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Comment by pseudosudoer | Hacker News Reader

Every year it becomes clearer that Idiocracy was indeed a documentary.

No. In the movie, President Camacho recognized the smart guy was smart and wanted him to help because he was smart. We don't have leaders with that kind of wisdom and good intentions.

We need a leader like President Camacho!

I find myself surprised that I agree.

When I watched the movie I laughed and thought it all ridiculous. I've since been shown that having well-intentioned, self-aware, cooperative people in government is probably more important than their intelligence.

Maybe he was stupid to the point of just being naive.

> No. In the movie, President Camacho recognized the smart guy was smart and wanted him to help because he was smart. We don't have leaders with that kind of wisdom and good intentions.

Also, Joe seemed genuinely interested in helping everyone, and didn't seem to neglect the needs of significant portions of the population to achieve some ideological goal or another.

Maybe there's such a thing as being too smart to have power.

To be fair Camacho was setting up Not Sure to be the fall guy. I don't think he really thought Not Sure could fix things.

That being said, it is a society who elected the smartest guy in the world president, and then when a smarter guy came along elected him as the successor.

In Idiocracy the masses are aware that things are not as good as they once were, they recognize and value competent people, and then voluntarily agree to put them in power so that things may be fixed.

IMO that is a depiction of some kind of meritocratic utopia - exactly the opposite of what we have, on all accounts mentioned above.

There is something subtly wrong with the world as presented in that "documentary" in general it is that somebody has to keep the lights on, the machines running, that is, there is too much working infrastructure for the citizens ability level. I suspect the big corporations maintain a hidden educated population and are happy to run the world from the shadows.

Now honestly it is just a goofy movie premise, and we should not look too far into it, but sometimes it is fun to go full nerd.

It could be that many people just died in between and there's a lot of remaining operational equipment that past smart people built. Costco is massive.

Sure, but this is a Demolition Man reference

I mean, we already have YouTube channels and tiktok content that are about the same as the TV show "ass" shown in the movie.

"America's funniest home videos" got dumbed down to "AFV" and the content was mostly "ow, my balls!". They even added a warning to the viewers to submit "wows, not ows".

Although to be fair,some of that happened before Idiocracy came out.

With the public money used for sports stadiums, that element of the movie to have government sports teams is slowly coming true also.

If you search YouTube for "fail army" there is clearly a whole ad supported business model for revenue from something that is about the same as "ow, my balls!"

This is basically https://chive.tv

How are college sports teams not government sports teams?

that's a good point. They are tightly integrated into the college whose charter is to educate. whereas a pro team will take anyone for the express purpose of the performing the sport well.

Further, colleges receive public money but are not free to attend for most students. And I am not talking about "free" from the students perspective, I mean most would not be permitted to enroll if significant tuition dollars were not deposited (unlike public schools, for instance). Also, plenty of colleges are private but have NCAA teams.

in May 2021 the number 1 clip on twitch was just someone's ass

Except that it has a happy ending, which is so rare in real world situations involving politics and power.

Sort of. They got the outcomes pretty close, but the movie was based on a premise of eugenics and equating poverty with low intelligence.

Weird, when I saw it, it was equating poverty with low access to education and corresponding outcomes.

More like high access to media and consumerism.

The intro of the movie makes it pretty clear that their premise is "IQ is heritable, and stupid people have more kids." It's not a coincidence that the "high IQ" couple is portrayed as wealthy and the "low IQ" people are shown as poor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TCsR_oSP2Q

Thank you. It's astonishing to me how few people remember the text of this movie -- it is so clearly saying dumb people are breeding, smart people are not.

It seems the dumb interpretation of the movie is spreading faster than the correct and literal one.

The movie was based on the (indisputable?) fact that intelligence is heritable- but not Eugenics, which takes that a step further and advocates for people deciding which other people are inferior and superior and organizing society around that. One could argue that the movie tries to make a case for eugenics, but it didn’t directly do so. I think the movie could also be seen as looking at culture instead of genetics, and also assuming that is passed down from parents.

I agree that it does wrongly depict poverty as a major indicator of intelligence.

For better or worse, "eugenics" at this point is basically a cultural repulsion field surrounding most of practical aspects of genetics. You dare to even suggest there are measurable genetic differences between people, and someone will shout "eugenics", rounding any conversation down to "yeah nazis said the same thing".

I suspect your idea of “practical aspects of genetics” includes ideas about how people different from you shouldn’t be allowed reproduce, and very little about things like researching the function of a newly discovered microbial enzyme.

Not really. It does, however, include ideas such as "perhaps we should learn to correct genetic diseases directly in the reproductive cells", which is a rounding error away from someone saying something like you just did.

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