What is your “most delayed redpilling”? Redpill is a term derived from the movie “The Matrix”; google it if you are confused. Today I experienced mine: I just learned about “Unit 731”, mentioned in another SDMB thread recently. Of course I’d heard about the Germans also in WWII, and even about USA Tuskegee experiments, and MKULTRA, but no inkling of this. It even attains the status of lie by omission, as I had heard about the Bataan Death March. Initially I was going to post a thread about “why didn’t I hear about this long ago?”, but I searched and found it has been done before in regards to Unit 731 on the SDMB. Is this the ultimate redpill for most people? Where else have you been completely blindsided, surprisingly late in life by a redpill?
There are lots of unpleasant events in history, many hidden or simply not discussed. Unless the particular event is central to your life, I wouldn’t say that uncovering one of them is a redpill incident. There are hundreds more out there that you probably haven’t heard of that may further shock you.
Are you somehow connected to Unit 731 that makes this a significant issue for you other than the overall unpleasantness?
No I am not “connected to it”. I don’t want the thread derailed into the specifics of my shock after learning about Unit 731. I want to hear about other people’s delayed redpilling on all sorts of subjects, and as a side topic: what is the ultimate delayed redpill for most people?
I’m not sure if this quite fits the OP’s criteria.
When I was 29, I applied for, and was accepted, to serve on a volunteer board (called the Board of Adjustment) that was part of my county’s governing structure. This board heard appeals from people who wanted to do things like build a house or barn closer to the property line than what the building code allowed.
I was utterly gobsmaked to discover how much of local government is run by virtually-unknown volunteers, and (in some cases) how much power those volunteers have. In our case, our decisions could not be appealed to the County Commissioners. The only avenue of appeal was the state court system.
But (and here’s the kicker) the court was forbidden by state law from overturning our decisions unless it found that we had abused our discretion.
Can I ask specifially what county/where?
Not precisely a redpill, but a little alarming that I’d never heard about it…
I’m 53; my father is 84. A couple of months ago, when I was up in Green Bay visiting him, the two of us were running errands (I was driving), and we were driving near the Fox River.
Out of the blue, my father says, “You know, I nearly drowned in the river when I was a kid.” He then told the story, about how he and his friend were walking across the iced-over river, and he fell through the ice. They were close to shore, and his friend screamed for help; my father was able to hang onto the edge of the ice until some adults showed up to help pull him out. “If I hadn’t been rescued, you would never have been born.”
I had never heard the story before; later that day, I asked my mother about it (thinking that my father, who’s starting to suffer from cognitive issues, might have made it up), but she told me that she’d known the story for many years.
Oh, I got one. To my utter shock, my mom, after I’ve had 55 years on this planet, told me that she had been married before meeting my dad. It fell apart as quickly as it happened, she said, but caused her to move out of town (NH) to Ohio, where she met my dad, married him 2 years later. It apparently got annulled (yes she’s Catholic). LOL moment when I said I had always thought she was a virgin on her (2nd) wedding night, and she just laughed a bit sarcastically and said, “Oh, no…”
The kicker is that my dad apparently told my sister years ago during a drunk moment (he’s been gone for 18 years now)…
I realized I’d never actually heard “The Monster Mash.”
I’d only heard a song about monsters doing the Monster Mash.
El Paso County, Colorado. (Containing the city of Colorado Springs.)
I significantly noted when I realized “Colorado”=“Color red” (several years ago). And now you mention it in a thread on redpilling. Was my realization a redpilling? I guess not really, just a “why didn’t I notice that before”, combined with a coinidence involving the color of one of The Matrix’s (or is it Matrices’) pills. I have noticed most of these redpill moments are more personal than what motivated this thread for me. That is cool: keep posting them. Maybe I kind of have Aperger’s syndrome or something for not weighting personal redpill stuff more. Or maybe others are ‘too much’ focused on the personal. But let’s not derail the thread on that.
I should note: I find Flyer’s redpill moment relatively unpersonal. Which is more like mine. But neither good nor bad: let us not judge, just divulge, our most significant redpill moments.
A red pill isn’t just something you were unaware of. The implication is that it’s something that was concealed and now that you’re aware of it your entire worldview has changed; it’s an “everything I knew was a lie” moment.
So I’m curious how learning about a WWII war crime was a red pill for you. Especially as I’m assuming you’re not Japanese.
I’d always seen the Germans as the sole immoral human experimenters. And it had been repeated ad nauseum in my classes and films, books, tv shows, etc. Now I learn about Unit 237, and I wonder: why wasn’t that noted, even as a footnote? I’m still processing it. So many people seem oblivious to it. Why? At the least, it changes my view of how comprehensive seemingly super authotitative people’s knowledge is. Maybe my History teachers were like, “The Germans were enough. I don’t have the heart to tell the kids about this.”
Awhile back I heard a thing on NPR about the book Killers of the Flower Moon (a good read), which led me to the story of the Osage Indian murders
That’s a slice of history I’d known nothing about.
We must have received different history lessons.
You’ll never learn anything if you only depend on the lesson plans from your teachers.
This may clear it up a bit
“Redpill” in this context has not quite transcended into general understanding – it’s still a niche concept. Therefore, let me leave this link and explanation here:
If anything, I see many more references to “red pill” as a men’s movement thing than as a callback to The Matrix.
Our family mythology is that mom being pregnant with me saved my dad from being drafted for Vietnam (I guess earlier in the war a pregnant wife deferred selection? I dunno).
Decades later, after an acrimonious divorce, mom told me that she used to pray dad would be drafted and killed in Vietnam. Yeah, my dad isn’t the best of men, but I was shocked.
Thank you, bordelond, for actually providing the definition.
Seven months ago, I discovered Project MKUltra. Prior to that, I just had some sort of vague understanding that surely the government didn’t tell us everything they were doing, but – eh, I don’t know, I figured they didn’t do anything too super-astonishing. Certainly nothing astonishing as covertly administering LSD to doctors, military personnel, government employees, and the general public in an attempt to control their minds.