5 ms·

Idiocracy hit a lot of superficial/thematic nails on the head with its silliness. "Don't Look Up" captures a lot more of the actual dynamics. Instead of anti-e

by netcan 6mo ago

Idiocracy hit a lot of superficial/thematic nails on the head with its silliness. "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.

thousand_nights 6mo ago
i couldn't finish "Don't Look Up", it felt like sitting through a political lecture. all i wanted from a comedy was some laughs.
- lionkor 6mo ago
  Fair criticism. It was very lecturing. Beyond that, it was also quite funny, but really, there was nothing funny about the end. I don't think it was meant as a comedy.
- sidewndr46 6mo ago
  I'm in the same category. The film is so awfully written and acted it isn't something that can be watched.
- Arodex 6mo ago
  Thereby proving the point of the film. Don't look!
- soblemprolver 6mo ago
  I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore. 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.
  - arnorhs 6mo ago
    > 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. 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"?
  - names_are_hard 6mo ago
    > 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? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?
    - vintermann 6mo ago
      I think there's so much ill-founded assumptions in eugenics BS that it's hard to know where to start, but as a genealogist, I can personally verify that upper or middle class, wealthier people, presumably the sort eugenicists identify with, clearly had at least a 2-3 generations head start on the demographic transition where I come from. 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.
  - coldtea 6mo ago
    >It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans 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?
- mvdwoord 6mo ago
  Same here. There was something feeling so obviously off with Don't Look Up.. for me at least. Idiocracy did not suffer from this.. but Mike Judge is somewhat of an acquired taste I guess.
  - mike_hearn 6mo ago
    I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up
  - duskdozer 6mo ago
    To be honest, I think it's about whether someone feels like they are making fun or being made fun of.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.
  - ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
    How about the British "Till Death Do Us Part" from the 1960s/70s? 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.
  - Frieren 6mo ago
    > Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago. 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.
    - coldtea 6mo ago
      Was that supposed to trigger me? Not from there, but I'm in favor of "unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires" and higher corporate taxes! But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea). Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.
davemp 6mo ago
I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.
- anonymars 6mo ago
  Fair point, but why jump to genetics instead of culture (upbringing)?
  - marxisttemp 6mo ago
    Because the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike
    - Filligree 6mo ago
      But is it true or false?
    - pbhjpbhj 6mo ago
      It's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence - it says 'fertility' but I think it means fecundity/actual reproduction
      - lelanthran 6mo ago
        Are you talking about the one called "The Machine Stops", published like a hundred years ago?
toofy 6mo ago
while i loved it, i’ve noticed a ton of people despised Don’t Look Up for the same reason some of the theater goers complained in a siblings comment. > 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!"
dspillett 6mo ago
> Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble, 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!
- dTal 6mo ago
  I'm afraid you are misremembering. The movie is explicitly eugenicist. The people of the future are explicitly biologically stupid. The opening transcript is unambiguous: [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.
  - chucksmash 6mo ago
    What is "explicitly eugenicist" in observing that the unprecedented way mankind has dominated its environment has changed the selection pressures we are subject to? My quest to survive to adulthood and pass on my genes looked nothing like the gauntlet an Homo erectus specimen would have run.
- dist-epoch 6mo ago
  > Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. They literally show IQ numbers in that scene. > Trevor: IQ 138, Carol: IQ 141 vs: > Clevon: IQ 84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
fleroviumna 6mo ago
[dead]
HexPhantom 6mo ago
Don't Look Up feels closer to how things actually break in practice
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  It’s a less extreme satire for sure.
asah 6mo ago
DLU captured the decisions better, but Idiocracy explained how we got there.
- vintermann 6mo ago
  Eugenics, you mean? Letting the stupid people breed? 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.
  - boogieknite 6mo ago
    tbf its not "letting the stupid people breed" and more that smart ppl stop breeding. still wrong and like other comments said, Dont Look Up is more practical bc its people with money, power, influence dooming us with greed

by netcan 6mo ago

thousand_nights 6mo ago

i couldn't finish "Don't Look Up", it felt like sitting through a political lecture. all i wanted from a comedy was some laughs.

lionkor 6mo ago
Fair criticism. It was very lecturing. Beyond that, it was also quite funny, but really, there was nothing funny about the end. I don't think it was meant as a comedy.
sidewndr46 6mo ago
I'm in the same category. The film is so awfully written and acted it isn't something that can be watched.
Arodex 6mo ago
Thereby proving the point of the film. Don't look!
soblemprolver 6mo ago
I couldn't finish "Idiocracy" because the underlying eugenics nonsense made me angry enough not to enjoy the comedy anymore. 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.
- arnorhs 6mo ago
  > 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. 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"?
- names_are_hard 6mo ago
  > 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? Can you elaborate on that? Did the emergence of property and currency cause a negative correlation between intelligence and number of offspring?
  - vintermann 6mo ago
    I think there's so much ill-founded assumptions in eugenics BS that it's hard to know where to start, but as a genealogist, I can personally verify that upper or middle class, wealthier people, presumably the sort eugenicists identify with, clearly had at least a 2-3 generations head start on the demographic transition where I come from. 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.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  >It made me angry because makes the point that natural selection has become ineffective on humans 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?
mvdwoord 6mo ago
Same here. There was something feeling so obviously off with Don't Look Up.. for me at least. Idiocracy did not suffer from this.. but Mike Judge is somewhat of an acquired taste I guess.
- mike_hearn 6mo ago
  I never saw it but Scott Alexander's review made it sound like the writers of Don't Look Up were themselves idiots, who wanted to send a political message but couldn't figure out how to do it properly. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up
- duskdozer 6mo ago
  To be honest, I think it's about whether someone feels like they are making fun or being made fun of.
coldtea 6mo ago
Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago.
- ndsipa_pomu 6mo ago
  How about the British "Till Death Do Us Part" from the 1960s/70s? 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.
- Frieren 6mo ago
  > Then you need to watch comedies made decades ago. 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.
  - coldtea 6mo ago
    Was that supposed to trigger me? Not from there, but I'm in favor of "unionization, safety nets and welfare for the working class instead of for billionaires" and higher corporate taxes! But also I don't think movies aren't silly because they deal with all the "big problems". After all they didn't have a problem making silly movies in eras with far worse problems, social and economic. And they could make hella fun movies on heavy topics just fine (Blazing Saddles and racism for example, or MASH and the Vietnam war - even if nominally about Korea). Modern comedies aren't silly or fun, not because times are troubled, but because they're written as shallow moralizing lectures. Any "caring" is performative. They're also walking on eggshells, and are too polite to have any edge. And then there's the derivative reboots and remakes, which many of them are.

davemp 6mo ago

I always have a problem when folks bring up idiocracy because the of the eugenics angle. It’s extremely unlikely that people are getting inherently stupider, just less educated. The former is some sort of prophecy of doom and the latter is actually actionable.

anonymars 6mo ago
Fair point, but why jump to genetics instead of culture (upbringing)?
- marxisttemp 6mo ago
  Because the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike
  - Filligree 6mo ago
    But is it true or false?
  - pbhjpbhj 6mo ago
    It's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence - it says 'fertility' but I think it means fecundity/actual reproduction
    - lelanthran 6mo ago
      Are you talking about the one called "The Machine Stops", published like a hundred years ago?

toofy 6mo ago

while i loved it, i’ve noticed a ton of people despised Don’t Look Up for the same reason some of the theater goers complained in a siblings comment. > 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!"

dspillett 6mo ago

> Instead of anti-eugenics making brains feeble, 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!

dTal 6mo ago
I'm afraid you are misremembering. The movie is explicitly eugenicist. The people of the future are explicitly biologically stupid. The opening transcript is unambiguous: [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.
- chucksmash 6mo ago
  What is "explicitly eugenicist" in observing that the unprecedented way mankind has dominated its environment has changed the selection pressures we are subject to? My quest to survive to adulthood and pass on my genes looked nothing like the gauntlet an Homo erectus specimen would have run.
dist-epoch 6mo ago
> Unless I'm misremembering, and it did make direct reference to intelligence rather than education and access to it. They literally show IQ numbers in that scene. > Trevor: IQ 138, Carol: IQ 141 vs: > Clevon: IQ 84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA

fleroviumna 6mo ago

[dead]

HexPhantom 6mo ago

Don't Look Up feels closer to how things actually break in practice

wiseowise 6mo ago
It’s a less extreme satire for sure.

asah 6mo ago

DLU captured the decisions better, but Idiocracy explained how we got there.

vintermann 6mo ago
Eugenics, you mean? Letting the stupid people breed? 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.
- boogieknite 6mo ago
  tbf its not "letting the stupid people breed" and more that smart ppl stop breeding. still wrong and like other comments said, Dont Look Up is more practical bc its people with money, power, influence dooming us with greed