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I feel the need to periodically remind people that Idiocracy is a eugenics movie.

One of the things that eugenicists believe is that it is bad for society when the “wrong people” breed.

The entire premise of the movie is that “stupid people” kept having kids while “smart people” didn’t have kids, and it ruined society because stupid genes propagated while smart genes died out. This is eugenics propaganda.

I know people will read this and their response will be “actually it’s satire” but the movie isn’t satirizing eugenics. It’s satirizing anti-intellectualism, and consumerism, and it proposes eugenics as a solution.

When eugenics was first conceived, it was used as a way to justify inequality. The idea was that people who held privilege were able to do so because they were smarter and genetically superior to lazy and stupid people who don’t have privilege. Obviously this is bad and wrong, but it is also the core lesson of Idiocracy.

The movie literally ends with the main character becoming president and having “the smartest children in the world.” Because he and his wife have smarter genes than everyone else. The proposed solution for the things that Idiocracy is satirizing is for the smart people to have children that can be in charge of the world.

I know it’s fun to use this movie to dunk on anti-intellectualism and the MAGA movement, but we need to stop. When you quote and reference this movie you are spreading eugenics propaganda.

This is such an important addition. It’s wild how often people accidentally stumble their way into eugenics, and it’s vitally important that people are educated and aware of eugenics and the problems with it.

This starts out as a nice gesture, then quickly becomes absolutely ridiculous.

1,024 dice. Man.

literally they just used an interpolator technology to make the the lines follow the curve of the face regardless of the camera angle. Thats a shader. That is literally just a fancy shader. Claiming any procedural technology is the same as midjourney is INCREDIBLY fucking disingenuous. Goddamnit

This is what I mean by "At some level of micro managing an AI it becomes a tool again, like a rendering program or a photo shop brush" Artificial intelligence or complex generative algorithms aren't inherently bad

me in planning stages of writing: this fucks. this is gonna be so fun.

me the minute i sit down to write: language is an unwieldy cudgel we use to beat the human experience to death in an attempt at ever communicating fully with another being. i wish intelligent life had never evolved. i want to go back to the cell stage like in spore

and then he woke up

fuck this 'mortifying ordeal of being known' shit i want a spaceship that perceives every one of my actions and understands me on a level deeper than i know myself

#SPEAKING OF EL BEING ENOBY #there's a lot of value in reading the Scholomance books as a dialogue #not with Harry Potter but with the Harry Potter *fandom* #including El being half-Indian and Orion being Nice Himbo Draco Malfoy #and taking the unexamined colonialism/british supremacy that underpins JKR's work #to its logical conclusion

#and then writing a whole trilogy as a critique of it #these books read to me as a response to the FANDOM response to JKR's shoddy worldbuilding and it is FASCINATING to me #like down to the choice of Some Dude From Manchester calling it the SCHOLOMANCE #which is a loaded as hell folkloric name

#and Wizard London actually having a response to WWII #a lot of which was 'keep calm and commit atrocities while yeeting eldritch abominations to India to make them THEIR problem' but like #it actually feels like the wizards interact with the world

#SPEAKING OF I'm still not over the Secret Wizard Councils Facebook Group (via @thepioden)

i mean, given how thoroughly Orion is reduced to his role as The Hero and what an important element of the story that is, i'd argue he's at least as much an engagement with fandom's Harry Potter as he is fandom's Draco Malfoy.

(though i wouldn't be surprised to learn that if you'd read Cassandra Claire's notoriously plagiarism-riddled early work you'd see allusions to the trendsetting Draco In Leather Pants lmao)

but iirc Enoby recruits both characters to her whatever is going on in My Immortal and harry changes his name to Vampire to be more goff so an amalgam makes. sense. as;lkdfsj;kldfklj

sidebar you know i love how Orion is just swanning around with silver Main Character Hair and it is so deliberately never called out as bizarre by any character, despite no one else in the whole setting having unusual coloring.

silver's a great choice, because it doesn't require any pigments or anything; it's a hair color human bodies do produce naturally. but not usually teenage ones. so is this in fact a sign of how his body has been under profound unnatural stress for its entire existence? who knows. not gonna even look at it.

but i think yeah, scholomance is definitely engaging with Harry Potter both as deliberately (and often thoughtlessly) constructed literary work and as cultural presence, which includes a lot of what people have done in reply to the fuckery and lacunae in the source text.

one thing i kept noticing without having any particular takeaway on it was the contrast between the handing of Hogwarts-the-setting as essentially a character in its own right which is implied to have some form of will and take 'sides,' but which ultimately does not possess agency and is not engaged with as a conscious entity ever

and the scholomance, which is understood to be not a person, but absolutely aware enough to be malevolent. and then further understood to be not truly malevolent but an utterly amoral, inhuman thing compelled by its design to maximize student survival rate at any cost--no justice, no goodness, only the cold numbers. the social-darwinist numbers rigged from the start to favor the children of its creators, and to eat the others alive to power its mission.

and then it throws itself on the pyre just as wholeheartedly as it did all those children, when the numbers say that's how to win the numbers game.

(and then they go back and save it.)

and like. it's great as an approach to the whole genre deal of magical school, where there's always a struggle in writing between the individuality of the people who make up the faculty etc and their function as part of the institution--that is, to do that justice you often need to take wayyyyy too much page time off the students. so this is a clever efficiency, in the way it contracts all the systemic injustice of a society into one inhuman entity. shaped by human will and prejudice, but not requiring you to directly engage with human individuals; a sort of social thought-experiment.

but i feel like there's an interaction with the textual handling of hogwarts specifically that i can't quite pin down.

anyway i think one of the interesting points of rebuke is that even when the power of friendship and purity of intent and so forth do n fact save the day. the text scrupulously avoids positioning survival in itself as a rhetorical victory.

winning doesn't mean you were right, it just means you were strong or lucky or clever. that's true at the beginning and it's still true at the end. do not endorse the idea that having something is proof you deserve it more than people who don't.

things to ask yourself when designing a female character:

“gay rights!” - Dash Baxter

Doctor vs Master in terms of who I'd rather have as an enemy is Master all the fucking way. The thing about The Master is their number one priority is not their moral code or revenge or domination or being a villain no their number 1 priority no matter what is being high camp. If the master was after me I would just clap to lower the lights and make "masochism tango" start playing and then during the dance I'd cuff and collar them with some ridiculously strong stuff and at the end they'd be like "mon chéri...it seems you have foiled me for now, but we shall meet again" and then they'd kiss me hand and I probably would have at least a few years before they show up again. Whereas if you're not already in a deeply codependent situation ship and you piss off The Doctor their number one priority is Fucking Getting You. You can fuck off to the year 6 billion in the 13th dimension and they'll still find your ass and be like "I tripled your lifespan and also gave you anterograde amnesia so everyday you will wake up with fewer and fewer loved ones but the grief will be brand new" like jesus christ man i don't wanna deal with that

Conversely this is why you would want to be good friends with The Doctor over The Master. The master is fickle as hell and WILL kill you for like. chewing too loudly or buying the wrong tea while once you've befriended the doctor they become your extremely loyal guard dog with something extremely wrong with them. Once they become attached to you specifically they WILL destroy a city for you. They both need serious help <3

reylos crying on twitter because Adam Driver explicitly confirmed that Bendemption was never originally in the plans for Kylo....this is justice for the last 8 years, actually

"they were just going to let the last Skywalker die as a Dark Sider???" well he wouldn't have BEEN the last Skywalker if Rian had actually followed through with the clearly foreshadowed revelation that Rey was one and let Finn be the nobody Jedi from nowhere as he was supposed to be

I just.

Eight years of arguing with Reylo stans about how Kylo's trajectory was to show us the long fall of someone continually choosing the Dark even as his father (who he explicitly acknowledged that he still loved!) and other people in his life repeatedly offered him the same choice Luke gave to Vader in ROTJ.

Eight years of noting that the point of Kylo, for JJ Abrams, was that you can be raised with love, support, and stability and still CHOOSE to make bad choices and continue to do so even when offered alternatives.

Eight years of pointing out that Finn and Kylo were deliberate character foils in TFA! Eight years of saying that Finn was supposed to show that goodness can come from anywhere, even a stormtrooper raised as a child soldier with no one to turn to, while Kylo was supposed to show that evil can come from anywhere, even a beloved Rebel's child with a stable childhood with lots of support figures.

Eight years of trying to get through to them that Finn and Kylo were supposed to represent the two choices Rey had as the sequel trilogy's Skywalker: to follow Finn's choices (Luke's choices) and stay in the Light, or follow Ben's choices (Anakin's choices) and surrender to the Dark.

Eight years has led to this moment of Adam Driver casually going "evolving into Ben Solo…that was never part of it" and “Rian took it into a different direction” in an interview on a random Tuesday night. I feel the vindication in this Chili's tonight and it is SWEET

Murderbot: This is my favorite human, Dr. Mensah. She can go wherever she wants and do whatever she wants

Also Murderbot: This is my best friend, Dr. Ratthi. He has to stay in the shuttle. Unless I'm breaking and entering, in which case he's specifically invited

Ok but Mensah rescued it from a hostile SecUnit with a mining drill like an intrepid explorer. Ratthi tried to climb back out of the hopper to retrieve a toolbag while a giant space worm was actively trying to eat them. Throughout canon MB is very firmy attached to its strongest early impressions of people (most notably Gurathin and ART, but others too) so Mensah is always going to be tagged "badass like blorbos from my shows!" And Ratthi will be tagged "WILL jump out of shuttle directly into something's jaws and die the minute I turn my back," and they're just going to have to live with it.

stressed about chem exams so I did a ghost king doodle to cope