Idiocracy
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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They found the smartest person in the world and listened to them to fix their problems... Not at all accurate.
Once zoomers can vote and Mr Beast gets elected, things will change.
I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
Over half of Zoomers can already vote. Gen Z is roughly 1997-2012.
Unfortunately the younger they are the more likely they are to be conservative it seems. More poisoned by the algorithms.
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we're in the "what if they didn't" timeline....
We’re only 20 years after Joe got frozen and he hasn’t been thawed yet. We still have 480 years before things get that bad.
They also tried to publicly execute him.
You make a convincing argument.
We're in the time he was frozen. We have 40 years or so before that part happens.
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Andor
Whys that?
fascist top-down government that rules without checks and balances stripping away civil rights through exploitation of the vulnerable using fear-of-the-other propaganda and outright lies to further centralize its abusive, selfish control over society while a small dedicated decentralized band of civil rights activists fight the expanding power and influence of the dark side.
It's extremely poignant right now
The problem I see is that in Star Wars, the goodies win because they appeal to the inherent good in people, their willingness to actually act
I fear that apathy and learned helplessness have taken root too deeply in the US. People just shrug their shoulders
I sincerely hope that I'm wrong
I mean, isn't the joke that there are only like 20 people who really do anything that matters in Star Wars? The rest of the trillions of beings in the SW universe are apathetic too.
That's also one of the underlying threads in Andor, Luthen is trying to agitate the empire so that they lash out and start really interfering with people's lives. The more the Empire tries to crush dissent, the more apathetic people they disrupt, and the dissent only grows. That's where we're at now, most people's lives haven't meaningfully changed yet, but it's coming.
Its insane that project 25 isnt taught in schools as the actual destructive blueprint for society, its too dangerous for people to be as ignornat of all this shit as they clearly are. Its suicidal
US schools have long been a disaster
Starting the day by saluting the flag and reciting some shit about it being the greatest country in the world is the behaviour of people being indoctrinated into a cult
Gotta get 'em young
Add the twisted version of the history of America taught, and the ignorance of the rest of the world and it's not surprising that things are in a shit state
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Yup, dude even gets disappeared just for being in the wrong street at the wrong time.
Nah that dude was very mexican. Should have tried to not do that.
Just started watching that show recently and it's so amazing I'm surprised Disney allowed it to be made. The parallels to the current state of society are so apparent. In one of the episodes of Season 2 a character says "Why can't they just leave us alone" and that resonated with me so much
The historical precedent is the rise of Nazi Germany during the 1920s and 1930s. You should now be somewhere in the early 1930s.
And Canada and Greenland are Poland.
or Poland and Austria
To get spoilers, watch Downfall.
Not a good example, since that shows the happy ending where powerful countries are finally finishing off the fascist regime after years of war and millions of lives lost. That is the amount of effort and determination it took to rid Germany of its fascists.
No such prospects for the American fascist regime. On the contrary the most powerful countries in the world will happily support it, because it undermines Western dominance.
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The Man in the High Castle.
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth. Great book and a TV miniseries. An alternative history that has Lindbergh winning the presidency in the 30s and the US government enacting fascism domestically. The book does a great job of portraying the chaos that ensues. The series is also very good.
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It’s a novel, but “It Can’t Happen Here” follows a scenario where a populist becomes President and removes all opposition.
1984 by George Orwell
Not TV (at least not that I am aware of), but it was the first thing to come to my mind. They made a movie if you prefer but, as always, you'll get more from the book.
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VEEP
Seriously. “Today the secretary of defense with a drinking problem reveals military secrets to a reporter due to a texting error.”
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There’s a satirical (well, don’t know how long it will be considered that) movie about it… it’s called Idiocracy
It's a great movie, but the eugenics theme is bullshit. The causes of modern decline have nothing to do with the half-baked idea that idiots will overrun the world through breeding.
Idiots aren't born in increasing waves, they're made by chronically underfunding education and flooding the world with propaganda and manipulative social media algorithms.
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Idiocracy
Elysium; the Matt Damon movie where the rich live on a space station and leave the rest of us to rot.
I'm not saying it's what's going on right this moment, but it's the end-goal of everything that Musk, Bezos, etc... are doing.
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The Prequel to Schindler's List
The bobiverse series (about a guy who is hit by a car right after signing up for a cryogenics thing and then wakes in the future to find out he's basically been legislated to have no rights and is stuck into a self-replicating drone for space exploration, it's pretty good) kind of starts off setting the backstory like it. The christofascism just started a bit later.
Obviously it's not one to one but given Trump's performative Christianity it was all I could think about around the failed coup on Jan 6.
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Ever heard of the rise of Nazism in Germany?
A lot of what he talks about prior to previous insurrections are pretty similar to what's happening now.
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The Ultra podcast has two seasons and goes in-depth into previous attempts by fascists at taking over the US government.
Sitting members of Congress aiding and abetting a plot to overthrow the government. Insurrectionists criminally charged with plotting to end American democracy for good. Justice Department prosecutors under crushing political pressure. Rachel Maddow Presents: Ultra is the all-but-forgotten true story of good, old-fashioned American extremism getting supercharged by proximity to power.
When extremist elected officials get caught plotting against America with the violent ultra right, this is the story of the lengths they will go to… to cover their tracks.
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The wave of fascism going throughput Europe in the 19th and 20th century of course.
But the state of the American people is also portrayed well in The Hunger Games (books and movies).
Literally the first novel ever written "Sinuhe" speaks of a very similar crisis in ancient Egypt.
The Twilight Zone (2019), "The Wunderkind"
Synopsis: A down-on-his-luck campaign manager (John Cho) is determined to get a kid (Jacob Tremblay) elected as the next President of the United States.
Take a serious look at the collapse of the Soviet Union, the gutting of the Commonwealth, and the rise of Russia under Yeltsin, then Putin. I'm not sure of any fictionalized works that examine this in any detail, but the aftermath and the new reality is well-described in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev. Link is a 10 year old review in the Guardian.
The falls of other empires would also be instructive. There is an excellent podcast/YouTube channel, the Fall of Civilizations(YouTube Link)(Spotify Link). In listening, I found several parallels to the first Trump presidency. I haven't listened in years.
A paper-thin skinned hegemon leads a dying empire against his staunch allies. I fed this prompt to ChatGPT and it handed me back Dune by Frank Herbert and Foundation by Isaac Asimov.
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Player Piano by Vonnegut
Babylon Berlin
Any sci-fi by Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley Phillip K.Dick, some by Robert Heinlein iirc.
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