What about the spray tan eccenric NY city real estate agent that shits on a golden toliet with an army of yall-qaeda terrorists
He might fit as an Austin Powers villain, especially if he had a bag of Cheetos in every scene.
I heard the Bond movies got more serious after the Austin Powers movies came out.
True story. After the 2016 election, there was a panel discussion. They had all the creators of the top US political TV dramas; The West Wing: Scandal: Veep: House of Cards and others. Every writer and producer said the same thing. If they’d had a character who said that they ‘liked soldiers who didn’t get captured’ the advertisers and network bosses would have demanded that the character be hated by all Americans.
South Park And SNL both commented that our 2016 situation was too ridiculous to parody
Back in the 1960s, it was a common joke that ronald reagan would never be President because no one would vote for a guy who co-starred with a monkey.
Today’s GOP would ignore reagan and run the monkey
So…that story basically confirms all programming (I mean not cooking shows) is propaganda, doesn’t it?
Dyslexic ass universe we live in . The 2020’s were supposed to be ‘the future’, an advanced post-scarcity world. We got a post-satire world instead
This is what we get for over indulging on irony starting in the 90s.
Nothing has meaning anymore.
But maybe correlation isn’t causation…
I’ve become more and more aware of “Irony poisoning” in every facet of our culture, from movies to memes to every other human interaction.
Maybe because of social media influence, we’re so scared that holding any kind of sincerity will reveal a vulnerability that will be ruthlessly attacked…
We must be ready to say “No I don’t mean that seriously” and change our projection within a moment’s notice when the culture winds change again.
It’s so bad anymore that people now need to add “un-ironically” to explain that they genuinely feel anything at all…
… and sometimes that’s said ironically.
we’re so scared that holding any kind of sincerity will reveal a vulnerability that will be ruthlessly attacked…
Ian Bogost defines this sort of thing as ironoia in his book Play Anything. Holding the world at a distance through ironic engagement.
What you are pointing out is slightly different, but very much along the same lines.
I found the book helpful to illuminate how ironic culture was a bad force when growing up and going through vulnerable stages.
If you look at 70s SF you get closer to the real 2020s.
AI taking over the world: Colossus: The Forbin Project
An Infectious agent causing problems: The Andromeda Strain
Human pollution causing massive issues: Soylent Green
in science fiction the AI that takes over the world is sapient. usually as intelligent as a person if not more. reality is dumber. we’re just trying to surrender the world to a series of algorithms that can’t tell how many fingers there are in a hand or which way they bend, or what a fucking fire hydrant looks like.
That is in movies and books.
In the real world the turning test is not proof that an artificial system is sentient but only if/when a human thinks it is. It is not about the intelligence/sentience of the system but the intelligence of the human observing that means the test is passed.
Sadly, for large parts of humanity, text based LLMs have already passed the turning test…
Have we forgotten about Trump, the Koch brothers, hmm who else.
Idiocracy is not an accurate depiction of what we have going on, and I’m tired of people saying that it is. Idiocracy was about a dumbing down of everyone because smart people did not breed.
However, people still had the best of intentions despite their limited brain capacity. They just didn’t know how to actually fix the world.
And real life we have people actively denying climate change despite the obvious effects not out of idiocy, but because they are literally being paid to, and because it makes a decent wedge issue for political gain. There is an obvious motive there that can be explained by malice instead of stupidity, especially since the people trying to get this money in power are likely to die before the effects of climate change come into full circle.
An idiocracy, they actively want to fix the climate problems, they are just literally too stupid to use water instead of Gatorade for plants. Because everyone is taking a slogan more literally than actual evidence.
Another great comparison is Donald Trump and Camacho. Donald Trump ignored the existence of covid-19, downplayed the effects of it, and blamed the parts of it that could not be ignored on his predecessor. He also villainized Anthony fauci, the man who was trying to make covid-19 only last a couple of weeks, but because he was villanized so hard it became a global pandemic that lasted over a year.
Camacho was fully aware there was a problem, acknowledge the people who were suffering and the Direct effects of the problem, and put the smartest man in the world in charge of fixing the problem.
It is not an app comparison, because Society is not the way it is because it is stupid, but because it is actively being manipulated by malefactors and bad faith agents.
The planet is not being mismanaged nor is it dying because it’s just time. It is being murdered for personal gain by people with names and addresses.
However, people still had the best of intentions despite their limited brain capacity. They just didn’t know how to actually fix the world.
And real life we have people actively denying climate change despite the obvious effects not out of idiocy, but because they are literally being paid to, and because it makes a decent wedge issue for political gain.
I mean I guess the paid shills are part of it, but there is also a large group of useful but ultimately well-meaning idiots repeating their propaganda. And even disregarding that nobody really knows how to fix climate change once you start adding stipulations like not crashing the bejesus out of the holy economy, so not that far off I would say.
An idiocracy, they actively want to fix the climate problems, they are just literally too stupid to use water instead of Gatorade for plants. Because everyone is taking a slogan more literally than actual evidence.
We want to fix climate change too, but we are Not Sure about how to handle the Brawndo stock crashing and how long it takes the nitrate levels in the soil to normalise once we switch back to water. See CO² emissions still not decreasing but rather increasing for decades now despite everybody knowing it’s the major cause of global warming, never mind that we would have to pull CO² back out of the atmosphere to stop the damage it will cause in the future from happening.
Camacho was fully aware there was a problem, acknowledge the people who were suffering and the Direct effects of the problem, and put the smartest man in the world in charge of fixing the problem.
My man Camacho also nearly killed Not Sure in a monster truck arena because of the unforeseen stock crash resulting in like half the population being unemployed and the soil nitrate level delay hiding that the solution worked, the latter being revealed Just In Time™ for dramatic effect.
It is not an app comparison, because Society is not the way it is because it is stupid, but because it is actively being manipulated by malefactors and bad faith agents.
Meh, it’s both stupidity and malice IMHO. When in doubt refer to Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Sometimes nobody having THE solution to a problem is a bitter part of reality that we have to face, and I fear the issue of climate change in particular is one of those problems. Existing malice notwithstanding.
to be fair, what do you expect from a guy who is part of the liberal NATIONALISTS
Can we start talking about those who told the truth more than those who lie? Here’s a short starting list:
Gary Webb
Milton William Cooper
Bill Hicks
Julian Assange
Edward Snowden
Anyone else?
Gary Webb killed himself, Milton Cooper was a quack, and Julian Assange is a far-right wing tool.
If he had released everything he had rather than just what he had on his enemies I would respect him a bit more.
Julian Assange was cool up until he was a fascist pedophile. He knew all about russia, but instead chose to double down on some damn emails.
My gen x friends complained about the villains in Captain Planet, but the we got Trump.
Also, Tomorrow Never Dies was loosely based on Rupert Murdoch.
My dad complained that Captain Planet was “libtard environmentalist propaganda” 30 years ago. Some things never change. Now it’s just Trump instead of Limbaugh.
These aren’t even people who publicity identify as conservative. Publicly…
They basically just stood still long enough and became conservatives that watch Daily Show.
