Idiocracy- I fear for our future

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Has anyone seen it? It was written and directed by Mike Judge (Office Space and King of the Hill). The plot is simple- stupid people breed like fruit flies while intelligent people weigh the consequences of reproduction and therefore have no or few children, leading to a bleak future where most people are mind-numbingly dumb.

This is what wikipedia says about it: "The film tells the story of two ordinary people who are taken into a top-secret military hibernation experiment that goes awry, and awaken 500 years in the future. They discover that the world has degenerated into a dystopia where advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid human society devoid of individual responsibility or consequences."

Watch the first 10 minutes online:
http://www.spike.com/video/first-10-minutes-of/2811209

An instructor recently brought up the film in class and she said she fears that this will happen. I fear that it is already happening.

Over the past days, weeks, years... I have read so many stories about people who should not be allowed to reproduce. Recently there was a story about a father who was teaching a two year old how to box (aka beating him) to toughen him up because he was acting too effeminate. To no semi-intelligent person's surprise, the kid died. A mother in NY drove 6 girls to a party while drunk and asked “if you think I’m gonna crash, raise your hand?” She did and one little girl died. A mother and grandmother were recently arrested for pimping out their 14 year old child. Supposedly breeding is a god given right, but should it be really?

I was at a dinner recently and the people at the table (all educated women) got into a serious discussion about the Real Housewives of Atlanta. The lady next to me was writing her PhD dissertation and one of the few things that got her excited was discussing Nene "trifling" ways. Is it because that is what people expect other people to talk about so they pretend to be interested (like I do) or do people really care about stuff life that? Really, we all have hobbies, interesting jobs, and backgrounds and we talk about reality tv? I have seen one episode of RHOA to see what all the hype was about. I have never seem the Bachelor/ette, Big Brother, Survivor, that Kardassian show, the show with Flava Flav or the spin offs, any other RHOA, any show with Paris Hilton... on purpose. I just look how every fool that embarrasses himself on national tv gets a reality show. Levi Johnston is getting a realty show. That Kardassian girl got a tv show because of a sex tape and having a big ass. I bet that airline steward in the news recently will get a show or product endorsements too!

What the f#%k have these people done really? Is there a demand for this buffoonery? Are people really watching this crap? Are these shows part of a conspiracy by the Bilderberg group, the Freemasons, and the Illuminati to destroy the middle class and create an easily quelled and docile proletariat?

In Idiocracy children are named after product brand names. I have heard of children called Alize, Chevy, Dior, Moet, Chanel, Fendi, etc. I could go on and on. I'm scared. Anyone else?

It is already happening. The same thing is brought up in KoRn's song Evolution and music video.

The only solution is to give rebirth to the Hashshashin and start "eliminating" the sources of ignorance Altair and Ezio style. For the sake of the world and our race.

You fear is legitimate! I just urged two of my brothers to watch this movie, and they were, while amused, also sobered at the implications.

The movie oversimplifies natural selection too much to be considered a viable plausibility. In the beginning, with the two couples, it equates the affluent, upper middle class couple as 'smart' and the poor, lower middle class couple as 'dumb'. In other words, rich people are smart and poor people are dumb. Without getting into the statistics of it, I think there's enough anecdotal evidence of rich people being dumb and poor people being smart that we can say that it's not always true.

It also assumes that smart people always have smart babies and dumb people always have dumb babies. Again, not always the case. Not every tall person has tall parents. Recessive genes can throw you for a loop, sometimes.

Finally, it ignores the fact that if dumb people breed more, then this future would have already come to pass within the 100,000 years or so that humans have been around. Particularly now with modern birth control, I'd venture that your average 'Yo babe, wanna screw?' neanderthal is LESS likely to procreate than, say, 200 years ago, when kids were married at 14 and expected to have 8 to 10 kids. In other words, I'd say relax.

You can stop being afraid - this has already happened. Game over. The stupid people already outnumber those with a modicum of common sense by a hundred to one, at least, and I feel I'm being extremely generous.

Humans are animals, after all, and not nearly so intelligent as they like to think themselves. The lemming masses share credit for invention and discovery by the thinking minority and refer to 'our species' as intelligent life. The species isn't intelligent - a rare few are intelligent, the rest can't find their @sses with both hands.

Its always been that way, unfortunately, the luxury of living in a technological society has in fact bred a whole new level of stupidity, because you now have at least three generations in the Western world who have grown up having to do nothing to contribute to their own survival and bred from the cradle to be mindless consumers.

The only conspiracy involved in that is the conspiracy of laziness that grows with each generation as the generation before them fails to instill in their children a sense of individual responsibility and respect for their neighbors. When you're fighting nonstop brainwashing by advertising and peer pressure, transmitting those values becomes a losing battle.

I've been convinced for some time now, that after Generation Y, the attrition (in the US at least) will be complete.

Its already happened... which is part of the reason I REALLY don't want to have kids & if I did I'd rather have a smart partner & adopt/foster a few who NEED a good home. Plus, if the "smart people" take all the abandoned kids, their is a slight chance we could lower the % of stupid people w/o contributing much, if at all ourselves to the human pop. by screwing. But I doubt anyone would seriously do this . The thing is, I'm not too familiar with the way the human pop. is reproducing compared to longevity. This may sound bad, but hopefully when all the old people eventually die, the human pop. will shrink A LOT.

In the UK, we pay our inept to outbreed the adept - we offer generous grants to the unemployable to have more & more kids, give them free housing, an alcohol allowance, food stamps and preference for social services over almost everybody else.

Or maybe I've just been watching too much Jeremy Kyle. Has anyone seen my left wingedness, I remember having it on the bus...

The film can't happen as depicted, but society has gone through cycles where you have hard working people seeking knowledge and building a great society. Then society gets lazy, panders to the lowest common denominator. In time, that society collapses, and while a dark age might take place, those strong and smart enough to survive start building the next great society.

The bigger fear is that there is an elite that ideally would like to have a world where the masses are no smarter than is needed for their purposes. They enjoy all that life has to offer, the rest are used as cattle to drive the machine. So long as some process is in place to keep society from collapsing in on itself, this state could be maintained indefinitely.

Here's some examples I found on another forum I belong to:
ONE
Recently, when I went to McDonald's I saw on the menu that you could have
an order of 6, 9 or 12 Chicken McNuggets.
I asked for a half dozen nuggets.
'We don't have half dozen nuggets,' said the teenager at the counter.
'You don't?' I replied.
'We only have six, nine, or twelve,' was the reply.
'So I can't order a half dozen nuggets, but I can order six?'
'That's right.'
So I shook my head and ordered six McNuggets
(Will probably graduate next year?)

TWO
I was checking out at the local Wal*Mart with just a few items and the
lady behind me put her things on the belt close to mine.. I picked up one
of those 'dividers' that they keep by the cash register and placed it between
our things so they wouldn't get mixed up.
After the girl had scanned all of my items, she picked up the 'divider',
looking it all over for the bar code so she could scan it.
Not finding the bar code, she said to me, 'Do you know how much this is?'
I said to her 'I've changed my mind; I don't think I'll buy that today.'
She said 'OK,' and I paid her for the things and left.
She had no clue to what had just happened.

THREE
A woman at work was seen putting a credit card into her floppy drive and
pulling it out very quickly.
When I inquired as to what she was doing, she said she was shopping on the
Internet and they kept asking for a credit card number, so she was using
the ATM 'thingy.' (keep shuddering!!)

FOUR
I recently saw a distraught young lady weeping beside her car. 'Do you
need some help?' I asked.
She replied, 'I knew I should have replaced the battery to this remote
door un-locker. Now I can't get into my car. Do you think they (pointing to
a distant convenience store) would have a battery to fit this?'
'Hmmm, I don't know. Do you have an alarm, too?' I asked.
'No, just this remote thingy,' she answered, handing it and the car keys
to me. As I took the key and manually unlocked the door, I replied, 'Why
don't you drive over there and check about the batteries. It's a long
walk....' (PLEASE just lay down before you hurt yourself ! !!)

FIVE
Several years ago, we had an Intern who was none too swift. One day she
was typing and turned to a secretary and said, 'I'm almost out of typing
paper. What do I do?' 'Just use paper from the photocopier', the secretary
told her. With that, the intern took her last remaining blank piece of paper,
put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five 'blank' copies.
(Brunette, by the way!!)

SIX
A mother calls 911 very worried asking the dispatcher if she needs to take
her kid to the emergency room, the kid had eaten ants. The dispatcher
tells her to give the kid some Benadryl and he should be fine, the mother
says, 'I just gave him some ant killer.....Dispatcher: 'Rush him in to emergency!'

I'm afraid of the stupid

I can see your perception, but here's what I believe they were portraying.

Affluent people are normally so because THEY THINK about having kids before having them. If there was no welfare state, you'd not see people breeding like rabbits because the welfare system will help pay to care for them. Those with money contemplate if they can afford to have kids. As a result, the affluent (or just fiscally responsible) have 1-2 kids on average.

Poor people become aware that they can get the state to subsidize their kids (food stamps, rent assistance, health care, school lunches, etc.). Since someone else pays (and the welfare system actually rewards women being baby makers when there is no father around to support the kid), they learn they live better by being breeders.

The movie does oversimplify, but you have the one guy who has his wife and next door neighbor pregnant. Then his son is BMOC (big man on campus) in high school and announces at the end of the championship game that he's going to have carnal relations with all the cheerleaders that night. Later, he's in a dumb ass Jetski accident and with much work, the doctors manage to repair the damage to his genitals so he can father more kids.

Then they go on about how the cognitive decline was a concern but all the drug companies were pouring money into finding cures for baldness and impotence.

It's parody of today's society and its sense of priorities, but on many levels, it was an accurate depiction of what happens again and again in human history.

No one here will live beyond 500 years. It's literally impossible. I say just don't worry about it...

If it's anything bad that'll happen to us in the future, it's gonna be either a nuclear war, a meteor, or we'll all turn into ginormous man-babies like in Wall-E because of our laziness...

Well I happen to think that the prevalence of phishing scams and online fraud isn't so much due to the rise of the internet, as it is down to the ease of access to stupid people that it gives. In the MMO game EVE:Online, scamming and defrauding players is an accepted career path, and because of the level of intelligence of so many players, can be very profitable.

The less responsibility people are willing to take for their own lives, and for the upbringing and education of their own children, the less mature they are at adulthood. Big Brother and the Nanny State are the result of a populace devoid of responsibility, and 'giant babies' are what a lot of people are becoming.

The downside to that, is that the state ends up treating everyone like a child regardless, and even those who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives, are not permitted to do so. We have litgation cases for the most rediculous things, and companies as a result have to go further and further to cover their a**es. In other words, the more capable child is suffering because of the less capable child's irresponsibility, because the parent punishes them both.

The stuff I see here is part of the reason why the economy crashed. They decided that it was the stifling nanny state shackling the private sector so they set up a casino and crashed the economy. There's a reason why there are laws against companies poisoning people, or selling snake oil and quack cures.

Right now, with technology, people need to do less and more is produced with fewer people and there's a great big reserve army of labour so many people have no work.

I was reading the Nets and saw this. I quit the human race.
http://www.tmz.com/2010/08/14/steven-sl ... blue-quit/
http://www.tmz.com/2010/08/16/steven-sl ... ragman-pr/

My confession for today is I post hoping that Willard (though looking more like Alan Rickman these days) will comment. I do enjoy his comments. Is it possible to "fan" people on here? I fan you Willard.

Don't just jump on the poor. In interviews with a good many businessmen, when the question of what books they've read recently is asked, the answer invariably is - I haven't read a book in years.
Or as an example from real life, H.P. Lovecraft, who in his younger years was a fire breathing conservative, and staunch believer in the genetic superiority of the upper classes, had the opportunity to have lunch with the leading business men of his home town of Providence. Lovecraft went away feeling these wealthy businessmen were the dullest, most unintellectual people he had ever met.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer