It depends on what you call a large degree. In higher socioeconomic families, heredity appears to account for a significant degree of variation. That makes sense, because presumably higher socioeconomic status families are able to provide similar environments, on average, to each other. In lower SES families,…

I challenge you to put together a list comparable to the one I did above using scandals from any and all of the Democratic administrations since Johnson. If you can't, please stop with the simplistic "Clinton is just as bad as the Republicans" nonsense.

How do the people get dumber in the movie? It's not medically retarded people breeding, it's average folks, who are labelled (in a joking way) with borderline IQs, while a couple of frigid yuppies are labeled with borderline genius IQs. The yuppie woman, in particular, is cast as the most guilty party and given the…

Failure to educate children is a problem. The growth in dishonest "skepticism" driven, in most cases, by propaganda funded by special interest groups like the fossil fuels industry is a problem. The fraying of the fabric of society driven by mass incarceration, mass un- and underemployment and unchecked exploitation…

The gap between "typical weaselly, lying politician" and George W. Bush is vast the way that one might describe the distance between galaxies.

I think you're right that Mike Judge is not actually a fervent eugenicist who thinks that the human race is degenerating without directed breeding. But the surface-level text of Idiocracy is precisely that. Clevon, IQ 84, outbreeds the "smart people," and at the end of the movie the "dumb people" are still…

Are you fucking kidding me.

Here's his wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…. Khalid El-Masri, a Yemen-born German, was detained by Macedonian police because his name was close to Khalid Al-Masri, a suspected terrorist. The CIA then renditioned him from the Macedonians because, again, his name was close to that other guy, including…

Man, I can't stop tripping down memory lane now.

I don't know, I guess I'd rather educate people and foster lively public discussion than write off the children of people I don't like because I think I'm so fucking smart, but I guess spaying and neutering poors is a way to go too.

Upvoted for "corporate criminal fuck-show." Hey, remember that time we sent literal TONS of shrink-wrapped bundles of $100 bills to Iraq on cargo planes and then they disappeared and no one had bothered to keep any written records?

It's actually pretty well-made and acted. The script is tight, the set dressing creates a consistent look and feel, the cinematography, coloring etc… communicate the action of the story and create memorable images. It also has a message that resonates, particularly with people who lived through the Bush presidency,…

To be fair, Bush didn't win either in 2000.

Until and unless one of the three clowns left in the race wins, it won't even be a shadow of the Bush years. I'll never forget watching Bush, from a golf cart in one of the early (pre-September) months of 2001, cutting off a reporter and saying "I don't think the jury's in on evolution just yet." That was the first…

Idiocracy is, to use a word I hate, problematic. I think Idiocracy is intended as a statement against anti-intellectualism. In the context of the early 2000s and the Bush administration, this was a salient and necessary statement.

I always tell people who "train in boxing gyms" that if they don't get punched in the face, they are not actually "training in a boxing gym." They are doing calisthenics with boxing gloves.

Yes, but I think for most activities "pretty naturally talented" is a relatively small part of the formula compared to "trained like mad beavers," and "lucky enough to be born in a time and place where the skill in question was valued." There are a handful of math savants who seem to have invented relatively high…

If you're going to do Morrison stories, he'd make a great Tinker/2 in a We3 movie.

Most "chosen one" narratives are basically that, when you get down to it. The whole cult of genius is the same way—we look at guys like Feynman, Einstein, von Neumann (or, more realistically, Jobs, Zuckerberg or whomever made a lot of money recently) and assume that there's something so special and so different about…

Theory: people who have actually been punched square in the face have a much more realistic view of fighting than people who have never been punched square in the face.