I think both possibilities are likely, and not mutually exclusive.

You’re likely to improve your forensic skills with basic practice, but you’re also likely to have a distorted view of your capacities.

Everything Rob Schieder started in.

None were very well liked even when they were fresh, but things like “Big Stan”, in which his pipsqueak convict character has to go on a karate-kid-style journey to learn martial arts from David Carrodine in order to fend off rapists before he heads off to prison is kind of a case study in a whole genre that could be called ‘damn, you really thought that was funny?’

Norm MacDonald and some of the other SNL folks dabbled in some of the same jokes, but were much more talented, so some of this stuff feels a little forgivable. Schneider though… oof.

Also: I haven’t seen it, but I’m going to guess that 2008’s “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” – in which Adam Sandler stars as an Israeli Mossad super ninja who wants to be a stylist – probably didn’t age great.

It’s a sex comedy about a guy trying to be sexually abstinent, and in the climax of the film he fails because a woman has explicitly non consentual sex with him, in a framing the film presents favorably.

I haven’t seen it, btw. This is the description I’ve heard.

I heard an interview recently with Emile Torres about this. And he didn’t make this any less stupid, but he did a great job helping to explain the deranged pathologies of the people behind these.

When you have the power to make decisions at a global scale, your goals and fears are radically different from those of people who only have the ability to make choices that impact their household or family or neighborhood.

These people have a fantasy of being not just A “great man of history” but THE greatest, most important, most monumental figure to have ever lived in the whole universe. And in their head, if this technology either allows humans to make a superior species that replaces us and goes on to conquer the whole galaxy or just eradicates all the life on the only habitable planet we know of… well what a legacy, you know? There’s no bigger tombstone that says ‘I MATTERED!’

And that’s what they crave. They’re basically sick, poisoned with toxic levels of power and ego.

Wait, really?