My favorite Jewish director is probably Michael Mann. I think I can safely put him in my top 5 movie directors of all-time list. He has not directed a lot of movies, but his work is of a generally very high quality. Heat (1995) is arguably his best movie. Apart from the cinematography, I like that the conversations are often very realistic, both in terms of content and delivery. Sometimes, there is a lot more depth in them than you may notice the first time you watch one of his movies.

In Collateral (2004) there are two pretty interesting and complementary scenes which I only noticed the second or third time I watched that movie, but let me provide a very brief summary of the setup of the story first: Tom Cruise plays a killer who takes out one guy after another during one fateful night in Los Angeles. In order to do that, he enlists the services of an urban gentleman, played by Jamie Foxx, who drives him around in a cab. Before aforementioned killer hops into the cab, an urban lady takes a ride. The cab driver is not just a cab driver, though. Instead, he has higher goals as he dreams of building up his own limo company. During breaks he does important research such as flipping through Mercedes Benz sales brochures, without having any idea of how to finance such a car.

The cab-driving urban gentleman somehow feels compelled to tell his passengers that his current gig is “just temporary”. Oh no, he is not just a cabbie. He is destined for greater things! The black woman is curious to learn more, which leads to the guy spinning some bullshit story about his fancy limousine service. The idea is laughable and not at all thought through, but the two urbanites have little regard for reality. When the killer gets into the cab, he gets to hear the same story a little later. Yet, the first question he asks upon hearing about that temporary gig is for how long he has been doing it. The answer is, “twelve years”. This immediately ends the conversation.

I think that this is an excellent example of male versus female thinking. Yes, even weak, feminized men engage in female thinking. There are guys who excitedly talk about cars they are never going to drive and women they are never going to fuck. This is a phase for some in their early teens but you can find even older guys who never outgrow it and persistently live in a make-believe world. Such people tend to flock together. Nobody of them cares that everybody else among them is full of shit. They are co-dependents who mutually enable each other.

In contrast, a man gets right to the point. Sometimes, you need to ask only one question to either end a conversation or prevent it from ever getting off the ground. Not infrequently do I end up in such conversations online but at work this happens as well. Sometimes, I get invited to comment on proposals that are so hare-brained you would not believe it, yet a handful or more people had nothing but praise for them. Of course, there are perverted incentives in Clown World businesses because an over-engineered system can be used to build your own little kingdom in a company. Well, to put an end to this, just ask why they did not consider this or that alternative approach. To give you a concrete example, I have repeatedly seen that people wanted to build a complex distributed system when the inherent complexity was minimal and the expected load of the system was negligible. Once someone dares to criticize such a project, some others normally also join in, so just ask why this is not just a simple script that runs twice a day. Granted, you are not going not make many friends this way, but that is an entirely different question.

Seeing through bullshit and daring to point it out is an inherently manly trait. You tell someone that he or she is wrong, for this or that reason. In contrast, the weak-minded man, as well as basically every woman, is much more interested in consensus and not rocking the boat. They do not care if a poorly thought-out project will lose someone a lot of money. They seem to not even care if it sinks their employer. The video game industry is a great example, considering the recent string of commercial disasters in the triple-A space. It is much more important to them that everyone else “feels good”. Obviously, you cannot build a functioning company, let alone a functioning society, with such people. Clown World is only temporary, though. The pendulum has started to swing in the other direction but there are still too many people who do not live in reality and have no real interest to ever do so.