Tell me something I don't know

[spi]

@Stickman393 your post inspired me to rewatch the intro, and I see what you mean by the eugenics stuff. My interpretation of the movie was based on my memory of what I thought it should be about and not what they actually said.

 

[Nostradoomus]

Welcome to Costco.







I love you.

 

[Gordo]

You folks are simply amazing...

 

[Mentaltossflycoon]

Favorite conspiracy theory:

 

[Stickman393]

@Stickman393 your post inspired me to rewatch the intro, and I see what you mean by the eugenics stuff. My interpretation of the movie was based on my memory of what I thought it should be about and not what they actually said.

I mean, it's Mike Judge, and it was released in 2006. A couple of years later tropic thunder came out with Robert Downy Jr in blackface. It was a different time.

I mean, it's a clever idea for a movie. And it's an intuitive idea...if one doesn't squint and tilt their head and then later on find out about a whole bunch of gawdawful stuff that happened because folks...kinda...like, really believed it and thought they were building a better society by...woof. Humans are weird.

Back to fun facts:

A CIA...erm...asset...dosed a bunch of unsuspecting folks with LSD back in the early cold war era.

This was under the MK ultra umbrella. The op was named "Operation Midnight Climax".

Basically...a mark would be lured into a safehouse by a sex worker, where they were observed behind two-way glass. The mark would be unwittingly dosed with LSD, and the sex worker would use the post-coital conversation to...eh...try to get the mark to spill personal secrets.

The objective was...ultimately...to try and discover a "truth" serum. Cause the CIA was pretty sure that the USSR already had one. Or at least...they wanted to get there first.

 

[spi]

People who are avid readers develop a system to mark library books they read.

I discovered this when I checked out 2 books of the same genre (psychological thrillers) and happened to notice they had very similar markings on the same page (111). In this case, it looks like the mark is initials and a number (perhaps a review).

After finding this, I learned this is a widespread practice in libraries across the world--and in retrospect it doesn't seem surprising at all. But discovering it by accident by finding two identical marks was pretty exciting to me.

 

[dlazzarini]

I have a different take on the movie--although I haven't seen it in a while, so maybe it's not what I think it was.

But in my interpretation of this film is that it had nothing to do with human's intelligence or innate abilities, but rather that we as a society choose to be this way, despite our intelligence (making it even that much more tragic).

And to tie it to the real world, we know we are facing a climate crisis, but instead of solving it, the most-educated people on the planet are working on algorithms to better serve ads and self-driving cars, while the wealthiest people on the planet are focused on shooting penises into orbit.

What movie are you guys referencing? I’m intrigued now

 

[spi]

What movie are you guys referencing? I’m intrigued now

Idiocracy

 

[fig]

 

[dlazzarini]

Idiocracy

Thanks. Haven’t seen it but now I have to

 

[Chuck D. Bones]

My favorite write-up on it is from Wait, But Why if you want to check it out: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html

Great read. Clear & concise.