The news has been hot about President Trump yelling at President Zelenskyy in the White House recently. One tidbit stood out:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy was wearing black slacks, boots, and a black sweatshirt with an embroidered Ukrainian trident...."You're all decked out today," Donald Trump remarked mockingly.
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/did-zelenskyys-outfit-at-the-white-house-tick-off-donald-trump-heres-what-he-was-wearing-as-the-president-took-a-sarcastic-dig-at-him/ar-AA1A3xQS?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Zelensky was all in black, including a sweatshirt, for a very formal kind of meeting. What is the symbolism he was going for? To some people, "men in black" are pirates (who might be good guys underneath), as we see in The Princess Bride movie.
To others, "men in black" are super cool defenders of the universe from the really bad creatures out there.
But, as the movie and its rap song spell out for us, "Men In Black" equals "M.I.B."
Here come the Men In Black
It's the MIB's, uh, here come the MIB's
Here come the Men In Black, Men In Black
They won't let you remember*
The good guys dress in black, remember that
Just in case we ever face to face and make contact
The title held by me, MIB
https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/3529257/Will+Smith
I was intrigued to find in my huge, old dictionary that "mib" means "mig" in the sense of a marble used for playing marbles. See https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mib.
Do you remember how, at the very end of the first Men in Black movie, the earth and our universe are portrayed as being inside a marble that an alien hand is playing marbles with? I don't think that was a lucky vocabulary coincidence. Is that final movie scene saying that the men in black are being "played with" just as much as everyone else? If so, who is playing everyone else? The technology we see and know about is like the visible tip of an iceberg, and I have felt myself "nudged" to do or say things in the past few years that I wouldn't have otherwise thought of doing or saying.
Of course, a "Mig" is also a USSR-era fighter jet.
So, when Trump makes a big deal out of Zelenskyy showing up dressed as a "mib"....what is really going on? There's so much that is unclear in international politics right now.
* If mind reading and altering technology has been being researched and patented since the mid-1970s (see https://patents.google.com/patent/US3951134A/en) then there has likely been progress on helping induce forgetfulness in targeted ways. Perhaps the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was only partially science fiction.
[Update 05/15/2025: Like most people, I notice more that which is salient to me (salient = of notable significance, standing out). I think that the reaction in our brain to that which is salient has been researched and most likely reverse-engineered so as to induce the reaction, possibly even in a heightened way, with new technology in order to nudge us in specific directions when we read news, ads, memes, etc. Try paying attention to what seems to stand out on your cell phone or computer screen and then to what seems to just sort of sit in the background without grabbing your attention; is there a difference?
Technology that can make some images and words salient while others on the same screen seem unimportant can be used to deliver messages, including messages that increase sadness or anxiety, in plausibly deniable ways. With AI doing the work, computer programs could mess with people's emotions and thoughts in ways that wouldn't even look harmful to other observers.
Surely I'm not the first person to realize this kind of messaging could go from the realm of science fiction to reality, too. Maybe there is already widespread use of such tech and it partially explains why our society has become so polarized: some are pushed to feel threatened by a trend, and others are pushed to view is as a trivial or even positive change.]