Posted on 01/06/2017 7:17:46 PM PST by rey
Has anyone seen Hidden Figures? Is it appropriate for a young girl?
I have a 12 year old girl who is interested in math, astronomy, and NASA. I thought the movie might motivate her.
Hidden Figures is an anti-white atrocity filled with lies.
The positive response by some Freepers is sickening. How stupid does a conservative have to be to see good in this garbage?
Since history isn't taught anymore and most people find it too dry & boring to read, pseudo-historical tales like this become “historical knowledge” for most. Red Tails, 300 and Saving Private Ryan are the worst examples that come to mind.
And good for your daughter ! Her biggest problem in choosing those as fields of study will be the negative attitudes & influences of most of her gal pals now and in the future. Tell her if she indeed wants to tackle those there will be “big rewards” both in career & personal sense of accomplishment in the future if she stays the course. It will be hard but nothing good comes from “easy”. My daughter made such a decision when she was about that age. She had to endure shall we say a lot of negative “social vibes” along the way and the negativity was entirely from her female social group. I told her they were just jealous! She ended up with a PhD in Chemistry with a great job - career. Married to a neurologist.
And certainly one cannot overlook https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)
I don’t think it was anti white at all. I’m certain you are not saying that the treatment of Blacks in the south from the 40s through the 60s was exemplary.
These women did work in the departments the book claims. I have read other books on the subjects and many women did work in those departments throughout the US. I just finished a book about the women who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mostly white but a few Blacks. By my reading on the subject, they did not employ any slouches in any of these departments. Many of these women had impressive mathematical minds. It is an impressive achievement for anyone to get an advanced degree in mathematics, particularly a woman during the period of 40-70.
Check this woman out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-vcErOPofQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEpsKnWZrJ8
Actress Hedy Lamarr was a mathematician who worked to help break codes.
Larry Mondello’s mother on Leave It to Beaver, along with her real life husband, developed test equipment for the Manhattan project as well as the fuses for those atomic bombs
granted, these women are not Black,but their accomplishments are impressive. The Black women who worked along side of them were equally as impressive. There is a lot written about the female mathematicians that worked in code breaking who were forbidden to discuss their work because of its nature who were thought by their family to have contributed nothing to the war effort because they could not discuss what they did. People at JPL had the same problems.
Furthermore, the contributions of the Muskegee Airman and the Nisei soldiers in Europe is legendary. They are among the most highly decorated and successful units. If your complaint is movies embellish, well no kidding. It is a movie not a documentary.
Nonsense. The movie invented fake racism to make white people look bad. There were no segregated bathrooms where these women worked. Their role was very minor, hundreds of other low level people had the same jobs. The movie absurdly claims these women had a major role in planning the mission and even corrected the white men who were the real brains behind the operation. None of these scenes happened in real life.
It’s sad that so many older conservatives don’t understand what cultural marxist propaganda is. They don’t even recognize it when they see it.
The men they corrected were engineers. It was not uncommon for engineers to rely on human computers. Engineers essentially came up with the problem and the human computers did the mathematics. It wasn’t that they corrected them, they showed them the solutions to the problem.
Our first satellites literally had physicists and astronomers standing over the women or in many instances, woman who did the calculations to verify they had achieved orbit. See the book Rocket Girls.
Johnson did confirm the IBM computer results for Glenn’s flight. Mechanical computers were not reliable and the results were checked by hand. This was common until the late 60s.
Many of the departments they worked in were contract departments, but in the 40s and 50s in Virginia facilities were segregated. Black women had their own department from which they were assigned. the bathrooms in Virginia were segregated. The pentagon was built with separate facilities and was not desegregated until 48 (The book starts in the early forties so many of the events are compressed in time. In the early forties they were working on missiles, airplanes, sound barrier, etc at the Virginia facility). I can’t remember when the NACA got rid of segregated bathrooms but it was after 48.
I spent summers in the southeast, late 60s early 70s, southeast GA northeast Fl. You would not want to be a Black person in that area during that time. It made quite an impression on me.
Read rocket girls, their role was not minor.
Nonsense. Those scenes were fabricated. They never happened. Hundreds of people checked those calculations, those three women had no special role not shared by hundreds of others. At no point in real life did any of them dress down and correct one of the leading engineers. Those scenes were made up by Hollywood writers.
You completely fail to understand how false portrayals of history like this movie lead to political correctness and multi-culturalism.
Trump is a reaction against the kind of conservatism that has no problem with cultural marxist propaganda like Hidden Figures. Baby Boomer conservatism has failed.
Mary Morgan (white) at JPL had Richard Feynman and another engineer standing over her while she calculated the date from the first US satellite to make sure that it indeed was in orbit. She also later rewrote the program, largely on her own, for Galileo’s antenna problem so the low range antenna would be able to transmit with enough power an its journey through the solar system.
Katherine Johnson (Black) verified the results from the IBM computer for Glenn’s flight. Through the 50s the NACA employed a little over 300 human computers, total from both coasts. the numbers jumped dramatically in the late 50s. They did not check each others work 100s of times. Certainly there was verification.
Given the sources cited in these books, what the authors’ suggest is highly probably. Is it 100% accurate? Nothing is.
Conditions in VA and throughout the south were abysmal for Blacks. It is wrong to treat any human being that way.
I understand the movie portrayal is a conglomerate of characters and event for the sake of time and drama. A 3 week long documentary would not sell well at the box office. The Chief of the department chopping down the segregated bathroom sign is a dramatization and a falsehood. No department head chopped down a sign. Bathrooms were segregated until at least 48 and probably until 49 maybe even as late as early 1950. The women ate at their desks because of the work load and because they did not want to go to the segregated lunch room. It was depressing. The average employee worked 10-12 hour days. Pre launch, some people, women included, worked 14-18 hour days. Dorothy Vaughn earned her degree in advanced mathematics and engineering while working full time for NACA an impressive accomplishment for anyone. She attended school in VA near Richmond provisionally because of her color. It is in the court records cited in the source material of Hidden Figures. How she addressed the judge in the movie is a dramatization, but the sentiments are real.
Are you like this about TV? You do realize people don’t stick their fingers out of the water counting to 3 while they drown? You also do realize that all those people aren’t actually murdered in Oxford on British TV and that it isn’t a single detective working alone on one case over the course of a few days to solve every murder that comes his way? In fact, little more than 9% of all crime results in a prison sentence in the US, that the vast majority of crime goes unresolved, that less than half of all murders are ever solved. Do you write to TV networks complaining about the false portrayal there? Are you like Grandpa Simpson writing to Victoria’s Secret complaining that there are any old women in the catalog and therefore outside reality and their customer base?
Is everything factual in Hidden Figures? Of course not. were there Black female computers working for the NACA, JL, and NASA? You bet. Did they do great work? You bet. Did they initially endure poor treatment because of their race and sex? You bet. Were there men working alongside the women? Not really. they worked largely alone. they certainly confered with the male engineers but did not work with male computers, certainly not at JPL. Was the south a fun place to live up until the early 70s if you were Black? Not really. I would not have traded places with them. I know you would not. You are not suggesting that we return to the segregation of the 30s and 40s, are you?
Once upon a time; women who knew math, were called : Computers, before the analog/digital variety came along.
Even during the analog. they did not initially trust the early IBMs and verified them by hand.
She thought up the idea of a compiler and so much more. Us Geeks owe her a lot. And hey, she was NAVY.
Pathetic baby boomer mewling. You admit I’m right about the factual falsehood of the movie. Keep swilling your daily dose of cultural marxist propaganda and make sure to thank Hollywood for the pleasure.
You are totally missing the point that Hollywood took a story where the woman herself said she was not discriminated against at NASA and made it into a historically false, anti-white morality play that defames one of America’s greatest achievements.
The fact that baby boomer conservatives like you failed to grasp what is going here is the direct cause of the left’s victories in areas related to multi-culturalism and political correctness.
” factual falsehood of the movie.” talk about an oxymoron. Yes, movies are falsehoods. Patton is a great movie but is rife with inaccuracies for the sake of drama. Saving Private ryan, good flick but wildly inaccurate. That is why they are movies. they are for entertainment. These are not documentaries. they are loosely based on real life, just like Hidden Figures.
Yes, these women were poorly treated at NASA and JPL. Certainly not as bad as the private sector. Yes, there was segregation at NACA and other research facilities when these computers came on. From the late 30s until the late 40s federal government facilities were segregated. You cannot deny that. they could not make a fluid movie within their time constraints that would cover from the late 30s up until the mid 60s, so they took liberties. On her own, Vaughn never would have been able to attend classes in Richmond, but because she was involved with the space program there was an allowance made.
You are certainly free to pretend that segregation was wonderful and no one suffered under it, but it speaks volumes about your humanity.
You support anti-white cultural marxist propaganda.
It was very motivational. We saw it with a theater full of old conservative farts who applauded for the black ladies’ victories several times during the movie.
http://celebrationcenter.org/hidden-figures-the-power-of-dreams-and-visions/
Suzanne and I saw Hidden Figures recently. It’s an excellent, well-crafted movie about the successes of three black women in the pre-integration South. The all-star cast includes Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kevin Costner, and Kirsten Dunst.
Hidden Figures is based on the true stories of Katherine Goble, later Katherine G. Johnson (Henson), Mary Jackson (Monae), and Dorothy Vaughn (Spencer), who were instrumental in the early days of the space program. When we meet them, they are driving to work at NASA Langley in the Norfolk area, in 1961. Their car breaks down and a policeman comes by. Eventually, they manage to get the car fixed and be on their way.
The women are working in the “colored” computing section in the East building on the Langley campus. They aspire to bigger and better. Dorothy is the supervisor, but does not have a supervisor’s title or pay. Instead, that title belongs to Vivian Mitchell, a white woman (Dunst.)
We watch the three women as they move in their careers. Katherine is assigned to an all-white, all-male computing unit where she is supposed to be checking the other employees’ calculations. Instead, she figures out the launch angles needed to ensure John Glenn (well played by Glen Powell) gets in orbit and home again – especially when his mission has to be cut short. In a meeting, Glenn specifically requests her to check calculations. Mary goes to court to get permission to take engineering classes at an all-white school. Gloria borrows a FORTRAN book (“FORTRAN is the wave of the future”) from the “white” section of the library and reads it, then winds up working on programming the new IBM mainframe computer.
At one point, Katherine’s boss, Al (Costner), tells her that there is more to going to the Moon than simply mathematics. You have to believe it. Later, he asks her why she disappears a couple of times a day for 40 minutes at a time. Katherine explains that she has to run all the way across the campus back to the East building because that’s where the “colored” bathrooms are. Al takes down the “white” and “colored” sign and announces that “we all pee the same color.” At the sloe of the movie, after Katherine’s calculations bring Glenn safely home, Al asks her “Katherine, do you think we can get to the Moon?” She responds, “We’re already there, Sir.”
The real Katherine Johnson is still alive, 98 years old. Today, there is a Katherine G. Johnson Building at NASA Langley.
There are a number of metaphysical themes in this movie. Obviously, unity is a theme in the removal of the color distinctions for the bathrooms. (History records that the cafeteria remained segregated for a while.) Reaching for a dream is central to New Thought. As Oscar Hammerstein asked, “If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”
All three women are doing that. Mary’s dream is to be an engineer. Gloria learns programming and becomes essential to the operations there, with several people working under her, including her former supervisor. And of course, Katherine’s exchange with Al at the very end of the movie shows the power of having a vision. “We’re already there.”
This is a well done movie that won several Golden Globe awards and is nominated for a number of Oscars, including Best Picture. It’s inspiring and well done. I think you’ll enjoy it. This is definitely a movie worth seeing.
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