'Idiocracy' Predicted All of This

I’ll make my own California, with blackjack and hookers.

Wouldn't it be better to merge back with Mexico?

don't the coastal elites want single payer healthcare?

doesn't that help everyone?

what am I missing?

I can imagine a pink elephant too.

> if all Americans eligible to vote in 2024 had cast ballots, the overall margin in the popular vote likely would not have been much different

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/behind-trump...

I was just following the parent's wording. I don't really think they were stupid, or even necessarily greedy and shameless though some no doubt have been. I think mostly it has been ignorance. Likewise the general voting population: I don't think they've gotten dumber, but I do think they've gotten more misinformed. As the saying goes, "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know for sure that just ain't so." Never has that been more true in American politics.

They are creating a world that is inhospitable to them.

They are stupid.

The classic obvious example is cost of living. All of the blue cities have awful zoning and development restrictions that cause them to fail consistently to actually produce new housing that comes even close to demand. The oft repeated success stories are how cities like Houston, despite being not the kind of city I want to live in, are much much more affordable since they actually allow the market to function. Progressives go on and on about how supply and demand doesn't actually apply to them, and how they need to demand 100% affordable housing with absolutely no explanation of how that will pencil out for developers, digging themselves even deeper into the hole.

More examples include how crime has gained San Francisco an image something like the land of the walking dead, where progressive governance treated homelessness and mental addiction as a problem of equity of opportunity - which in the super long run is perhaps true, but doesn't lead to any good short term outcomes. It's only now that some blue city mayors realize that, actually, order might be kinda important.

As well as the inability for these cities to maintain and improve their transit systems, usually because they can’t focus on cost and service quality and instead try to make their transit projects be about irrelevant things like income inequality, protecting obsolete jobs, saving random endangered species or whatever, so you end up with the NYC MTA being unreliable, filthy, and hopeless to expect anything positive to come out of it. Red cities just sidestepped it by organizing around the car, I don't love it but at least you can get around places instead of relying on the worst transit systems on earth.

American progressives seem to have a hopeless zero-sum mentality, where the only way the common man can experience a better life is at the expense of some rich person, and perhaps that is related to the fact that many live in American cities, for which daily life continually has gotten worse because of how incompetent their governance has been.

I can't really talk though. I just gave up on the USA and moved abroad since it was too hopeless for me.

Nothing, this person is just making stuff up.

Healthcare - rather than just assuming that the most maximalist possible universal healthcare strategy is the best solution, actually consider how different healthcare strategies balance the cost of long-term solvency, cost control, speed and quality of service, and so on. For example, I am partial to the Japanese system, which unlike the Canadian system (which has crazy wait times), people pay 30% of costs so they still have skin in the game while the national healthcare system mandates fee schedules for common procedures to control costs. No blocking access to specialists behind primary care doctors, no banning private insurers. You get fast healthcare with a more sustainable fiscal basis, and less frivolous use of limited healthcare capacity than e.g. a system where there are no copays. The problem there though is that they have not enough supply of doctors (read: US should think about significantly increasing the supply of medical education and reducing the cost of medical training) and too much incentive for churning people through the system extremely quickly (read: US should have pricing not just be flat fee so that you aren't incentivized purely for speed).

The progressive wing seem irrationally tied to whatever Bernie Sanders claims is the best healthcare arrangement, and think that insurers are the source of all problems, when they actually are terrible from a business standpoint, they barely make money, and the cost of healthcare isn't from them but rather from other fundamental issues that have little to do with them. The result of this is that they land on a policy that half of America doesn’t want, and are too stubborn to budge on it, which means the United States will never get a rational healthcare system.

Housing & transportation - get rid of restrictions that reduce the ability of developers to actually build housing, from zoning restrictions to environmental legislation that is weaponized by NIMBYs to block development, to union labor requirements that send costs of building transit and housing through the roof, to affordable housing requirements that make projects not pencil out. Commercialize and densify areas in and around train stations as much as possible, specifically with for-profit developments, not trying to turn prime real estate into low-income enclaves because they hate gentrification more than they like progress (failing to think critically about what would likely happen if a poor and dangerous place became less poor and dangerous, or the people within such a place made some money to have the option of living elsewhere...).

I am partial again to the Japanese model where the available zones are set nationally, the rules for whether or not you get a permit is basically a checklist, if you check all the boxes you can build what you want, it doesn't discriminate on who's doing it, and for transit in particular, the train companies are literally private real estate companies that develop stations to the maximal extent possible because they make money from it. If you've visited Japan, did you think Shibuya felt awful because it was largely developed by Tokyu Corporation? Or that neighborhoods lack character and energy because the architecture is designed by a small handful of mass-manufactured modular home developer companies?

Progressives seem to think that supply and demand doesn't apply to their beloved cities, corporate landlords are the source of all evil when it comes to housing problems, and that private transit companies are not even a possible option because capitalists are greedy (when in reality they're more motivated than any of these activists are to actually do things that affect change on communities). My lived experience tells me that what I consider to be the greatest housing and transit successes in the world often come from large private developers who are incentivized well, because I've been places and observed how they function.

Also, we should be switching to land value taxes to incentivize efficient use of land, by making vacant lots expensive to hold, while also raising huge amounts of money, because the logic is simple enough for a 3 year old to understand - we have a lot of land and it is expensive. I haven't heard a single progressive even mention the idea despite being a great way to tax the wealthy while providing a strong incentive for better outcomes in cities, because they haven't thought about the root causes of why their cities feel like dumpsters long enough to care, and instead want to protect the historic laundromat and parking lot. Instead they harp on about wealth taxes that will mostly be evaded, and in the end net out tiny amounts of money that don't affect the economy as a whole and have no effect on the quality of their communities besides driving out economically ambitious and successful people.

I can keep going. I'm not a Republican, I'd much rather have the moderate Dems who actually think about the causes of issues to win primaries rather than populists who just try to get everyone pissed off (and probably are lying to their constituents anyway once they moderate as soon as the primaries end because they realize how unpopular and irrational their ideas are), but that isn't where the country is going these days. People are more interested in ideological purity tests than they are about substantive argument, in this sense the leftists aren’t any different than the MAGA people. Instead people like you already decided that people like me have no substantive opinions - very in line with the political zeitgeist these days where everyone's angry all the time and can't have rational conversations or learn from anyone else's experiences in the world. So, idk, enjoy your life.

>But he (like most people) is probably fine with designer babies and sperm clinics that expressly sell product based on the characteristics of the donor (tall, high IQ, etc). That’s a tidier form of the same thing.

that is a wild blanket assumption that "most people" "probably" want designer babies, as if a majority of prospective parents are using sperm clinics.

I think you missed the entire point of the film. You know the end speech where Not Sure says something along the lines of "read a book" and "maybe don't put sports drinks on soil and expect it to grow".

The main premise of the second and third acts of the film demonstrates the scientific process. Hypothesize: "water will make plants grow", Experiment: "put water on plants instead of brawndo", analyze data: "the plants are growing". Go figure, after people see the results of the experiment they change their preconceptions!

It's stupidity by choice. Willful ignorance.