Primogeniture in any form is discriminatory precisely since birth order is an immutable, permanent, unchosen characteristic assigned randomly at birth, just like race or sex.
Primogeniture makes sense in a world where odds that you arrive at the adult age are rather low, due to the high risk of death from illness and injuries.
The oldest child is the most likely to survive. It is a rational and fair rule in such context.
Many discriminatory policies could be considered rational. It is rational for jobs to discriminate against handicapped people who require extra affordances to be able to do the same job (for example, wheelchair ramps).
“Fair” is a much trickier beast! My favorite approach to conceptualizing fairness is Rawls’ veil of ignorance: if you were going to be placed as a random member of society, rather than your current position, and you would still support a policy given this change, then the policy is fair. Knowing that, beyond the veil of ignorance, I may be a paraplegic, would I still support dismantling the ADA’s wheelchair accessibility requirements?
Things like inclusion and other theories such as the one you describe are only possible in rich and technology-advanced societies. And are vulnerable to groups chosing to play against the whole society.
When you have to struggle for life, discriminating against some categories, such as disabled people is necessary for the whole group to survive. Animals do it, and humans in antiquity did it too, out of necessity. It's actually how evolution happens. Humans still do it to some extent when they choose how to mate : they discriminate.
It also means you can't use the generalization "a human hand has 5 fingers" to then say that "therefore because your hands have 6 fingers, you are not a human"
>"bring back idiomatic design" doesn't help when we don't have enough idioms
One must always research and find the dominant or most applicable idioms for whatever they're doing. Are you building a command line tool? For which platform? What other similar tools are you basing its design on? You have to check yourself and see whether your software conforms to the idioms of the platforms, communities, etc that you're targeting.
I think the intent of Mike Judge's joke was less so an outright promotion of eugenics and more so mocking the upper crust of American society's approach to family planning. (That of which Judge was intimately familiar with during his time in SV when he worked for a graphics card company.)
A lot of his work with KotH analyzed the same dynamics of educated and uneducated America and the interplay and I think Idiocracy is essentially the terminus of the observations he would make where if the idiots got their way. (A semi-common plot point with Hank in KotH where he would be pit against rediculous circumstances.)
> There is nothing in the movie that suggests that the decline in average intelligence is a result of cultural factors or education.
Have you skipped start of the movie or did we watch different editions? They literally open the story with redneck family breeding and spreading their redneck ways through family ties while “smart” family waits for the perfect moment.
I think that the movie makes it really, really obvious that the intellectual degradation goes beyond just culture. The people are presented as being borderline mentally disabled.
I rewatched the intro, and it is true that they label the character IQs. That said, I still don't think that the particular mechanism is the most important part
The movie obviously doesn’t depict a eugenics program, but it makes the core argument of eugenics: if human breeding is left uncontrolled it will lead to “stupid” people breeding more.
Correct! It mandated eugenics in real life, in the early 20th century. I didn't say that the movie shows eugenics happening. I said "the film itself implies that the idiocracy is due to stupid people breeding more, a classic tenet of Nazism and eugenics alike." Work on your reading comprehension.
It's true though, isn't it? The response is what typifies Nazi and similar positions.
It is curious that there's no reported disgenic effect though - that seems counter to evolutionary theory? Perhaps it's only limiting the rate of growth of IQ/intelligence.
There's a classic sci-fi story in which we rely on computers, the population gets dumber to the point noone knows how to make/fix the computers. I think in that there's a computer glitch that then wipes out humanity; but it's from the time when there were monolithic computers.
Is Dennis the Menace a treatise on corporeal punishment?
If we want to treat Idiocracy as a policy paper, why not take away as a lesson to think beyond merely themselves when the well-educated decide whether to raise children?
The film wasn't about education, it was about genetics, as the intro makes abundantly clear. And the Redditors who get themselves hot and bothered about this film aren't laughing, they're congratulating themselves on being the intelligent ones instead of the dysgenic stupids while crowing about how "Idiocracy is a documentary" -> stupid people are overbreeding.
If most people in the thread have different takeaways, and you're laser-focused on seeing eugenics and superiority (especially when you keep making condescending remarks like "hope this helps" or "work on your reading comprehension"), I don't think that reflects on the film
Yeah, the consensus of a plurality of users of a Silicon Valley startup incubator heavily associated with the right wing is definitely the only opinion that matters about the subtext of a film.
That's ironic seeing that nazis (or the far right in general) usually need stupid people to vote for them so they get into a position where they can undermine a democratic system...
All kinds of people voted for the Nazi party, including very intelligent and respectable professors, and there was no special split in intelligence between either side voters (or measure of that).
What's ironic is using nazi-like thinking (the idiot masses who vote far right vs the enlightened people who vote left), instead of treating it as a complex political matter, and accepting that perfectly intelligent people can just as well fall for that shit.
Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic. Not that most people on this site have ever dipped below PMC treatlerite comfort.
>Voting for the right as a member of the working class is truly idiotic
Or not everybody shares your priorities and ideological outloook, or even pragmatic assessment of how more fucked they are with the right vs the left in power in the past, and it's the above that's naive.
Perhaps they're adverse to people so apolitical and self-righteous that think nobody can't vote anything else than what they're selling, unless they're stupid or immoral.
Every single quality of life improvement for the working class, from minimum wage, to overtime, to weekends, was delivered by the left. Please tell me one thing that the right has accomplished for laborers.
Many Useless Uses of cat in this documentation. You never need to do `cat file | foo`, you can just do `<file foo`. cat is for concatenating inputs, you never need it for a single input.
As someone who worked with Unix/Linux and command line arguments for 30 years and still "abuse" cat like the documentation, I regularly hear this complaint.
Yes, "cmd <file" is more efficient for the computer but not for the reader in many cases.
I read from left to the right and the pipeline might be long or "cmd" might have plenty of arguments (or both).
Having "cat file | cmd" immediately gives me the context for what I am working with and corresponds well with "take this file, do this, then that, etc" with it) and makes it easier for me to grok what is happening (the first operation will have some kind of input from stdin).
Without that, the context starts with the (first) operation like in the sentence "do this operation, on this file (,then this, etc)". I might not be familiar with it or knowing the arguments it expects.
At least for me, the first variant comes more naturally and is quicker to follow (in most cases), so unless it is performance sensitive that is what I end up with (and cat is insanely fast for most cases).
