Is that... so bad?

Do you think that horses are upset that there are fewer of them today, and that somehow they'd rather their population increase but bear the industrial age burdens again?

I hate cars way more than I hate AI, but relieving horses of the burden which they carried and the gruesome lives they lived... that's not one of my objections.

If AI can do for humans what cars did for horses (but without the flooding cities with traffic violence part), I'll feel just fine about that.

At most, Mythos has reminded us that this "deal" is subject to frequent cycles of being compromised-and-patched.

From time to time, I have run browsers configured for opt-in javascript (eg, umatrix), but man it's a lot of work to live that way.

One of the greatest films ever made is a comedy depicting the combination of psychosis, greed, incompetence, and bigotry bringing about mass murder and nuclear holocaust, culminating with the characters planning orgies in a mineshaft.

If depicting _that_ is OK (and it is - Dr. Strangelove is one of the finest in the medium, not only in its commentary on war, but its commentary on film), how in tarnation can adult actors pretending to be step-siblings cross the line?

On the other hand, to the (apparently zero, currently?) extent that this is about AI companies profiting from war and murder by deploying weapons that kill people without human intervention, then their liability seems to be not only civil but criminal.

Yeah, I agree - I have the same objections to ajazeera that I have to RT, CNN, Fox News, NYT, etc. - they are each overwhelming pressure from controlling corporations and states that they can't shine light where it needs to be shone.

But in this case, I was really only pasting them for links to the statements by Pakistan and Iran, which I do trust them to link / quote faithfully. It wasn't meant as an endorsement of their editorial or news-gathering quality.

Links to Pakistan and Israel statements here: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/8/us-iran-ceasefire-de...

Aren't you making the very point you purport to refute? What's so different about this than Rome circa 50 BC? They even invaded Persia!

...and in doing so, it depicts a world that is not at all reminiscent of the one in which we live.

The white house is not occupied by idiots, but by thieves and murders and sexual predators. The American landscape is not a Brawndo-dustbowl, but a highly profitable, productive, and delicious-but-toxic bounty of subsidized factory farms, stemming not from a misunderstanding of botany, but a misapplication of that understanding.

The same is true of the medical industry, the justice system - literally every institution portrayed in the entire film, with the possible exception of waste disposal / the trash avalanche.

That's exactly the point: the world of the film is, in every way that matters, the opposite of the reality in which we live. So how are these strained comparisons useful?

> then I wonder how sincere and transparent he'd be.

Obviously we can't know, because the universe of Idiocracy is on rails toward stupidity and poverty, and never even considers greed and abundance as features of its janky political lens. In the first few minutes of the film, it establishes that poor, stupid people are to blame for every societal ill, and then it depicts a future in which no character ever even grapples with any other antagonist than the poverty and stupidity of his ancestors.

Is that today's world?! For who? Are the poor people in Iran and Gaza and Yemen who are dealing with explosives raining down on them (rather than Brawndo) stupid? Do you think their fate is attributable to the proclivity of previous generations to breed in inverse proportion to their material wealth?

It's just such an asinine premise it's hard to even understand what would qualify as a sound comparison, but it's certainly not any of those listed on this website.

I've become fascinated by existing webs-of-trust that we can observe in the world. The bluegrass ensemble in particular represents a very interesting prototype.

I'd like to learn more about how you built this.

One missing piece in the navigation, at least for what my inclinations expect, is the _manner_ of the connection between nodes. Sure, I can see that Rachel McAdams is connected to York University, and that York University is connected to a bunch of other people, but the interface doesn't tell me how they are connected.

What is so similar about our world to that of idiocracy? In almost all the ways that matter, it seems like we are going in the opposite direction.

* The primary plot point of idiocracy is that poor (and thus, stupid - the film never explains why this correlation exists in that universe, though) people are the only ones who reproduce. For this reason, there is evolutionary pressure toward decreased intelligence. It's an odious premise on its face IMO, and certainly not what is happening in the USA: our birth rates are declining _because_ people are not economically stable.

* President Camacho is the exact inverse of Trump: he is stupid, uninformed, disconnected, and has few resources to address the challenges he faces, but he makes good-faith efforts to do so at every turn. And he seems to be sincere and transparent. Trump's illusion runs precisely counter to this: he has every resource he can possibly need, but chooses to enrich himself and his friends instead of advancing the public interest.

Virtually every plot point of Idiocracy can be broken down this way. I see very, very little of the film universe that is consistent with our sociopolitical trajectory.

If you want a Mike Judge film that shines light on uncomfortable truths about 21st-century America, the obvious choice is Office Space.

I mean, I'm a professional musician - not sure if that gives me more credibility or less - but I don't feel slighted by folks listening to music made by others (whether those others are other humans, or birds, or whales, or AI).

As you point out, music has an infinite edge; one can spend a lifetime exploring either its niches or its closures and still have an infinity of each to continue discovering.

As moat identification goes, I do feel slightly secure in the sense that AI music (and the information age generally) seems to stoke a hunger for dirty traditionals played well on thick steel strings, and it's going to be a minute before robots can pick 'em like we can.

This rings as "make America great again", just with a different mythology standing-in for "again".

The US (or at least the US _state_) hasn't been in control by reasonable adults in over a century, or arguably ever.

What is finally becoming obvious is that this particular landmass is much too large to be under the control of a single state, and now that we have instant communications and ubiquitous cameras, even the arguments (laid out eg in the federalist papers) are no longer dispositive.

Calm and careful deprecation of the US as a state needs to top the new agenda.

I was kinda on the fence about this debate, but your arguments have actually pushed me away.