Return to the Planet of the Apes
I can see that schools and classes for talented and intelligent kids have become a hot topic in Finland again. In the news article
that reports that half of the people support them, you don't need to
read very far in the reader comments to find the usual lefto-equalist
knock-out cliches of how Einstein was considered stupid in his time
(apparently, if some early version of classification scheme ever seriously misclassifies anybody,
that taints all such efforts of classification forever) and how the
Nazis believed in intelligence differences and that intelligence is
meaningless next to wisdom that dumb people have a lot while the smart
people rarely have it. Of course, all this lofty talk about how all
children must learn to respect and help each other and not imagine that they would in any way be better
than others, which is the reason why Martin Prince must have Nelson
Muntz sitting behind him, in reality only means that Martin must learn
to shut up and act stupid to avoid getting a beating.
And I do find especially strange these ideas that higher intelligence leads to an evil dystopia of jackboots and concentration camps, whereas people who "maybe are not so bright" are always good and warm-hearted people that we need have a lot more of. To correct this notion, just go visit a country or a neighbourhood where the average IQ is one standard deviation or more below average, and you will see a real-life dystopia that already exists today. Just don't go there after dark, or you might also get a free lesson about the supposed inherent goodness and moral superiority of the people who have low intelligence.
I read this morning Steve Sailer's post "Mike Judge's "Idiocracy:" The movie the Fox studio doesn't want you to see" and was really surprised to see that this movie "Idiocracy" has finally come out. Indeed there is no trailer, no advertising, not anything anywhere, and the movie is opening only in six markets "not including New York and San Francisco" (ha ha, now there is a surprise... not), but it was playing in our local theater. This is one of the benefits of living in a world-class city. So we went to see it this Labor Day afternoon, since we really had nothing better to do. There was only one other person in the theater, so to my delight, we could enjoy this movie in peace without having to endure the real-world equivalents of these movie characters yapping and babbling in the theater.
So the premise of this movie is that an average guy is frozen Futurama-style and due to a few mishaps he wakes up in the far future, in which centuries of dysgenic breeding has had such severe results that he finds himself the smartest man in the world, so that his habit of using complete sentences makes him sound smart and "faggy". The movie immediately starts great by showing us a smart yuppie couple and the trailer trash couple. (I had already read that this was coming, but even so, I was delighted that they didn't edit it out.) Whereas the yuppie couple, who were basically taken straight out of the writings of Steve Sailer or Vox Day, remains childless ("We just can't have a kid in this market", the woman says echoing Steve's notion of "affordable family formation", and many other of his themes could be seen in this movie, including the military's reliance on standardized tests), the white trash couple merrily breeds back and forth and soon their ever-expanding family tree completely overcrowds the screen, whereas the yuppie female finds that her fertility has fallen, her husband dies and in the end, now considerably aged and thus uglier, in a style reminiscent of Maureen Dowd, she wistfully longs for the "right guy" to one day come along.
After our hapless hero finds himself in the far future full of crude lowbrow humour, consumption and unconstrained pornification, the first half of the movie is actually quite funny with its machine-gun satire about stupid people and their mannerisms and inability to ever achieve anything or to even understand what they are stuck in. The second half of the movie is much weaker, with the plot and actors basically forgetting what they were supposed to be like, just so that the story could come to the happy end.
Of course you have to suspend your disbelief from the beginning so that you can imagine all this technology working on autopilot, since these people of the future certainly would not be able to keep it running, producing the energy, food and whatever else a society needs so that it doesn't completely collapse within a week. I just told myself that there is a Marching Morons -style secret cabal working behind the scenes, and left it at that. Of course in reality, only smart people are able to have fun by imitating underclass mannerisms, as long as they sober up by the Monday morning. When the people from the left half of the Bell Curve try to do the same, they just get mired deeper in their misery.
Most of the humour consists of simple sex and fart jokes, made "ironically" of course, but there were also a few politically incorrect moments. For example, quite a few of the stupid people of the future were obese, and some were even nonwhite and to my surprise, sported gangsta rapper and inner city and latino underclass mannerisms. Occasionally their behaviour was actually very painfully close to what we can see on TV today. The few token bones thrown for the liberals (who, as Steve Sailer often likes to point out, are superior to us because at the same time, they are more intelligent than us and they believe that intelligence differences are meaningless) were... oh heck, by now you should be able to guess what they were even without me having to spell them out for you. For all the angry noises that leftists make about "stupidity" these days, almost as if they thought that it was somehow a bad thing and that we need more highly educated experts to tell us what to do and how to live, I would really be interested to hear their opinions about this movie and the NASCAR and monster truck rally fans depicted in it.
You would normally assume that a movie like this that stars the handsome, intelligent and lovable Luke Wilson would have had the studio advertise it and have the stars do the usual publicity tour for the movie, the way as in that other movie "You, Me and Dupree" that had the less sympathetic Wilson brother in the starring role. I kept anticipating to see Owen appearing in some cameo role basically acting the same way he acts in every movie he is in, but if he did I missed it. But at least this way "Dupree" will get a whole new layer of unintentional meaning when we eventually watch it on Movie Network. Normally such advertising and publicity tour would have indeed been in proper order, but even though this movie is nowhere as satirically biting as it very easily could have been, consisting mostly of fart jokes instead of, say, just casually pointing out the well-known negative correlations between intelligence and future time orientation and certain lifestyle choices that are known to have highly negative social effects, even the few worms that escape by creaking open this particular can of worms are so immensely serious that it is simply unimaginable that any studio boss would take the slightest chance of becoming the next Mel Gibson over the idea that society of stupid people is worse than a society of smart people.
At least deep down, leftists know perfectly well that they don't have any real arguments against soccer mom eugenics, and they also know that IQ is strongly correlated to most good things in life. Therefore they have no choice but to hysterically shout down and crucify anybody who even dares to approach this forbidden territory as a "Nazi", instead of engaging them in a honest debate. And at least nobody who wants to have a future career in the movie industry would want that for himself. As fun as it is to be right, it is way more fun to be successful.
For this reason, I can't even begin to imagine Luke Wilson sitting in some talkshow and casually explaining how the premise of the movie is that dysgenic breeding is currently making humanity stupider and that is somehow a bad thing. That right there would be the end of his career. Even if this basic concept is played only for crude fart and sex jokes the way it was done in this movie, pretty soon people might start asking the real serious questions and perhaps even begin to notice and point out certain tomwolfean phenomena that are happening in the real world in front of their eyes, and we certainly can't have that, now can we?
So my prediction is that the movie will fail financially and be taken out of the theaters. So those of my readers who want to see this movie, go see it some time this week while you still can. After that, it will take a long time until it might come out on DVD. However, I predict by that time it will suddenly sell more than Futurama, Family Guy and Office Space combined, having achieved a cult status. I am sure I missed many little jokes in the background, and while we were walking home, my wife said that she really wants to see this movie again on DVD, so that she can pause the show when necessary and read everything. I did notice one perhaps unintentional little gaffe, though, when at one point the "lawyer" character called Wilson's character "Wilson".
And you know, right now when I am writing this sentence, my wife is watching Maury Povich Show in which they are once again doing paternity tests to baby daddies and baby mamas. The results revealed a moment ago that the man in the hot seat was the father, which made the fat underclass mother quite triumphantly happy while his new, prettier and more slender wife looked rather sad. I can't help but wonder what the latter woman now thinks of feminism and the idea of generous child support payments that they advocate. More generally, I have to wonder if, after watching "Idiocracy", I will ever again be able to see the world the same way as before.
And I do find especially strange these ideas that higher intelligence leads to an evil dystopia of jackboots and concentration camps, whereas people who "maybe are not so bright" are always good and warm-hearted people that we need have a lot more of. To correct this notion, just go visit a country or a neighbourhood where the average IQ is one standard deviation or more below average, and you will see a real-life dystopia that already exists today. Just don't go there after dark, or you might also get a free lesson about the supposed inherent goodness and moral superiority of the people who have low intelligence.
I read this morning Steve Sailer's post "Mike Judge's "Idiocracy:" The movie the Fox studio doesn't want you to see" and was really surprised to see that this movie "Idiocracy" has finally come out. Indeed there is no trailer, no advertising, not anything anywhere, and the movie is opening only in six markets "not including New York and San Francisco" (ha ha, now there is a surprise... not), but it was playing in our local theater. This is one of the benefits of living in a world-class city. So we went to see it this Labor Day afternoon, since we really had nothing better to do. There was only one other person in the theater, so to my delight, we could enjoy this movie in peace without having to endure the real-world equivalents of these movie characters yapping and babbling in the theater.
So the premise of this movie is that an average guy is frozen Futurama-style and due to a few mishaps he wakes up in the far future, in which centuries of dysgenic breeding has had such severe results that he finds himself the smartest man in the world, so that his habit of using complete sentences makes him sound smart and "faggy". The movie immediately starts great by showing us a smart yuppie couple and the trailer trash couple. (I had already read that this was coming, but even so, I was delighted that they didn't edit it out.) Whereas the yuppie couple, who were basically taken straight out of the writings of Steve Sailer or Vox Day, remains childless ("We just can't have a kid in this market", the woman says echoing Steve's notion of "affordable family formation", and many other of his themes could be seen in this movie, including the military's reliance on standardized tests), the white trash couple merrily breeds back and forth and soon their ever-expanding family tree completely overcrowds the screen, whereas the yuppie female finds that her fertility has fallen, her husband dies and in the end, now considerably aged and thus uglier, in a style reminiscent of Maureen Dowd, she wistfully longs for the "right guy" to one day come along.
After our hapless hero finds himself in the far future full of crude lowbrow humour, consumption and unconstrained pornification, the first half of the movie is actually quite funny with its machine-gun satire about stupid people and their mannerisms and inability to ever achieve anything or to even understand what they are stuck in. The second half of the movie is much weaker, with the plot and actors basically forgetting what they were supposed to be like, just so that the story could come to the happy end.
Of course you have to suspend your disbelief from the beginning so that you can imagine all this technology working on autopilot, since these people of the future certainly would not be able to keep it running, producing the energy, food and whatever else a society needs so that it doesn't completely collapse within a week. I just told myself that there is a Marching Morons -style secret cabal working behind the scenes, and left it at that. Of course in reality, only smart people are able to have fun by imitating underclass mannerisms, as long as they sober up by the Monday morning. When the people from the left half of the Bell Curve try to do the same, they just get mired deeper in their misery.
Most of the humour consists of simple sex and fart jokes, made "ironically" of course, but there were also a few politically incorrect moments. For example, quite a few of the stupid people of the future were obese, and some were even nonwhite and to my surprise, sported gangsta rapper and inner city and latino underclass mannerisms. Occasionally their behaviour was actually very painfully close to what we can see on TV today. The few token bones thrown for the liberals (who, as Steve Sailer often likes to point out, are superior to us because at the same time, they are more intelligent than us and they believe that intelligence differences are meaningless) were... oh heck, by now you should be able to guess what they were even without me having to spell them out for you. For all the angry noises that leftists make about "stupidity" these days, almost as if they thought that it was somehow a bad thing and that we need more highly educated experts to tell us what to do and how to live, I would really be interested to hear their opinions about this movie and the NASCAR and monster truck rally fans depicted in it.
You would normally assume that a movie like this that stars the handsome, intelligent and lovable Luke Wilson would have had the studio advertise it and have the stars do the usual publicity tour for the movie, the way as in that other movie "You, Me and Dupree" that had the less sympathetic Wilson brother in the starring role. I kept anticipating to see Owen appearing in some cameo role basically acting the same way he acts in every movie he is in, but if he did I missed it. But at least this way "Dupree" will get a whole new layer of unintentional meaning when we eventually watch it on Movie Network. Normally such advertising and publicity tour would have indeed been in proper order, but even though this movie is nowhere as satirically biting as it very easily could have been, consisting mostly of fart jokes instead of, say, just casually pointing out the well-known negative correlations between intelligence and future time orientation and certain lifestyle choices that are known to have highly negative social effects, even the few worms that escape by creaking open this particular can of worms are so immensely serious that it is simply unimaginable that any studio boss would take the slightest chance of becoming the next Mel Gibson over the idea that society of stupid people is worse than a society of smart people.
At least deep down, leftists know perfectly well that they don't have any real arguments against soccer mom eugenics, and they also know that IQ is strongly correlated to most good things in life. Therefore they have no choice but to hysterically shout down and crucify anybody who even dares to approach this forbidden territory as a "Nazi", instead of engaging them in a honest debate. And at least nobody who wants to have a future career in the movie industry would want that for himself. As fun as it is to be right, it is way more fun to be successful.
For this reason, I can't even begin to imagine Luke Wilson sitting in some talkshow and casually explaining how the premise of the movie is that dysgenic breeding is currently making humanity stupider and that is somehow a bad thing. That right there would be the end of his career. Even if this basic concept is played only for crude fart and sex jokes the way it was done in this movie, pretty soon people might start asking the real serious questions and perhaps even begin to notice and point out certain tomwolfean phenomena that are happening in the real world in front of their eyes, and we certainly can't have that, now can we?
So my prediction is that the movie will fail financially and be taken out of the theaters. So those of my readers who want to see this movie, go see it some time this week while you still can. After that, it will take a long time until it might come out on DVD. However, I predict by that time it will suddenly sell more than Futurama, Family Guy and Office Space combined, having achieved a cult status. I am sure I missed many little jokes in the background, and while we were walking home, my wife said that she really wants to see this movie again on DVD, so that she can pause the show when necessary and read everything. I did notice one perhaps unintentional little gaffe, though, when at one point the "lawyer" character called Wilson's character "Wilson".
And you know, right now when I am writing this sentence, my wife is watching Maury Povich Show in which they are once again doing paternity tests to baby daddies and baby mamas. The results revealed a moment ago that the man in the hot seat was the father, which made the fat underclass mother quite triumphantly happy while his new, prettier and more slender wife looked rather sad. I can't help but wonder what the latter woman now thinks of feminism and the idea of generous child support payments that they advocate. More generally, I have to wonder if, after watching "Idiocracy", I will ever again be able to see the world the same way as before.
No link to Vox?
Posted by Anonymous | 9:27 PM
My bad, corrected.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 10:02 PM
I think Ilkka really nails it: MJ's implicit views on modern men and women are Vox Day-like reactionary.
Consider the Luke Wilson character: feckless, passive, unattached, naive. He doesn't figure out the girl is a prostitute, bores her to death initially with his boyish chatter, declines her invitation to go to bed, and, as president, just marries the whore instead of fulfilling his duty under the circumstances to spread his seed. The male yuppie husband is a wuss, too. It's the woman who does the talking to the camera, interrupted by his occasional whining. (And the army colonel who bakes up the scheme pathetically flowers into manhood under the tutelage of a pimp.)
The modern women are no better: a barren Maureen Dowd-alike career woman and a prostitute. (Why did MJ make the female lead a prostitute when she didn't have to be? Not just for comic potential, I think.) The prostitute is fairly smart- not your typical crack whore. Both these women have voluntarily taken themselves out of the reproductive game, to the benefit of the white trash breeders.
So that seems to be the moral of the movie- the failure of modern men and women of reasonable intelligence to do their duties.
Posted by Andrew | 12:31 AM
OK, I consider myself Liberal and I don't find this movie offensive at all.
But I find it curious that Liberals (or "leftists") are blamed for this supposed anti-Darwinist political correctness.
Puhleeze, byotch! It is well documented that Liberals/Democrats are much more accepting of the scientific underpinnings of Darwinist theory than Conservatives/Republicans.
Dysgenic breeding leading to people using complete sentences being called "faggy"? Hello? Have you forgottten George Duh-buy vs. French-speaking Kerry already? The conservatives have spoken, and they have spoken in favor of the dystopia of "Idiocracy."
Posted by A random Lib ... | 6:19 AM
It is well documented that Liberals/Democrats are much more accepting of the scientific underpinnings of Darwinist theory than Conservatives/Republicans.
Yes, they very well may be... unless it is applied to humans, in which case it is just wrong and evil.
See, for example, the essay "Darwin's Enemies on the Left".
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 8:10 AM
And of course, the main ideological problem in this movie is not evolution, but IQ. You know, that little thing that leftists claim they have way more than conservatives, even though IQ doesn't exist or predict anything and is in all respects completely meaningless.
Once you accept the basic premise of this movie, that society becomes worse in many important respects if its average IQ plummets, you enter a very dangerous ideological territory, from the leftist point of view.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 8:57 AM
I was lucky to see the movie in Houston. I liked it and can’t seem to stop thinking about it, but the movie is problematic. I am ready to believe that Fox News, Costco and Starbucks did not like the way they were portrayed, and so they may have interfered with the movie’s release. Studio execs may have been afraid of saying out loud that smart people are better than stupid people, so they didn’t know how to promote it. But there is one more problem with it – it is physically hard to watch so many revolting people do so many revolting things in such a revolting environment. Scenes showing a future hospital or a lazy-boy/toilet made me want to go home and take a shower.
This said, I think the movie has a few scenes that are simply perfect. The yuppies discussing their problems are pitch-perfect, and so is the scene in which Luke Wilson character tries to convince the cabinet to use water instead of Gatorade to water plants, while they keep babbling about electrolytes.
Posted by Anonymous | 1:51 PM
Being in the New York area I won't have the chance to see Idiocracy in theaters. Does Fox consider it too disturbing for New Yorkers' effete sensibilities?
Fortuantely, a(n) (almost) straight-to-video/DVD release is no longer a financial kiss of death.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 5:46 PM
Actually, liberals are MUCH more willing to accept Darwinism's applicability to humans than Conservatives.
http://pewforum.org/surveys/origins/#3
However, since we are both in agreement that an acceptance of evolutionary theory is a basic test of scientific literacy, and, well, basic sanity, I humbly propose the following: We amend the Constitution to allow only those who profess a belief in human Darwninian evolution to vote. That'll rid politics of those nasty lefty-libbies, right? That'll scrub them right out of our political system, and place political power right where it belongs...
Posted by A random Lib ... | 6:01 PM
The issue isn't whether the left accepts evolution as an explanation of man's distant origins but whether it accepts that evolution has continued to shape us since we took on a human form, particularly during the tens of thousands of years since man divided into the various groupings now called "races". When it's suggested that differences among these groups might be "evolved" and hence genetic rather than social in origin, liberals suddenly seem less excited about Darwin.
Posted by andy | 12:49 AM
Liberals may be "less excited about Darwin" when it comes to explaining differences among human "races", but so are scientists. There is little peer reviewed scientific evidence for profound biological racial differences. When there is such evidence, then this Liberal will believe it. Until there is such evidence, this Liberal will view such claims, like the claims of religion, as ideological claptrap.
Posted by A random Lib ... | 4:13 AM