Today I Learned #4: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

[Kyriakos]

TIL that in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Donald Duck may have called Daffy Duck a [negro]. I never noticed it when I watched the movie, but I was listening to a movies & tv podcast this morning, and they played the clip, and it sure sounded like he said it. Of course Donald Duck is deliberately difficult to understand, that's part of his character. Some places claim that he said "nitwit", and others say that if you turn on the subtitles for the movie, the N-word does not appear. One person says the subtitle for the line reads "you [goshdarned] little...", with the ellipsis. I haven't gone back to watch the scene myself. fwiw, this is the first time I'm hearing about it, but this isn't actually a new thing. The oldest hit on Google I saw is dated 2007, and the writer of that blog-post notes that he first heard about it a few years earlier. So this is at least 20 years old.

I really doubt it; that movie didn't have any strong language, even of non-slur type. So it'd be really out of place there
It was a very cool kids movie, imo. Who doesn't dream of leveling everything so as to build highways where cars go on and off, off and on ^^

 

[EgonSpengler]

I was reading about the 1968 U.S. Presidential election last night. Some bits:

I knew that President Lyndon Johnson stepped down voluntarily and decided not to run for reelection. What I didn't know is that (a) he didn't step out of the race until March 30, and (b) he did so because his margin of victory in the New Hampshire Primary over Hubert Humphrey was so uncomfortably close that it inspired Robert F. Kennedy to enter the race. I had thought Johnson hadn't been "primaried" (an incumbent challenged for the party nomination), but it turns out he was.

I knew this already, but I'm struck dumb by it every time I happen across it: Not only did George [flipping] Wallace run as an independent that year, Curtis [flipping] LeMay was his running-mate. If I had a "Rogues' Gallery" like a comic-book superhero, those two psychos would both be in it. Naturally, with the demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, Wallace and LeMay presented themselves as the "law & order" candidates to conservative, White Americans. They won 5 states in the general election, and you can almost guess what they were: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

Gov. Reagan of California was Richard Nixon's biggest challenger for the Republican nomination. If you look at the final tallies, it might jump out at you that Reagan got more votes than Nixon did, but because this was before our modern primaries, Nixon got the nomination at the convention anyway. In fact, Reagan was the only person on the primary ballot in his home state of California, so you could say there were shenanigans on behalf of both men. I don't know how many votes California represented, but it must have been a huge number, and I don't know if there's any indication how many votes Nixon would have gotten there. By contrast, Reagan's next-best primary finish was 21% in Nebraska, to Nixon's 70%. In the New Hampshire Primary, Nixon got over 80,000 votes, while Reagan got 362. So in reality, it wasn't close. Still, I hadn't realized that Reagan had run for President that early. I don't know if there's a plausible alternate universe where Ronald Reagan was the Republican candidate in '68, but it's kind of fun to think about.

Also in the Republican primary, one of the early candidates was George Romney, Mitt Romney's father. A Gallup poll in mid-1967 showed Romney trailing Nixon only 25% to 39%. Then Romney made a 'fact-finding' trip to Vietnam and was so disillusioned by what he saw that he turned against the war. And that was the end of his campaign. He withdrew from the primary in February '68 after getting fewer than 5,000 votes.

In just January of '68, President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara had assured the American public that the war in Vietnam was on the verge of being over. 500,000 Americans were in-theater, 43% of them conscripts/draftees, and we were suffering 1,000 casualties a month (and God only knows how many Vietnamese were being killed). And then, on January 30, The Tet Offensive. By the time of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, Johnson's popularity was so low and protests against the war were so intense, the Secret Service actually barred him from attending the Convention because they were so concerned about his safety.

On February 27, CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite 'came out' against the war, and recommended the U.S. pursue peace talks with North Vietnam.

After winning the June 4 California Democratic Primary, Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed. Historians still debate whether Kennedy would have won the nomination over Humphrey at the convention in August.

Famously, during the Democratic National Convention, the Chicago Police and Illinois National Guard attacked a large anti-war protest, centered on Grant Park and Michigan Avenue. The U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, formed by President Johnson after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, later reviewed the events and labeled them a "police riot."

 

[Birdjaguar]

Yes 1968 was quite a year in election politics. In many ways it makes 2024 look tame but from a very different perspective. 2024 is far more dangerous to us all. The anti war folks were out in the streets marching and Mayor Daly was scared enough to beat them into submission. Today it would be the MAGA guys in the street with guns threatening to shoot people to get Trump elected. Trump should give them all Brown Shirts and arm bands.

 

[Takhisis]

I was reading about the 1968 U.S. Presidential election last night. Some bits: (…) on January 30, The Tet Offensive.

Don't forget the bit where Nixon and Kissinger committed treason and went behind LBJ's back to promise the Viet Cong better terms if they kept up their offensives because higher casualties would mean the Democrats would be likelier to lose the presidency.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

Yes 1968 was quite a year in election politics. In many ways it makes 2024 look tame but from a very different perspective. 2024 is far more dangerous to us all. The anti war folks were out in the streets marching and Mayor Daly was scared enough to beat them into submission. Today it would be the MAGA guys in the street with guns threatening to shoot people to get Trump elected. Trump should give them all Brown Shirts and arm bands.

Give some of them brown shirts and armbands, and let those without into the crowd as agents provocateur.
70 years old and such a noob. Do you need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows?

 

[Narz]

Not sure if it's from hate watching breadtubers, but there's a ton of things I'm processing right now.

What's breadtube and what do you love to hate and what did you learn?

If you do not believe me, you can look it up yourself about from simple things like 5.8 ft minimum height requirement listed on a Sperm Bank's web site and firsthand reports about donors being rejected.

Sounds like every girls tinder profile already

Chicks be fussy bro, this isnt groundbreaking stuff, female mammals be practicing eugenics on the daily. Males on the other hand usually shoot first ask questions later.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

What's breadtube and what do you love to hate and what did you learn?

Breadtube is a YouTube video that takes the form of a long essay, usually over an hour long, sometimes but not always as an analysis of something in pop culture. These videos often end with blaming capitalism and America for everything bad in the world.

 

[Samson]

Breadtube is a YouTube video that takes the form of a long essay, usually over an hour long, sometimes but not always as an analysis of something in pop culture. These videos often end with blaming capitalism and America on everything bad in the world.

That is an TIL. I thought it was just a mildly derogatory term for youtube.

 

[Kyriakos]

It's a (rather lame) euphemism for formulaic monetized videos.

 

[PhroX]

It's a (rather lame) euphemism for formulaic monetized videos.

It might have become this (I haven't been keeping track), but at least originally, the term referred to a loose community of left-wing youtubers who made videos based on their politics, particularly in response to alt-right youtubers.

 

[Narz]

Breadtube is a YouTube video that takes the form of a long essay, usually over an hour long, sometimes but not always as an analysis of something in pop culture. These videos often end with blaming capitalism and America for everything bad in the world.

Capitalizing on anti-capitalism sentiment seems a good way to monitize these days. Deconstructing capitalist pop culture to become part of capitalist pop culture.

The best part of being a critic is you don't actually have to produce anything yourself.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Capitalizing on anti-capitalism sentiment seems a good way to monitize these days. Deconstructing capitalist pop culture to become part of capitalist pop culture.

The best part of being a critic is you don't actually have to produce anything yourself.

It's not new. Go back to the nineties and have bands signed to major labels writing songs about how it's bad to sell out, or to teenagers wearing Che Guevara t-shirts.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

TIL that all chitons have aesthetes.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

That Saturn has a perfect hexagon on its pole

https://twitter.com/x/status/1762905410699481529

 

[Valka D'Ur]

It's interesting, but it makes the planet look moldy.

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

That Saturn has a perfect hexagon on its pole

https://twitter.com/x/status/1762905410699481529

It's not a perfect bestagon!

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

That the US space program was not very popular with the American public

Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program

For most of our lunar adventure, a majority of Americans did not support going to the moon. On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s “We choose to go the moon” speech, we excavate this forgotten opposition.

www.theatlantic.com

Many black papers questioned the use of American funds for space research at a time when many African Americans were struggling at the margins of the working class. An editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel, for example, argued against Apollo in no uncertain terms, saying, "It would appear that the fathers of our nation would allow a few thousand hungry people to die for the lack of a few thousand dollars while they would contaminate the moon and its sterility for the sake of 'progress' and spend billions of dollars in the process, while people are hungry, ill-clothed, poorly educated (if at all)."

This is, of course, a complicated story. When 200 black protesters marched on Cape Canaveral to protest the launch of Apollo 14, one Southern Christian Leadership Conference leader claimed, "America is sending lazy white boys to the moon because all they're doing is looking for moon rocks. If there was work to be done, they'd send a [n-slur]."

But another SCLC leader, Hosea Williams, made a softer claim, saying simply they were "protesting our nation's inability to choose humane priorities." And Williams admitted to the AP reporter, "I thought the launch was beautiful. The most magnificent thing I've seen in my whole life."

 

[Valka D'Ur]

That the US space program was not very popular with the American public

Moondoggle: The Forgotten Opposition to the Apollo Program

For most of our lunar adventure, a majority of Americans did not support going to the moon. On the 50th anniversary of JFK’s “We choose to go the moon” speech, we excavate this forgotten opposition.

www.theatlantic.com

The article is paywalled.

As for the rest of it, we have technology now that we wouldn't have had if not for the space program. Communication satellites let us talk to each other in practically real-time (the lag is there, but not enough to matter). Back in 2001 I spent 5 weeks in the hospital, and met the father of one of my elementary school classmates from decades before. Turns out he was Mormon and yeah, he tried to convert me - gave me a long list of chapters and verses to read, after I told him I actually had a Book of Mormon at home (the doorknockers left it and I never got around to doing anything with it).

Anyway, he kept carrying on about the space program and how they shouldn't go into space and they shouldn't do this and that and everything else, and how they should fix the problems on Earth before going into space... honestly, if he hadn't been 85 years old, I'd have firmly told him that he was denigrating the technology that was helping to keep him alive, due to the numerous medical applications of offshoot technologies that came from the space program.

That's not to say that there aren't expensive things that I think shouldn't be funded because social programs need the money more, the health care situation in this province is abominable (being starved of funds because the premier and her party want to privatize it, and to hell with the Canada Health Act; she thinks she can just ignore any federal laws she doesn't like), etc. But the long-term benefits from the space program may not help today. But they will help at some point in the future.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

TIL about the Amazon molly, an all-female species of fish that mates with males of different species to reproduce via a process called 'gynogenesis'

 

[Comrade Ceasefire]

TIL that the EU funded the Giant Alien project to combat Giant Hogweed.

Heracleum mantegazzianum - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

(Admit it: you thought it must have been a Donald Trump initiative.)