A Look at Idiocracy

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I found this comment on Imgur.com today, which answered to this picture:

with:

Idiocracy is an optimistic movie. In it, a popular president chooses to listen to a subject matter expert over corporate profits.

I laughed for a solid minute and felt I needed to share. And then I realized how true and unrealistic that is, as I was also watching an opinion-poll regarding the upcoming german elections, where none of the major parties are having a good candidate for the chancellor-ship and every single party that has a chance to succeed is just a cess-pool of hypocritical and corrupt cleptocrats, who don't even own the academic titles they hold and are liked by noone and yet, somehow, still are going to be elected by a majority of the population.

Interesting. Thinking about what goes on at the end of the movie with his appointment; I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that that is more or less the 90's democrat approach... or at least its own brand of generic populism.

Thinking back, there's possibly some "both sides" rhetoric going on with Judge's future. I think about what pre social media progressive and right wing social foundations might have as far as common underlying rhetoric, and it's just so crazy that it might work.

[Yukaphile]

I haven't seen this since 2008, lol. Should I rewatch it? Will President Camacho remind me too much of Trump?

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I haven't seen this since 2008, lol. Should I rewatch it? Will President Camacho remind me too much of Trump?

Yes Im curious of the scenes you wish to exhibit for discussion purposes here.

[Beastro]

Judge has a knack for that. King of the Hill can be taken as a straight up satire mocking Midwestern conservatives, but it can also be seen as a validation of their principles. Hank Hill is an annoying guy, but he's a decent everyone would love to have for a neighbour even if you'd always be eye rolling at him. I know, one of my brother's is pretty much a carbon copy of him in so many ways.

The only bit to KotH that falls out of that pattern is the completely unsympathetic left-wing antagonists he keeps running into.

That is because Mike Judge himself is politically center right, but in a "things were good in the 1950s, before the damn hippies" kind of way. It is just that the Bush-Clinton-Bush era was so far right, even with Clinton in office, that we killed half a million people in Iraq for no good reason and somehow our society just rolled with it. With comparison to mass death on the scale of hundreds of thousands of lives, Mike Judge's "I hate hippies but also my boss is a dick" attitude just seems normal.

That's an interesting interpretation of things. Especially the political filter you presume there with some word use.

So may I ask, was it a similar right influence that resulted in the Kennedy/Johnson Administration breaking Eisenhower's Containment policy and become proactive in South East Asia? You could say that American society didn't take that sitting down, but I could argue that many Americans didn't either in the 2000s.

And for no good reason? The US was attacked at its heart and the American people went house cleaning. I'm a bloody Canadian and as a teen I knew that. I saw the towers burning that day and said "I don't care who is behind this, Saddam's days are numbered". If you don't understand that and don't see why a nation would go to war over such a thing, then you don't understand national sovereignty and national will. Nations have a tendency to do their own thing independent of people's desires and why they are very much like a superorganism than something fully under our control; their will I'd call is the national interest.

[TGLS]

So may I ask, was it a similar right influence that resulted in the Kennedy/Johnson Administration breaking Eisenhower's Containment policy and become proactive in South East Asia?

I kind of doubt that the Vietnam War would have gone that much differently if Stevenson were in the White House in '55, Nixon were in the White House in '61 or Humphrey were in the White House in '72. The United States has had a more or less coherent foreign policy from the Cold War era onwards.

[Senko]

I enjoyed this when I first saw it now, now I find it more and more likely we're headed this way. Although admitedly it can at times be hard to tell the difference between an idiot and a troll.

[TulipQulqu]

And for no good reason? The US was attacked at its heart and the American people went house cleaning. I'm a bloody Canadian and as a teen I knew that. I saw the towers burning that day and said "I don't care who is behind this, Saddam's days are numbered". If you don't understand that and don't see why a nation would go to war over such a thing, then you don't understand national sovereignty and national will. Nations have a tendency to do their own thing independent of people's desires and why they are very much like a superorganism than something fully under our control; their will I'd call is the national interest.

I do not know how to explain this to you, but Iraq had nothing to do with 911. Suadi Arabia and Egypt are where the hijackers, the closest co-conspirators to Osama bin Laden in terms of culpability, came from. The invasion of Afghanistan makes a kind of sense, if you only look at the broad strokes, but the occupation of Iraq was insanity.

The Iraq War killed over a half million people. Saddam could have been abducted by the USA and sexually violated on television every day since 911; I don't think the "we are all insane assholes for not freaking out about this" vibe would be as bad in that reality.

I happen to be a person. I get nervous when these "national will" type things, whatever they are, kill a shitload of person type things for insane reasons.

Do you understand self-preservation? Do you consider yourself a person? What am I missing here?

[CrypticMirror]

Iraq was all about W's daddy issues, along with certain neocons getting mad that they felt Saddam's continued defiance was embarrassing for America, and, if anything, 9/11 delayed W's war in Iraq while he invaded Afghanistan. W was gunning for Iraq before Florida's dodgy ballots were even buried. Of all the recent stupid wars, Iraq was the dumbest and the least justifiable. I'm ashamed how quickly my own country, the UK, jumped on that war train too. I'll never understand Blair's thirst for it.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Judge has a knack for that. King of the Hill can be taken as a straight up satire mocking Midwestern conservatives, but it can also be seen as a validation of their principles. Hank Hill is an annoying guy, but he's a decent everyone would love to have for a neighbour even if you'd always be eye rolling at him. I know, one of my brother's is pretty much a carbon copy of him in so many ways.

The only bit to KotH that falls out of that pattern is the completely unsympathetic left-wing antagonists he keeps running into.

That is because Mike Judge himself is politically center right, but in a "things were good in the 1950s, before the damn hippies" kind of way. It is just that the Bush-Clinton-Bush era was so far right, even with Clinton in office, that we killed half a million people in Iraq for no good reason and somehow our society just rolled with it. With comparison to mass death on the scale of hundreds of thousands of lives, Mike Judge's "I hate hippies but also my boss is a dick" attitude just seems normal.

That's an interesting interpretation of things. Especially the political filter you presume there with some word use.

So may I ask, was it a similar right influence that resulted in the Kennedy/Johnson Administration breaking Eisenhower's Containment policy and become proactive in South East Asia? You could say that American society didn't take that sitting down, but I could argue that many Americans didn't either in the 2000s.

And for no good reason? The US was attacked at its heart and the American people went house cleaning. I'm a bloody Canadian and as a teen I knew that. I saw the towers burning that day and said "I don't care who is behind this, Saddam's days are numbered".

So, you don't care who actually committed the attack, you just want to see this other, unrelated person die as horizontal revenge? That seems like a good reason to you? Or have I completely failed to understand your meaning?

[Frustration]

I do not know how to explain this to you, but Iraq had nothing to do with 911.
[edit]
What am I missing here?

For starters, you're missing the bit where the previous poster has already acknowledged that Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11.

The Second Iraq War, on the other hand, had a great deal to do with 9/11.