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The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

charliechaplin.com

181–190 of 412 posts

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#181
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It applies to HN too, the vast majority of comments probably don't have more than, at most, a few minutes of serious, focused, thinking behind them. And with how good LLMs nowadays, probably a numerical majority don't even contain anything worth noting.

Do you have any sort of data to support this, particularly the second claim? It seems particularly absurd to me.

The comments are the data?

I'm not really sure what your asking for.

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#182

"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart" - I think many have this so very wrong. Is support for fascism is a sensible, logical, well-thought-out policy? No, it's a heart-felt, emotional appeal to scared, proud, paranoid, crude, brutal people (who seem to be about half of our neighbors). surely the mindful decision is empathetic, constructive, and wise - not just base.

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Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#183
post #90

I always liked this version with music added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibmcsEGLKo I remember sharing a jail cell with a 19-year-old Mexican kid once and we were talking about the guards being assholes and he said "they're like machine men"; and I said "with machine minds and machine hearts?" and he was like "YES! You know it?!" -- it was a good moment, we spent the next few days trying to remember the whole s…

He is a machine, everything with him happens. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention. He lives in a subjective world of 'I love,' 'I do not love,' 'I like,' 'I do not like,' 'I want,' 'I do not want,' that is, of what he thinks he likes, of what he thinks he does not like, of what he thinks he wants, of what he thinks he does not want. He does not see t…

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Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#185
post #147
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's so simple. Support for fascism can seem sensible and logical if you let yourself think that between you and greatness stands a minority whose sole purpose is to prevent you from becoming great. You could argue it's not emotion but a calculation coming from struggle and an easy explanation for that struggle. Not every wrong assumption comes from emotion and we have the whole history of science to pr…

You are effectively describing an appeal to emotions, not reason.

Every ideology appeals to emotions—liberalism, democracy, fascism, communism, etc. This is why we seldom see academic professors, who deliver lectures on TV, winning elections based solely on their lectures.

Ideologies aim to harness people's emotions to gain support. Democracy, fascism, and communism all possess underlying logic. By analyzing these ideologies dispassionately, without moral judgments, one can discern the logic in each of them.

When encountering opposition, there are numerous ways to resolve conflict and achieve one's goals. These include discussion, compromise, and litigation, but also extend to extreme measures like murder and genocide. While one cannot deny the existence of these methods, their acceptability depends on individual values.

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#186
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we may be too often missing the important part of being a decent human being. "decent human being" is too vague and easily manipulated term, so it could be better to follow hard metrics and data.

Showing unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Will that do as a definition? Be altruistic.

Practice empathy towards others and altruism follows in due course

Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#188

This speech is, in a nutshell, a call for humanity, peace and tolerance. It pains me to see a world where our centers of education have become almost precisely the opposite. They have distorted the minds of our young to the point that they are full of hatred, intolerance, bigotry and, yes, racism. All underscored by a solid foundation of utter ignorance. There's a video somewhere of an interviewer asking university s…

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Re: The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

#190

"Don't let your mind speak louder than your heart" - I think many have this so very wrong. Is support for fascism is a sensible, logical, well-thought-out policy? No, it's a heart-felt, emotional appeal to scared, proud, paranoid, crude, brutal people (who seem to be about half of our neighbors). surely the mindful decision is empathetic, constructive, and wise - not just base.

I think the fascist sells the idea that our feelings of weakness can be hardened into solid, rational, scientific, truths. This almost seems like… a horrible promise to a wounded man, that he could be a machine-man, and that’s the best he could ever be, and that will give him strength.

Maybe the fascist must appeal to mechanical-ism because his philosophy is fundamentally emotion-driven.

The transparent, meritocratic democracy is naturally pretty rational in the first place. The pitch is that we’re already part of a machine, and we can bend it to serve us.

World war 2 was very much not over, when he gave this speech…

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