one can't know every single person, something required to make a truthful statement about what the human race is really all about.

Enter the Internet. Not only do "common folk" (I honestly kind of miss the term peasant, like as a real classification and not with negative or positive connotations) have the ability to "communicate" with "people," they also have the ability to gain all sorts of "information" at the press of a button.

But people don't communicate with each other over the Internet. Realistically, it is more like a high pace exchange of letters. Pen pals are great and all, but you don't really know someone just by exchanging letters (I wouldn't go around saying I know yall even if I knew your real names). And yet a lot of people think they can discern all sorts of things about other people based on what they see them do on the Internet.

And then there is the "information." Again, it isn't some all-knowing repository. Information is as fallible as it ever was. The Internet is like a high pace trip to the library. One will find all sorts of things there, from the silly to the outrageous. A better comparison is the "town crier." Before the printing press, some dude just comes into the town and shouts about whatever happened in the neighboring one. It's just a dude. He might be wrong. But because the Internet is believed to be a tool that makes it easier to find and/or register information, it is believed to be somehow "enlightening" or herald an age of "more accuracy." But it is just a bunch of dudes, all of whom might be wrong or inaccurate.

Growing up in the late 2000s and early 2010s, we were constantly told by teachers and librarians to "not believe everything you see on the Internet." The issue is that this implied you can believe everything you read or *watch* (or that at least printed and televised material was generally accurate)... but lo and behold, print and television is rapidly disappearing in favor of the Internet. So a person is left with either not believing anything (societal malaise, indifference to the world) or believing anything (again, those dudes who could be wrong and inaccurate and whose "information" may be anything but that).

And even what remains of print and television is defective, because the people who write it are forced to use the Internet to find information.

5 hours ago, Nuke said:

i figure if we every blow ourselves up in some global thermonuclear war, humans will suffer, survive and for a time it will be a harsh lesson. one that will slowly be forgotten as time goes by. there are many other failure modes though. we had to have two world wars to learn that lesson, and here we are forgetting that and acting like they did before it all started. they stuck around a little longer than the ones learned in subsequent proxy wars. must be proportional to scale. the final lesson we learn will be "schools out, you flunked".

Maybe going off the rails so to speak, but I don't really like this idea of "lessons" from history.

Trying to glean lessons from history is essentially just mythmaking. But instead of Coyote or Raven, you swap them out for people who actually existed. But the purpose is the same. "This bad stuff happened in the days of yore, see how terrible it is and don't do it again!"

Of course, the problem with myths is that no one really cares about them. Tales of the Great Flood did not stop people around the Mediterranean from doing the sorts of things that supposedly led to the Flood in the first place. Perhaps the only place where myths have some degree of an effect on people are children (when used as an aid in child education) and a very small amount of adults (the type of people who have the moral conviction to stand back and die rather than fight and take a life).

IMO, the only way people are ever gonna change is by... changing. Which means actually thinking about the decisions they make and the problems before them, not "Daddy did it this way so I have to too" or "Granddad said this is how it is, so it has to be this way." Or "the Grand Duchy of Fenwick has said it and therefore it is true!"

I don't think other people ought to espouse this opinion, but personally, I honestly think there is nothing to be learned from history about how to deal with societal issues in the present. Opening up a history book in this day and age is about as useful as opening up the Nihon Shoki.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily need to come in the form of a sort of "scorched earth on the world of ideas" as it might seem I am alluding to... it could just mean dropping some connotations and being a bit more creative here and there, being a bit more respectful and humble over there. But the bottomline is that it comes down to personal choice. Not "adding a new ingredient" to the imaginary "mass of jelly" I mentioned above. No one can make anyone do this stuff.

I think this is why kingdoms fall and great monuments fall into disrepair. There was no Roman Empire, it was just a bunch of people happening to agree with all sorts of different things (and of course those who disagreed dying or being otherwise excluded from the group of agreers). Generations change and so do opinions. They do different things. "The Roman Empire falls" or less dramatically, "Town A starts doing its own thing, Town B starts doing its own thing." "Group B goes off and does its own thing over there." "Group A stays and does its own thing." In a sense, we hear the dramatic description more often because of a bias towards talking about what was lost. For every person who died in the fall of Rome there certainly was another, if not perhaps another four or ten, who lived on and prospered. But it's hard to talk that way; most people don't talk about a natural disaster and go "Look at all that new real estate for development!"

In a sense this is sort of inevitable, not in the dramatic sense of destiny or fate, but because of that hard limitation on real human relationships. "The Captain" can declare he rules over all of his subjects, loves them or is a tough father or whatever, but in reality he still has that group of people numbering in the tens that he actually knows. He doesn't know everyone else, even people he works with every day, which is why he might adopt those traits supposedly inherent to charismatic warriors (like paranoia and suspicion, fear) when in reality that's just what humans do towards people they don't know. I am equally suspicious of the guy in front of me in the line to use the bathroom as a captain might have been of his rivals.

On a final note: that's an example of one of those "decisions they make" that humans can not so obviously make a change on. The feeling the captain and I get is the same: suspicion (it doesn't become "polsuspicion" or "supersuspicion" just because a captain does it). Yet I think about it (even if I think what I think is common sense and not really thought) and decide I don't need to be openly hostile to the guy in front of me. Meanwhile the captain might do something different (either himself or tell someone he equally doesn't really know to do something about it, probably with a weapon).

[DDE]

12 hours ago, Fizzlebop Smith said:

I think there is a natural gravitational toward the dystopia side of things due to constraints in energy.

...which seemed to appear seemingly out of nowhere in the 1970s, when past growth of energy consumption - a key correlate of economic productivity - hit a mysterious ceiling.

From https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/elois-ate-your-flying-carhtml

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Where there is a change is in the "charismatic warrior" community; the people who make grand ideas about the entire world and then shout from the highest peaks that it is that way (and often that they are the apex of the world). To a big extent this involves having a sort of psychotic (as in, being in a state of psychosis) view of the world. Big assumptions and big omissions need to be made to create these grand ideas, because of course, in reality, these people have that same Paleolithic-level interaction (really only knowing a number of people in the tens). One would kind of have to take the humans out of humanity and make it a sort of "mass of jelly" to even make an assertion about the entire human race. Because realistically one can't know every single person, something required to make a truthful statement about what the human race is really all about.

Interestingly, these captains, as you call them, are rarely the ultimate leaders, as they should be. There's often an additional layer of abritrator-coordinators that we generally used to call 'kings', who are wary of these omissions and seek to dampen impulses and mitigate hard - through what may seem to be obtuse and antiquated restrictions.

Going potentially off-topic, I generally blame many of our maladies on this additional layer forgetting their ultimate responsibility, hiding behind bureaucratic procedures and checks and balances, which lack true agency but are run by a combination of ambitious, very interested captains and disinterested living cogs.

[DDE]

On 2/12/2025 at 3:47 AM, DDE said:

P.P.S. Also, speaking of idiocy and unpredictability, mark this down - Snowden will be pardoned by the end of this week as part of a delayed "spy" swap for Fogel. No mention will be made of [snip] earlier ridicule of trading Booth for Griner

Well, color me shocked, I didn't even remember about Vinnick.

The guy was sentenced by a Greek court to be extradiated to France, followed by the US, followed by Russia. I am not entirely sure that his modest charges weren't just a ploy to invoke extradition rights, but it will be a very odd prisoner exchange where the recovered party is, theoretically at least, a wanted man.

Edited yesterday at 08:07 PM by Vanamonde
Avoid politics, please.

[Superfluous J]

14 hours ago, DDE said:

...which seemed to appear seemingly out of nowhere in the 1970s, when past growth of energy consumption - a key correlate of economic productivity - hit a mysterious ceiling.

From https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/elois-ate-your-flying-carhtml

I wonder how the last 10-ish years of that graph would look if it was made today, with bitcoin and AI "helping" use power.

[Nuke]

i had kind of hoped crypto would stay. but we cant have peasants making money with little or no effort, can we? current gen gpus just ended up power hogging to sell performance, but the real objective was to make hashing cost more than electricity. we need an algorithm that resists hoarding of infrastructure by single entities. otherwise the biggest holders of hash power just end up becoming the new banks. it should also function with ubiquitous hardware so you dont manufacture e-waste that's only good at hashing for a couple years before it too no longer pays for itself. only then can you truely democratize banking.

Edited 13 hours ago by Nuke