Say what you will about his politics, but William Jennings Bryan was a sublime orator. In the closing argument (that never was) of Scopes, Bryan wrote:
“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.”
China exemplifies this. In a generation or two, they’ve gotten all the technology Western society made without Westerners society’s attendant moral development over 200 years.
We’re doing our darndest to wring every ounce of morality out of our own culture. Life is expendable at either end of the proverbial conveyor belt. Church? Meh. Ask any kid graduating from high school what’s in store, and you hear: to make a whole lot of money. Sometimes I can’t help but think if Uncle Sam looked in the mirror, he’d see Mao winking back at him.
During the testing of the bomb in July 1945 some of the scientist were making bets on where or not the bomb would set off of the upper atmosphere and destroy the world. The I.T. giants of the world today are making bets on where or not A.I. will take over the world.
Read anything by John Solomon at "Just The News" or any book by Peter Schweizer. Start with "Clinton Cash". That book knocked me on my ass.
To keep things even brush up on Mitch McConnell and how his wife's family business is the Foremost Group based in Asia.
The ONLY reason they kicked Trump out of office is he literally disrupted TRILLIONS of the D.C. laundering system. Not all, but most of them that have been there the longest regardless of party.
If not for the success of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, there’s a good chance I would not be typing this post. After years of combat in the Aleutians, my father would have been among the first wave of the invasion of Japan. There are gross estimates of 400 to 800 thousand US deaths and millions of civillian casualties before Japan would be bludgeoned into surrender. Thankfully, Truman used the device and he was able to come home. Despite its destruction, at the end of the day, it saved many more lives than it took, including mine and the untold millions of sons and daughters that would never have been born.
For me, Oppenheimer’s quote “And now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” is misplaced. That beast was unleashed a long time ago.
There were no "years of combat in the Aleutians." The battle of Attu began and ended in May 1943. There were around 1,500 American casualties. Later that summer the Allies invaded Kiska, but there was no battle because the Japanese had already slipped their men off the island. There were nevertheless almost 200 casualties, from friendly fire, accidents, and Japanese booby traps.
Japan seized Attu and Kiska in June 1942. To say the “battle” to retake them began and ended in May 1943 exposes an incredible ignorance typical of someone who gets their history from Wikipedia, U.S. troops didn’t just show up one day and declare victory. They were there before the invasion, ill equipped to battle the extreme elements to which they were exposed in order prepare for the Japanese attack that would come later. And after the attack they endured bombings, strafing, recon patrols so deep into enemy territory you could literally smell the enemy as well as numerous engagements until July 1943. And after they secured the islands they remained there, waiting to see if they would be ordered part of the invasion of Japan. Thankfully they were not called to do so. That was the main point of my post. Obviously it was lost on you
Ah, well, I only flew to Adak in 1983 to cap off twenty years of study of the Aleutian Campaign. What would I know?
The actual battles in the Aleutians were as I describe them above, May 18 to May 30 on Attu, a few days on Kiska. The Japanese on Attu, around 2,400 strong, attempted to fight, but were too poor in ammo and supplies to achieve anything. The Japanese had antiaircraft guns on both islands, but they were virtually not used.
Oppenheimer’s bomb did not cause Russia, Europe, China and the United States to all choose the path of demographic collapse combined with festering societal inequality. Decades of selfish, shortsighted leadership brought us to this precarious point.
In the zero sum battlefield of WWII, incendiary bombs killed (incinerated, to be precise) far more civilians and indigenous military targets in Japan than the two relatively primitive nuclear bombs. Presentism foolishness aside, casualty-weary America was relieved the bombs accelerated Japan's surrender.
All of this led to two profoundly great expressions of American's cultural superiority and intrinsic goodness: We occupied Japan and restored her to a wonderfully functioning nation (and Germany to some extent), and we have been profoundly moral stewards of atomic warfighting technology. We have never resorted to nuclear warfare ever since.
I look forward to seeing the movie, but with a heavy heart. The development of the atom bomb opened up a new world of uncertainty and, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, some in the hands of unstable regimes, a world tiptoeing on the edge of disaster. Simply put, we face a real threat of nuclear war as Russia, Iran, and North Korea, in particular, play nuclear brinksmanship to achieve political ends, a dangerous game where a mistake could bring on nuclear war. Whether such a war could be limited to the battlefield is doubtful, and no country, no matter how powerful or developed, is prepared for mass destruction of its population centers. Putin, Kim, and the ayatollahs may believe that their regimes can survive the holocaust intact, and that's the real threat.
But in the absence of a Manhattan Project, we would in the present day have no baseload source of carbon-free energy to replace fossil fuels. We would be required to accept the low-energy medieval existence the Greens have planned for us.
That the "environmentalists" haven't enthusiastically pushed for nuclear as the renewable energy source of choice convinced me long ago that the whole 'stop oil' push is unrelated to 'saving the planet' and is more about creating a cold and hungry serf class and a self-selected and impenetrable overlord class.
The funny thing is that CCP has already created that to a large degree, and that the WEF crowd may be surprised to find that - when the time comes - the CCP overlord class will see no need to invite them behind the walls and into the comfy side of things.
Exactly. Which is why when any “environmentalist” talks about green transition, my thought is always, “you first.” And then they go buy a mansion on a low lying island off the coast of Massachusetts despite insisting that the ocean is rising.
This is why I totally don't understand the sudden appearance of that Paul Kingsnorth character as a voice on the right. To me, "I'm exactly like the Deep Greens except that I have converted to Christian, therefore you should listen to me" is not a conservative argument. He's nothing but an angry Druid dredged up to appeal to the antivaxers.
I question whether we needed the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, but it is likely that the development of nuclear energy would have resulted in the development of nuclear weapons in the end anyway. It just seems to be the nature of man to figure out how to use advancements in technology for the purposes of war.
What the ayatollahs want is the destruction of Israel. I suspect that some of them would be willing to sacrifice their nation's population to achieve that goal.
We ended the war with Japan by destroying two cities with two atomic fission bombs each with yields in the 20-25 kilotons of dynamite range. Modern fusion nuclear bombs on multiple independently targeted warheads per missile are rated in megatonage ranges. Just think what nuclear war could do now. Makes WWsI and II combined look like a fist fight.
I am reminded of the great creative power of the scientific mind that naively builds incredible technology that is eventually twisted by politicians and despots for nefarious purposes. Think social media, internet, nuclear energy, airplanes, computers. All great ideas, meticulously perfected and perverted towards evil.
Oppenheimer is a necessary story... but also an old one. The Apple in the Garden and the Tower of Babel; the Promethean Fire, Icarus' Wings, and Pandora's Box; Faust and Frankenstein; 2001, Jurassic Park, Gattaca, The Matrix, etc. etc..
We're always trying to play God, convinced our ingenuity is powerful enough to contain the forces we arrogantly unleash. In the words of a band named after a Cold War spy plane, "How long must we sing this song?"
I'm going "Woke" for the moment. Imagine a movie where a white male actor portrayed Martin Luther King, Malcolm X or Jackie Robinson. In the Manhattan Project the number of Jews was astounding. The majority of the scientists were Jewish. Almost all of them were German, Hungarian or Austrian refugees. The list included: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Otto Frisch, Neils Bohr, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, John von Neuman, Rudolf Peieris, Franz Simon, Hans Halban, Joseph Rotblatt, Stanislav Ulam, Richard Feynman and Eugene Wigner. Enrico Fermi wasn't Jewish but he left Italy to save his Jewish wife. In this movie there's not one Jewish actor. If you believe that the creation & use of the Atom bomb wasn't necessary or was criminal view photos of the tens of thousands of young marines floating in the water or lying dead in the sands of Iwo Jima or Okinawa. Imagine Nazi Germany with a Nuclear weapon.
I learned the term “goywashing” this week. But there’s a bright side. If nuclear holocaust destroys half the planet, after seeing “Oppenheimer”, perhaps they won’t blame the Jews.
We will always be blamed. After all we control the weather, banks, aliens from outer space, the Holocaust (We enjoy killing ourselves) and who knows what else. It’s all in The NY Times best seller “ Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Thanks Henry Ford!
True. But after Oppenheimer, they might be led first to Ireland and the UK, giving us Jews more time to see the diamonds in our hems and flee. Off to sharpen my space laser - ah, the joys of a Sunday!
Race-swapped casting of historical figures can be a problem, but are you arguing that Cillian Murphy doesn't look like the actual Oppenheimer? It seems to me that the problem is when actors are cast who don't look anything like the actual person, if they don't have the cultural context or life experiences it seems less consequential because, well, they're supposed to be pretending.
That’s a small part of it. I think judaism was central to the story of Oppenheimer. It is meaningful that these Jewish scientists were literally running a race against Nazi Germany, where their families were being killed in concentration camps. I also think that the McCarthyism and the moral crisis, that were part of the story, were directly related to Judaism. The story is that Nolan, the Director, wanted to work with Cillian Murphy. Surely he could’ve found room and a Jewish actor to at least play Albert Einstein. This story had Judaism directly at its center. It was an apocalyptic moment, culturally, globally, and to the entire Jewish diaspora. It defined the century to come. Yes, I would like to see some historical accuracy. I look forward to seeing Cillian Murphy again on screen in the upcoming biopic of Frederick Douglass. /s
Sure, but it’s not like they cut the importance of Jewish people out of the movie. They literally say that antisemitism will be the downfall of the Nazis. They emphasize that Jewish physicists were discriminated against in the U.S. They talk about leaving Europe because it’s unsafe.
Cillian Murphy doesn’t look anything like Frederick Douglass, but if they found someone who was, say, Haitian, to play him and the guy looked right and was a good actor, I think it would be fair enough.
If the claim is that there is someone whose appearance matches the character, whose acting skill is up to the job, and that they shouldn’t play the role because of some other reason, I don’t know what else is really material.
Hard to explain. These were lions of the 20th global order. Jews are such a tiny percentage of the world (16 million out of 8 billion) that it would’ve been nice to see some historical accuracy. I can understand why you feel differently, however, Jews were treated as something other when we immigrated here. It’s good to know that we are considered part of the mainstream enough to be played by non-Jewish actors. Thanks for your input on that, it really made me think.
Stipulating that we're not talking about someone who doesn't look like the character (i.e. Netflix Cleopatra), there are other examples. It's not uncommon to see people from the same general part of the world cast in roles that don't match their exact ethnic background. Just off the top of my head, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people are often cast interchangeably (Garret Wang as Harry Kim, for example). It's also common to have more "white" castings that don't line up. Was John Adams Italian? No, but Paul Giamatti got good reviews for playing him. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For example, Marvel's casting of obviously not Russian actors like Mickey O'Rourke and Elizabeth Olsen to play Russian characters comes across as ridiculous to me. And these aren't even real people. Biopic casting is tougher; there aren't going to be a ton of actors who actually look like real historical figures whose appearance is known from pictures. I'm not really a fan of Ana de Armas (beautiful as she is) as Marilyn Monroe, but for me it was never a question that Cillian Murphy was a great casting choice for Oppenheimer. Not straightforward for me who can sell a character and who can't.
I would also say that I have minority Ashkenazi ancestry and my Jewish grandparent left Europe for the U.S. before the war and joined the Army and returned as a combatant, so it's not that I'm unsympathetic to these sorts of issues. But am I a "Jew"? I wouldn't say so. Nor am I any of the other numerous ancestries I possess (Greek, Scottish, Swedish, etc.). People are so interbred in the U.S. that clinging to old notions of group identity doesn't ring true to me.
The folks who were actually at Los Alamos were disproportionately Jewish. However, the directors of the Manhattan project were not. Notably, James B. Conant was one of the directors of the Manhattan project. He was a traditional WASP (and president of Harvard and notable advocate of the SAT). Fortunately (for the US) the Germans were never that close to getting them bomb. Indeed, they never got a chain reaction to work. The Germans made highly material scientific errors, that stymied their project.
I don't regard those folks as actors. The only one that I indirectly know is/was Salk. He was a serious scientist, not an actor. He is (arguably) famous for coming up with one of the successful Polio vaccines. Later in life, he tried to develop an HIV vaccine and failed (all attempts to develop an HIV vaccine have failed, good treatments have been highly successful).
It wasn't so much that they made errors as the fact that the heavy water plant in Norway had been destroyed, so they did not have enough heavy water to carry out experiments to determine things like mean free path. Also, they were doubtful (mostly likely correctly) that their government would provide the very large amount of funding that would be necessary, as they were getting clobbered in the east by Russia. The transcript of their conversations when they were in custody after the war is available.
You have the germane history wrong. The Germans mismeasured the Neutron cross-section of pure Carbon (the Americans did not). As a consequence, the Germans believed that they needed Norwegian heavy water. The Americans (correctly) knew that they did not heavy water and built the reactors (Chicago, Hanford, etc.) using Carbon. Of course, pure Carbon is much cheaper and easier to get than heavy water. Much later, the Canadians (for very different reasons) built reactors using heavy water. That was also a mistake.
Nice review of a relevant movie such as "The Sound of Freedom". Oh yeah, thefp won't cover a $100M successful - and very relevant to the connected insiders - movie...
I was surprised by how resonant the movie was regarding cancel culture, due process, basic rights. The tribunal sneering that Oppenheimer didn't have rights because he wasn't really on trial is so redolent of Title IX courts or HR proceedings or online cancellations. The "offense archaeology" of digging through all his past associations. The cynicism of his enemies.
Given how long it takes to make a movie, it's hard to imagine that Nolan was consciously intending to make some kind of commentary on the Twitter Files, etc., but it sure felt like he did.
But the big question is: Why this story? And why now?
I would think the answer is pretty obvious...
Because NOW people have become skeptical of scientists, scientism and government. What better way to reclaim their loyalty than to wave the flag of potential annihilation and remind everybody that the government is the good guy!
Was hoping for a review, but....well, this article doesn't really say anything. Okay, the movie's apropos. And there's a lot of flowery language to support that. But is it good?
I mean, it's Nolan, so--yeah, it's good. We didn't really need your review to know that. But we didn't need what you gave us, either. If you'd at least given us a review, then maybe I wouldn't have felt like your philosophic meanderings wasted 5 minutes of my life.
I saw it in iMax, Marcus; that's a plus, but the movie doesn't depend on that. I also read the book, American Prometheus. Both terrific! The movie and book are less philosopic than valid historical accounts. It was a remarkable time--the revolutionary advances in physics during the first half of the 20th century, plus the emergence of the full-fledged, modern bureaucratic state (now known as the administrative state)--and the atomic bomb was the manifestation of the fusion of these great forces, the scientific/academic triumph of quantum physics melded with the massive administrative reach of the bureaucratic state. It's awesome!
Say what you will about his politics, but William Jennings Bryan was a sublime orator. In the closing argument (that never was) of Scopes, Bryan wrote:
“Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.”
China exemplifies this. In a generation or two, they’ve gotten all the technology Western society made without Westerners society’s attendant moral development over 200 years.
We’re doing our darndest to wring every ounce of morality out of our own culture. Life is expendable at either end of the proverbial conveyor belt. Church? Meh. Ask any kid graduating from high school what’s in store, and you hear: to make a whole lot of money. Sometimes I can’t help but think if Uncle Sam looked in the mirror, he’d see Mao winking back at him.
Excellent comment
During the testing of the bomb in July 1945 some of the scientist were making bets on where or not the bomb would set off of the upper atmosphere and destroy the world. The I.T. giants of the world today are making bets on where or not A.I. will take over the world.
Does science control us or do we control science?
I tracked down the text of the argument.
http://www2.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/wjb-last/wjb-last.htm
Spencer Tracy was fantastic
https://youtu.be/vtNdYsoool8
“The threat of a nuclear war is as significant right now as at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis”
——————————————————-
It needs to be said that this is because of the Donbas Region and Hillary Clinton. Are there dumber reasons to start a nuclear war?
Don't forget Lindsay Grahamnesty's and John McCain's role in Ukraine as well as Pelosi's kid, Kerry's kid, et al.
Please elaborate for those not keeping up,self included.
Read anything by John Solomon at "Just The News" or any book by Peter Schweizer. Start with "Clinton Cash". That book knocked me on my ass.
To keep things even brush up on Mitch McConnell and how his wife's family business is the Foremost Group based in Asia.
The ONLY reason they kicked Trump out of office is he literally disrupted TRILLIONS of the D.C. laundering system. Not all, but most of them that have been there the longest regardless of party.
I consider myself reasonably well-read, but Kevin and Danimal, you've lost me here.
Nope. Another quagmire, because Vietnam, Afghanistan, & Iraq simply were not enough. And that is the BEST case scenario.
Combine "Donbas" and Clinton" and you get "Dumbass"
The first misstep will probably involve North Korea..
Iran. This nation is run by a fanatical religious leadership.
Which is more dangerous than fanatical non-religious leadership how?
It's only because Mutterer sees religion as irrational...it betrays his ideals, but doesn't really say anything.
If not for the success of Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project, there’s a good chance I would not be typing this post. After years of combat in the Aleutians, my father would have been among the first wave of the invasion of Japan. There are gross estimates of 400 to 800 thousand US deaths and millions of civillian casualties before Japan would be bludgeoned into surrender. Thankfully, Truman used the device and he was able to come home. Despite its destruction, at the end of the day, it saved many more lives than it took, including mine and the untold millions of sons and daughters that would never have been born.
For me, Oppenheimer’s quote “And now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” is misplaced. That beast was unleashed a long time ago.
There were no "years of combat in the Aleutians." The battle of Attu began and ended in May 1943. There were around 1,500 American casualties. Later that summer the Allies invaded Kiska, but there was no battle because the Japanese had already slipped their men off the island. There were nevertheless almost 200 casualties, from friendly fire, accidents, and Japanese booby traps.
Japan seized Attu and Kiska in June 1942. To say the “battle” to retake them began and ended in May 1943 exposes an incredible ignorance typical of someone who gets their history from Wikipedia, U.S. troops didn’t just show up one day and declare victory. They were there before the invasion, ill equipped to battle the extreme elements to which they were exposed in order prepare for the Japanese attack that would come later. And after the attack they endured bombings, strafing, recon patrols so deep into enemy territory you could literally smell the enemy as well as numerous engagements until July 1943. And after they secured the islands they remained there, waiting to see if they would be ordered part of the invasion of Japan. Thankfully they were not called to do so. That was the main point of my post. Obviously it was lost on you
Ah, well, I only flew to Adak in 1983 to cap off twenty years of study of the Aleutian Campaign. What would I know?
The actual battles in the Aleutians were as I describe them above, May 18 to May 30 on Attu, a few days on Kiska. The Japanese on Attu, around 2,400 strong, attempted to fight, but were too poor in ammo and supplies to achieve anything. The Japanese had antiaircraft guns on both islands, but they were virtually not used.
Oppenheimer’s bomb did not cause Russia, Europe, China and the United States to all choose the path of demographic collapse combined with festering societal inequality. Decades of selfish, shortsighted leadership brought us to this precarious point.
“A nascent Iranian nuclear program could produce a bomb on short notice”
—————————————————-
*Democrat-backed, antisemitic, Jeremiah Wright-inspired Iranian nuclear program
In the zero sum battlefield of WWII, incendiary bombs killed (incinerated, to be precise) far more civilians and indigenous military targets in Japan than the two relatively primitive nuclear bombs. Presentism foolishness aside, casualty-weary America was relieved the bombs accelerated Japan's surrender.
All of this led to two profoundly great expressions of American's cultural superiority and intrinsic goodness: We occupied Japan and restored her to a wonderfully functioning nation (and Germany to some extent), and we have been profoundly moral stewards of atomic warfighting technology. We have never resorted to nuclear warfare ever since.
All that could be true, and we could still see human civilization wiped out by nuclear war tomorrow.
I look forward to seeing the movie, but with a heavy heart. The development of the atom bomb opened up a new world of uncertainty and, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons, some in the hands of unstable regimes, a world tiptoeing on the edge of disaster. Simply put, we face a real threat of nuclear war as Russia, Iran, and North Korea, in particular, play nuclear brinksmanship to achieve political ends, a dangerous game where a mistake could bring on nuclear war. Whether such a war could be limited to the battlefield is doubtful, and no country, no matter how powerful or developed, is prepared for mass destruction of its population centers. Putin, Kim, and the ayatollahs may believe that their regimes can survive the holocaust intact, and that's the real threat.
But in the absence of a Manhattan Project, we would in the present day have no baseload source of carbon-free energy to replace fossil fuels. We would be required to accept the low-energy medieval existence the Greens have planned for us.
That the "environmentalists" haven't enthusiastically pushed for nuclear as the renewable energy source of choice convinced me long ago that the whole 'stop oil' push is unrelated to 'saving the planet' and is more about creating a cold and hungry serf class and a self-selected and impenetrable overlord class.
The funny thing is that CCP has already created that to a large degree, and that the WEF crowd may be surprised to find that - when the time comes - the CCP overlord class will see no need to invite them behind the walls and into the comfy side of things.
Exactly. Which is why when any “environmentalist” talks about green transition, my thought is always, “you first.” And then they go buy a mansion on a low lying island off the coast of Massachusetts despite insisting that the ocean is rising.
This is why I totally don't understand the sudden appearance of that Paul Kingsnorth character as a voice on the right. To me, "I'm exactly like the Deep Greens except that I have converted to Christian, therefore you should listen to me" is not a conservative argument. He's nothing but an angry Druid dredged up to appeal to the antivaxers.
I question whether we needed the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, but it is likely that the development of nuclear energy would have resulted in the development of nuclear weapons in the end anyway. It just seems to be the nature of man to figure out how to use advancements in technology for the purposes of war.
There are two inexorable drivers of technology: Killing and porn. Sometimes simultaneously.
Sounds about right. Maybe we should add comfort.
Or the advancements of war for the purposes of things like food - using ammonium nitrate to fertilize corn, for example.
What the ayatollahs want is the destruction of Israel. I suspect that some of them would be willing to sacrifice their nation's population to achieve that goal.
It sounds like the destruction of WWI and WWII before the atomic bomb are lost on you.
We ended the war with Japan by destroying two cities with two atomic fission bombs each with yields in the 20-25 kilotons of dynamite range. Modern fusion nuclear bombs on multiple independently targeted warheads per missile are rated in megatonage ranges. Just think what nuclear war could do now. Makes WWsI and II combined look like a fist fight.
Substitute TNT for dynamite in the tonnage ratings for nuclear weapons
So much quicker and easier now with missiles.
I am reminded of the great creative power of the scientific mind that naively builds incredible technology that is eventually twisted by politicians and despots for nefarious purposes. Think social media, internet, nuclear energy, airplanes, computers. All great ideas, meticulously perfected and perverted towards evil.
Don’t forget dynamite...
Invented by the man who gave us the Nobel Peace Prize.
Oppenheimer is a necessary story... but also an old one. The Apple in the Garden and the Tower of Babel; the Promethean Fire, Icarus' Wings, and Pandora's Box; Faust and Frankenstein; 2001, Jurassic Park, Gattaca, The Matrix, etc. etc..
We're always trying to play God, convinced our ingenuity is powerful enough to contain the forces we arrogantly unleash. In the words of a band named after a Cold War spy plane, "How long must we sing this song?"
This is beautifully expressed, and there is nothing new under the sun. AI is yet another genie that can’t be put back into the bottle.
I think it was U2, not Coldplay… But point taken. How long must we sing this song?
Yep. The U2 was the cold war spy plane I meant to reference.
I'm going "Woke" for the moment. Imagine a movie where a white male actor portrayed Martin Luther King, Malcolm X or Jackie Robinson. In the Manhattan Project the number of Jews was astounding. The majority of the scientists were Jewish. Almost all of them were German, Hungarian or Austrian refugees. The list included: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Otto Frisch, Neils Bohr, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, John von Neuman, Rudolf Peieris, Franz Simon, Hans Halban, Joseph Rotblatt, Stanislav Ulam, Richard Feynman and Eugene Wigner. Enrico Fermi wasn't Jewish but he left Italy to save his Jewish wife. In this movie there's not one Jewish actor. If you believe that the creation & use of the Atom bomb wasn't necessary or was criminal view photos of the tens of thousands of young marines floating in the water or lying dead in the sands of Iwo Jima or Okinawa. Imagine Nazi Germany with a Nuclear weapon.
I learned the term “goywashing” this week. But there’s a bright side. If nuclear holocaust destroys half the planet, after seeing “Oppenheimer”, perhaps they won’t blame the Jews.
We will always be blamed. After all we control the weather, banks, aliens from outer space, the Holocaust (We enjoy killing ourselves) and who knows what else. It’s all in The NY Times best seller “ Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. Thanks Henry Ford!
True. But after Oppenheimer, they might be led first to Ireland and the UK, giving us Jews more time to see the diamonds in our hems and flee. Off to sharpen my space laser - ah, the joys of a Sunday!
Race-swapped casting of historical figures can be a problem, but are you arguing that Cillian Murphy doesn't look like the actual Oppenheimer? It seems to me that the problem is when actors are cast who don't look anything like the actual person, if they don't have the cultural context or life experiences it seems less consequential because, well, they're supposed to be pretending.
That’s a small part of it. I think judaism was central to the story of Oppenheimer. It is meaningful that these Jewish scientists were literally running a race against Nazi Germany, where their families were being killed in concentration camps. I also think that the McCarthyism and the moral crisis, that were part of the story, were directly related to Judaism. The story is that Nolan, the Director, wanted to work with Cillian Murphy. Surely he could’ve found room and a Jewish actor to at least play Albert Einstein. This story had Judaism directly at its center. It was an apocalyptic moment, culturally, globally, and to the entire Jewish diaspora. It defined the century to come. Yes, I would like to see some historical accuracy. I look forward to seeing Cillian Murphy again on screen in the upcoming biopic of Frederick Douglass. /s
Sure, but it’s not like they cut the importance of Jewish people out of the movie. They literally say that antisemitism will be the downfall of the Nazis. They emphasize that Jewish physicists were discriminated against in the U.S. They talk about leaving Europe because it’s unsafe.
Cillian Murphy doesn’t look anything like Frederick Douglass, but if they found someone who was, say, Haitian, to play him and the guy looked right and was a good actor, I think it would be fair enough.
If the claim is that there is someone whose appearance matches the character, whose acting skill is up to the job, and that they shouldn’t play the role because of some other reason, I don’t know what else is really material.
Hard to explain. These were lions of the 20th global order. Jews are such a tiny percentage of the world (16 million out of 8 billion) that it would’ve been nice to see some historical accuracy. I can understand why you feel differently, however, Jews were treated as something other when we immigrated here. It’s good to know that we are considered part of the mainstream enough to be played by non-Jewish actors. Thanks for your input on that, it really made me think.
Stipulating that we're not talking about someone who doesn't look like the character (i.e. Netflix Cleopatra), there are other examples. It's not uncommon to see people from the same general part of the world cast in roles that don't match their exact ethnic background. Just off the top of my head, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese people are often cast interchangeably (Garret Wang as Harry Kim, for example). It's also common to have more "white" castings that don't line up. Was John Adams Italian? No, but Paul Giamatti got good reviews for playing him. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For example, Marvel's casting of obviously not Russian actors like Mickey O'Rourke and Elizabeth Olsen to play Russian characters comes across as ridiculous to me. And these aren't even real people. Biopic casting is tougher; there aren't going to be a ton of actors who actually look like real historical figures whose appearance is known from pictures. I'm not really a fan of Ana de Armas (beautiful as she is) as Marilyn Monroe, but for me it was never a question that Cillian Murphy was a great casting choice for Oppenheimer. Not straightforward for me who can sell a character and who can't.
I would also say that I have minority Ashkenazi ancestry and my Jewish grandparent left Europe for the U.S. before the war and joined the Army and returned as a combatant, so it's not that I'm unsympathetic to these sorts of issues. But am I a "Jew"? I wouldn't say so. Nor am I any of the other numerous ancestries I possess (Greek, Scottish, Swedish, etc.). People are so interbred in the U.S. that clinging to old notions of group identity doesn't ring true to me.
The folks who were actually at Los Alamos were disproportionately Jewish. However, the directors of the Manhattan project were not. Notably, James B. Conant was one of the directors of the Manhattan project. He was a traditional WASP (and president of Harvard and notable advocate of the SAT). Fortunately (for the US) the Germans were never that close to getting them bomb. Indeed, they never got a chain reaction to work. The Germans made highly material scientific errors, that stymied their project.
For some reason Jews don’t make good or serious actors. I’m thinking Moses, Jesus, Maimonides, Freud, Einstein & Salk to name a few.
I don't regard those folks as actors. The only one that I indirectly know is/was Salk. He was a serious scientist, not an actor. He is (arguably) famous for coming up with one of the successful Polio vaccines. Later in life, he tried to develop an HIV vaccine and failed (all attempts to develop an HIV vaccine have failed, good treatments have been highly successful).
That's my point. But what did they all have in common?
circumcision?
Ouch!
It wasn't so much that they made errors as the fact that the heavy water plant in Norway had been destroyed, so they did not have enough heavy water to carry out experiments to determine things like mean free path. Also, they were doubtful (mostly likely correctly) that their government would provide the very large amount of funding that would be necessary, as they were getting clobbered in the east by Russia. The transcript of their conversations when they were in custody after the war is available.
You have the germane history wrong. The Germans mismeasured the Neutron cross-section of pure Carbon (the Americans did not). As a consequence, the Germans believed that they needed Norwegian heavy water. The Americans (correctly) knew that they did not heavy water and built the reactors (Chicago, Hanford, etc.) using Carbon. Of course, pure Carbon is much cheaper and easier to get than heavy water. Much later, the Canadians (for very different reasons) built reactors using heavy water. That was also a mistake.
Nice review of a relevant movie such as "The Sound of Freedom". Oh yeah, thefp won't cover a $100M successful - and very relevant to the connected insiders - movie...
I was surprised by how resonant the movie was regarding cancel culture, due process, basic rights. The tribunal sneering that Oppenheimer didn't have rights because he wasn't really on trial is so redolent of Title IX courts or HR proceedings or online cancellations. The "offense archaeology" of digging through all his past associations. The cynicism of his enemies.
Given how long it takes to make a movie, it's hard to imagine that Nolan was consciously intending to make some kind of commentary on the Twitter Files, etc., but it sure felt like he did.
Exactly...and the left has the gall to say it's a warning against the McCarthyism of the right.
The book the movie is based on, American Prometheus, is great. Can't wait to see the movie -- hopefully on IMAX.
How many were killed by Covid 19 as opposed to by the two bombs over Japan?
But the big question is: Why this story? And why now?
I would think the answer is pretty obvious...
Because NOW people have become skeptical of scientists, scientism and government. What better way to reclaim their loyalty than to wave the flag of potential annihilation and remind everybody that the government is the good guy!
Go Democrats!
Go fuck yourselves!
Was hoping for a review, but....well, this article doesn't really say anything. Okay, the movie's apropos. And there's a lot of flowery language to support that. But is it good?
I mean, it's Nolan, so--yeah, it's good. We didn't really need your review to know that. But we didn't need what you gave us, either. If you'd at least given us a review, then maybe I wouldn't have felt like your philosophic meanderings wasted 5 minutes of my life.
I saw it in iMax, Marcus; that's a plus, but the movie doesn't depend on that. I also read the book, American Prometheus. Both terrific! The movie and book are less philosopic than valid historical accounts. It was a remarkable time--the revolutionary advances in physics during the first half of the 20th century, plus the emergence of the full-fledged, modern bureaucratic state (now known as the administrative state)--and the atomic bomb was the manifestation of the fusion of these great forces, the scientific/academic triumph of quantum physics melded with the massive administrative reach of the bureaucratic state. It's awesome!