What’s funny is that each end of the political spectrum is convinced that it’s the other end that is dragging us toward idiocracy.
But you just posted about INFOWARS yourself!
Kornbluth’s got you covered:
http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/kornbluth-littleblack/kornbluth-littleblack-00-h.html
The technology works because there is a fleet of unseen Wall-Es taking care of stuff…
Because it relies on grotesque caricatures and is, itself, fairly low-brow entertainment (even if it isn’t “Ow, my balls”.) It also implies that intelligence (which it confuses with IQ) is genetic and thus decreasing because poor people have more kids - which is dangerously wrong and counterfactual on multiple levels - which entirely takes away from any other points it was trying to make.
Yeah, if you give people - specifically women - an education, they’ll have fewer kids because they have options.
Not to mention, the reality is that IQ scores have steadily, consistently gone up for a number of generations in developed nations (the Flynn effect), such that the tests have to be re-calibrated so that previously above-average scores are now average. That’s true for a number of reasons, but more education focusing on abstract problem solving, better nutrition, recognition of the importance of cognitive challenge in early child-care and richer media environments play a big part. It also indicates that IQ doesn’t really represent general intelligence. But the idea that poor people “outbreed” rich, educated people in developed nations, thus creating a population with ever-decreasing IQs is the opposite of what happens.
Yeah, it doesn’t work at all as a satire - the total disconnect from reality prevents that entirely, I think.
So did you! At this rate Alex Jones will owe us royalty checks.
My 20+ years of living in Austin were punctuated by my initial love of Alex Jones, his infiltration of the Bohemian Grove and his belief that the Branch Davidians didn’t deserve to be burned to death by the FBI.
Sadly, he morphed politically into a bible-waving, survivalist pandering nut-job. I miss the old Alex. I’d suspect he’s been swapped for an Evil Alex Jones twin but the tell-tale soul patch isn’t evident.
Who made all those cast iron pots for the cannibals in old cartoons?
And who’s following them around with a movie camera?
However, Idiocracy is supposed to be a satire about society and intelligence, so I judge it differently than I would most cartoons.
May I please aim you in the direction of Ray Confort, a.k.a. The Banana-man?
Relevant:
I thought “Ow, my balls” was the most intelligent and entertaining part of the movie, honestly. It was less pretentious than the rest of it.
This guy? Seems like that’d be shooting fish in a barrel. He’s apparently already making a monkey out of himself trying to refute his own misunderstandings of Darwinism…
Yes, but he’s infamous for his Lying For Jesus tactics in interviews, admitting to quote-mining and such but excusing them as pious fraud. Since you specifically said that you’d mock him and his views in the context of an interview and see how far you could go without him figuring it out, I think that it would be an expert-level challenge to not only do that, but to do it in such a fashion that it doesn’t get left on the cutting room floor.
Ah, I see. We’d have to set it up so that the production people weren’t on his side, for sure.
Man, that would be fun, though. It would be great to do his own banana routine back at him, with wide-eyed disingenuousness, and keep circling back to that until he had to debunk it himself.
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