Works have meanings beyond their surface-level detail and literal meaning. They also have themes and clear implications. And Idiocracy certainly has those. It has clear undertones of eugenics.

The first is the clear implication that population demographics require active management. In the movie, there was no mass government program to encourage births among those of low intelligence and discourage births among the intelligent. This situation developed entirely naturally through culture acting on its own. A viewer could only conclude that if this horrible future is to be avoided, that we need to start worrying a lot more about who is reproducing in what numbers. We either need government mandates or major cultural initiatives to encourage reproduction among the deserving. Idiocracy never outright endorses eugenics, but the implication is obvious. Writers aren’t idiots. They know the clear implications of their work. You don’t end up with a political movie that clearly implies the solution is genocide without realizing that’s the obvious implication.

The second is the theme that intelligence is something that can be bred or selected for at all through the social stratification we have now. Are those with PhDs really more intelligent, by writ of birth, than those that never graduate high school? Or it mostly about circumstances of birth, opportunities, personal choices, or even neonatal environmental pollutant exposure? Do we have any real evidence that intelligence differences within the species are something that can truly be selected for? Hell, what kind of intelligence are we talking about? Scholastic ability, emotional intelligence, executive reasoning, etc? There are many types of intelligence. And the very idea that the poor and those of lower educational attainment are of genetically lower intelligence is a key eugenics theme.

Yes, Idiocracy never comes right out and explicitly endorses eugenics. But the implications and themes are undeniably pro-eugenics.

Yup. For whatever reason (likely regulations), most dispensaries are set up a lot like traditional general stores. Everything behind the counter.

You sound incredibly pretentious.

I’m sorry, but I’m not talking about McDonalds. I’m not talking about engineered food products. I mean a good thick slab of fresh bread made from flour, salt, a bit of sugar, and not much else. Served with a big dash of butter. That is heaven.

The healthspan stuff? Completely irrelevant to my point. What is the point of a healthspan if you deny yourself all the pleasures of life? Enjoy all things in moderation. But I firmly reject this whole, “well…have a little wheat bread if you muuust…anything else is abusive.”

“Do you even know what real food tastes like?”

Well you clearly know what your own farts smell like. Jesus Wept! Your head is so far up your ass you can see the contents of your own stomach.

Wood science, I suppose.

Your hair is the roof of your mouth.

If theft is this bad, these stores should just switch back to the traditional model used by pharmacies and general stores. Consider this photo of a traditional pharmacy:

Or this old general store:

This is what these businesses used to look like. In traditional pharmacies and general stores, most goods were kept behind counters or at the very least within direct view of those behind counters. A traditional dry good store might literally just be a big counter in the front with a huge warehouse in the back. You show up with a list of goods you want, and the clerk would run into the back and grab everything you wanted.

The model of a store with aisles that customers wander through is not the historical norm. As industrialization improved, the relative costs of goods lowered, while the relative cost of labor increased. So it made sense for stores to accept a higher level of theft and shopliting by offloading the item-picking process to their customers. They got the customers to do a lot of the work for them, but in exchange they accepted a higher level of theft.

Now they’re trying to have things both ways. They still want customers to do all the work of picking out their purchases from the shelves, but they’ve decided they don’t like the level of shoplifting that level of low labor cost business inevitably produces. They want the customers to do most of the labor of clerks, but they don’t want to accept the level of theft that inevitably produces.

I honestly wonder, is it illegal to simply unlock those things, if you have no intention of actually stealing from them? It’s not like they use particularly high security locks. You can probably buy some simple lock raking or cylinder lock tools.

Is it actually violating a law to unlock one of those cases if you don’t have any intention of actually stealing something?

You sacrifice and sacrifice, cutting everything out of your habits or diet that may bring you pleasure, only for the sake of extending your life. Then at the end of it all, you look back in dismay, in the dismal realization that despite your years, you have never lived at all…

My bugbear with Mc’D’s is how they now always ask you if you are using their damned app.

I know I shouldn’t, and that they’re just teenagers reading from a script. But I just can’t help myself. Whenever they ask if I’ll be using the app, I flippantly reply, “nah, I don’t want Ronald reading my email.”

The ability to pay for subsidies has no relation to the source of the funds. What matters is GDP, overall national wealth. And Norway is only slightly ahead of the US. Considering the US’s far superior manufacturing capability, if Norway could go all electric, than the US certainly could have by now. Norway’s had to import almost all its electric cars; the US can make its own cars.

This man needs to be sentenced to 10 years solitary confinement in a room with 100 electronically controlled vuvuzelas serenading him at all hours of the day and night.

Submariner it is!

You’re assuming the law will be applied consistently.

They won’t even need to use terrorism. Right in Project 2025 is a plan to slowly classify any public existence or acknowledgement of LGBT identities as “pornographic.” And in turn classify showing “pornography” to children is pedophilia and worthy of being put on the sex offender registry. They want to make it so if say, a trans woman, goes out in public and a child sees her, then that is the equivalent of grooming an 8 year old child by showing them pornographic videos. Oh, and they also want to attach the death penalty to crimes of pedophilia.

They’re talking about rounding up 20 million people and deporting them. Do you really think you can do that without setting up massive camps that match or exceed the scale of anything the Nazis set up? And if you really want to move that many people around, you may end up having to use trains.

Oh, and worse, they have no plan on how to actually deport that many people. The Nazis originally planned to deport all the Jews as well. Yet they quickly found that there simply weren’t enough nations willing to accept all these deportees. Other countries aren’t obligated to accept your deportees.

So you now have millions of people in camps, costing a fortune to maintain, and no where to send these people. That always ends in slavery, death, or death by slavery. Whenever your plan starts with “round up tens of millions of people and put them in camps,” you can guarantee that a massive death toll is going to follow.

Anything less than tens of millions dead falls short of your comment. And that’s likely not the reality.

Trans people, the group currently most targeted for elimination by the right, represent about 1% of the US population. Jewish people in pre-Nazi Germany also represented about 1% of the population.

When Republicans past eliminationist laws meant to persecute trans people, deny them from public life, and kill them by taking away their healthcare, they are committing crimes of the same order as what Germany did in the 1930s.

That is simple historical by-the-numbers truth.