Idiocracy

[Bojangles]

Anyone else ever see this movie? It's a comedy that I guess never made it to theaters. I watched it tonight out of sheer boredom but it was surprisingly entertaining.

 

Idiocracy is a 2006 comedy film directed by Mike Judge. It stars Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. A dark comedy, it features an "Average Joe" and a prostitute subjected to a military experiment in hibernation, from which they are to awaken in one year. However, they are forgotten and, instead, emerge 500 years later in a world where dysgenics and cultural anti-intellectualism have resulted in a uniformly stupid humanity.

 

Here's a rundown:

As the movie begins, vignettes and a voiceover illustrate that as unintelligent people enthusiastically outbreed intelligent people, future society will become inevitably and irreversibly dumber.

 

In 2005, Private Joe Bauers (Wilson), a completely average man, and Rita (Rudolph), a loyal prostitute who is very afraid of her pimp, Upgrayedd (spelled with two D's for a "double dose of this pimping"), are selected as guinea pigs for a year-long secret military hibernation project. The pair are sealed into coffin-like chambers. Unfortunately, after a scandal in which the officer in charge is arrested on prostitution charges in connection with Upgrayedd, the experiment is forgotten, the military base is demolished, and a Fuddruckers (renamed Buttfuckers in the future) is built on the site.

 

Five hundred years later, Joe and Rita's containers (unearthed in The Great Garbage Avalanche) open, reviving them. Joe lands in the apartment of Frito (Shepard), an idiot. Feeling woozy, Joe visits the hospital where Dr. Lexus (Long) diagnoses him as simply retarded. Lexus panics that Joe has no bar code tattoo and can't be scanned for payment, while Joe panics that 500 years have passed, and the world he sees out the window is falling apart. Joe flees but is arrested at a Carl's Jr. vending booth for failing to pay the hospital bill, and for being unscannable.

 

Joe's defense lawyer at trial turns out to be Frito, who stupidly helps convict him. In prison, a poorly-designed I.D. machine records Joe's name as "Not Sure" and barcodes him. During a mandatory I.Q. test, Joe realizes just how stupid humanity has become. Easily escaping the prison, Joe returns to Frito's apartment and asks if a time machine exists to help him return to the past. Frito says there is, but will help only after Joe promises him billions of dollars in interest on a bank account Joe will open in the past.

 

Enroute to the time machine, Joe, Rita and the lawyer enter a city-sized Costco, where Joe is arrested again when his new barcode is scanned. Instead of going to jail, Joe is taken to the White House: President Camacho (Crews) has seen Joe's I.Q. test and recruits him to solve the world's food shortages, crippled economy, mountains of garbage, etc. Joe learns that water has been replaced by Brawndo (a sports drink "with electrolytes"), even for crop irrigation, causing the food shortage.

 

After Joe reintroduces the use of water for crops, the giant Brawndo Corporation's stock plummets, causing massive unemployment. The angry population riots, and Joe is sentenced to a Running Man/Mad Max/demolition derby style "rehabilitation". Meanwhile Rita sees crops sprouting in the fields. To save Joe, she bribes a TV cameraman to show the crops to the world (a task he completes only by accident). The President sees the thriving new plants on the stadium big screens and pardons Joe just before he is incinerated by a flame thrower. Soon afterwards, Joe becomes the Vice-President and eventually, President. He abandons his plans to return to the past so he can work on saving the future.

 

At the celebration, Joe learns that the "Time Masheen" is just a bad amusement park ride. After the credits, we see a third hibernation capsule open, releasing a snappily dressed Upgrayedd into the world.

[jbrshmonster]

 

that movie is hilarious.

[Ski Mask]

I think somebody posted a thread about it on here before. or it was in the movie recommendation thread. I loved it. the only thing that annoyed me was how stupid the dialogue was. I mean, I know it was done to emphasize how dumb everyone has become, but it was still a bit akward.

[Bojangles]

Sadly enough, it reminded me of most people in my city.

[puhfester]

It's got electrolytes!!!!

 

I like when the guy "breaks" out of jail the alarms are saying "eXscape! eXscape"... clever.

[Torquemada]

hahaha the fucking electrolytes.

[DeweyVonGumpsteinAndTheWiz]

luke wilson wearing safety orange crocs. priceless.

[lord_casek]

i have this movie. mike judge gets many props.

 

good stuff. sad, but good.

 

 

rudfuckers.

 

 

and what about the coffee shop that is now a handjob parlor?

haha

[El Mamerro]

I just remembered I've had this on my hard drive for weeks and I completely forgot about it. I'm gonna watch it now.

[bustanut]

Great movie funny as hell

[fermentor666]

First, this movie is awesome.

 

Second, Fox is retarded for burying the release. It released in only 7 theaters in 7 cities for one week without any promotion after spending literally over a year on the shelf. And Fox also sucks for releasing the DVD with barely any extras.

 

Third, why the fuck are you spoiling THE ENTIRE MOVIE in the first post of this thread???

[Bojangles]

First, this movie is awesome.

 

Second, Fox is retarded for burying the release. It released in only 7 theaters in 7 cities for one week without any promotion after spending literally over a year on the shelf. And Fox also sucks for releasing the DVD with barely any extras.

 

Third, why the fuck are you spoiling THE ENTIRE MOVIE in the first post of this thread???

 

Sowwy!

[Hayabusa]

IVE BEEN TRYING TO FIND THIS MOVIE EVERY TIME I GO TO THE VIDEO STORE BUT THEY NEVER HAVE IT

DUBYA TEE EFF???

[Al Green]

this movie is really great and really intentionally shitty. mike judge is a patriotic hater of america.. and a total cynic...ive even talked to him on the phone once or twice..dude is a dick.

[SUR X3]

"...Because its got what plants need?"

[groyn shmoyn]

dang... i had the opprotunity to watch this last nite and i passed.

 

 

south park kept me enterained anyway.

[phax]

such a funny movie

[Poesia [ ] T]

Where on our Way..

 

The Dumbing Of America

 

By Susan Jacoby

Sunday, February 17, 2008; Page B01

 

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

 

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

 

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

 

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

 

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

 

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book -- fiction or nonfiction -- over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

 

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book "Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter," the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their "vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen." But these zombie-like characteristics "are not signs of mental atrophy. They're signs of focus." Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

 

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

 

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time -- as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web -- seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

 

No wonder negative political ads work. "With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information," the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. "A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching."

 

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible -- and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University's Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate -- featuring the candidate's own voice -- dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

 

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

 

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, "they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin."

 

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today's public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it "not at all important" to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it "very important."

 

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

 

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. ("Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture," Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a "change election," the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

[CELT]

Sadly enough, it reminded me of most people in my city.

 

:lol:

[Stimme]

I own it. One of my favorites.

 

And I completely agree with bojangles, everyday someone reminds me of this movie.

[xrebelheartsx]

poesia, i read that yesterday... sickeningly true.

[Ape Shit]

This was posted in a newspaper back in October....

 

American kids, dumber than dirt

Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history

 

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

 

I have this ongoing discussion with a longtime reader who also just so happens to be a longtime Oakland high school teacher, a wonderful guy who's seen generations of teens come and generations go and who has a delightful poetic sensibility and quirky outlook on his life and his family and his beloved teaching career.

 

And he often writes to me in response to something I might've written about the youth of today, anything where I comment on the various nefarious factors shaping their minds and their perspectives and whether or not, say, EMFs and junk food and cell phones are melting their brains and what can be done and just how bad it might all be.

 

His response: It is not bad at all. It's absolutely horrifying.

 

My friend often summarizes for me what he sees, firsthand, every day and every month, year in and year out, in his classroom. He speaks not merely of the sad decline in overall intellectual acumen among students over the years, not merely of the astonishing spread of lazy slackerhood, or the fact that cell phones and iPods and excess TV exposure are, absolutely and without reservation, short-circuiting the minds of the upcoming generations. Of this, he says, there is zero doubt.

 

Nor does he speak merely of the notion that kids these days are overprotected and wussified and don't spend enough time outdoors and don't get any real exercise and therefore can't, say, identify basic plants, or handle a tool, or build, well, anything at all. Again, these things are a given. Widely reported, tragically ignored, nothing new.

 

No, my friend takes it all a full step — or rather, leap — further. It is not merely a sad slide. It is not just a general dumbing down. It is far uglier than that.

 

We are, as far as urban public education is concerned, essentially at rock bottom. We are now at a point where we are essentially churning out ignorant teens who are becoming ignorant adults and society as a whole will pay dearly, very soon, and if you think the hordes of easily terrified, mindless fundamentalist evangelical Christian lemmings have been bad for the soul of this country, just wait.

 

It's gotten so bad that, as my friend nears retirement, he says he is very seriously considering moving out of the country so as to escape what he sees will be the surefire collapse of functioning American society in the next handful of years due to the absolutely irrefutable destruction, the shocking — and nearly hopeless — dumb-ification of the American brain. It is just that bad.

 

Now, you may think he's merely a curmudgeon, a tired old teacher who stopped caring long ago. Not true. Teaching is his life. He says he loves his students, loves education and learning and watching young minds awaken. Problem is, he is seeing much less of it. It's a bit like the melting of the polar ice caps. Sure, there's been alarmist data about it for years, but until you see it for yourself, the deep visceral dread doesn't really hit home.

 

He cites studies, reports, hard data, from the appalling effects of television on child brain development (i.e.; any TV exposure before 6 years old and your kid's basic cognitive wiring and spatial perceptions are pretty much scrambled for life), to the fact that, because of all the insidious mandatory testing teachers are now forced to incorporate into the curriculum, of the 182 school days in a year, there are 110 when such testing is going on somewhere at Oakland High. As one of his colleagues put it, "It's like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it."

 

But most of all, he simply observes his students, year to year, noting all the obvious evidence of teens' decreasing abilities when confronted with even the most basic intellectual tasks, from understanding simple history to working through moderately complex ideas to even (in a couple recent examples that particularly distressed him) being able to define the words "agriculture," or even "democracy." Not a single student could do it.

 

It gets worse. My friend cites the fact that, of the 6,000 high school students he estimates he's taught over the span of his career, only a small fraction now make it to his grade with a functioning understanding of written English. They do not know how to form a sentence. They cannot write an intelligible paragraph. Recently, after giving an assignment that required drawing lines, he realized that not a single student actually knew how to use a ruler.

 

It is, in short, nothing less than a tidal wave of dumb, with once-passionate, increasingly exasperated teachers like my friend nearly powerless to stop it. The worst part: It's not the kids' fault. They're merely the victims of a horribly failed educational system.

 

Then our discussion often turns to the meat of it, the bigger picture, the ugly and unavoidable truism about the lack of need among the government and the power elite in this nation to create a truly effective educational system, one that actually generates intelligent, thoughtful, articulate citizens.

 

Hell, why should they? After all, the dumber the populace, the easier it is to rule and control and launch unwinnable wars and pass laws telling them that sex is bad and TV is good and God knows all, so just pipe down and eat your Taco Bell Double-Supremo Burrito and be glad we don't arrest you for posting dirty pictures on your cute little blog.

 

This is about when I try to offer counterevidence, a bit of optimism. For one thing, I've argued generational relativity in this space before, suggesting maybe kids are no scarier or dumber or more dangerous than they've ever been, and that maybe some of the problem is merely the same old awkward generation gap, with every current generation absolutely convinced the subsequent one is terrifically stupid and malicious and will be the end of society as a whole. Just the way it always seems.

 

I also point out how, despite all the evidence of total public-education meltdown, I keep being surprised, keep hearing from/about teens and youth movements and actions that impress the hell out of me. Damn kids made the Internet what it is today, fer chrissakes. Revolutionized media. Broke all the rules. Still are.

 

Hell, some of the best designers, writers, artists, poets, chefs, and so on that I meet are in their early to mid-20s. And the nation's top universities are still managing, despite a factory-churning mentality, to crank out young minds of astonishing ability and acumen. How did these kids do it? How did they escape the horrible public school system? How did they avoid the great dumbing down of America? Did they never see a TV show until they hit puberty? Were they all born and raised elsewhere, in India and Asia and Russia? Did they all go to Waldorf or Montessori and eat whole-grain breads and play with firecrackers and take long walks in wild nature? Are these kids flukes? Exceptions? Just lucky?

 

My friend would say, well, yes, that's precisely what most of them are. Lucky, wealthy, foreign-born, private-schooled ... and increasingly rare. Most affluent parents in America — and many more who aren't — now put their kids in private schools from day one, and the smart ones give their kids no TV and minimal junk food and no video games. (Of course, this in no way guarantees a smart, attuned kid, but compared to the odds of success in the public school system, it sure seems to help). This covers about, what, 3 percent of the populace?

 

As for the rest, well, the dystopian evidence seems overwhelming indeed, to the point where it might be no stretch at all to say the biggest threat facing America is perhaps not global warming, not perpetual warmongering, not garbage food or low-level radiation or way too much Lindsay Lohan, but a populace far too ignorant to know how to properly manage any of it, much less change it all for the better.

 

What, too fatalistic? Don't worry. Soon enough, no one will know what the word even means.

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/10/24/notes102407.DTL&feed=rss.mmorford

[dowmagik]

i almost rented this last night, but chose hannibal rising instead - a bit let down.

[christo-f]

"Ow my balls!".

 

Great movie, also a little scary if you give it too much thought.

[Bojangles]

The whole movie is in sections on Youtube if you've never seen it!

[Overtime]

why you trying to read that word!

 

you like sex and money! dude, you're trippin me out

[shooter mcgavin]

sick mov

[After School Special]

IT HAS WHAT PLANTS CRAVE

[shaolinmasta]

yeah saw this earlier in the week funny shit

[soupBDC]

Computer: "Thank you for waiting. Doctor Lexus will be with you shortly."

 

Dr. Lexus: "Hey, how's it hangin' essay?"

 

Bower: "Not so good. I don't really know what's going on but I must be seeing things. I think it might be these drugs the army put me on, but uh, if you could just get me well enough to get back to base—"

 

Dr. Lexus: "Huh riiight. Kick ass. Uhh, don't want to sound like a dick or nothing but uhh, says on your chart you're 'Fucked up.' Also uh, you 'Talk like a fag.' And, 'Your shit's all retarded.' Whhhaaaat I do is I just, like, uh like, you know. Uh, oh you know what I mean. Like."

 

Bower: "No, I'm serious here."

 

Dr. Lexus: "Hah, don't worry Scro, now there's plenty of 'tards out there living really kickass lives. My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now."

 

Bower: "I—I need to be serious for a second here: I need help."

 

Dr. Lexus: "There's that Fag talk we talked about. Huh huh. Alright so that'll be, uh, this many dollars, so uh, if you could just like put your bar code in that shit."