hey gawker dudes. what the fuck is wrong with you?

good kinja zing, at least

really excited to start getting my news from a content farm whose content is crowd-sourced from racist teens

_Coming from a UK perspective, Deserter's Songs felt like the first of the modern arty Amerindie stuff that would come to more prominence in the 2000s._

I wasn't commenting on whether /Deserter's Songs/ was influential, esp because I don't really think of Mercury Rev as a 'big' band in the sense that most of these bands are. I just meant that I can see how it recalls Supertramp.

This was the easiest artist poll for me to vote in by a country mile. First pass had 21 songs; sorting the 20 was surprisingly quick after I cut out poor #21. Took me about 15 minutes, and it would have taken me a third of that if the band didn't use such hard-to-remember titles

"Paint a Vulgar Picture" has only gone up and up in my estimation over the years - there are days I'd call it my favorite Smiths song

http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/idiocracy-is-a-cruel-movie-and-you-should-be-ashamed-fo-1553344189

matt novak otm

I appreciate Novak's ongoing veiled trolling

The origin story for Idiocracy’s future world of half-wits is that uneducated people in the early 2000s are having kids and smart people don’t reproduce enough. It’s clear from the film that the intelligent people are wealthy, while the uneducated people are poor. So we’re starting from a position of believing that wealthy people are inherently more intelligent and, by extension, deserve their wealth. This link between intelligence and wealth is perhaps the most dangerous idea of the film and pretty quickly slips into advocating for some form of soft eugenics to build a better world.

i have not seen the film in a while to comment specifically on how it tries to present this link but there is definitely a v strong correlation between education + birthrates.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/05/SDT-2013-05-fertility-education-07.png

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.457.6886&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Studies of fertility decline in the developing world have come to different conclusions about the presumed causes of these declines. 1 But there is near unanimous agreement on two of the strongest influences on reduced fertility at both the individual and the community levels. These two influences are (a) the status of women/mothers (as measured by a number of indicators, but referring finally to some notion of gender equality, which is usually not the same thing as ‘‘prestige’’) and (b) the education of the women who become mothers. There are exceptions, of course, but on the whole the exceptions only serve to strengthen the case that these two indicators (gender equality and female education) both tend to depress fertility.

wealth + intelligence != education but it's not some kind of secret promotion of eugenics programs to note that the correlation between education + fertility is very well studied.

If only we could get rid of the uneducated Americans (read: redneck poors) and we’ll have the opportunity to live in a utopian world filled with smart and civilized people.

If "get rid of" means educate the Americans so that there are no uneducated Americans left, it stops sounding so sinister.

lol you just fell into the same trap he laid out that the commenters on the blog did

The trap is reading the article, tbf.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” - George Carlin

*median

haa

The origin story for Idiocracy’s future world of half-wits is that uneducated people in the early 2000s are having kids and smart people don’t reproduce enough. It’s clear from the film that the intelligent people are wealthy, while the uneducated people are poor. So we’re starting from a position of believing that wealthy people are inherently more intelligent and, by extension, deserve their wealth. This link between intelligence and wealth is perhaps the most dangerous idea of the film and pretty quickly slips into advocating for some form of soft eugenics to build a better world.

idiocracy is a terrible and reprehensibly smug movie (but also completely a product of the bush era and can only be understood in that context, kinda like NOFX) and i would probably agree with most of this article if i read it, but what's with the complete allergy to admitting that anyone deserves > or < wealth? are we all maoists now? i'm personally ok with some highly educated people having more wealth; i would rather have a doctor who makes double my salary than one who makes the same as me or less, and i'm glad kids who study mind-numbingly boring forms of engineering will make good cash and work hard to build buildings and roads that don't collapse. what makes idiocracy soft eugenicist is in the film intelligence transmits exclusively through a hereditary channel. but education isn't hereditary, anyone can go to school. the film seems to suggest that even if dumb/poor people go to school they don't get any smarter, or that they don't go at all. and the classist depiction of the dumb people in idiocracy is offensive in & of itself, you don't need to be an absolutist egalitarian to see that.

idiocracy is a terrible and reprehensibly smug movie (but also completely a product of the bush era and can only be understood in that context, kinda like NOFX)

nofx formed in 1983 #nofx

like i said i haven't seen it in quite a while - does the film make an explicit argument re hereditary intelligence? i thought the premise was just that ppl got less educated over time - that could easily be a failure in the transmission of memetic cultural values and not about breeding stupidity.

so-called "smart ppl" were too far up their own asses to care about anything other than their 1.5 children but that's not the message any internet quoter gets off on

novak's shtick is to take the popular reading of something and skewer it, anyone commenting "that's not what it was really about!" or defending the false dichotomy he knowingly sets up ends up commenting every time

it's a subtle trolling technique that relies on a somewhat forced naivety but hopefully pulls in clicks

sounds bad

"You should be ashamed" is probably my favorite good-faith rhetorical tack.

Maybe his reading isn't correct on specific arguments but my primary memory of seeing Idiocracy in the theater was its meanness. I have zero desire to watch it again, because of that, but it's especially jarring given Judge's other work (especially King of the Hill), which is generally kind toward people. Even in Beavis and Butthead there's not the misanthropy of Idiocracy.

there is something within me that wants to see a president camacho in my lifetime

Can it be mean and creepily eugenicist and fun and funny? I think that's what it is.

yeah i also feel it doesn't really fit in with judge's other work

TBF, the setup for that movie feels more than a little tacked on. I think he would've been just as happy presenting a string of unrelated stupidity vignettes if they would've held together as a movie.

am i misremembering or is there not also a lot of ebonics in the dialect of the idiot future?

maybe? but i think hick and dumb cali speak was more prevalent.

xp I don't remember that being the case at all.

Direct quote from the movie's narration: "the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, Valley Girl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them."

idiocracy is problematic and kinda gross and I am in fact ashamed at how hard a lot of it makes me lol, however feeling ashamed about that isn't gonna unlol the lols

Problematic is a v problematic term

Joan C OTM

Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them

hearing this line in my head forced a guilty but genuine irl lol

GO AWAY, BAITIN'

me irl

i think it just occurred to me how this site is now entirely political content but it's kind of really boring political content, like "look at this typo Trump made in a tweet" or "here's some really OTT reduction/interpretation of some already-widely-disseminated news story", and there seems to be way less content daily. I miss wacky articles abt NYC and stuff that was fun to read, sheesh

sending someone with an extremely sharp and unique point of view to do wacky things go on a Paula Deen cruise or go to some weird meditation seminar was really smart and original. I get that a large part of any current news site is going to be aggregation but besides j0rdan's videos (which tbh are really wonderful) is ANY original content being written at this point? Is anyone going places to report on stuff?

anna merlan went on a cruise, if you like: http://jezebel.com/sail-far-away-at-sea-with-americas-largest-floating-1760900554

gawker has been pretty bad/boring lately

lack of genuinely outraged bumps in the spirit of this thread probably related

yeah the editorial move to just covering the same old trump shit as the rest of the media is boring af

500 Days of Trump

Class & wealth issues aside, Idiocracy is full-on racist horseshit. Plus often funny ¯\(°_°)/¯

i hate the idiocracy view of the world. we have an ignorant, bloodthirsty proletariat is because our political class failed them, there's nothing to be smug about

we have an ignorant, bloodthirsty proletariat is because our political class failed them, there's nothing to be smug about

No, we have an ignorant, bloodthirsty proletariat because people are stupid. The "political class" is every bit as ignorant and bloodthirsty as the people who vote for them.

people are stupid

the giveaway is the unsophistication of their political understanding

I've caught flack for saying this before but I don't really believe that Judge made Idiocracy to make a point about anything, I think it was really just him wanting to make a funny movie about dumb people set in future-American Gladiators world, anyone who takes it seriously is kind of an idiot themselves

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1352662289l/11289919.jpg

roland barthes needs some graphic design assistance

too late now, he's dead

https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/death-of-the-author.jpg

xpost

how ironic.