I apologize to my Canadian friends. This is embarrassing.
(Laughing and crying.)
This trolling and misdirection are not in the movie. Also, both are clearly effective, and a discourse that warps economic impact on US midterms voters within identities, reduces the chance of exposing the bad consequences and risks of power-politics. So this is quite well timed, and the outrageous quotient is I think also well calibrated.
Charles Chaplin understood it, so please y'all catch up ASAP.
The difference being that in the movie Idiocracy the President didn't assume he knew everything and was willing to listen to people who knew more than him.
Maybe there's naunces I'm missing because I'm not American, but it made me feel a bit gross in the same way a lot of pop culture around 'chavs' in the UK made me feel a bit gross. I don't think always refraining from punching down is a good rule in comedy, but I struggle to find much comedy in things which are nothing but punching down.
Maybe I'm being unfair to the film because of the fanbase as well. I've always seen it as a mild red flag when someone says it's their favourite comedy, but it's hardly the film's fault it got popular on places like reddit.
This is circular reasoning: You don't like the film because of the fanbase which you don't like because they like the film.
There is no "apologia for eugenics" in the intro. You have to actively infer that as a logical consequence ("we need to prevent stupid people from procreating as much") of what is shown ("society becomes stupid when stupid people procreate more than intelligent people"). The reason it is only in the intro and is never revisited is that it is just the setup for the actual movie, not a message in itself (the whole sequence is in fact very dissimilar from the rest of the movie). A more accurate setup would be that we have a culture that selects for primitive behavior and is anti-intellectual, but that isn't as funny as showing Cletus fucking everything that moves.
I expect the next administration will push through some laws limiting this sort of idiocy.
So you have faith in the average American voter? (Or at least a plurality of them?)
You also seem to be ignoring all the systematic changes that have been made during Trump 2 in your prediction for such huge wins for the democrats. Things like the final destruction of the Voting Rights Act and the extreme Gerrymandering have gone mostly towards republicans. Also 32% of voters (or more) still don't really see a distinction against Donald Trump and The Almighty. Forgive me but I'm not convinced it'll be the bloodbath you think it's going to be. Democrats might have a minor edge in the house when all is said and done and literally nothing else to show for it.
† But it might not, if you turn five 7/3 R seats and two 9/1 D seats into six 6/4 and one 9/1 you risk a dummymander where too many of "your" voters vote the "wrong" way and you have seven Democrats elected even though you still took almost 50% of the vote in some districts and you drew the maps.
Now the trouble is that voters seem to be imagining that if the Democrats take the Legislature that's the whole ball of wax and it just isn't. If there's a narrow D majority in both parts of Congress you can expect that to stall the stupidest stuff from Trump which was subject to congressional oversight, but the useless "We need bipartisanship" mewling will start almost immediately from people who apparently were 100% fine with party-line Republican decisions or executive override.
When it became clear this was happening some gerrymandering attempts were aborted, for example in Indiana.
As awful as it is, this is what America is now.
Expensive gas and groceries are pretty unpopular. I guess some chunk of people will find a way to wholly blame Biden or whatever.
Markwayne Mullin, DHS Secretary, just yesterday:
“You have a Biden administration that is failing the American people because they are allowing millions of people to come into this country illegally.”
20 months in to a 48 month term and they're still blaming the last guy, and phrasing it as if the last guy is still actively doing things other than having cancer.
The whole admin is a bunch of clowns. And unfortunately they benefit from a right wing media machine that reinforces the nonsense, and a general media environment that is more than willing to sanewash and downplay.
The midterms won't look pretty for him.
> I expect the next administration will push through some laws limiting this sort of idiocy.
The problem is that the bar is now so low that basically anybody will win, by design.
They'll pass some surface level bullshit to treat symptoms, like how lakes can or cannot be renamed. But they'll fail to address any root, systemic issues that allowed this BS to unfold in the first place, paving the way for the other half of the Uniparty to resume power 4-8 years later.
Democracy is illusory.
Not according to the link above, and the growing array of solvable yet perpetually unsolved problems in other countries.
At best, you get an illusion of progress. That's not progress.
Plus frequent public votes on actually important matters, the mark of adult smart population. Politicians globally will go out of their way to explain to you why Swiss model is bad for other places, but it boils down to who holds actual decision power and accountability.
Folks generally like to feel they are objective, but only to the point when something they don't favor is winning. I am guilty of same behavior, part of human nature I guess but its good to realize one's own fallacies
Recent rebuttals to the Swiss model:
Its most direct democracy globally having most free citizens (depends on viewpoint but I stand behind this claim firmly), bar none. They just don't need to shout about it all the time like US folks do, they simply just deliver, over 800 years and counting.
"In a 5-4 decision..."
They're clearly OK with that, so it's not a problem that we can't ask them because they're dead, but the remaining Justices might now want to weigh in on whether it's OK to kill Supreme Court Justices if you're President, and might perhaps be expected to decide that's not OK and the earlier judgement was flawed.
It's not even that many deaths, Trump's decisions have directly killed far more people than that without them having any say in the matter - He isn't (and never will be) in jail for it because of course these assholes get to do whatever they want and a Democrat will maybe send them a stern letter
The response we saw would be appropriate for toddlers but the Justices aren't toddlers, they're adults, they knew perfectly well what they were doing and so the only way to deliver justice was to ensure their decision has consequences.
What we really need is to sweep away the existing party duopoly, particularly by dropping the bullshit and actively harmful first-past-the-post electoral system which effectively mandates it.
The socialist wing of the Democratic Party is even less libertarian than the moderates, and it’s hard to call them controlled.
What's particularly damaging about Trump's approach to tariffs is the uncertainty. The targets don't always make a lot of sense. They're done haphazardly through questionable paths, which means they're subject to legal challenges. They're changed on a whim when Trump decides he needs to make a splash, or when someone says something he doesn't like, or when he wants to blow up a negotiation, or whatever.
It all leads to a situation where business owners and investors can't really be sure what the tariff landscape is 6, 12, 18, 24 months into the future. Will the tariffs survive legal challenges? Who will Trump decide to tariff next? Which tariffs might be increased drastically next week?
That is not an environment that fosters investment and business growth.
Unfortunately November is going to be a historic voter supression event like nothing ever seen before.
As a Canadian I say: please don't apologize; we're actually enjoying this.
The US could retaliate in a lot of other ways that could be much more hurtful to us: higher tariffs, break collaboration treaties, etc. The fact that Trump is "fighting back" with something this lame is just funny. It is like watching a 5 year old throwing a tantrum.
Compare this reaction with dogs. When a rottweiler or Doberman is angry with you, it attacks and hurts you. When a chihuahua or terrier is angry at you, it just makes a lot of noise. Trump's reaction is like a chihuahua, it is not like a rottweiler.
How do you have pride when the leader of your tribe is a liar, swindler, rapist, thug?
What a simplistic mind that says unthinkingly "Well the leader of my country wants it, I'm not going to question him, rah rah!"
This is my kind of patriotism, personally. I love America. I want America to succeed in the world. And I will call my government out when it is fucking it up.
Renaming Lake Ontario on a whim because Trump is no longer happy with the USMCA trade deal he himself made just a few years ago and the negotiations aren't going well because he keeps making crazy demands is squarely in "fucking it up" territory.
We are absolutely being taken over by a gang / mafia style organization.