Yesterday, a coworker told me that living through current events was like living in the Starship Troopers movie during the Buenos Aires attack. What do I even tell him on Monday?
Yes, he described Palestinians as "the bugs" and said some other really fucking ignorant quotes from that movie without the slightest understanding of Paul Verhoeven's intent (his effort may have been doomed from the start; he even scolded actors on set for "not getting it" and just enjoying the fascism).
I have some license with what I say because I'm moving and transferring out of state in a few weeks but I also don't want to have a bad mark on my record by saying something particularly scary about the IDF, so what should I tell him on Monday?
That did come up. He wore irony armor, however, and remarked that he "looked cool" but that he wasn't a nazi; "it was just a cool uniform and he was doing it for the human race. He cared about human life so he wasn't a nazi."
Honestly though, just tell him that he isn't engaging with art in anywhere near an intelligent way. That it's very surface level. If he's like most libs that will offend him and he might need to reconsider how he interpreted it.
He believes that he can do a non-STEM job just as well as a non-STEM person because only STEM degrees matter and everything else is, quoting him, "children's puppet theater."
Good fucking luck putting on a children's puppet show without knowing anything about children's puppet theater, by the way.
Excellent. I may well say just that next time I see him, but then again, the "ENTERTAINMENT HAS NO EFFECT ON ME" crowd is pretty ironclad in their belief.
I don't think he likes kids at all, at least in any way that can be considered appropriate for school. All of his "funny anecdotes" are Mr. Herkabe-from-Malcolm-In-The-Middle style contempt for kids while feeling smugly smarter than them.
Did... did you teacher have a part in Starship Troopers? Is he this guy?
EDIT:
He believes that he can do a non-STEM job just as well as a non-STEM person because only STEM degrees matter and everything else is, quoting him, "children's puppet theater."
An obvious counter that should shut this dude down: "Why are we talking about this? It's just a movie, not real life. Why are you reading so much into it?"
Meet his incuriosity with your own. He sounds like he's seeking validation for his intelligence and denying that will drive him up a wall.
An obvious counter that should shut this dude down: "Why are we talking about this? It's just a movie, not real life. Why are you reading so much into it?"
Meet his incuriosity with your own. He sounds like he's seeking validation for his intelligence and denying that will drive him up a wall.
I think I may do just that as part of my response in the break room tomorrow. He does seem to base a lot of his worldviews on fiction (and not just that movie) while also deriding fiction as "children's puppet theater."
Some of my least pleasant classroom experiences in college were STEMbros (especially the TE part) that dragged their feet through the one or two non-STEM courses they had to take from time to time and had to constantly signal how displeased they were with being there.
I fully believe university education should be mandatory for most people, with more cross-field education required.
I know so many STEMbros who couldn’t understand the themes of a film or book if you smacked them in the head with it, and I also know so many humanities majors that fundamentally don’t understand the physical world around them to a point I don’t understand how they can walk down the street without dying.