I have a friend who is a good person overall but really buys into the “real life is becoming Idiocracy” bit. I was frustrated, because I’m not the best real-time arguer so I don’t think I did a good job of expressing why the movie is disgusting trash.
I attempted to talk about how it blames people instead of systems, and how it’s an awful eugenics narrative. But we quickly got into a rabbit hole about whether intelligence can be passed on genetically or not and if that matters, and other dumb topics that went nowhere.
What’s a concise and offline-compatible way of explaining why Idiocracy is bad & decent people should find it gross?
Honestly I think it’s flawed just because it posits the idea that people who disagree with you are big dumb stupid heads and that’s the only reason they disagree with you. They couldn’t be smart but disagree (for topics less about morals) or smart but just immoral (for topics about morals). Nope any disagreement is just because they’re stupid.
It also kind of just gets a lot of fundamental bit of knowledge wrong anyway. Even if you could consider someone objectively stupid, that doesn’t mean they are entirely incapable of everything. Things like not being able to read are often the case of a failed education system considering that there are countries with near 100% literacy rates, rather than some innate trait that they just can’t learn. And there are plenty of people who can hyper specialize in a certain field but not really do much outside of it.
Heck that’s a problem in the aviation industry of rich doctors who think they know everything buying a new plane and then crashing.
I strongly think that a large portion of climate change skeptics know that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change and they just don’t give a shit.
This is certainly true at least for the oil companies. They’re not stupid about it just taking a gamble they die before.
